Melancholia: bad vibes all over

Birds tumble softly from the ether; a woman gazes at her hands as they give off sparks; a horse collapses to the ground like an old barn; a woman clutching a child sinks deeper into a darkened golf course; a bride sinks into the surface of a stream or trudges through forest only to be snared by roots. All of this unfolds in extremely slow slow-motion, as though some collective will is urging time to a standstill. And you can see why. The end is nigh. Mind you, it’ll take a while to actually get there.

Had I, for whatever reason, had to exit the theatre after the prologue of Melancholia, an astonishing, kind of devastating sequence heavily indebted to more masters of contemporary photo-based art than you could squueze into a year at ICP, set to the romantic bombast of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, I would surely have thought I’d seen the first ten minutes of some rapturous masterpiece. But I stayed, or rather stuck it out, and remembered I was in Lars Land, a place where flights of genius are undermined by lengthy digressions imbued with didacticism, smugness, cynicism and sadomasochistic projections of the author’s disorders onto the opposite sex.

Lars von Trier: maker of some unforgettable images, brilliant conceptualist, shit storyteller. I think I’ve done the image bit, so let’s get to Lars the conceptualist. Melancholia has two parts, two sisters, two disasters. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) shows up two hours later for her insanely lavish wedding reception at a castle. Once she arrives things just get worse: mom (Charlotte Rampling) delivers the most withering wedding speech in history before locking herself in the bathroom and Justine slips ever deeper into debilitating depression. She can barely make it through the night, though disappearing for long spells, telling off her boss and jumping some nervous stranger’s bones seems to help. By dawn, the damage is unrepairable, the marriage still-born. The groom ultimately leaves without her.

After the wedding Claire (Charlotte Rampling) determines to take care of Justine, who’s now verging on catatonic—there’s a painful scene where Claire simply can’t get Justine to step into a hot bath... and that bath looks pretty nice! Claire becomes increasingly preoccupied with the news that a planet called Melancholia has been hiding behind the sun and now seems to be on a collision course with Earth. As apocalypse looms, Claire, quite understandably, becomes hysterical, while Claire's husband (Kiefer Sutherland) turns out to be of no help and Justine is increasingly becalmed and not nice to her at all.

As I summarize all this I realize how much I admire the raw ideas behind Melancholia, the balance of it, that juxtaposition of the individual crisis with the infinite that makes it the nihilist cousin to The Tree of Life. As I think through my experience of Melancholia I have to admit that it was definitely made by someone who really, really gets depression. The problems all come in the way we meander through the story without pace or punctuation, the way we’re meant to bask in the ostensibly clever portraits of one-dimensional or only semi-coherent characters who are mostly just assholes. Everyone, generally, is cruel, though the men tend to be weaklings while the women at least have a certain integrity—and, as with so much von Trier (see Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, et cetera), that integrity is what ensures their doom. So we watch and we wait for von Trier to do whatever it takes to twist his plots into awkward, sometimes plain stupid knots so as to completely screw over his heroine (though Dogville, it must be said, attempted to reverse this somewhat by allowing its heroine a climatic revenge). We worry, we do indeed feel the burgeoning unease, something von Trier is indeed highly skilled at inducing, and we wait. And the waiting can be tedious.

Battle: Los Angeles: What's alien for Oorah!?

The disasterama alien invasion opera Battle: Los Angeles can’t have been the easiest project to provide production design for: despite the film’s inane if commanding title, much of the action is set in Santa Monica, nearly every square inch of which gets blown to kingdom come. Yet early in our story, as marines troll the corpse-strewn resort town for survivors, a clever and conspicuously placed SUPPORT OUT TROOPS sign looms. It’s a straightforward plea and a sort of moral summary of what follows, which teeters on the cusp of bald armed forces propaganda. Battle: Los Angeles is more war movie than science fiction, and within its genre more Pearl Harbor than Thin Red Line. In a pivotal third-act scene, the most heroic of the movie’s uniformly heroic marines attempts to comfort a small child who just lost his civilian father and is several hours into a pants-kaking apocalypse by declaring that “Marines never quit!” Am I the only one who found this an inappropriate opportunity for recruitment?

