Hot Midnight Coffee, Oil City

Oh, and go Packers too, but mostly BURN THE WITCH

I saw Silent Hill today, and I'd like to address an open letter to the screenwriters of Europe, Japan, and this very country:

It's true, we have some hideous history over here in the Heartland of America, but we never burned witches, okay?  We hanged a good few of them, which is what all the Salem business was about, but that was just the one time and we apologized very shortly afterwards.  Even Cotton Mather was sorry, which is no mean feat for the forces of reason. 

So, in the future, please refrain from relying on dramatic devices featuring Dark Secrets in the form of burnt witches in the buried past of small American towns.  It doesn't point up any deep wrong in American history, any blood crying out from the ground.  All it does is nudge the audience and say, fundamentalist Christians are supposed to be holy but you know what they're actually really creepy, which, yes, they are, but any fourteen-year-old in Hot Topic can tell you that.  It's not news, and it doesn't exactly impart a frisson.  All that Ezekiel 25:17-type business, ministers chanting dolefully about the Faithful and the Blood of the Innocent, is just a big plate of country ham for a scenery-chewing actor, dished up by a screenwriter who probably did his research by rereading The Crucible and visiting godhatesfags.com.  It is, in short, no longer scary.

(Silent Hill did have some pretty damn scary moments, though, and none of them were from any attempts at storyline-based horror.  They were all from OH SHIT WHAT IS THAT THING which is exactly the appeal of the games to me, and that was quite well translated.  It also has the best villain-slaughtering of any movie I have ever seen.  I recommend it, by way of fun.)

Mr. Eddie's Father?

In the second-to-last post I mentioned that Dragon Seed was made into a movie starring Katharine Hepburn.  Today I saw this fascinating article on "yellowface" linked on Hit and Run, and it's got a small picture of Hepburn in Dragon Seed, looking just as Asian as she possibly could. 

Of Mickey Rooney's turn as a humorous Japanese neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany's, the author Robert Ito says, "May Rooney burn in hell for this supremely racist bit of 'acting.'"  I haven't seen that movie yet, but I have seen Rooney lately in several new late-night commercials for depressing old-people products, such as term life insurance.  He barely says a word, just grins weakly at the camera, and pretends to do dishes while his wife delivers the spiel.  I think he may be in hell already.

I don't generally review enough movies when I blog but here is one

I had a tremendous time at V for Vendetta, but most of this was no doubt due to the fact that I was madly in love with Hugo Weaving's V from the moment he appeared on screen.  Like Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth, Natalie Portman's Evey spends an inexplicable amount of time trying to get away from the dashing otherworldly man who has brought her to his home, leading to much hand-wringing on the part of the female audience (which was pretty much entirely me at that showing).  Weaving's dark silken voice and phantom-like screen presence made me sigh every time he appeared out of the blackness to press a knife to an unsuspecting throat and whisper, "Hush . . ." 

As deliciously distracting as Weaving was, that wasn't enough to obscure that this movie is not as smart as the Wachowskis want it to be.  It's marketed as "thought-provoking," but the thoughts it provoked in me were mainly, "oh, is that a sly allusion to BU$H'S AMERIKKKA that I spot?  Good Lord, the Wachowski brothers will be blacklisted for this!  Hollywood will never stand for such shenanigans and goings-on!" 

V is a poor analogue to the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.  To start with, V is a mastermind, and he works alone, whereas actual terrorist leaders, like politicians everywhere, get young men to do the dying for them.  V also chooses targets of a highly sensitive nature, either empty ones (the Old Bailey and the Parliament) or those filled with arguably complicit workers for the government (the state television network).  This is really a Law & Order shades-of-gray approach to the moral dilemma of a terrorist attack.  Attacking a network staffed with civilians is morally problematic, but it's not exactly an Israeli shopping mall.  Real terrorism is an X-ray showing a chestful of nails in a child who was standing too close to a suicide bomber.  It's only inspiring if you're out of your mind with hatred.  All the crudeness and brutality was on the side of the government, not V, so you aren't pressed to the hard question of whether his work is worth dead children and burning homes.

Nonetheless, the movie does pack a substantial emotional punch.  I understand it's better if you read the graphic novel, in which Britain is much nastier and V is accordingly much colder, and less human.  (It's also explained in the comic that V gained superpowers from the government experiments he was subjected to.  The movie never explains that this is why he has become a badass; you're left to wonder if he trained in a mountain fastness in Tibet like Batman, or met a mutated ninja rat in the sewers, or what.)  I'm glad, though, that I saw the movie first, so as to head off the bitter sensation that the story was substantially changed and therefore totally ruined.  Alan Moore has enough of that for everyone.