Julia’s Eyes: jmag review
Here’s my quick review of new Spanish horror Julia’s Eyes from the current issue of triple j magazine. I’ve decided I like it even more since I wrote this. A few of the setpieces are still rattling around in my head, and it’s tone reminded me a little of The Haunting…
JULIA’S EYES
Director: Guillem Morales
Starring: Belén Rueda, Lluís Homar
Country: Spain
I’m wary when I see a filmmaker “presenting” another’s film. I figure it usually just means trading a famous name on the poster for a giant-sized cheque. So far, though, Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) has managed to get two great Spanish horror films a wider release. First there was the excellent ghost story The Orphanage, and now comes Julia’s Eyes.
Belén Rueda plays twins: one who’s killed in mysterious (and, uh, fairly terrifying) circumstances, and her sister who becomes obsessed with uncovering what happened. Both suffer from degenerative blindness that gets worse with fear-induced stress. Julia’s Eyes isn’t remotely concerned with its mystery making sense. It’s bloody fantastic, though, at setting up smart, scary setpieces. Is there someone in the house? Why can’t I see his face? Some of its stylistic gimmicks would’ve failed in lesser hands, but here they’re used to make you feel like you’re going mad.
Julia’s Eyes isn’t as tight as The Orphanage, but they’re both great, old-school rollercoasters, genuinely scary and genuinely fun.
Other reviews this month: Get Low in cinemas; Howl and Unstoppable on DVD.
Issue #51 on sale now.
X-Men First Class: Mutant TV
After I saw Wolverine: Origins, I actually defended it. Kind of. I said that it was so haphazard, nonsensical, and oddly-shaped it provided perhaps the most accurate recreation of what it’s like read mainstream superhero comics. In two hours, it made me feel like I’d read a year’s worth of issues in one sitting – with a few different writers, some rushed fill-in art, and a helping of editorial interference.
Now X-Men: First Class achieves something similar, only much more successfully. A 1960s-set prequel to Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men movies – with Singer back on board with a story credit and as producer – this is a welcome return to the thematic material that makes mutant stories interesting.
Admittedly the characters are sometimes forced to announce these themes out loud, but that’s a small price to pay.
Director Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass) does very well in some smaller moments, especially in the striking reverse-angle transformation of an innocuous office to a torture chamber; he also knows that the movie’s power comes from James McAvoy’s Charles and Michael Fassbender’s Erik, and the scenes they share are the movie’s highlights. If only the same could be said for January Jones as Emma Frost, who is embarrassingly lifeless here. The comic book version of Emma would be appalled by this pretender wearing her lingerie.
Vaughn struggles in the movie’s special effects-heavy sequences, though. Towards the end, things take on the look of a big-budget Smallville finale. That’s not a compliment. (I know fans, situated both in and out of Hollywood, can easily become obsessed with fidelity to their source material. I maybe just fell prey to it talking about Emma Frost, above. But including Banshee’s flying-with-flappy-wings-and-screaming-towards-the-ground? Yeah, that was never going to work.)
In fact, the whole movie looks a little cheap. A little made-for-TV. And that got me thinking: why not?
In some ways, First Class does mimic the structure and feel of comic books. For example, it begins with the same sequence that brutally kicked off Singer’s first X-Men film, and then adds another twist to it. This is common practice in comics as new writers pick apart heroes’ origin stories, always returning to embroider them with new, painful details. But with its small-screen spectacle, cast of thousands, and overstuffed plot – this ends up feeling less like comic books and more like mutant television.
As critic Paul Verhoeven wrote in his review: “Really, what they should have done was give it the Game of Thrones treatment and make a big, detailed, character-driven story all about the early Academy days.”
I couldn’t agree more. Charles and Erik, travelling the globe, recruiting mutants! Having zany adventures and philosophical disagreements on their ideological differences! Killing an occasional nazi along the way! That’s a season’s worth of entertainment even before they begin their mutant academy and lifelong rivalry. As enjoyable as this movie is, its second half feels like a clipshow of episode highlights to come.
Watching First Class also made me realise something has shifted in what I want from TV and what I want from film. It’s now television that seems to give me stories with truly epic scope. At the cinema, I’m leaning towards more singular spaces, driven less by narrative and more by a character’s subjectivity or particular mood.
It also made me realise, as so much television now looks so ‘cinematic’, I should probably stop saying ‘made-for-TV’. Then again, ‘straight-to-video’ is still in my vocabulary…
Rapture Ready
In Australia, not long ago, we were amongst the first to see the respectable 6pm Saturday deadline for Harold Camping’s predicted rapture. It was impossible to ignore the fact that the world actually didn’t end. Don’t worry – he’s now said that it’ll come in October, and this time was more of a spiritual armageddon. The kind most of us wouldn’t notice.