The three-alarm meteor shower that kicks things off reveals itself to be a full-on hostile extraterrestrial colonization attempt just when guilt-ridden Staff Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart, well-cast, oddly enough) was supposed to be retiring from service following a tragic “tough call” which cost the lives of several members of his company in a curiously unspecified foreign conflict. Massive destruction is thus occasionally interrupted by portentous gossipy grumbling about Nantz’s lethally neglectful leadership, leading up to the token grossly overwritten bathetic monologue in which Nantz explains his actions and regains the confidence of his fellows. The attempt to generate some character development is noble enough, but what screenwriter Christopher Bertolini contrives is so generic that it mostly feels like draggy distraction from questions like why has no one mentioned nuclear bombs yet, or where’s our ubiquitous snarling explosion movie go-to girl Michelle Rodriguez… Oh wait, there she is!

Reunited with cinematographer Lukas Ettlin, the pair having teamed up previously for Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, director Jonathan Liebesman evokes the chaos of battle through jittery camerawork and aimless fidgeting with the zoom. The gunplay and scurrying is at least fairly coherent, and there’s a pretty nifty bit where Nantz fools a flying alien drone by having it follow a bunk radio signal. There’s also a memorable sequence involving some sloppy, syrupy alien surgery, preceded by what’s easily Bertolini’s finest piece of dialogue, given to an attractive civilian (Bridget Moynahan) and potential love interest for Nantz in the inevitable sequel: “Maybe I can help. I’m a veterinarian.” The aliens of course never utter a word, not even in alien, so you’re waiting in vain if you hold out for their leader to mount the Griffith Observatory and announce that they’ve come to liberate us.

New books by or about Bolaño: Tracing the poet's progress and the emergence of the novelist

The events of Monsieur Pain (New Directions, $28.50) orbit around the peculiar illness that would take the life of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. He died, rather mysteriously, in Paris in 1938. He had been in Spain, had worked for the Republican cause, and it’s suggested that his heartbreak over Spain exacerbated his demise. Yet in Roberto Bolaño’s novel, Vallejo, who appears only briefly, and only as a warm body, in a scene that finds him examined by a practitioner of “the occult sciences,” seems primarily to be dying from some spiritual condition that manifests itself in chronic hiccups. All around him Europe is becoming swept up in waves of fascism, seeming to hiccup itself, choked by spasms, unable to breathe calmly in an increasingly stifling air. And, who knows, perhaps the poet is hiccupping on the continent’s behalf, one final, wordless poetic act.

(Vallejo isn't the only character in a newly released novel to suffer perilously from a persistent case of hiccups. In Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City [Doubleday $34], his busy but loose, sprawling, often hilarious tale of friendship set in an alternate Manhattan, a man is afflicted with incessant hiccups caught from a beloved dog.)

Monsieur Pain is the earliest novel we now have from Bolaño, whose body of work has been getting rapidly translated into English by a couple of different US houses in the wake of the tremendous critical acclaim that met The Savage Detectives and 2666, both of which were published in the last few years. In the book’s preface, Bolaño explains that the novel was written back in 1981 or 82, long before he appears to have made any significant commitment to being an author of fiction rather than a poet, which he always maintained was his real vocation. Yet Monsieur Pain feels somewhat less overly poetic in its prose or structure than the later work. Some of the characteristics that we associate with Bolaño—the enigmatic sinister, the collision of politics and ineffable psychological need—are present, and an epilogue of biographical sketches is something of a prelude to the structural device found in Nazi Literature in the Americas. But, even though Monsieur Pain is translated by Chris Andrews, who has deftly translated the bulk of the Bolaño available, we don’t yet hear the Bolaño voice. That will come in good time—in fact it’s positively vibrant in The Skating Rink (New Directions, $28.50), the early mystery novel released in English last summer—and it’s perfectly interesting to see the author develop his approach in this slim work dense with curiosities.

While it hardly follows a generic narrative thread, Monsieur Pain is imbued with much playful tropes lifted from thrillers, considerable intrigue, and bizarre detours. There is the hero’s unrequited love for a young widow. There are foreigners following our hero through the streets. Bribes are taken. There are inexplicable orders that must be adhered to. There is also a surprise meeting in a café with a pair of twins who design miniature scenes of deadly catastrophes to be displayed in aquariums (which subtly anticipates the deep sea imagery of 2666). There is a screening of a perplexing, semi-documentary movie with the sly title of Actualité. This Paris is a confluence of shadows, and Bolaño’s writing feels rather close to an open homage to Kafka. The hero is repressed and finally ineffectual, lovesick, lonely, dream-rattled, and consumed with guilt. Perhaps he’s losing his mind. Perhaps he’s being mesmerized. He wants to save the life of César Vallejo, but there are forces that will not let this transpire.

