WORKS OF ETGAR KERET

One day I found upon the comics shelves of the otherwise pretty lousy Holgate Branch Library, a short walk from my home, a volume called How To Love, containing works by the Actus comics collective.  Seriously, the Holgate Branch Library is the lousiest library I have ever encountered.  It used to be pretty okay for a little neighborhood branch library but it seemed that once every few years they would undertake an assessment which concluded that they should reduce the number of  actual books, and see that the ones they kept were mostly thin illustrated books with shiny covers with the word dummy or idiot in the title.  If you just want to browse it is worse than useless - it is insulting.  A real tragedy considering how great almost every other library in the city is. 

I was pleased by the quality of the works in How To Love,  and surprised to find that there were people in Israel who just want to live normal daily lives.  I was ashamed to be surprised.  For you see, Actus is an Israeli comics collective.  Realizing one's ignorance is the first step toward removing it and I had soon read the few other available volumes of Israeli cartoonists - two by Rutu Modan (Jamilti and Exit Wounds) whose clear-line style and nostalgic/surreal stories are fascinating, and Jetlag, a collection of  works drawn by various artists, based on the stories of Etgar Keret.  I had never heard of Keret but instantly saw in him something I had never seen before and didn't even know what it was.

Keret's books are not the kind you want to read right through.  They would be good to have around where you could pick one up and spend a few minutes reading a story and go about your day digesting them.  His stories are very very short and each one is unique. Each one is strange in a new way, a boiled down Twilight Zone compressed into two or three pages and inserted into the real world.  However unimaginable the situations and events, they seem Normal with a capital N. 

Keret has also had his works transformed into movies, with varying results.  The most mainstream of them is Wristcutters, A Love Story (2006), based on a single story of the crummy half-assed afterlife to which suicides are doomed. Meduzot [Jellyfish] (2007) is written and directed by Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen, and is made up of a group of stories which intersect but don't overlap.  An inept and alienated young woman finds some of life's meaning in a beautiful child who appears from the sea, a Filipina works as companion to a harsh elderly woman who doesn't seem to appreciate her daughter's life as a stage actress, and a young couple are having a rather unhappy honeymoon when they encounter a mysterious writer staying in the same hotel. $9.99 (2008) is an Australian/Israeli stop motion animated film comprising a group of Keret's stories which, as in Meduzot, intersect without overlapping.  It suffers, in my opinion, from that type of physical ugliness unique to stop motion animated characters, and bears a touch of that unsettling Australian psychology which makes me apprehensive every time I have to decide whether or not to watch an Aussie movie.  There is a beggar who commits suicide and returns with wings - still the same mooching bum but with wings.  There is a woman who wants her men to be smooth and clean - really smooth and clean.  There is a young man who looks to a mail order book for his answers to life's problems and the book costs $9.99.  Of the three, Meduzot is the one that best conveys the spirit of Keret's work and I recommend it.  It has another value which I think is very important, in showing life in Israel without religion and politics.  It is not a commentary on anything other than living as a human being.

If you have a few moments to spare, and would like to try out an Etgar Keret story there are a few you can read on his website here.   You can also learn about some of his other activities, like the four foot wide house.

So why was I surprised to learn that there were regular people in Israel?  Try not to freak out when I tell you this.  That place has got more baggage than any other country on earth.  You never hear anything but politics, religion, conflict from that place.  Sometimes I want to smack that country and say just be Human first, then be religious or nationalist or whatever you want to be, because all that stuff isn't as fascinating to me as it seems to be to you.  We all brush our teeth the same way. Keret doesn't write Israeli stories, or Jewish stories, political or religious stories.  He writes stories that can fit into any brain without having to be an example of something or teach a lesson about something, and they make you see things a little bit differently.

ALINE BROSH MCKENNA AND THE FEMALE ACTION MOVIE

After I binged out on Mexican horror movies for Halloween I needed a break. Not a break from watching movies, that would be the smart thing to do.  I needed to see something nice.  A chick flick.  After a couple of false starts I settled on Morning Glory (2010).  I remembered that it got fairly good reviews when it came out, then promptly vanished forever.  That's just what I needed, something fluffy that would drift away on a breath, that would show a glossy snapshot of a pleasant world.  Morning Glory is about the Clumsy-cute Spunky Girl Who Won't Give Up.  She finds herself thrust into place as director of the worst rated morning talk show on television and she has to get those ratings up or they will cancel the show.  The only way to do it is with a plan that is so crazy it just might work - drag in a surly highly respected journalist and try to force him to banter.  It's a Shirley Temple movie, with Harrison Ford as the old grump who must be won over by cute little Rachel McAdams' cheerful never-say-die attitude.  But of course what it really takes is for her to finally snap and bitch him out for being a hateful old jerk. It was cute.  It washed my brain clean.