But all this rapture-talk reminded me of a novella I wrote, inspired by my own odd feeling of disappointment when the world didn’t end on New Year’s Eve 1999. It’s called Zero Zero Zero, and features the hyperactive, advertising-tinged writing style I used a few years ago. (I’ve been trying to tame it ever since.) It stars a conceptual supermodel, a vigilante postman, and a young man receiving private, inexplicable broadcasts of a sci-fi radio serial.
I thought I’d put the first chapter, Midnight, online for anyone who might still be feeling a little apocalyptically unsettled.
A Black Bat in a Yellow Oval
One of the things you have to admire about superhero comics is their ability to turn almost anything into fresh meat for their never-ending adventures.
The fact that the Hulk went from grey to green in his earliest issues due to colouring difficulties? Decades later, it’s the rationale for two different Hulk personas warring inside Bruce Banner. Inconsistent Supermen and Batmen confusing your readers? Fix it with an apocalyptic storyline about the multiverse collapsing into a coherent whole! And then, later still, fix that first fix with another story bringing the multiverse back!
Lately, I’ve been writing about superheroes, their corporate owners, and the public domain. Comics work these issues into the fabric of their ongoing stories, too – mostly by framing them in the most ironic and heartbreaking ways. But in Batman Inc., writer Grant Morrison takes these issues and feeds them into Batman’s war on crime.
“Bruce is obviously a corporate CEO, billionaire and playboy superman,” says Morrison, “so what would Batman look like when that guy applied everything that he normally applies to Waynetech to Batman’s mission and way of life?”
Batman, Inc. features billionaire Bruce Wayne publicly admitting to funding Batman’s expensive gear and gadgets; all while, as Batman, travelling the globe and bestowing the rights to “wear the bat” to heroes of his choosing. Morrison’s inspiration was the hype around Tim Burton’s first Batman movie in 1989. In the academic anthology The Many Lives Of The Batman, William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson describe Bat-Mania like this:
During the summer of 1989, this bat-logo permeated American culture, appearing on candy, boxer shorts, leather medallions, earrings, baseball caps, night lights, sterling silver coins – in short, on any item capable of bearing the trade-marked image (or unlicensed likenesses thereof). The bat-logo’s omnipresence diffused its meaning, reducing the wearing of a black bat in a yellow oval to a mere gesture of participation in a particular cultural moment.
Batman’s symbol is everywhere in Gotham, too. Batman’s obsessed with it. He’s made it into his weapons, his vehicles, and everything else imaginable. In Gotham After Midnight, we see that he’s rigged Wayne Manor to spray the symbol across every single surface. Sometimes it feels like he’s terrified his memory is slipping away, a la Memento, and he’s designed his entire life to remind him that he’s Batman. Every thrown Batarang whispers as it returns to him: “You’re Batman. You’re Batman. You’re Batman.”
In our world, anyone can wear the Bat-symbol – so long as they’re willing to pay for the merchandise. But within his own universe, Batman is incredibly protective of his brand. Many times over the years he’s angrily told someone not to wear the symbol. In Batman Inc. #4, Morrison retells a moment from way back in 1956’s Detective Comics #233, as Batman calls out after Batwoman: “Wait! You can’t just… no one can wear a Batman costume in Gotham but me!” She says: “Ridiculous! No man, maybe!”
Batwoman quickly proves that she’s worthy of wearing his symbol, but others aren’t so lucky. Morrison’s current run is filled with ‘fake’ Batmen; his very first issue has a cop dressed as Batman shooting the Joker in the forehead. Other impostors attack him throughout, all driven mad by becoming Batman. And later, Batman’s memories are stolen and implanted into fresh bodies in an attempt to create an army of perfect bat-soldiers.
“They’re stealing your DNA. Your memories. To imprint unstoppable soldiers. Driven by your trauma.”
“Then tell them they can have it. You can have it, too. If you can bear it all at once.”
It turns out no one can handle the superhuman levels of pain and misery fuelling Batman. Impostors that borrow his story, mission, and iconography without permission will be destroyed by them. Only the ‘real thing’ can survive.
Morrison is no stranger to taking the external demands on his stories and narrativising them. My favourite example is the second volume of his epic The Invisibles; it took the need for action and accessibility required to boost sales and turned it into a growing anxiety about what this (seemingly glamorous) violence was doing to heroes’ psyches. And the idea of Bruce Wayne applying corporate logic to Batman’s mission makes perfect sense – but can the men and women who take on his heroic identity survive? Is the fact that they are ‘official’ Batmen enough to shield them from the horror built deep into the brand’s DNA?
I ended my last Bookslut column by wondering if we should apply the moral code of these fictional superheroes to their corporate status, too. I can happily imagine Superman wishing himself into the public domain. Batman, though, would be horrified at every bat-shirt, every bat-lunchbox, and every homemade bat-costume. They’d never be “mere gestures of participation” to him. They’d be signs of tragedy to come.