At one point a character speaks of the notion that “every death has a ritual function; death, indeed, was the only genuine rite left in the world.” For Bolaño himself, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, death seems to have functioned as a shroud of mystique that would posthumously envelope his writing, much in the same way that Bolaño’s imprisonment in Chile after the coup, which has over the years been exaggerated by certain commentators, had enveloped his writing with a certain heroism while he was still alive. So it’s that much more interesting to hear from Bolaño during the final part of his life in this excellent little collection entitled Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (Melville House, $18.95).

It opens with an essay by Marcela Valdes that pays tribute not only to Bolaño but also to the Mexican investigative journalist Sergio González Rodriguez, Bolaño’s friend and the author of Huesos en el Desierto, an exposé on the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez. González Rodriguez's research was essential to developing the portrait of Bolaño’s Santa Teresa, his fictionalized Juarez, and the dark centre of 2666. Bolaño, who greatly admired American crime writers such as James Ellroy, once said he wanted to be a homicide detective, and his correspondence with González Rodriguez was perhaps the closest he came to vicariously fulfilling this urge. (A list of other things Bolaño might have liked to do with his life can be found later in the book: “Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick, and there’s no other choice but to write.”)

In the four interviews that follow, we’re able to read Bolaño’s sense of the shape of 20th century Spanish-language literature, with numerous illuminating comments on the authors who he felt remain important, and the book features a number of informative, concise, and nicely laid out side-notes that give the reader easy access to basic information on every figure mentioned. Bolaño, whose tongue is frequently in cheek but who is equally capable of sudden, surprising flights of sincerity, discusses the problems with reading prose from the perspective of a poet, the differences between Mexico, Chile and Spain, his tendencies toward radicalism and the solitude it brings with it, the literary marketing value of political imprisonment, and types of literary silence. Looming over this last topic is the sad fact that Bolaño’s silence was the kind imposed by death that comes far too young, and at the peak of a brilliant career.

2012: Not with a bang but a protracted groan

The planets will align, the sun will burp fire, the earth’s surface will start to slide all over, and it’s all happening faster than expected—unless of course, you use the Mayan calendar, read New Age books, or watch this ridiculous movie. It’s two-and-a-half hours of earthquake, flood, fire, and fun for the whole family. The apocalypse becomes a theme park ride, yet again, in the hands of Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow director Roland Emmerich, never one to do anything as rash as stray from the flabbiest of formulas. There are idealistic heroes and grotesque villains, family reunions, teary goodbyes, countless near-misses, blatantly sexist divisions of labour, reams of dopey but relentlessly portentous dialogue, and rampant death and destruction. There’s also a Paris Hilton impersonator, replete with valiant chihuahua. Amanda Peet holds hands with a Tibetan lady. Woody Harrelson plays himself. They don’t call them disaster movies for nothing.

John Cusack plays a novelist and chauffer who wrote a book about Atlantis dismissed by critics for its “naïve optimism”—his words—but beloved by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s mercilessly micromanaging humanitarian geologist and advisor to US President Danny Glover—among the prophesies espoused in 2012, apparently a full term in office is really going to add some years to Barack Obama. Cusack stumbles onto Harrelson’s paranoid—but 100% correct!—apocalypse watcher and gets from him the map to the mountainous Chinese hiding place of the secret super-arks being developed by a committee of global politicians. Cusack packs up ex-wife Peet, the two kids, and the ex-wife’s new boyfriend, who thankfully knows how to fly a plane, and runs for it. They make it to China with the help of some unsavoury Russians, but will they get on the ark?

There’s lots going on in 2012, though little of it amounts to anything besides constant regurgitations of the same stale sub-Spielbergian sentimental schlock and suspense scenarios spruced up with the latest CGI scenery. What’s most annoying is that Emmerich and co-scenarist Harald Kloser don’t even make use of the more interesting items they themselves conspicuously plant in the story, such as all those wild animals being hustled into the ark, ready to make lunch of some hysterical humans, or the fact that Cusack’s seven-year-old still wets herself and has to wear diapers. A filmmaker willing to fess up to his own lust for visions of Armageddon would surely have made something more genuinely spectacular and provocative with all this—my vote would be for Paul Verhoven—but Emmerich, ever the conservative, doesn’t go all the way with anything, not the familial reconciliation story nor the gallows humour nor the horror nor the millenarian pseudo-science. You would think that a movie about the collapse of civilization might, you know, have something to say about civilization, and you'd be wrong. Not the end of world, of course, just an astonishing lack of imagination.

