Tag Archives: movies

The Neverending Story: A Movie Review

Posted on by
7

Several people had wonderful things to say in response to preceding birthday post, where I restated what has become the mission statement of this blog:  to look for the fantasy in all realities and the reality in all fantasy.  The comments were almost too kind – but not quite – and they prompted me to begin several posts on people and things that have shaped my thinking about imagination.  What jumps to mind first is movie released in 1984.

The Neverending Story, 1979, a fantasy novel by German author, Michael Ende, was translated into English in 1983.  A film was released the following year, which I saw in the early ’90’s, after one of my psych professors said, “It’s a story about our culture’s war on imagination.”

A lonely boy named Bastian loves to read.  One morning on the way to school, he ducks into a bookstore to escape pursuing bullies.  He asks the grumpy store owner about an intriguing book called, The Neverending Story.  “It isn’t safe,” the owner says.  At an opportune moment, Bastian “borrows” the book and carries it into the school attic to read.

The book relates how the kingdom of Fantasia is under attack by the Nothing, a dark void that consumes everything it touches.  The creatures of Fantasia appeal to their ruler, The Childlike Empress, but the Nothing has made her ill.  She summons Atreyu, a warrior of Bastian’s age, to conquer The Nothing, and gives him a magical talisman, the AURYN to guide him on the quest.  The force behind The Nothing summons Gmork, a wolf-like beast who craves power, to kill Atreyu.

The AURYN. Stephen Spielberg keeps the original prop in his office

Nowadays we’d call this a middle-grade book, but 33 years ago, when The Neverending Story was written, that label didn’t exist.  Most books written for young people, then and now, focus on personal issues.  Bastian is lonely and has trouble at school, but this is just the inciting action, not the real subject of the story.  The book and movie are unique in presenting a very adult theme – imagination and the forces arrayed against it – in fiction for this age group.

Atreyu finds no clues concerning the Nothing, so he risks the Swamps of Saddness to find the wisest being in Fantasia. Those who succumb to the sadness sink into the swamp and are lost. This is the fate of Atreyu’s beloved horse, Artax.

The wise being  cannot help, but directs Atreyu to the Southern Oracle, 10,000 miles away.  While trudging through the swamp with Gmork on his trail and little chance of success,Atreyu begins to sink into despair.  A Luckdragon named Falkor rescues him and carries him most of the way to the oracle.

Atreyu and Falkor

The oracle tells Atreyu that the only way to save Fantasia is for a human child, who lives beyond the borders of the realm, to give the Childlike Empress a new name. Then the oracle crumbles, a victim of the Nothing.

Falkor and Atreyu seek the border, and find the Nothing, which has become incredibly strong. Atreyu encounters Gmork who explains that Fantasia is “humanity’s hopes and dreams,” while the Nothing is “human apathy, cynicism, and the denial of childish dreams.”

Atreyu kills Gmork but is wounded and nearly falls victim to the Nothing. He is rescued once again by Falkor, but when he regains consciousness, only fragments of Fantasia remain, floating in the void.  The two make their way to the Ivory Tower, where Atreyu tells the Empress he has failed.

She says no, he has succeeded.  His quest was the only way to draw the attention of the human child, who is listening to them as they speak.  Bastian realizes she is talking of him.  As the Nothing begins to consume the Tower, the Empress begs him to say her name.  Bastian races to the attic window, and cries, “Moonchild!” into the face of an approaching storm.  He finds himself face to face with the Empress, who reveals that the Nothing has consumed all of Fantasia but a single grain of sand.

The Empress gives Bastian the last grain of sand of Fantasia

The Empress tells Bastian that his imagination and wishes have the power to restore the land to its former glory. In the final scene, we see Bastian soaring on Falkor through skies in Fantasia and his own world.  I wasn’t crazy about the ending.  There’s a Disney quality though out, since in the days before digital animation, films like this relied  on animated models and actors in costumes, but that was not necessarily a liability.  Jim Henson pulled it off without missing a beat in Dark Crystal, 1982.