When I looked it up I found that it was written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada (2006), which I kind of hated.  One thing I didn't hate about it though was the writing.  As I said, I eventually started to like it.  That's what happened with Morning Glory - I never really hated it but I finally liked it for what it was.  So I figured what the hell let's check out something else by Aline Brosh McKenna and see what happens.

I looked up 27 Dresses (2008) and it seemed like the sort of thing that was the least like anything I would ever want to experience, so I knew I ought to see it.  The way I am different from a lot of people is instead of just learning about things I know I will like I try to learn about things I might not like, but I try to find something good in them.  Some stuff I know about, like zombies.  I saw Lucio Fulci movies in the '70s at drive ins and dollar movies so zombies are OLD OLD hat to me.  You can keep your zombies.  Unless they include Milla Jovovich all strapped up in black leather.  But being a bridesmaid, that is something I don't know about.  I have been to a couple of weddings and what an incredible waste.  Weddings are anathema to me, so the idea of there being a person who is a wedding junkie, or women who dream all their lives about the perfect wedding, that is just INSANE.  The titular dresses are a closet full of bridesmaid dresses, and this whole movie probably got kickstarted by the brief online Horrible Bridesmaid Dresses craze.  The hero of the movie is the person who always does everything for everyone else and never for herself, a wedding junkie with a closet full of horrible dresses, one from each wedding she has been in.  She is played by Katherine Heigl, who seems to be popular for her non-threatening everywoman appeal.  She is hopelessly in love with her handsome boss and when her younger prettier sister comes along and snatches him up something has to snap.  You could send this movie back to 1938 and put Claudette Colbert in it and it would work just the same - changing dresses in the back of a taxicab (driven by Allen Jenkins) as she rushes from one wedding to the next.  It was after seeing this that I understood that these are Female Action Movies.

An action movie has a hero seeking a fabulous object in exotic locations with an inferior sidekick, facing obstacles and adversaries which become progressively more difficult until at last the good guy wins.  Except in these movies it isn't vengeance or a million dollars in gold, it's the fulfillment of a lifelong dream or true love.  There are no explosions except emotional ones, no leaping through windows shooting two machine pistols as a ball of flame explodes behind you, except with your heart.  The sidekicks are not ever-present, sometimes they are quite intermittent but they are there, to act as a sounding board or to give advice - not cute and spunky like the hero but helpful and convenient.  The adversaries are not evil, just unsympathetic, selfish, oblivious to the feelings of others, and they are not defeated, just brought around to the side of righteousness.

Armed with that knowledge I tried out I Don't Know How She Does It (2011), though not without some trepidation.  I almost chickened out.  Sarah Jessica Parker is the urban mother of two who does something important in investment banking that nobody understands which causes her to always be going somewhere and breaking promises to her daughter.  Maybe she just waited to start a family but at some points Parker is looking a little haggard, and maybe too old for these cheerful chatter roles, but what else has she got going for her?  She's going to have to be playing crazy grandmas someday. Through much of the movie I found myself exclaiming "I HATE THIS," and yet the overall effect was that I actually liked it. One very important adventure aspect of the Female Action Movie is public embarrassment.  In each of these movies there are moments of supreme public embarrassment which, contrary to her expectations, the hero survives with few repercussions.  Falling down, hitching up your underwear where everybody can see you, getting lice from your kid.  It happens, it's over, nobody dies - like crossing that jungle rope bridge over the piranha river chased by cannibals, it seems like it is going to be terrible but then it is over and you cut the ropes and keep running.

I had some momentum going so it was either We Bought A Zoo (2011)  or Laws of Attraction (2004).  I don't know about the zoo thing, and kids and animals so I will pass on that one.  Laws of Attraction stars Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan as two high-powered divorce lawyers who instantly hate each other so obviously they must fall into bed as soon as possible and eventually wake up from a drunken spree - married.  This wasn't quite as specialized as a Female Action movie as McKenna's later work and it would be a good married date movie because naturally any divorce movie ultimately affirms marriage.