But you want to know what really pisses me off about 2012? All through the film everyone keeps talking about how the Mayans warned us. But take a look at the faces of those who make it onto the ark at the end—not one fucking Mayan! So much for NAFTA.

The bittersweet sixteen: Stranded on DVD

It was not like a shipwreck, one survivor explains. Rather, it was somehow closer to being lost at sea, the snow being just as unruly, oppressive and deadly a force. At first, some wondered if they’d awoken to find themselves in the hereafter, the vastness and blankness of their surroundings evoking some realm of heavenly purity, of desolate, austere beauty, and it was only the cries of agony, the tremendous, unimaginable suffering endured by all those who didn’t instantly perish that convinced them otherwise. This place they found themselves in was indeed very much of this world, but to listen to their testimonies you’d think they’d returned from a distant planet.

Watching Gonzalo Arijón’s Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains is an exhausting experience. And after you’ve seen it, the idea of telling this story in any other way, at least cinematically, starts to feel vulgar or insufficient in comparison. While there are well-staged and evocative re-enactments to help us visualize their narratives, so much of the film is comprised of now middle-aged men simply sitting, remembering, speaking—yet it’s absolutely riveting. Each of its subjects, articulate, vivid storytellers the lot, talk us through their memories of the incident, the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes. Of the 45 people on board only 16 lived to see rescue some grueling 72 days later. Yet the fact that 16 survived, that any survived, is about as close to a true miracle as most of us will ever know of.

The plane carried the Old Christians, a rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay, en route to a match in Santiago, Chile. They did not reach their ostensible destination, but the situation in which they found themselves would prove to be a defining moment in each of their lives. They shared numerous traits that one can’t help but interpret in retrospect as somehow essential to their survival: youth, nationality, physical fitness, education, class, an ethic of teamwork, and varying degrees of religious conviction. To this day they all live within a short distance of one another. The durability of their faith and sense of brotherhood would come to lend heightened meaning to their team’s moniker, seeing them through the most horrific and despairing depths of their 72-day trail. They had no outdoors training and were unfamiliar with the mountain conditions. One survivor describes how the crash gave him his very first contact with snow—which he immediately waded in up to his chest. They had little food, poor clothing, nothing to create heat with, and, despite there being two medical students among them, no medical supplies. They would eventually be forced to resort to cannibalism. Yet here, most of all, they took comfort in their religious beliefs, citing Christ’s offering of his flesh during the Last Supper as precedent and permission for the carnal communion they came to partake in. For all their lack of supplies, they did have a functioning radio—which meant that they were able to listen to broadcasts announcing that the search for them was called off due to weather conditions. The assumption was that they were surely all dead.

Many of us already know this story, through news reports of the day, through journalist Piers Paul Read’s 1974 bestseller Alive, Frank Marshall’s 1993 adaptation of Read’s book starring Ethan Hawke, or the recent memoir by Fernando Parrado, the survivor played by Hawke. But you haven’t heard the story in a way that even approximates the power and intimacy of Arijón’s documentary. There is a scene in which a man describes speaking lovingly to his wife’s corpse as it lay in the snow, which eventually swallowed her up altogether. Parrado and Roberto Canessa eventually set out to find help, despite having no idea where they were or in which direction they should venture. After 12 days, from across a river, they finally encountered a Chilean huaso named Sergio Catalan, who they could only communicate with by writing a note in lipstick, attaching it to a rock, and tossing it across the water. There is a scene in which Catalan describes Parrado and Canessa as literally smelling of the grave. No animal would approach them, he says. These are things you can’t invent.

