They’re All Cars! All Cars!
Until recently, Cars was the only Pixar feature I’d never seen. I love almost all their films unreservedly but there was something about Cars’ imagery that unsettled me. I remember having this conversation with a friend, years ago:
“They’re talking cars, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And people watch them race?”
“The spectators are cars, too.”
“What about, like, the mechanics?”
“They’re also cars.”
“But what about…”
“THEY’RE ALL CARS! ALL CARS!”
Where do these cars come from? Are they built, or are they birthed? I’m not the first to struggle with a universe entirely populated with sentient cars. (Okay – and some trains, boats, and helicopters too.) I found this hypothetical cutaway image of Lightning McQueen, guessing at the biology that could be sitting, squelching, inside his metal frame.
I find that to be the more comforting alternative, frankly. When I was visited by the Thirsty Mayor about halfway through the frenetic Cars 2, my vague suspicion of the franchise snapped into focus.
You see, Lightning McQueen is a slick racing car, without even headlights to spoil his smooth lines. But what about Mater, his dim-witted tow truck best friend? Unlike McQueen, Mater clearly has doors.
Doors.
They never seem to open, but they’re there. Are they vestigial remnants of a time before these cars came to life? Before their engines erupted with teeth and gums and flopping tongues? Perhaps there was even a moment of truce – a time when these cars could think and talk and dream, but were still happy to let their drivers inside.
Or maybe it happened in an instant. A signal was broadcast from aerial to aerial. The doors locked. The side windows fogged to grey. The windshields eclipsed with enormous cartoon eyes. From that point forward all cars would drive themselves, and the human skeletons still belted into their seats swallowed down like bad memories.
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.