Spontaneous Musings

A rare occurence, saw three excellent yet vastly different flicks within the last five days.
One an independent or indie flick that came out sometime last year and was nominated for a best actress oscar, one a foreign horror flick that is Swedish, and one a recent studio children's film, directed by an off-beat director. What all three films have in common is they take place in depth of Winter, the colors are stripped or faded, snow covers the ground, and many of the characters are working poor or working class. Each focuses to an extent on a boy and a mother, the father is either entirely absent, or barely in the picture, and the mother is overwhelmed with taking on both roles and not quite handling either well. While the boy is disconnected from his peers in some way. He struggles for friendships, for connection, much as his mother or the adults around him do, but the connection is hollow, rife with misunderstandings, and disappointment. Each in their own way deal with the feeling of being isolated, cut off from society, yet they are in the midst of it. All end happily, with a human or not so human connection. Also, all to a degree comment on the political and socioeconomic situation the characters find themselves in, but in different ways.


Frozen River directed by Courtney Hunt and starring Melissa Leo and Misty Upham, is about two women who out of desperation start smuggling illegal immigrants across the frozen river that links and divides Canada and the US. The film does not justify nor does it demonize the smuggling. Melissa Leo plays Ray Eddy, a woman who dreams of a double-wide track home - the sort of home that you can move by trailer. It has three rooms, pipes that do not freeze in the winter because they are insulated, and a jacuzzi in the master-bath. She is currently living in a track home with no insulation, pipes that freeze all the time, and barely has enough cash on hand to afford more than popcorn and tang. She has two sons. Her husband, a compulsive gambler, took off with all their money before the movie starts, including the cash they'd saved for a final payment on the doublewide. If they don't pay within two days, they will lose their deposit of 1500 dollars and the track home. It's two days before Christmas and Ray must get the money together or she will lose her home. She's passed over for a promotion at the covenience store she's been working at the last two years. Hunting her husband at the bingo parlors on the neighboring Mohawk reservation, she stumbles upon Lila Littlewolf (played by Misty Upham)who took her husband's car. Lila who has a history of illegal smuggling, is struggling to regain custody of her son from her mother-in-law. The wrestle over it, and Lila manages to coerce Ray into helping her smuggle some illegals across the border. Lila makes over 1200 that day. Ray persuades Lila to do another run, inorder to get her share of it back. Meanwhile Ray's teenage son is busy taking care of his baby brother and holding the house together, as well as preparing for Xmas.

The film without giving too much away is about the bond between the women, Lila and Ray, what divides them and what unites them - it turns out that what unites them is stronger than the divisions that society mostly inserts. It also provides a commentary on our system of justice, the contrasts between the Mohawk tribal system and the American/Canadan border patrol. How the two cultures view family, responsibility, and rehabilitation. It does not provide clear answers. If anything just questions. A film that does not leave you, long after you've seen it, yet is a happy film. A film that warms the soul, and provides hope in the oddest way. It is a film about women...the men are secondary, another rarity. It's hard to talk about it without going into too much detail. But it may very well be amongst the most memorable films I've rented or seen this year.



Where the Wild Things Are - is directed by Spike Jonze, but written and co-produced in part by the original writer, Maurice Sendak, based on Sendak's classic Children's book of the same name. After seeing the film, I was not surprised by this. Before I saw it, I chatted about it with a children's book illustrator at MoMa on Friday night. I asked him, as we wandered through the contemporary art wing, past Van Gough's Three Musicans, and George Brett's famous Campbell Soup Cans, what he thought of the film. He said that he loved it, but he only recommends it to people who still have that playful child inside. It is a movie, he stated, that you will either love or hate. Much like people either love or hate George Brett's wall of painted campbell soup cans or Jackson Pollock or Frida Kahol, or any other artwork. Some critics saw it as rather dark and horrifying. But then some critics have said the same thing about Sendak's books - including Into the Night Kitchen. I remember in a Children's Literature Class in College - hearing a rather critical take on Sendak, where the critique came quite close to accusing Sendak of being a pedofile. A take that sort of reminds me of an article I read in the NY Times on German film, The White Ribbon - in which they stated, the brutal Protestant repression of sexuality caused a sadistic fascist mentality, aka Nazism, to emerge.

As a child, Where the Wild Things Are was my favorite book, until something or other came along to take its place. The pictures played with my imagination as did the words.
There weren't that many words and the plot was simple, leaving much to the imagination.
Why did Max leave? Why was he ferocious? So much was going on here, and yet, Sendak left most of it up the mind of the child to determine and to identify with - it was almost as if Sendak was inside my own head. Less was more in Sendak's world. I remember going to bed at night with that book, a dear friend, who filled my head with fascinating creatures.

