i watched constantine last evening. anyone seen it? keanu reeves as an exorcist/occult ins officer trying to do his bit to maintain the balance between the forces of heaven and hell on earth. not a bad way to pass two hours. actually the first half of the movie is pretty good: you’re mostly kept in the dark about what’s happening, the film doesn’t seem to be going anywhere–just enjoying being atmospheric. it does get very silly towards the end but peter stormare as satan is a hoot, as is tilda swinton as mick hucknall, i mean gabriel. but i don’t really want to say much about the film. if like michael and me you watched all the “prophecy” movies you’ll probably like this one. if not, not. (why is gabriel so often an asshole in these movies?)
i am interested though in movies about this general theme of balance between good and evil/light and dark that don’t rely entirely on catholic mythology/iconography. i remember reading recently about a russian movie called “nightwatch” which seems like it might be one (it apparently outgrossed both “lord of the rings 3” and “spiderman 2” in russia–which may or may not be a big deal; i’m guessing many indian movies outgrossed both of these in india as well). these catholic movies are all so deeply religious they become a little boring. and the world of vampires and werewolves (underworld etc.) are mostly superhero movies masquerading as something else. okay, i’m rambling.
Arnab – My previous post is a mess. Can you delete it? I’ve re-jiggered it here. thank you.
Nightwatch is being readied for its US release. The trailer is avialable on Apple, and it has ravens, which are always sweet, as well as doll heads mounted on spider-robots. And it’s a trilogy, which, out of the box, seems a bit unnecessary.
As for Constantine, I avoided this one in theaters, but rented it while depressed one night, and didn’t like it. A bit of a painful confession here: I used to read comic books. And Constantine, as a character, was a very good one. I won’t go (much) into the whole Alan Moore thing, and how the guy single-handedly made mainstream comics good in the 80s, only to have the life sucked out of each one in movie form for years now (Swamp Thing, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell (I thought it was bad).) As such, he no longer lets his name be used in the movies and refuses to even take payment for them anymore; which is bizarre.
In the comic, Constantine looks like Sting. He’s blond, English, and a bit of a prick. Also – and this is quite the kicker – Constantine just talks. It’s obvious he has connections to magic and god and devils and so on, but he doesn’t bang his arms together to open the portals of hell; or have a cross-gun that shoots jesus-bullets. He’s just a guy. Nothing is easier in a comic book than granting someone "super powers," so you can imagine that it was very unusual to have a character – involved in magic – who doesn’t really have any powers himself. Instead he gets people more powerful than he (and devils and gods) to do things; he does favors, he calls in those favors, he promises, and controls, and tricks. Knowledge and anticipating how things will play out are his only real powers. As such, it seemed very English to me: He would persuade the truly powerful to do things, and the book explored all sorts of world political parallels there as well (Big pharma, Thatcherism, stupidly lumbering powerful America).
Another very powerful thing in the book is that his actions had awful consequences. Almost down to a one, every one of Constantine’s friends and associates paid for the relationship with their lives or souls or families. He might save a soul – or even the world – but in the process he’d end up condemning others to horrible fates. And they’d frequently come back to remind him of it.
It was a great premise, and the film summarily ignored it, from its broadest concepts down to the color of his hair. Oddly, Gavin Rossdale’s character came closest to the tone of the original books; yuppies making deals with the devil, and the devil dessing like an aristocrat. (In the book, at one point Lucifer plays obscene Cole Porter songs on the piano at a fancy London restaurant. Bits like that were great.)
Alan Moore’s Watchmen thankfully remains unamde, and V for Vendetta seems half a step-away from being shelved or headed straight to video.
Ah, but Watchmen lives forever as yet another great unmade Terry Gilliam film.
My favorite good/evil battle film is another Gilliam: Time Bandits. No Evil has yet beaten David Warner, and as Supreme Being Ralph Richardson is also damn hard to top. But I’m betting this isn’t quite what Arnab has in mind.
I always want to like these movies, but they rarely scare me–at best, in the Prophecy series, they’re grand excuses for actors like Walken and Elias Koteas to strut. But as horror… well, the films that imagine such a schematic battle never seem much more than absurdly entertaining.
Well–I take that back. Slightly. I’m a huge fan of John Carpenter’s stranger projects, and one of them is a quasi-Quatermassian thing called Prince of Darkness, which does a great job at reimagining a truly scary vision of Satan and satanic forces…. but then there isn’t really a “good” doing battle, just a group of scientists who slowly realize what they’re unleashing, but then it’s too late!
I wasn’t particularly keen on The Stand, but it manages to riff on good/evil sides without sinking into straight Vatican propaganda. The book, at least, did scare the bejesus out of me.
Which maybe points us back to horror? I think the problem with these films is not so much the catholicism or religiosity inherent–it’s their dull schematic manichean view of horror. I much prefer the creeping unease of, say, recent Japanese horror, which has these vengeful ghosts seeping into everyday life, for what seems almost no reason at all. Good/Evil Schmevil–give me a little of that old-time chaos.
I do have high hopes for the Russian flick, but I also have high hopes for the next Presidential election, and that seems equally likely to disappoint.
thanks to encore ondemand i watched hellboy for the second time last night. i liked it a lot when it was first in theaters and it held up. i don’t know much about lovecraft but this is apparently more in the lovecraftian than catholic end of things–and apparently this is truer of the comic books (in the film a cross gets thrown at a vital point). mark probably will have complaints about this adaptation as well, but i’m looking forward to the next instalment (also directed by del toro, and apparently in production). hopefully it will be as touching and witty as the first one, and as little invested in cgi over characterization.
apparently, it suffered on release because it came out at the same time as the passion of the christ and it seems theater owners in conservative areas refused to put it on the same marquee (some changed the listed title).
I never read any Hellboy comics, so I didn’t dislike it for ruining a good comic book (the way Constantine did.) And it was a better film than Constantine, which disappointed me a lot. I love supernatural Nazis almost as much as I love Selma Blair, so I was willing to cut Hellboy some serious slack on those two points alone.
That said, the only thing remotely Lovecraftian about Hellboy was the occaional tentacle on the beasties. But those tentacles can trace their evolution back to hentai comics from across the pond, rather than poor nutty H.P. from Providence.
my comment about the lovecroftian element comes from reading about the comics on wikipedia. i really would like to read the comics themselves. i think it is the back-story of the tentacles in space/another dimension and the whole apocalypse without a particular organizing principle or catholic duality thing that seems to draw on the lovecraftian mythos.