R.I.P. Horton Foote

 So it goes ...

Mickey Rourke was robbed

Nuff said.

Quote of the Week

"Life is pain; anyone who says differently is selling something."

—William Goldman, The Princess Bride

Coraline

This movie kicks ass. It's hard to put into words exactly why, but that's as it should be. A movie ain't words. A movie is a movie.

A movie, a good movie, but especially a good animated movie, is a waking fever dream.

Coraline has that dreamlike quality of all good fables. (And cartoons — One Froggy Evening comes to mind.) It doesn't feel invented. It feels like it always existed.

Coraline (the character) has just moved to a a weird new house in a weird new town. She feels dislocated, disassociated, disconnected. Her parents (and goddamn if this ain't familiar territory) are writers — they work at home, but to adolescent Coraline, that's no excuse. To her, they feel remote and unavailable. Then Coraline discovers a magical doorway to an Other World with Other Parents. Aside from their button eyes, they're perfect — perfectly loving, nurturing, attentive, and always available — too good to be true. Then the story shifts — like a seemingly solid rock on a cliff edge that suddenly starts falling down below your feet. The Other Mother is a monster who lures children into her knock-off realm of faux creations and then tricks them into staying there forever with a Faustian bargain involving the sewing on of button eyes. Coraline is forced to confront this demon — and rescue her parents, whom she's trapped in her realm.

The story is Neal Gaiman's — one of my personal heroes. My summary doesn't do it justice. The story alone is timeless. But director Henry Sellick's film adaptation of Gaiman's tale is more than a story — it's visual poetry, and 3-D visual poetry at last. This movie actually deserves the 3-D treatment — it never feels like a gimmick.

Sellick's adaptation is a rich, lushly textured labor of love. If God is in the details, then God is singing in every frame. To top it off — this is freaking stop-action animation, not CGI. Every detail that hits your eyes in stereoscopic glory is a photograph of an actual puppet being lovingly moved by hand. Considering that it's frame by frame at 24 frames per second, that's a whole lot of love.

The only possible criticism of this movie is it's too much damn movie. Like Captain Hook's cake, it's just too damn rich, and impossible to consume in one sitting.

But that's no criticism.

That's all the more reason to love it.

The Wrestler

Caught Sunday afternoon showing of Aronofsky's The Wrestler. Damn, what a great movie. It does exactly what a great movie should do: it opens up a doorway into another world, a world you didn't know existed, then yanks you inside. It says: Here's what it looks like. Here's how the people think, how they talk, how they feel.

Mickey Rourke (who unrecognizable from the Rourke of Angel Heart/Barfly days — he pretty much looks like his Marv character from Sin City) plays Randy "the Ram" Robinson — a washed up wrestler who hit his peak in the late 80s.* He was huge back then. Since then, things ain't worked out.

Randy (in a deliberate parallel to Mel Gibson's S&M Jesus) rips his body to shreds on the weekends as a wrestler, slashing himself with hidden razors for blood effects, shooting steroids, and impacting himself with barbed wire, tables, chairs, whatever. During the week, Randy suffers even greater psychic pain working in a Joe Job for a dickless, shmuck boss who goes to great lengths to make him eat shit. He takes it all with good humor and grace. His non-girlfriend girlfriend is a pole-dancer in a titty bar who's not allowed to fraternize with customers. Like Randy, she's past her prime. Like Randy, she's really a superhero. And that's what Randy really is, folks.

He's a superhero. There's even a Randy-the Ram action figure. That proves it.

The only place he can live, the only oxygen he can breathe, is not in the real world, it's in the wrestling arena where everything's larger-than-life in a black-and-white morality play. He puts on a costume. He fights evil. He has powers beyond those of mortal human beings. He's a superhero.

Then he has a heart attack.

From here, the expected arc of the story is: You ain't a superhero. Accept your human limitations. He tries. Randy retires from wrestling. He reconciles himself to his bitter daughter. Then they unreconcile. Randy, despite doctor's warnings, goes back in the ring for a 20-year-anniversary rematch with the Ayatollah. It's gonna kill him. He knows it. But he dies with his tights on.

An honest movie. A movie with balls.

I loved Pi. I loved The Fountain.

Darren Aronofsky just keeps getting better and better.

*The movie's drenched in the Guns & Roses-type heavy metal sounds from that period. Personally, I hated that shit, but it works from his POV — a working class dude to whom the 80s was one big party. Randy bitches something to the effect, "that fucker Cobain ruined everything." From his perspective, I guess he did.

Happy thoughts

Obama’s inauguration speech was filled with promises to brave icy currents, endure storms, and keep our eyes on the horizon. There seemed to be one direct slam at the Bush administration …

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

The camera cut to Bush. He didn’t seem insulted. He seemed to be trying his level best not to laugh out loud.

From there, Obama proceeded on a long catalog of good intentions.

And whenever the camera cut to Bush, he still seemed to be fighting the urge to laugh.

I could imagine him thinking …

Yeah. You just try. Close Guantanamo. Stop the wars. Build roads and bridges and fight global warming. Clap your hands to together and make the economy come back to life just like Tinkerbell! Think happy thoughts! Go for it, pal! Heh-heh-heh. We’ll be waiting for that “change’ you promised us. You’ll see how easy it is. Yeah. I’d love to see you try ….

R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan

Patrick McGoohan, dead at 80.

Words of a text message my cousin sent me. Both of us, in a way, grew up in the shadow of Patrick McGoohan. Our imaginations were shaped by the influence of The Prisoner, the show he had created. It was more than a TV show. Like 1984, and A Clockwork Orange, it shaped the idea of freedom by giving a clear idea of its opposite. Now he's gone.

Hopefully, the first sight he sees on entering the pearly gates won't be angels with number badges.

Be seeing you.