Finally I tried to finish it off with Three To Tango (1999) but McKenna was merely co-writer on it and frankly it stank so bad I happily quit after 15 minutes of heavy-handed yoks and gay jokes.  So there you go.  That was my foray into Aline Brosh McKenna territory and what I learned from it was that your sidekick will always be there for you when you do something stupid and humiliating. If you just keep trying and never give up you will finally find true love, have your dream wedding, and balance a happy home with a career in high finance.  Sometimes you just have to snap, and smack somebody down, and think about yourself for once, and show them you are a human being too, but it will all work out okay in the end.  That's how it is in the movies anyway.

Movies

Bunraku (2010) I didn't realize when I "obtained" this that it hadn't been released to US theaters yet.  I have some standards about downloading and tend not to go for certain things as a matter of principle.  I had a vague idea this was not going to get a US theatrical release and thought this was the only way I could see it. Sorry.  Watched it anyway.  This extremely imaginative, lively and colorful fantasy never sets foot in reality for a moment, which is something I really appreciate in a movie.  You're going to have to build sets for everything anyway so why not make them the craziest sets you can, and light the hell out of them and stick greenscreens behind them to fill the background with pure art instead of just a picture of something you can see by looking out the window.  That said, it is all pretty much fight scenes tied together with a string of genre cliches.  I need more from a story than that.  It was fun to see but I would have liked it more if there had been an actual plot or some kind of relational contrivance beyond these guys have to fight those guys. Or some songs would have been cool, to go with the imaginative choreography that was already there. So, 6/10 for me.  If you like that fighty stuff go see it if you can.

Books - The Overton Window "by" Glenn Beck

The Overton Window - Glenn Beck  I had seen this at the library a few weeks ago and had been thinking of it ever since.  Kook novels are a field of special interest for me because they contain ideas which I am unlikely to encounter anywhere else, usually packed in an especially mediocre form of utopian/dystopian fantasy.  I was in the mood for something easy to digest and I knew this couldn't have been written by Beck himself (if it had, it probably would have been 600 pages), so it would be a standard ghost-written page-turner which hit all the notes at the right time.  When a kook novel is written by the kook him/herself it can be challenging, if not impossible, to read and I regret that among the many on the shelves here at the Kooks Museum I have only read most of them.  Any book I can rip through in four hours is a well-crafted piece of formula fiction, and that's what this is.  Steeped in kook lore as I am, I got all the Global Political Conspiracy references and was pleased to be introduced to some pretty interesting social engineering concepts, including the eponymous Window - ideas acceptable to the public are within this so-called window, and to change what is accepted one introduces extreme and unacceptable ideas, which automatically widens the window making less extreme ideas palatable.  This is similar to less well-defined ideas of my own, that the existence of an obviously insane extremism makes it easier to introduce unusual or uncommon ideas which seem more reasonable by comparison.  This is a classic and very useful fallacy of argument which actually operates subliminally to alter people's ideas without their knowing it. The irony of Beck's use of the Overton Widow concept, to me, is that he doesn't appear to realize that he has been used for exactly that purpose - as a public loony introducing crank extremist theories in order to make a less radical deliberate thought control agenda more palatable.  After finishing The Overton Window I opened another book I got at the same time, the first volume of  Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  I knew by the time I got to the second paragraph that I held in my hands a work of genius.  The sad thing is, I am not sure I will be able to read it.

Movies

Mummy's Boys (1936) Comedy duo Wheeler and Woolsey are a pair of ditch diggers who join an archaeological expedition plagued by a mummy's curse. A lot of chasing around, not as much vaudeville-style presentation as some of their other films and thus not as interesting to me. 3/10

Inception (2010) Good concept, well executed, but a bit heavy on the noise and stuff crashing into other stuff and things blowing up for my tastes. In short, too big and expensive. I'd like to see the same idea pared down to its basics and presented as simply as an old Outer Limits episode. 6/10

Movies

Le main du diable (1943) Painter buys demonic talisman which replaces his hand with a possessed occult hand, fulfilling his dreams of greatness. The catch is, he must sell it before he dies for less than he paid or be eternally damned, plus the devil is ruining his life just for fun. No big surprises, but a pretty nice deal with the devil movie in general. 6/10