Arijón’s task of having to work all these incredible stories into a two-hour whole itself must have been arduous. Zeitgeist’s new DVD supplying us with scenes left out of the final cut, some of which are so rich its difficult to imagine how Arijón could bear to lose them. But I think Arijón, who grew up with some of these men, was wise to focus on making the train of disparate memories as fluid as possible, emphasizing the collective experience, since what is finally perhaps most remarkable about this story is how utterly devoid of infighting conflict it is, how unlike any of the number of ruthless tales of survival we know from novels and movies. For all its appalling, infernal details, what we’re left with by the end of Stranded is, strangely enough, a testament to optimism, love, interdependence and grace in some of the worst possible circumstances.

Unlucky numbers: Knowing

In just about any movie where the protagonist is a teacher you can usually count on a classroom scene in which the movie’s themes and conflicts are announced. It’s surprising actually how often the convention works. It’s a way of playing fair with the audience and certainly preferable to having the characters make similar announcements in the thick of a heated climax. Early in Knowing astrophysicist and MIT prof John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) engages his students in a conversation about determinism, randomness and purpose. Koestler’s a man of science, the errant son of a pastor, and a still grief-stricken widower. For him, “shit just happens.” And if there’s one thing you can say about Knowing, it’s that a lot of massively cataclysmic shit happens.  

Call it disaster porn. Through a series of coincidences that are surely more than just coincidences Koestler gets his hands on a paper covered in numbers that’s been buried underground for 50 years, its author a creepy little girl who’s since grown up and died. During a drunken math binge Koestler unravels the document’s hidden code, which prophesizes a series of wickedly fatal disasters, most of which have already come to pass—but there’s still three left! Can Koestler, recklessly/stupidly throwing himself into the eye of the hurricane, prevent these catastrophic events? The little girl got all the other ones right, so hey, you do the math. But you may want to cover your eyes when the screaming crowds being crushed to pulp or the burning bodies stumble about begging for mercy. Some of this shit will give you nightmares.

For better or for worse, Alex Proyas, who helmed cult favourite Dark City, fully commits to the material, which means balancing Koestler’s personal revelation and Cage’s odd, sleepy breed of hysteria with the broader story of global apocalyptic hysteria. If you’re willing to go along with this thing, there’s something genuinely compelling at the base of all this. Loony, half-baked and more than a little friendly to religious nuts and conspiracy theorists alike, but compelling. Of course, there’s also something stupendously silly about numerous key points on which the plot turns: the messages scrawled under a bed, the skinny blonde stalkers in overcoats, the risible final images of some sort of paradise that cry out to be included as outtakes on a DVD for The Fountain. You have to admire Knowing’s willingness to go all the way with its catastrophic equations, yet it arguably could have benefited from a few hints of ambiguity, a little room for doubt. In life and art alike, certainty can be a precarious thing.

Not hi-5 nor finger-snap nor knuckle buckle nor forearm grab, The Guatemalan Handshake is hard to learn

It opens with a beguiling slow-motion plume of tire-squalled dust. It then glides through a montage of black and white expository tableau, sumptuous colour images and sonic elements that seem lovingly culled from scrapbooks for David Gordon Green’s first two movies: a little girl swinging over a river backwards through time or a demolition derby, the scenes arcing across the screen while the little girl—her name, which she’ll no doubt come to resent, is Turkeylegs—speaks through voice-over about her best friend Donald. What she says here is, in its way, crucial. There are three things Donald would like to see before he dies, Turkeylegs tells us, “a lake of chocolate, a turtle the size of a horse, and a trophy with his name on it.”

The Guatemalan Handshake unfolds in a Pennsylvania town, dividing its time between various representatives of its citizenry. The film’s catalytic event is a power surge that, in a compelling sequence, inspires a mist of varied voices that speak of malfunctioning appliances with the awe of hurricane survivors or pilgrims who’ve witnessed a miracle. Yet might the real, underlying catalyst that afflicts the characters in writer/director Todd Rohal’s feature debut be something more like a toxic spill? Judging from those reactors lingering in the background, maybe it was a nuclear accident? Something funky must have infected the water supply in these parts, because the local eccentricity meter is way into the red.

The flashback to Spank Williams’ failed public death, a grieving dog owner’s attending her own funeral, a story about Amish time travelers, a guy who sounds like he’s gonna have a coronary every time he talks, a photo of a man posing with Willie Mays and the world’s biggest chewing gum, a handicapped boy who explains that nose-picking is “awesome”—when do such bubbles of quirkiness reach critical mass? There are several inspired gags, like whenever Stool (Rich Schreiber), the movies’ most awkward date since Jackie Earle Haley, spontaneously takes off his shirt in some misguided act of foreplay—but a lot of these gags would probably work better if they weren’t all shoved into a single, heavily saturated comedy.