I haven't read the book in an age. I did buy it for my neice, my own copy long since thrown out, tattered, half devoured, by the little wild things my brother and I had once been, although I think I adored it more than he. But I remember it, and the film fit my memories.
It is a bit more barren and less green and leafy, but this film much like Frozen River - takes place in the arrid and frozen corridors of the heart and mind. It starts in the depth of winter, Max dresses in a white fur suite, complete with whiskers, and has no friends outside of his sister. A lonely boy, he makes them up. They live inside his imagination.
Building his igloo fort and making his snowballs. He attempts to share the fort with his older sister, but she ignores him, then when her friends come over they destroy it - leaving poor Max enraged. Eventually, he goes off to Where the Wild Things Are and plays at being their king. Trots around their arid and forested island, and builds a massive igloo fort with trees and twigs and rocks and dirt. Has a snowball fight with earth clods, which ends unfortunately much as his snowball fight had, yet with Max in the role of the bully. The Wild Things are in some respects exaggerated versions of the problems Max is encountering at home. His own fears and insecurities played out. Each Wild Thing a different version of Max, his mother, his estranged father, and his sister. He loves them, he fears them, will they eat him up?

The film like most of Spike Jonze's films is surreal in places and feels a lot like a visual poem. Watching it is more an emotional experience than an intellectual one. You feel the film, it speaks to that portion of the brain that draws, tells stories, plays twiddly winks,
and runs laughing and tumbling and sprawling down a grassy hill, uncaring of grass and mud stains. I found myself smiling at parts, tearful at others, and others, drooping lazily, curled up in my seat. To me it was like watching a poem. And I'm not sure many people know how to read poetry - they seem to want to translate it somehow, much like one would translate every word of a foreign language into their own, instead of thinking in that language. Some things do not translate. This is a film much like some poems that you simply have to allow yourself to fall inside of, not explain. You either identify with Max and his wild things, or you don't. You either feel the brushy fur of Carol's face against your own or you don't. It's visceral not intellectual. When you tear at it, analyze its bits and pieces, you lose it somehow...it melts in your fist like a snowflake.






Let the Right One In
is by Tomas Alfredson and based on the book by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It may be the most innovative vampire film that I've seen since...well, can't remember the last one. It also takes place in winter, amongst the snow, and long endless nights. It focuses on a 12 year old boy, named Oscar, who much like Max in Wild Things, has no friends and a working/single mother who is distant, but loving. The father - he sees on weekends, but is absent.
One night, a 12 year old girl moves into his building. The girl's name is Ellie and she is a vampire. One of the best shots in the film is one in which Ellie's helper, an old man, is draining a man of his blood in a snowy forest, when a huge white poodle finds them, sits down opposite and watches, unable to shoo the poodle off, the helper leaves the body and the canister of blood. It's a funny and horrifying scene. Much of the film is the same way, leaving you with an odd uneasy feeling at the end of it.

Much like Wild Things, the cinematography is poetic. It feels at times like a visual poem. But, alas, poorly dubbed, if you can avoid the dubbed version and get one with subtitles - go for it. The English version has the worst dubbing that I've heard. The voices are monotones and don't fit the characters.

That is my only complaint - the dubbing. A romance of sorts develops between Oscar and Ellie but it is not a sexual one. This may be the only vampire film that I've seen that is almost aesexual. Ellie has no sex organs. When Oscar sees her genitals - they are much like those of a plastic barbie doll, sewn up. No opening. It was one of the most disturbing things I've seen. And the landscape of the film is bland, the buildings, the school, the environment - a bland almost sterilized cookie-cutter world. Ellie does not fit inside it and neither does Oscar. As in Frozen River and Wild Things, the violence is understated. It is there but used sparingly and when it does occur - you feel it more than you would in a film such as The Departed.

The sex - if it is there - is in the blood, the drive of fangs. The repression of sex to the point that it becomes an unnatural and ugly thing. Ellie doesn't change into a monster when she becomes a vampire, but she is monsterous - leaping like a spider, crawling like one up a building, attaching herself like one to the back of an adult, as she sucks their blood. Her attack, though, is not sexual, it's more like a spider or a tick, or a leech, except in the form a girl.

As in Frozen River and Wild Things, Let the Right One In covers the gray areas of human morality, struggles with certain issues, and provides murky answers. When Oscar accuses Ellie of being a murderer - she asks him if it is any different that what he wishes for the bullies, the revenge he desires? She does what she does only to live. To survive. It is not to be cruel. Is his desire for vengence better or worse? Yet, what she does is monsterous and when she bits a human, without killing them, she does infect them with her virus, she makes them a vampire.

Forever young, forever stuck inside her 12 year old body, lonely, apart. On the other side of the cold glass, with the snown dripping down. Cold. Oscar stands watching. And emphasizes.
I won't spoil the ending...but it is one that is haunting.