Riptide (1934) Ponderous depression-era melodrama with Norma Shearer the vivacious victim of stuffy husband Herbert Marshall's suspicions, and Robert Montgomery the boozing nitwit into whose arms she flees. Not a speck of reality intrudes into this tale of the desperate problems of fantastically wealthy and beautiful people scampering gaily around the mediterranean or weeping in lavish chambers. Though it is ferociously romantic for the first fifteen minutes, this is really the same story as 1930's wonderful The Divorcee, with slower pace and less appeal. Gowns by Adrian are fantastical and fabulous, angular and asymmetrical with huge contrasting lapels, or slim glittering sheaths with miles of train, but the characters are all a bit much, the dialog is heavy and repetitious, the action is slow and the abrupt ending seems like a quick fix to what might have been more satisfying as a tragedy. 4/10

Movies

Cat Girl (1957) Multigenerational curse of unknown origin causes mental bond between woman and leopard. Not quite a transformation film - she thinks she turns into a cat and there is a vague blurry sort of a transformation scene at one point, but mostly it is gloom, atmosphere and stiff British dialogue. Not very exciting or interesting. 4/10

Konga (1961) Michael Gough, one of the great overactors of the cinema, is the mad scientist whose plant serum transforms a tiny chimp into a gigantic gorilla suit. Takes a very long time for the gorilla suit to become gigantic so for the most part it is a conventional gorilla suit movie, with the requisite stranglings, and lab apparatus being swept off tables. When the gorilla suit finally becomes gigantic it bumbles feebly about, or stands immobile, roaring at the hundreds of rounds of gunfire zipping past it because something that large is so difficult to hit. The moral of it all is that those who use science to justify their sociopathy are destroyed by their own creation, but I heard that before. It's all pretty flat, leaving lots of time to admire the way the lighting on the sets doesn't appear to come from any of the visible light fixtures. 3/10

Kongo (1932) There is also a chimp in this movie but everything else is different. Walter Huston is a scar-faced wheelchair-bound white witch doctor who controls his lackeys with drugs and violence, and the natives with simple stage magic, while nursing a grudge against the man who stole his wife and broke his spine. The natives are props and plot devices, the whites uniformly filthy and degraded, though bearing a tiny spark of humanity. Lupe Velez is oiled up and lustful, always on the brink of losing her top. A truly perverse production of a lurid and deranged melodrama. 8/10

Movies

Danger: Diabolik (1968) John Phillip Law is fantastically attractive as the masked super-criminal Diabolik. Directed by Mario Bava, based on a comic strip, this is the perfect venue for Bava's wild talents. Diabolik's subterranean lair is a vast hallucination, and the Night Club Scene is the most bizarre and amazing I have ever seen. The theft of a twenty-ton giant ingot of solid gold was fantastic in every sense of the word. The super-criminal, such as Diabolik, Fantomas, Mabuse, Lupin or The Black Lizard, as a character and genre has been shamefully neglected in these decadent times, while idiotic allegiance to primitive ideas of law and justice are spoon-fed to the masses as virtues to prevent their rising up against their evil masters. The world awaits its deliverer. Until then, this fantasy will have to do. 8/10

Adaptation (2002) This is the kind of movie Donna chooses, and I end up watching them just because I like to learn about things. I would never have picked it myself, but ended up enjoying it quite a bit. This movie shows how helpful it can be to listen to your stupid half - one of the best things I ever learned. I don't understand how Nicholas Cage can be such a good actor and still end up in so many brain-dead action spectaculars. Chris Cooper gets the toothless redneck genius thing down with deadly precision. Pretty good stuff if you like quality. 8/10 for completely different reasons from the above.

Movies

Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) Robert Ryan seems an odd choice for Nemo in this Anglo-American Verneian fantasy, but he carries the stern misanthropy well. Chuck Connors is one of the people saved from a shipwreck by Nemo's gilded-age scuba divers, and his only desire is to escape from the domed city, with Luciana Paluzzi tossed in as temporary love interest. Large and elaborate sets with lots of gold paint and colored lighting, and nice models almost make up for the blatantly stupid script. They were clearly trying for the Disney Adventure Film audience, so they dropped a kid and a kitten in for no other purpose. The story is episodic and incoherent, and I soon saw that asking why and how about anything would be pointless. There is a giant mutant devil-ray called Mobula, and familiar face Allan Cuthbertson takes the "Dr. Smith" role - hysterically flipping out and frenetically wrecking things for everyone - to a self-destructive extreme. All that said, it was still kind of fun to watch, and I saw it long ago in its optimal environment, a Saturday afternoon kiddie matinee. At least there was a kitten. 5.5/10

