Solaris (1961)

Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s most famous science fiction novel is a reminder that books behind movies are often better than the movies based on those books. I still haven’t seen Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version of Solaris, but Andrei Tarkovsky’s version has thwarted me a few times. For one thing, I suspect Soviet director Tarkovsky may have expected viewers to already be familiar with Lem’s novel. His shots of this strange ocean planet, Solaris, are quite beautiful, but the novel has more detail about the planet’s formations and activity, if Tarkovsky even were attempting “mimoids,” “symmetriads,” “asymmetriads,” and such. It’s easy to be distracted by the bizarre scene on the research space station where the humans dwell, as Tarkovsky’s movie may be. It feels like there’s more plot there. But Lem intended the novel chiefly as a “first contact” story and specifically contact with an entity or intelligence utterly alien to humans. The entire planet is a life form itself. The attempts to communicate with it are still accounted as failures after many decades of study. What it seems able to do is manifest strange beings. Somehow it reaches into the minds of these scientists for the most traumatic events in their lives, and then somehow it replicates their most significant others. Most are implied on this small team. They feel shame and hide these strange creations from the rest of the team. The only one we learn about is a former lover of one scientist who killed herself. She—or it—is not a hallucination and it is not human. It is frighteningly needy and thus manipulative and it has unusual, unexpected strength and abilities. What, if anything, is Solaris attempting to communicate? I have always read it (in the movie and in the early going here) as a style of defense or warning of its powers. But I think Lem intended it as beyond understanding. On the other hand, if you were Solaris, it’s not hard to believe you would feel attacked by much of these research efforts. In the end there’s no understanding. The human research goes on—they have found a way to neutralize the strange manifestations. And the ocean planet beneath them roils on as ever, ceaselessly. A great novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Musicology (2004)

Musicology, as Wikipedia dryly notes, is Prince’s 28th studio album. It’s also his first album under the name Prince on a major label (Columbia) in 10 years. What I remember about it is that it was sold at the counter of Starbucks outlets at the time, in the 2000s, when the corporate coffee specialist briefly entered into the business of selling albums. Get a coffee, buy an album, play games on your laptop with the free wi-fi. Or maybe play the album on your laptop? I think that’s how it might have gone for me, though without the laptop. At any rate it was marketed as a kind of milestone for him, though ultimately, all these years later, it feels to me more like another in a long line of slight misfires. But it won Grammys for the title song and for “Call My Name.” I have to admit I was surprised by all the attention “Musicology” got. It’s the first song on the album and was also released as a single. But I’ve never really noticed it much. The other single was “Cinnamon Girl,” which is a better song but not by that much. “Call My Name” was also kinda sorta released as a single—promotional, not official, though it did make it to the lower echelons of the charts. It’s the best of the three. All the songs on Musicology have high floors but generally lower ceilings. They’re good, they’re professional, but they are not that original or inspired. It often feels like the riffs and hooks have been used by him before. They’re just shuffled around and redistributed here. “Cinnamon Girl,” for example, feels a lot like “Raspberry Beret.” “The Marrying Kind” has a Dirty Mind vibe. Et cetera. I’d be more willing to write Musicology off as a running-in-place exercise except for the song “A Million Days,” one of his achingly beautiful torchbearer ballads, and one of the better ones. If my math is right a million days is about 3,000 years, a good long time. I keep it in mind as I tend to stop and play it on repeat at least a few times when I get to it on the album (third song in) and sometimes that’s enough, I’m not interested in the album anymore, or sometimes I stick around for “Call My Name” and that’s it. Prince was doubtless a towering talent but, by the time he was pushing 50 and 27 albums in, some thin gruel by comparison seems inevitable. Stream it on your laptop next time you hit a Starbucks for a little touch of 2000s nostalgia.

“The Big Toe” (1981)

Serious hats off to children’s author Alvin Schwartz, self-designated “collector” of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its companion pieces More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. It’s remarkably good stuff and an incidental clinic in how to do horror, both implicitly and explicitly (with stage cues and such for telling these stories aloud). Reportedly a generation was scarred by them. The slim little volumes are illustrated by Stephen Gammell, whose images haunt as much as the stories can bite. Really. They are officially intended for ages 8 to 12 but “The Big Toe” is a good example of how Schwartz dances around any constrictions or proprieties. It all happens in a rush in the setup. A boy finds a big toe at the edge of the garden. He tries to pull it up but it’s attached to something. Then it comes free. Something groans and he hurries home. His mother’s response, verbatim: “It looks nice and plump. I’ll put it in the soup, and we’ll have it for supper.” And so they do, and then it is on to the storytelling part, when the family has gone to bed and something comes into their house looking for its toe. There is even a second, alternate ending which has its own jump-scare moment for the teller to utilize. Already we have shifted into the mechanics of a prank and how to pull it off, as if we have forgotten about the big toe. Which was attached to something and nice and plump and they ate it. They ate it. How is a kid not going to obsess about this later? The way everybody just acts like it’s normal. What’s it, a funny-shaped turnip or something?! There’s a lot of that in these collections and also a lot of innocent fun, blindfolded or in the dark feeling grapes as eyeballs, cold spaghetti as ... something, I forget, and more just party entertainment instruction like that. Schwartz collected his story material from old folk tales and they are often quite weird and stay with you too. I don’t often recommend YA lit, let alone middle-school class, but there’s a lot of good stuff here and interesting pointers on horror. This one operates on misdirection—hits us with the toe business but keeps moving, softening us up for the inevitable fallout to come as the mind grapples with the points of the story. Moral: Don’t eat big toes, even if they’re nice and plump.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Alvin Schwartz, ed., Stephen Gammell, ill.
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The Landlady (1847)