Rohal’s definitely gone out on a limb here, making something this unapologetically, warmly goofy, yet the goofiness rarely seems to serve much more than goofiness itself. On occasion this tack is so cartoonish that it only distances us further from the characters it purports to have affection for, like that grieving dog owner. Rohal’s story is basically a chain that links characters with accoutrements—a turtle, an electric car, a wheelchair, a headband—and a scattering of events, such as Donald’s disappearance following emotional trauma and a dog’s electrocution, or the double injury at the roller rink. Things feel most harmonious is when we get evidence of what may be Rohal’s true gift: his ability to nurture strong performances from a cast of mostly non-professionals, especially Katy Haywood, who plays Turkeylegs, and Sheila Scullin, who plays Donald’s estranged girlfriend Sadie. There’s also a very appealing performance from musician Will Oldham as Donald himself. Strikingly clean-shaven after his beardy turn in Old Joy, Oldham looks and sounds so endearingly boyish here he could’ve walked right off the set of Matewan, a movie made when he was all of 16.

The Guatemalan Handshake is threaded together by themes of paternal anxiety—manifested in a pregnant woman participating in a demolition derby and the father of her unborn child absconding—and the letting go of childish things. Yet the film itself often feels stunted, closely guarding its own preciousness, retaining each and every affectation whether they actually gel together or not. If Rohal’s next film works better than this one, it will likely be because his eccentricities are the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself.

The Second Plane: Martin Amis on our being the involuntary guests to the blood wedding of terror and religion

If the numerous figures wrangled together under the big top of global intelligentsia, certain novelists among them, desire to distinguish their two cents from the clamour of collective pocket change, it mightn’t hurt to allow themselves to change their minds now and then, or at least develop their positions through time and experience, however subjective or limited that experience may be. If his various opponents have any single bone to pick with Noam Chomsky, for example, it’s that he appears to have the same response to everything. For many of us not graced with similar certainty, there’s something persuasive about thinkers who make some attempt to regularly tend to their thoughts, to bring to their ideas a sort of narrative that we can track, a path we can follow and perhaps more easily identify with.

Turning the development of political convictions into narrative seems to be the underlying point of The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (Knopf, $29.95), the new collection of previously published writing by Martin Amis addressing, through essay, fiction and book or film criticism, the new challenges of life after that fateful “day of de-Enlightenment.” Arranged in chronological order, the last entry written only last September, the pieces convey something of Amis’ wrestling with man’s capacity for darkness, violence, tedium and self-delusion, all themes that, were it not for 9/11, would otherwise signal just another day at the office for the author of London Fields, Time’s Arrow and Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Okay, “wrestling” may be too fraught a term –Amis, as always, never sweats all that much under the heatlamp of heavy consideration– but he does in fact think out loud and articulately, resulting in a highly valuable read.

In ‘The Second Plane,’ written only a week after 9/11, Amis writes how for “thousands in the South Tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.” In ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,’ written in June 2002, the future begins to form a network of links to the past that were perhaps not so easily discernable in 9/11’s immediate aftermath, and the links keep highlighting the role of religion. While Amis separates his stance from that of “humanist pit bulls” like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) –Amis is a humbly confessed agnostic, rather than a tough-talking atheist– he begins to examine what he sees as the fundamental dangers of religion. And Amis being Amis, he’s not preoccupied with niceties.

“The twentieth century… has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows little sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful… if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.”

In ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind,’ written in September 2006, Amis makes some refined distinctions: between Muhammad, who “no serious person could fail to respect,” and Muhammad Atta; between Islam, “the donor of countless benefits to mankind,” and Islamism, “a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination.” To be sure, Amis seems less concerned with excusing religious moderates from his attack on extremists than with directing our attention to the ways in which religious rhetoric, along with the new boredom of life burdened with arbitrary security measures, injects all post-9/11 powers with tacit permission to stop thinking. To put it another way, whichever side you’re on, so long as God’s on it, you’re allowed to be a bloodthirsty idiot.