Movies

The Rainbow Thief (1990) Aimless fantasy of squalor directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, starring Omar Sharif, Peter O'Toole and Christopher Lee. The sort of movie where the protagonist is frequently chased by a dwarf dressed as a potato bug who shouts "You stole my gramophone!" Much of the film is spent in an elaborate and wet sewer set, and during the climactic torrential flood sequences I could only feel pity for the elderly actors who had to spend so much time having filthy water dumped on them. It all seemed forced, trying to be weird but not really succeeding. I do have to give Sharif a lot of credit for putting in a great deal of hard work in this. 4/10

Movies

Immortel (2004) Written and directed by French cartoonist Enki Bilal, a 3DCG animated film with main roles played by live actors. Like his comics it is elaborately fantastic and intensely detailed with a complex and indescribable story. Something about the god Horus coming out of a floating pyramid over future New York to impregnate a non-human woman with the spawn of the gods. Looked like it was going to be amazingly great, but turned out to be kind of tiresome and vague. 4/10

Motorama (1991) Unique magical realist fantasy hero's journey/road movie. In an alternate reality that resembles the American West, a ten year old boy in a red Mustang drives from one Chimera gas station to another trying to accumulate all the game cards that spell MOTORAMA, to win the grand prize. Along the way he loses an eye, is forcibly tattooed, his hair turns grey, and he encounters cameo appearances by the likes of Jan Murray,Mary Woronov, Michael J. Pollard, Garrett Morris, Meatloaf, Drew Barrymore and Dick Miller. Not the sort of thing you would expect to be the vehicle for metaphysical philosophy but I believe that a correct understanding of this movie could result in mystical enlightenment. 8/10

Movies

A Deadly Invention (1958) I've got your "steampunk" for you, right here. Known as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne in the US, Karl Zeman's masterpiece, a superlative blend of live action and animation, presented in the style of steel engraved illustration. No other film until the advent of computer image processing combines animation and live action film so intensively in each scene. As is so often the case I saw part of this as a child, perhaps aged seven or eight, and I could hardly comprehend what I was seeing. I just knew I had never seen anything like it, or anything as bizarre and amazing. Today with my wider knowledge I feel the same. Based on Verne's motifs and ideas, it tells the story of a megalomaniac who finances his mechanistic plans for world domination by sending forth an attack submarine from his volcano stronghold, and I see now what an inspiration it has been to me all my life, how it seeded my mind with a fantastical worldview which determined my path in life and my interests and endeavors for years to come. I might say to Zeman as an acquaintance once said to Timothy Leary, "If it weren't for you I'd be a doctor now."

10/10

Movies

An Old, Old Story (1968) and The Singing, Ringing Tree (1957) - two fairy tale movies about the difficulties involved in wooing arrogant bad-tempered princesses, both presented as colorfully and unrealistically as possible, filmed entirely on fantastical and often surrealistic soundstages. The former and more recent is Russian and presents the story as a puppeteer's dream, based on the classic fairy tale of the Magic Tinderbox. It tends more toward the stage musical, with half a dozen song and dance numbers which are competent but not thrilling, and its Soviet ideology is clear in the unflattering depiction of royalty, and the victory of the proletarian hero. The latter and older is German and tells a fairy tale I had never before encountered but which contained many familiar motifs involving magical bargains. In this case the princess must be deprived of all her luxuries before she confronts the flaws of her own character and regains her beauty. By far my favorite of the two, it is filmed in Agfacolor which, at its best, provides intense pure colors that thrill the eye. The sets are huge and elaborate, and the magical transformations are splendid. The one oddity is that it is not dubbed into english, simply given an english over-narration, but it becomes acceptable quite rapidly. Rating: 6/10 and 8/10 respectively.

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) Fairly high concept for such an economical production - space explorers of the 21st century landing on Uranus (ha ha, I know, it's like a butthole only it's a planet) encounter a telepathic being that uses their memories and desires to captivate and control them. Most of their desires involve the pastoral scenes of their youth and women in negligee. I had a love-hate relationship with this as a lad, seeing it three or four times on TV and never really knowing if I liked it or not. I enjoyed it a bit more now that my own desires more closely parallel those of the protagonists. I appreciate the technical details of the production too, and appreciate what went into it. There is a stop-motion one-eyed ratosaur, a giant cave spider attack, and the telepathic monster itself appears in a number of different guises - including a large glowing brain, and most delightfully to me a literal piece of tripe with a fake eye stuck in it! GENIUS! A little tedious, but at times there are lots of bright colors and moving shapes which counts for a lot. 6/10

The Astounding Tripe Monster!!!