In the last scene of The Neverending Story, I’m aware of watching a children’s movie, which disappoints, since most of the film was greater than any such category.  Even so, in the 20 years that have passed since I saw the movie, I’ve never forgotten the chords it struck concerning imagination.  Please take a look at this clip of Atreyu meeting Gmork to get a sense of the movie’s scope:

In succeeding posts, we’ll look at some views of Depth Psychology and certain spiritual traditions.  For both of them, literalism is the enemy of living with soul and imagination.   The Neverending Story tells us this is a battle we each must fight in our own hearts and minds.  The world of practical affairs and the marketplace have never had much use for the world’s dreamers.  Can we still manage to hear the cries of the Otherworld beings who fade into nothing at our lack of attention?  “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane is the dying cry of someone who lost Fantasia.

The Neverending Story echoes world folklore in showing the need otherworld creatures have for humans.  Irish and Scottish fairies steal mortal children.  The fairy queen sought out Thomas the Rhymer to be his consort for seven years, the same length of time the sea nymph, Calypso, held onto Odysseus in ancient Greece.  Why do such beings need us for redemption?

These are just some of the questions this apparently simple “children’s movie” raises.  They are far to complex to answer here, but I plan to take some additional forays into imaginal realms in the next few posts, so please stay tuned.

Paracosms in Writing and Music

Posted on by
6

When I turned to the editorial page of the local paper this morning, I learned a new word and a wonderful concept.  http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/27/4591277/springsteens-global-attraction.html.

David Brooks, a writer for The New York Times, and several friends “threw financial sanity to the winds” to follow Bruce Springsteen on tour through France and Spain , because supposedly the crowds are even more intense than their American counterparts. 

Young European fans know every word of songs The Boss recorded twenty years before they were born.  Their enthusiasm “sometimes overshadows what’s happening onstage,” says Brooks.  The moment that spawned his article was seeing “56,000 enraptured Spaniards, pumping their fists in the air…and bellowing at the top of their lungs, ‘I was born in the USA.‘”  

How could this be, especially since in Springsteen’s music, USA often means New Jersey?

Brooks asked himself the same question and borrowed a term from child psychology to help understand it.  The word is paracosm, meaning a world in imagination, “sometimes complete with with imaginary beasts, heroes and laws that help us orient ourselves in reality.  They are structured mental communities that help us understand the wider world.”

Children do it, says Brooks, and as adults we continue the habit.  Then he adds the observation that is the point of this post:

“It’s a paradox that the artists who have the widest global purchase are also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes.”

Springsteen’s New Jersey.  J.K. Rowling’s English boarding school.  Tony Hillerman’s Navajo country.  221B Baker Street.  Downton Abbey.  Tolkein’s Edwardian rural England, aka, The Shire.

Hob Lane, near where Tolkien lived as a boy

I often think of the books I hate to see end, the kind that inspire fans to continue the story on their own, as I described in a recent post on fan fiction http://wp.me/pYql4-298.  Character remains the essential ingredient – we want to follow Harry, Ron, and Hermione wherever they may lead us – but in his article David Brooks points out the critical nature of the world where they more and act and love and fight.  We wouldn’t really want to see the Hogwarts gang on Sunset Boulevard anymore than we’d want Sam Spade in St. Mary Meade, working a case with Miss Marple.

“If you build a passionate and highly localized moral landscape, people will come,” says Brooks, echoing Field of Dreams, a movie that largely took place in a cornfield.  “If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place…if your concerns are expressed through a specific paracosm, you are going to have more depth and definition than if you grew up in the far-flung networks of pluralism and eclecticism…sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft boundaries, or none at all.”

I think this is an important thing to consider – one you seldom read about in books on writing but which instantly resonates when called to mind in the context of our favorite fiction.

But let’s end with The Boss

One of Springsteen’s best known songs, “My Hometown,” moves me the way “Born in the USA” moved a stadium full of Spaniards.  Hometown for me is part of a paracosm, a special kind of imaginary landscape.  I’ve said elsewhere that when I was young, we moved around too often for me to have any sense of a hometown, yet the moment I say the word I can see it vividly, with eyes opened or closed.

We’ll let the master paint the picture, since someone (I forget who) once observed that only a troubadour of Springsteen’s calibre could make you nostalgic for New Jersey.

Enjoy the paracosm.

