Pulling Rabbits: On The Coen Brothers

I don’t think that people properly realize how incredibly strange the Coen Brothers’ films really are. They have an uncanny talent to lure you into the depths of their demented minds and make you feel just a little too comfortable there. And before you know, a group of nihilists torturing a stoner by throwing a ferret at his genitals doesn’t seem all that strange.

Nothing to see here, move right along

I think this is one of the reasons some people tend not to "get" their comedies: they don’t get funny until you realize how absolutely ridiculous they are. Burn After Reading, for example, is a movie that is made like a spy movie, but it is actually about a bunch of absolute idiots who hump and kill each other over something that is completely worthless. There is this great plot element about “classified” information that is really just some dudes memoirs. They are not important. To anyone. But the movie is made with such suspense it’s hard to pop this bubble. But when you do, laughter will ensue.

This actually makes sense in the movie

The Coen brothers have something you might call a rythm: first they make a noirish, serious movie, then they make a screwball comedy. Rinse and repeat. They have made 15 films so far, and only two of those don’t fit in that mould. But don’t think for a moment that this makes their movies predictable. Especially their endings are pretty unique: sometimes everybody ends happily ever after (Intolerable Cruelty), sometimes it’s uncertain what is going to happen (Raising Arizona) and sometimes everybody simply gets murdered (Burn After Reading).

But the thing that really makes their movies differ from each other is their setting. Now, when most directors make a movie somewhere, they either shoot in a place where the scenery is nice or somewhere where they can rent cameras cheaply. But when the Coens make a movie someplace, the movie looks and sounds like the spirit of that place. Fargo is set in Minnesota, and the movie just gives you the chills, so cold does it look. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou is set in the American South, and everything looks  like the brothers dragged their celluloid through the Mississipi river. They don’t use settings. They use places.

From Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Brothers themselves are notoriously difficult to grasp, and their films never seem to truly open themselves either. There always is a little edge, a little something that can never really be explained. Maybe that's what always drives me back into the demented world they create. I don't know. The only thing I know is that I always return for seconds.

Alias

I could write an entire essay on how the works of Sufjan Stevens and the Coen Brothers share similar tones and themes. For now, let me just suffice in sharing this wicked song with you. It's from the album Illinois. Get that album. It's brilliant.

Review: Batman

When little Bruce Waynes parents where shot down before his eyes, he decided to rid his city of evil. He trained in a monastry, studied forensics and disguised as a bat to strike fear in the hearts of his enemies. Sadly, this tale is entirly fictious. But if Batman were real, the first thing he would do is probably beat up Tim Burton. Not for murdering his parents, but for butchering everything that ever made the character great.

Batman (the film) is something the obese, cynical thirtysomethings that write the internet tend to drool over with glee. Micheal Keatons Batman was even featured as the second-best Batman in this very amusing article (property of Cracked.com). So my hopes were up somewhat when I set out to watching the movie. And anyway: it’s Tim Burton! How bad can it be?

Awful, as it turns out.

The story of Batman is about the most basic one you can tell with the entire mythos: there’s Batman, there’s The Joker, there’s The Girl, Joker tries to take over shit, Batman beats him up, humping ensues, ya di ya di ya. We also get treated to both of the characters’ origin stories somewhere along the line. Nothing new here, and certainly nothing that could be called creative storytelling.

Batman is basically nothing of what it should be, and whatever it does right is rather irrelevant. For starters: the acting is blander then a mouthful of unbuttered toast, and just as hard to swallow. How the hell did they ever make Jack Nicholson, one of the greatest actors ever, play The Joker, one of the greatest villains ever, with such a complete lack of depth? This is by far the worst acting job I’ve ever seen the man do, and compared with something like The Shining it’s almost a disgrace. But Keaton is even worse, somehow. I don’t think it is humanly possible to be a more boring Batman. He never gives the impression that he is the vigilante badass we all love him for. Instead, he just stands around in his silly costume and looks like someone just hit him with a brick over the head. Then he walks over to a bag guy and punches him with the velocity of a ladybug. Said bad guy then falls over. (…) Thrills!

 Derp

The script is downright stupid as well, the lines are cheesy and some of the supporting characters are downright annoying. There is this papparazo guy who is both annoying AND usesless to the movie. The movie seems to realize this halfway through, after which he just sort of disappears. Even the music is mediocre, and it was written by Danny Elfman, for Christs sake! The man is a goddamn superstar of movie composers, but given this mess of a movie even he doesn’t know what to do.