This long story (or short novel) by Fyodor Dostoevsky is probably more fairly called a novella, in the notably vaporous task of separating stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels. Like The Double and even Poor Folk it already bears the mesmerizing quasi-hysterical voice of Dostoevsky which is so familiar now. Other elements of his writing we would come to know are here as well: grinding poverty, urban squalor, disease, fever, a central character so sensitive he verges on mental illness, along with various ways of being inept about relationships. In this case his beloved—his landlady only because her father or lover is the landlord—is first seen collapsing in church, where our guy has followed her. It’s more or less a case of love at first sight, because he is out on the street looking for a place to live when he first sees her. In the inchoate way the plot of The Landlady advances, she goes for him too, after he has taken a room at her place and then fallen into a stupor for weeks with disease. She nurses him and falls in love with him. It seems to be her way. But there is the complication of Murin, who is older than her and altogether a mysterious figure. Wikipedia suggests he may be a sorcerer. He’s at least a failed businessman, failed but capable of building an operation with barges and a factory. That’s the story about him anyway. I got a little lost in this one, taking the ride on the high points of Dostoevsky’s keening voice. His internal dialogues are impeccable, or maybe I share his sense of the outrage and frustration of the marginalized. I feel like I already know a lot of his characters, especially the protagonists who rant and go mad with rage. I enjoyed watching this one fall in love in the scene in the church. The ways of this landlady are strange and inscrutable. Murin might be her abusive father or her abusive lover or even possibly her abusive trafficker. It’s not clear, but her loyalty to him is very clear. Lots of strange notes through all the sturm and drang here. I can see why it’s considered minor, but it has its points, starting with what a pleasure as usual it is to dive in and read.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Parasite (2019)

[2020 review here]

Gisaengchung, South Korea, 132 minutes

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Writers: Bong Joon Ho, Han Jin-won

Photography: Hong Kyung-pyo

Music: Jung Jae-il

Editor: Jinmo Yang

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-sik, Park So-dam, Lee Jeong-eun, Jang Hye-jin

(spoilers) Director and cowriter Bong Joon Ho’s best movie, or my favorite anyway, is a comical but only slightly exaggerated meditation on class conflicts between rich and poor. It’s a picture where all Bong’s crazy dirty themes and styles come together organically and just right. On the poor side we have the Kim family: father Taek (Song Kang-ho, you’d know him, a Bong regular, seen in The Host, Memories of Murder, and Snowpiercer), mother Chung Sook (Jang Hye-jin), young adult and criminal mastermind daughter Jung (Park So-dam), and son Woo (Choi Woo-sik, Okja). They live in a basement apartment whose picture window looks out on an alley where people often come to urinate and/or fight. And then we have the rich Park family: father Dong-ik (Lee Sun-Kyun), mother Choi Yeo-jeong (Cho Yeo-jeong, a perfect ninny), adolescent daughter Da Hye (Jung Ji-so), and young son Da Song (Jung Hyun-jun). And, importantly, not to be missed, the Park family’s housekeeper Moon Gwang (Lee Jeong-eun, another Bong semiregular, seen in Mother and Okja).

It's a crowded ensemble cast which sorts out as the movie goes. First, Kim Woo finds an opportunity to tutor the Park’s daughter Da Hye, who is 14 or 15 and promptly develops a crush on him. With this inroad, the Kims scheme to take all the jobs in the Park household. Kim Jung sells herself as an art therapist for Da Song, who is an undisciplined 8 or 9 years old, going through an “American Indian” phase. He’s extremely hard to control, though Jung somehow manages it in about 15 minutes. We never see how, but Da Song is completely obedient to her. He probably has a crush on her too. From there Kim Taek gets the job as the family driver and, eventually, Chung Sook takes over as housekeeper. It’s all like a situation comedy, with a touch of slapstick and unlikely schemes to displace the original Park driver and housekeeper. Unlikely, but they work perfectly. They are often just funny, and the fast pace helps to hide the ridiculous plot holes.