Amis has been taking a lot of flak for what some have deemed his hateful, anti-Islamic attitude, an accusation that, once you actually read his work, can be seen as just a form of media-based bullying, an attempt to mob Amis into a corner, one cohabited by a truckload of right-wingers that would no doubt make for some rather uncomfortable chit-chat. Amis is openly hostile to the Bush administration –another house of destructive religious piety– and only friendlier to Blair by comparison. He’s hardly on side with the invasion of Iraq –see ‘The Wrong War’– but he’s willing to put things in some perspective. He declares the invasion of Iraq was not “wholly dishonorable.

“This is a more complicated, and more familiar, kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a giant contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. A dramatic (and largely benign) expansion of American power seems to have been the general goal; a dramatic reduction of American power seems to be the general outcome. Iraq is a divagation of what is ominously being called The Long War. To our largely futile losses in blood, treasure, and moral prestige, we add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.”

Amis may be going a little too far out of his way (benign?) to avoid being lumped with the camp of the ineffectual Left that welcomes all manner of conspiracy theorist pundits, but his perspective is far more nuanced than any voluble variation on “stuff happens.” Above all, Amis keeps his eye on a bottom line peopled with mass murderers, whose culpability can’t finally be diminished by arguments of how the US had it coming. Throughout The Second Plane, and perhaps most especially in the fiction pieces –one of which imagines the final days of Muhammad Atta, a story which functions nicely as a sort of companion piece to the alternating chapters in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man– Amis keeps coming back to the sheer banality of sexually repressed, fleetingly inspired evil, seeing nothing noble or righteous anywhere in its vicinity, only something sad, deadly and all too familiar.

Horton Hears a Who!: the sub-microscopic apocalyptic disaster movie as talking animal kiddie fluff

An elephant is gradually shunned, then hunted down by his entire jungle community for claiming that there is life beyond what we can see, hear or feel. A less-than-respected town mayor is wracked with anxiety, a panicked sense of futility, burdened with the knowledge that his world teetering on the brink of apocalypse. Pretty heavy shit for a kid’s movie, but we’re riffing in the heady realm of Dr. Seuss, who sort of had a knack for blending mortally high stakes and political metaphor with screwy humour and fantastical hi-jinx.

Horton Hears a Who! has the enormous advantage of Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) still lingering in our collective memory, ensuring us that no matter what the Fox animation squad does to Horton can’t possibly be worse that the grotesquerie of Howard’s live-action toilet fodder. Horton does share Grinch’s star, but fortunately Jim Carrey, often cartoonish in any case, can’t mug quite as gratingly when reduced to voice only. (And weirdly, the elephant looks more like costar Steve Carell than it does Carrey.) In fact there are a moments where his good-natured titular elephant, persecuted for claiming that an entire world exists on a spec resting on a flower, is reasonably charming, interacting with his pupils or with his mouse pal, the obligatory sidekick well-voiced by Seth Rogan.

What ushers Horton Hears a Who! to a substantially higher level of Seussian entertainment however are the scenes in Whoville, where Carell’s Mayor slips and slides through a village of curly, gravity-defying, Gaudi-inspired architecture and candy-coloured everything. While Horton’s jungle home feels akin to typical contemporary, soft-hued, numbingly fluid, Hollywood-budgeted computer animation, Whoville, where the animation style has been stripped down to something far more graphically bold, draws us into a landscape that actually feels like a place Seuss might have dreamed up.

But the film’s major problem isn’t related to these varying degrees of visual or aural charisma. What makes Horton Hears a Who! something of a drag is the fact that you can feel writers Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul (the scribes behind The Santa Clause 2) straining to expand Seuss’s winsomely compact tale to feature length. There are too many supporting characters with little to do, too many scenes that become repetitive and redundant. One of the laudable themes of the story is the importance of questioning authority: if only the team behind the film could have questioned their studio superiors to the point of making them accept that Horton, like the beloved 1966 version of Grinch, would probably work better at a third of the duration.

1973: The year of awkward sex, permissive parenting and tentative transgression

Early in the commentary track he shares with writer/ producer James Schamus featured on Criterion’s new two-disc special edition, director Ang Lee describes The Ice Storm (1997) as a “disaster film.” While it might seem laughable to apply this genre to a movie concerned with upper-middle class domestic conflict in 1973 suburban Connecticut, it proves an inspired way of contextualizing the movie’s cycle of events. Based on Rick Moody’s novel, The Ice Storm does in fact contain a pair of disasters, the larger being that of the Watergate scandal, the more immediate being the weather event of the title. Neither disaster promises pyrotechnics or rampant death, yet both have some sort of transformative effect on the characters. This effect works best when functioning on the level of atmosphere, but there’s also a tangible, irreversible effect that ultimately drapes an overwhelming shadow over the entire story.