And you know what? I wouldn’t have mind. I wouldn’t have given a shit about every nasty thing I just said if the movie would just be fun. But it isn’t. In fact, it’s boring as hell. It’s NOT to much to want movie starring the goddamn Batman to be at least fun.

This movie is basically just a parade of great moviepeople working miles beyond their full potential. Just watch the Nolanmovies again, they are infinitly better.

Alias

Aaawh yeah.

Review: Splice

Science fiction horror has, paradoxically enough, always been more about people then anything else. But it makes sense if you give it a little thought. Human drama is always about confronting characters with situations that are new to them, thus creating conflict. And what makes a better drama then setting the characters (and the viewer) up against something that is truly new, namely something that hasn't existed before? Which is what monster story writers have been doing for almost 300 years now.

Take, for instance, the famous story of Frankenstein. A man builds a creature. He is, however disappointed in his work and abandons his creation. The "monster" then vows revenge and starts killing people close to his creator. When Frankenstein (the scientist, not the monster) dies, however, the monster can be seen grieving at his dead body.

If you strip away all the "we must not play God" and "science must not get out of hand" subtext, you will have to recognize that this is a very male-centered story. You can read it like a distorted father-son relationship, in which both act out their aggression on anything but each other. The problem here comes directly from reckless and emotionally detached creation and a lack of nurturing and motherly love, two attributes which are traditionally male (by which I mean that they are usually contributed to men. I'm not saying all dudes are heartless bastards).

D'aaawh

The funny thing is that this male perspective is, perhaps more even then in other genres, a staple of the horror genre (science fiction tends to be more emancipated). Psycho, The Exorcist and even The Shining*  all are about battles that are fought out between men, with women trapped hopelessly in between. There are exceptions, but they are few and rarely contain a truly female perspective.

Enter Splice.

Splice is a 2009 monster movie that tells the story of Clive and Elsa, a couple of biochemists at work and in the bedroom. At the beginning of the film, they have just completed their latest project: splicing the DNA of several species together to create a new specie. But just as all the pieces are falling into place (including an interview in Wired) and they can pursue the next medical breakthrough in science, their project is plugged. Elsa, who is clearly the dominant one in the relationship, pushes Clive to continue working on their next project in secret: splicing animals with human DNA. What comes out is Dren (nerd spelled backwards), who looks like one of David Cronenbergs erotic nightmares and behaves like a mix between a sweet little girl and one of the facehuggers from Alien, including adolescent mood swings and an Oedipus complex. She (it?) is never truly an animal, but not completely human either. She's more like a force of nature. Clive wants to destroy her, but Elsa feels responsible for the creature and decides to keep it. She soon starts to nurture Dren like a child. I won't have to spell out that this is not a very good idea.

Above: not a very good idea

Splice's concept is, as you might see, pretty damn original. It's Elsa's mother instincts and nurturing reflexes that set most of the film in action, not Clives curiosity. And it's implications are rather groundbreaking as well: where most "creature features" lay the blame squarely on reason going wild without any ethical or emotional concern, Splice seems to say that it's emotion meddling up peoples logical thinking that really makes the shit hit the fan. In fact, instead of saying that the science going rogue is the issue at hand, you can see Splice as laying the blame on the supposed moral outcry of the general public that forces Clive and Elsa to go rogue. Stuff to think about.

The movie is not without it's faults, however. To reach some interesting dilemma's, the characters do things that are just impossibly stupid, especially for a couple of supposedly brilliant scientists. And staying on the subject of science: the theoretical framework for the movie is loose at best, and the "scientific"babble Clive and Elsa sometimes retort to is more then a little dumb. The movie also never gets anywhere near scary, which some people might find a letdown. On the other hand, the acting is pretty good and the special effects (especially those of the creatures) are rather spectacular for such a low-budget indie movie. And the film kept my full attention for an hour and a half, which is quite a feat in and on itself.

Splice is a movie that doesn't get interesting unless you are willing to think about it. In that respect, it is a rather good and intelligent movie. If you like discussing movies after you've seen them, Splice is a recommendation. If you want a movie to stand solely on it's own, however, you might be a bit disappointed.

Alias

* The Shining, the way I see it at least, is all about Jack vs. himself. His wife is basically a stock character.

P.S.Wow, we can have movies with dominant females that are not evil mothers or dominatrixes now! Yay for emancipation!

Eels are awesome.