Men In Black III – A Movie Review

Posted on by
6

Saving the world one alien at a time

I want to say this is the best Men in Black yet and would do so except that they’ve all been fun, and this one assumes familiarity with the basic premise. Though it could not stand alone, this movie does not simply rest on the laurels of the franchise. It adds a number of plot twists including time travel and alternate futures.  We also learn much of the backstory of Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) through the excellent performance by Josh Brolin as his younger self.  We learn where much of his stoicism comes from in relation to Agent J (Will Smith), and we discover a hint of romance in the background of Mr. No Fraternization.   Throw in an earth-threatening bad guy, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) and you have a movie that keeps your attention from start to finish.

Jemaine Clement as Boris the Animal

Boris escapes from LunarMax prison.  He’s the last of the Boglodites, a race that would have destroyed earth except for the ArcNet shield that Agent K (Jones) had sent into orbit on the first moon rocket on July 16, 1969.  Boris time-jumps back to July 15, 1969, kills K, and the Boglodite invasion begins in our time.  The earth’s only chance is Agent J (Smith) who follows Boris back in time and teams up with Agent K’s younger self in a desperate effort to stop Boris.

They meet a key ally, Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), at an Andy Warhol be-in.  Warhol is reveal as an agent, and Griffin as a 5th dimensional Arcadian who can see all possible futures.  At Shea Stadium, he recalls his favorite moment in human history – when the Mets won the world series.  His explanation of how this was possible made for a nice metaphysical aside.  Involving factors like a home run ball that was flawed because a factory worker’s wife had left him the day it was made, Griffin’s story served as a fine illustration of the Buddha’s teaching on the  interdependent arising of all phenomena.

young Agent K, Griffin, and Agent J

The plot depends on several nifty gizmos that just happen to appear at the right time, and we have the obligatory alien free for all and agent-gets-slimed moment, but those who liked the previous movies will enjoy the new situations, especially watching Will Smith overcome an alien shark with mustard.

I decided to see the non-3D version.  The glasses sometimes give me headaches, and I suspect the in-your-face effect of some of the creatures would have been distracting.  Either way, if you liked the earlier MIB movies, you’ll find a lot to like in this one.

Dark Shadows – A Movie Review

Posted on by
4

I expected to like this movie. I wanted to like this movie.  At the theater, I tried to like this movie, but I couldn’t pull it off.

Dark Shadows was a gothic soap opera that ran from 1966 – 1971.  As a child, Johnny Depp wanted to be Barnabas Collins, a 200 year old vampire.  He got his wish, but sadly, not even a cast with Depp, Michelle Pfieffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Christopher Lee, and Alice Cooper can save a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Comedy blends well with horror – think of Young Frankenstein or Ghostbusters – but Dark Shadows blows it at several crucial points.  In one scene, the vampire seeks out a group of wide-eyed hippies.  He asks them about love and romance and then slaughters them – after we get to like them.  That’s a bush-league scripting error!  A screenplay can kill people we care for, but it cannot do so and hope to remain funny.  The rest of the comic riffs fall flat after this.

I bonded more with the hippies than with the characters I was supposed to care about.  The brave orphan, the confused adolescent girl, and the etherial love interest remain distant and two dimensional.  Barnabas never charms in the manner of Captain Jack Sparrow.

The love scene between Barnabas and the witch attempts to be wild and kinky but doesn’t get beyond the special effects.  The final battle is won by a ghostly deus-ex-machina.  The vampire wiggles his fingers, signifying hypnosis, and a mob of cops and townspeople do his bidding.  The plot is full of holes and unanswered questions.

We were in the mood for a gothic movie, and now I wish we had chosen The Raven.  Dark Shadows ends with a lead-in to a sequel which I do not intend to see.  Save your money on this one.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Posted on by
5

I happened upon this theme while geeking around with an iPhone app.  While looking for a way to create custom ringtones, I found, “Ringtone Converter” on iTunes.  This is a free app, designed to make 30 second ringtones from any song in your iTunes library.  Some of the songs don’t load, though most of them do, and I roamed through my library, auditioning songs as potential ring tones until I came to a clear winner – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

As I listened to IZ’s voice, I looked up the song on Google.  It was written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg in 1939, for The Wizard of Oz, and almost cut from the movie by MGM CEO Louis Mayer who said it slowed down the action.  “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” went on to win the Academy Award and become one of the most covered songs of all time.  It’s number one on a list of “Songs of the Century “compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts.  In a letter to Howard Arlen, Judy Garland said,

“‘Over the Rainbow’ has become part of my life. It’s so symbolic of everybody’s dreams and wishes that I’m sure that’s why some people get tears in their eyes when they hear it. I’ve sung it thousands of times and it’s still the song that’s closest to my heart.”