Juror #2 (2024)

We can’t say with certainty that Juror #2 will be director Clint Eastwood’s last picture, but he turns 95 this year so it’s not outside the realm of possibility. As a dedicated middlebrow filmmaker, Eastwood—like his spiritual brother Ron Howard, who we first knew in our living rooms as Rowdy Yates and Opie Taylor—makes pictures that make people feel good, with optional additional moral instruction. That’s the long and short of it: Unforgiven, American Sniper, Gran Torino, Sully, Million Dollar Baby, the paired Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, etc., etc. Within his wheelhouse Eastwood has turned out to be a pretty good filmmaker—better than Howard. Juror #2 was originally intended as a direct-to-streaming release, which might have been more appropriate given how much it relies on a coincidence that makes any reasonable person howl. Nicholas Hoult (the silvery-lipped Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road and the boy in About a Boy) plays Justin Kemp, a recovering alcoholic whose wife is third-trimester of a high-risk pregnancy after previous miscarriages. He’s called to jury duty on a case where (gasp!) he and not the man on trial turns out to be the wanton vehicular homicider in question. Oh such dilemma. I mean, it’s set in a small town in Georgia, Ocilla, so sure, it’s possible. But it’s so constantly hard to believe. Screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams is really pushing it here and Eastwood is too for accepting this ridiculous premise as remotely plausible. Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense, Hereditary, also with Hoult in About a Boy) plays it with her usual skill as the prosecutor who bears one of my favorite character names of all time, Faith Killebrew, which puts me in mind of the Minnesota Twins. J.K. Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland pile on with additional star power. Simmons is good in the sour hangdog way he usually is. Sutherland, as a semi-corrupt and somewhat unbelievable AA sponsor, is remarkably bad, reminding us that his usual signal of intensity, hoarse whispering, has been failing him for a while now. Is Juror #2 dramatic and engaging? Sure, I guess so. I mean, I watched the whole thing even while carping to myself about plot points. Eastwood could have picked worse ways to do a swan song, if that’s what this is. But that’s an insight that could well appear in the dictionary definition of “damning with faint praise.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston’s classic of the Harlem Renaissance has followed a tortuous path in its relatively brief time. Poorly reviewed when published, Hurston was subsequently attacked on dignity grounds. Folks like Richard Wright were embarrassed by her celebrations of the culture of poor Blacks. The book went out of print. All of her books, novels, nonfiction anthropology collections from oral tradition, and a memoir, went out of print. She was working as a maid and substitute teacher at the end of her life. Their Eyes reads to me as somewhat disjointed and it is very thick with dialect. But there is great beauty in many of the descriptive passages, and Janie is a lively and always interesting character with lots of interesting characters and situations around her as she travels Florida pursuing her destiny. There is a hurricane scene that is amazing. Hurston died in 1960. There was an attempt to revive interest in her in the late ‘60s, in the context of the civil rights movement. That effort fizzled and her books again went out of print. In 1975 there was another attempt, in the context of second-wave feminism, and this one stuck. It started with an essay by Alice Walker published in Ms. magazine. Hurst’s books have been read, taught, and stayed in print ever since. I suspect Wright, whose Native Son is one of the great novels of the 20th century, may have been uncomfortable with the frank sexuality of Janie, who has no problem leaving her first marriage to marry her second husband without divorcing, and was otherwise perfectly faithful to her partners even when they mistreated her. The larger point may be that Janie’s first marriage was not really her choice, at age 17. Her grandmother picked him for her. The other two—both of whom die, with Janie still in her 40s in the present time of this novel—may have been odd unions and perhaps not her best options, but at least they are her own choices. It’s not hard to see how Their Eyes works better as feminism than civil rights. At any rate, it’s a rollicking tale that travels far in Florida. I like the setting very much, and parts of this shaggy tale are just knockout good.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“Son of Celluloid” (1984)

This might be the story that finally sold me on Clive Barker because it shows his impressive range with a variety of sources. It also has many of his flaws, for example starting slow with an arguably unnecessary overture piece. The story proper really starts when we get to the end of the night at a rundown repertory movie theater—the night’s show had been a spaghetti western double feature with Clint Eastwood. The only staff are Ricky the janitor, a big thinker and drug-taker, and Birdy the manager, who is 34 and overweight. A woman is waiting in the lobby for her date, who went to the restroom. Ricky goes to check on him and the Barker carnival whirs into existence. The restroom is not a restroom but has become a desert scene from a western movie and someone is firing gunshots at Ricky. The date has already been killed. Ricky has a very hard time getting back to the reality of the restroom and theater, and this is only the start of a phantasmagoric lunacy that unfolds as Ricky and Birdy try to close the theater for the night. There is a monster in there with them and it is so weird you really should get it from Barker in the story. It’s rooted in movie pop culture the way “New Murders in the Rue Morgue” is rooted in Edgar Allan Poe. But it is also all Barker. The gore proceeds logically, focusing on the organs with which we consume movies. Barker likes to go prolix—let him. He tends to close all open loops, which is good because he opens so many of them. I could complain about too much explaining, but not everything is explained and that’s good enough in that regard. The main thing, so often, is that you just don’t know where he’s going. You expect him to go for extremes, as the putative author of splatterpunk, but you can’t guess which ones. Sometimes it feels too loose and wild, but the appeal often remains wondering where he’s headed. I love this one because it doesn’t love just great cinema, but also the venues where it’s shown, or was once (the style of repertory theater I knew in the ‘70s and ‘80s is all but dead now). And what a monster this one has!

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 3 kindle)
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