It’s about two families. Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) struggle amiably through marital disharmony, placating themselves with a casual affair and kleptomania respectively. Their teenage children Paul and Wendy (Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci) use the freedom granted to them by their desperate to be hip parents to explore pharmaceuticals and sex with a precocious inquiry. Jim and Janey Carver (Jamey Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver) by comparison seem more mutually remote and programmatic in their mid-life crises. Their sons Mikey and Sandy (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), the former an already dreamy kid precariously enamored with weed, the latter sensitive to the point of paralysis, his only outlet for expression coming from a predilection for blowing shit up (okay, so actually there are a few pyrotechnics), are the willing playmates of the pro-active Wendy, who engages each in separate games of show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine. Building tensions up toward the night of the storm, where the parents abandon the kids to attend a key party drenched in pathos, the story operates around this generational role reversal: what happens when the parents act like kids and vice versa.

In the same sense that Brokeback Mountain (2005) –Lee’s other most fundamentally American film– can be regarded as being about the failure of love to overcome outspoken social antipathies toward homosexuality, The Ice Storm can be said to be about the failure of The Sexual Revolution to overcome the repressive apparatus of the American family/community. This sense of failure emerges from a series of interesting conditions: virtually every character is either too old or too young to have come of age during the radical cultural shifts of the late 1960s; the characters exist largely within a community cut off from the unruly influence of cosmopolitan life by geography and affluence; and crucially, the film climaxes with a fatal tragedy that reverberates hugely through the final sequence, feeling unavoidably like some cosmic punishment for half-hearted experiments in permissive parenting. This ending still feels to me like this terrifically rich film’s one major misfire, reducing the complex relationships by way of what feels like the act of a forsaken and vengeful God. (It bears mentioning that Lee’s only previous appearance on a Criterion disc was his introduction to The Virgin Spring (1960), a film with a weirdly similar finale.)

Of course it would be even more reductive to judge The Ice Storm solely on such a reading of its last reel. Inherent in the film’s unusual multitude of central characters, with their ongoing, measured transgressions, their flashes of fleeting insight and their general lack of decisiveness, is the idea of the movie as a multifaceted portrait rather than a traditional linear narrative anchored by some overt moral lesson or resolution. Lee himself felt attracted to a Cubist method of directing, wanting to show varying sides of a situation, an idea or an emotion all at once –and indeed, without employing any overly conspicuous formal device, he achieves this effect quite well, through the careful placement of figures in a frame, the mirroring of gestures and images from one scene to the next, and, most of all, the tremendously detailed performances from his extraordinary cast.

A lot of attention was paid to Weaver when the film came out. Her subtle balancing of Janey’s exterior frigidity with an inner vulnerability is genuinely impressive, but her character remains marginal. Allen’s character by contrast feels more central and certainly more desperate, yet Elena nonetheless feels a bit too sketched out. Kline, who Moody himself credits with deepening his character, stands out from all the other adults because his weaknesses are so acute, his humiliation so squirm-inducing, and his deficiencies so tenderly undercut by the actor’s ingratiating persona. But the fact is The Ice Storm belongs to the kids: moony-eyed Wood conveys such innocent rapture; Maguire’s wavering voice and goofily cavalier way with literary references imbues his every attempt at confident delivery with a near-palpable ache; Hann-Byrd’s unbreakable astonishment with everything around him is both heart-breaking and totally hilarious; and Ricci, more than anyone, embodies the film’s tender hesitancy and desire for some elusive self-realization and sensual fulfillment. She’s just amazing.

Besides the commentary track, Criterion’s typically superlative extras include some very good new cast interviews (which reveal Weaver in particular to be an actor who admirably takes little for granted), some reflections from Moody, plenty of fun, candid material from the duo of Lee and Schamus, some interesting deleted scenes, and some fascinating making-of stuff from costume designer Carol Oditz, cinematographer Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet, Night on Earth) and production designer Mark Friedberg, all of whom provide enlightening testimony on their detailed work and make an impressive case for the liberal use of biodegradable hair gel when wanting to evoke an ice storm in the middle of spring.