The voice of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole speaks for itself.  It’s a good time of year to listen to this man who brought so much beauty into the world – his birthday was May 20.  When he died in 1997, Hawaii state flags were flown at half-mast, and his body lay in state in the capitol rotunda.  He was only the third person given this honor.  This video commemorates Israel’s voice and legacy, and records the thousands who came out to celebrate his life on July 12, 1997, as his ashes were given to the ocean and his spirit journeyed over the rainbow.

The Muppets Get Their Star

Posted on by
4

On March 20, the first day of spring, The Muppets received the 2466th star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.  The cast, which has charmed TV and movie viewers for 50 years, now joins a select group of “fictional” stars, which includes Mickey Mouse, Godzilla, Shrek, and The Simpsons.  Miss Piggy pointed out during the news conference, however, that all movie stars are fictional.

Photo by Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

Lisa Henson, CEO of Jim Henson Enterprises remarked that The Muppet’s star, in front of the El Capitan Theater, is very close to her father’s.  Henson created Muppet prototypes in 1955, for a show called Sam and Friends, which ran for six years on WRC-TV in Washington, DC.

Jim and Jane Henson with the cast of "Sam and Friends"

Henson died in 1990, at the age of 53, of complications from a severe strep throat infection.  Associates and family say he was so busy working, he didn’t seek medical help until it was too late.

During the last year of his life, Henson negotiated to sell the Muppets to Disney. The sale was finalized in 2004. The latest Muppet movie was released to DVD yesterday too, a seemingly successful effort to revitalize the cast and introduce Walter, a new character, who was present at the dedication ceremony.

Kermit received his own Walk of Fame star in 2002, but Henson’s little frog would be the first to say The Muppets are a group effort. The group finally has the recognition it deserves.

Life: The Movie by Neal Gabler – A Book Review

Posted on by
12

In his final movie, Being There, 1979, Peter Sellers plays Chance, a gardener with a low IQ, who becomes an advisor to the president and business tycoons. In one iconic scene, Chance is accosted by a knife wielding youth in Washington, DC.  He pulls out his TV remote control and clicks it to change the channel.  He is puzzled when the assailant doesn’t vanish.

Peter Sellers as Chance in “Being There”

This might be the perfect illustration for Neal Gabler’s, Life, The Movie:  How Entertainment Conquered Reality, (2000).  Gabler quotes historian, Daniel Boorstin, who wrote in the early 60’s that, “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”  Done deal, according to Gabler, who calls us, not just a “post-modern culture,” but a “post-reality culture.”

At times I had to keep my own assumptions in check:  subjects like reality and imagination open onto psychological and spiritual vistas beyond the scope of this or any other single book.  But when Gabler cited concrete examples, I found myself nodding my head on almost every page.

“You know how to brood because you have seen Rebel Without a Cause,” Gabler says, quoting cultural analyst, Louis Menand.  “What better model does the world offer?”

Gabler charts the ascendency of entertainment in America from the early 19th century, where the split between high and low culture was fueled by our democratic suspicion of all elites.  Calling someone “aristocratic” was a serious insult.  During the 1840 presidential campaign, when a man called Daniel Webster an aristocrat, he thundered back that he’d grown up in a log cabin, and anyone calling him an aristocrat was “a coward and a liar.”  ( Sound familiar? )

Nathaniel Hawthorn despaired of the fate of serious writers amid the flood of “trash” being published.  One publisher sold four million dime novels in five years, at a time when the US population was only 25 million.

In 1850, 1% of the population owned 50% of the nation’s wealth and held almost all public offices.  Upward mobility was a myth, since 98% of that wealth had been inherited.  While the one-percent held the power, then as now, culture wars raged, sometimes with a violence that we (thankfully) haven’t seen yet.  One night in New York, rival Shakespearean actors, one British and one American, were both scheduled to perform, the former in an uptown theater, the latter downtown.  Police ejected the rabble who had bought tickets solely to heckle the British actor.  A much larger crowd gathered across the street to throw rocks as the “aristocratic” crowd tried to leave.  The militia was called, a riot ensued, and before the night was over, 22 lay dead and more than a hundred wounded.

In the end, it was movies that won the day for popular culture.  The 1% stayed away from the early nickelodeons, which tended to be crowded and crass.  Later, with middle-class patronage, refined behavior became the norm, but the elite have never fared well in the movies, from the Marx Brothers  Night at the Opera, to the present, where a too-expensive suit is always the mark of a villain.

Three Stooges + high society + pies = disaster

As he charts the history of high vs. popular culture, Gabler makes a telling point.  It isn’t just about high brow and low brow – it’s about the ascendency of entertainment.  Being entertained is easy, and the corollary is that when the goal is entertainment, grabbing and holding audience attention is the supreme value, and “things that do not conform – for example, serious literature, serious political debate, serious ideas, serious anything – are more likely to be compromised or marginalized than ever before.”

Life: the Movie is a complex and disturbing book.  Gabler says in the introduction, it is diagnostic and not prescriptive.  To offer easy answers, he says, would be like the movie illusion where we meet the monster in act one and see it vanquished in act three.  Writing 12 years ago, Gabler said:

“One is almost compelled to admit that turning life into escapist entertainment is a perversely ingenious adaptation to the turbulence and tumult of modern existence.  Why worry about the seemingly intractable problems of society when you can simply declare ‘It’s morning in America,” as President Reagan did in his 1984 reelection campaign, and have yourself a long-running Frank Capra movie right down to the aw-shucks hero?”

I read this book after watching Neal Gabler speak on the fictions that lace the current election campaign on Moyers & Company, as I described in the preceding post. Because of it’s scope, I would recommend Life: the Movie only to those who want to delve into this issue in some depth.

But  I would recommend that everyone watch the ongoing conversation this year between Gabler and Moyers.  The confusions and illusions surrounding the political process are more convoluted than when the book was written, but Neal Gabler remains a reliable guide to pulling back the curtains and helping us draw closer to the truth.

Politicians as Would-Be Movie Stars

Posted on by
4

James Hillman died last fall at the age of 86.  Even though I only met him twice at lectures, I’ve read his books for decades, and he is one of only a few people who deeply shaped and changed the way I see the world.  Hillman was an influential post-Jungian thinker.  As I said in my “About” page, from Hillman I learned to search for the fantasy in our “realities,” and the reality in our “fantasies.”

James Hillman

Hillman considered literalism one of the great diseases of our time, but one area where I have trouble “seeing through” the illusion of “fact” is election year politics.

On Sunday I got a clue about why so much of the rhetoric sounds like bad dialog in a B grade movie – to a great extent, it is!  A guest on Sunday’s edition of Moyers and Company was Neal Gabler, a film historian, cultural critic, and author of Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (2000). Gabler says our politicians are trying to play movie heroes.  We-the-people demand it, but it makes us cynical because we know it’s a sham:  “we’re…in a campaign season where what we’re really watching is not so much political debate, though it’s called that, as we are watching a movie in which candidates are contending to be our protagonist-in-chief.”

Neal Gabler

Gabler continues:

“There’s a kind of American schizophrenia about our politics. On the one hand we love to sit back and see these people be compelled to seduce us because elections are basically about seduction…But that also gives way to an incredible cynicism about the process…And one of the reasons we’re cynical is because we get it. We get how it works.”

Gabler says now that we have an Occupy Wall Street movement, we need an Occupy Media movement.  We need people fed up enough to say, “I want a real debate on issues.”  Otherwise, “if we don’t start asking those questions we can’t move this forward at all. All we’re going to get is punditry and analysis of who’s winning and who’s losing and a movie. We’ll get nothing but the movie. But the problem is movies don’t answer the pressing questions of America. Policy answers the pressing questions of America and we have to demand to know what these guys are going to do and what choices they’re going to make.”

I personally don’t have much hope that it’s going to happen in this election cycle.  Meanwhile, Gabler’s image of the candidates-as-would-be-actors, trying to be Clint Eastwood or John Wayne, makes their actions intelligible.  There is Hillman’s “fantasy in the reality.”

If this sounds as interesting to you as it is to me, you can watch the 20 minute interview or read the transcript here:  http://billmoyers.com/segment/neil-gabler-on-how-pop-culture-influences-political-culture/

The good news is, Moyers promised to have him back on the show as the election year continues.