Browsed by
Category: Essays

Adventure On Film: Paperhouse

Adventure On Film: Paperhouse

Comments 9 comments

By and large, if I had to drop one decade from the annals of cinema, it would be the eighties,SK-Paperhouse-1-334x500 but that period did come up with its share of winners.

One of the eighties’ forgotten gems is the fantasy-horror hybrid, Paperhouse (1988), a British release that did its best to compete with flicks like Heathers for Cineplex space, and failed. U.S. gross, according to the internet movie database, was just over $241 thousand. Sad. Paperhouse deserved better, much better.

Spoiler-free, the plot follows Brit tween Anna, curious about lipstick but not yet ready for boys, as she succumbs to a severe case of glandular fever.  The disease leaves her prone to vivid dreams, all of which stem from Anna’s crayon drawing of a bleak, lonely house. Whatever Anna adds to the house manifests itself in her dreams, and what starts out as a bit of a lark (think Harold and the Purple Crayon) quickly turns sour. Hardly twenty minutes in and it becomes clear that Anna may well have planted (or drawn) the seeds of her own destruction.

Having just read Violette Malan’s piece on John Gardner (On Moral Fiction) right here at Black Gate not a week before sitting down to re-watch Paperhouse, I couldn’t help but be struck by the film’s parallels to Gardner’s own arguments in favor of “moral” art and criticism. But what Gardner posits in his book he pursues by Socratic argument, in essay form; Paperhouse cleverly crafts those same questions into a cohesive dramatic whole.

Yes, the movie can be enjoyed on a purely surface level, without ever ceding the floor to philosophy, but make no mistake, this little chiller has a great deal more on its mind than things that go bump in the night, which is why it holds up so well, twenty-five years on.

…

Read More Read More

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

Comments 13 comments

Godzilla01Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)
Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

Sayanora, Tsubaraya — and Sayanora, Golden Age of Japanese Cinema

The end of the Golden Age of Japanese Giant Monster movies coincided with the end of the most productive era for the Japanese film industry. Starting in the early 1950s, the country’s film industry experienced a meteoric rise. The major studios released a combined average of 450 movies to theaters each year. But the growth of television in the 1960s started to erode film attendance. In the late-‘60s, audience levels dropped precipitously, numerous theaters closed, and the studios faced cutbacks. Contract directors and stars were released, departments were scaled down or eliminated, and the studio responsible for the “Gamera” and “Daimajin” films, Daiei, was forced out of business entirely.

Science-fiction and monster movies had it particularly rough because of the growth of television. Popular superhero TV shows offered a cheaper alternative for young audiences to get their giant monster fix. The children who increasingly made up the viewership for Godzilla movies could now see kaiju action daily from their living rooms.

Ironically, the person most responsible for the growth of SF television was Eiji Tsubaraya, Toho Studio’s master of visual effects and one of the four “Godzilla Fathers.” Tsubaraya formed his own independent company, Tsubaraya Productions, in 1963 to create special-effects television programs. The 1966 hit show Ultra Q led to the monumental success of Ultraman the next year. Each week, Ultraman pitted its giant-sized title hero against a new monster. Clone shows sprouted everywhere, and the monsters of cinema screens started to bring in less money.

…

Read More Read More

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)

Comments 5 comments

MosuGojiWelcome back… the double holiday interruption delayed this march across (and on top of) the Tokyo skyline. But now the Big-G is back and about to enter the Golden Age of Japanese Fantasy Cinema and the peak of kaiju movie greatness.

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)
Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

The Godzilla Masterpiece: Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

The astronomical success of King Kong vs. Godzilla made Toho Studios commit to yearly Godzilla movies for the rest of the decade, as well as increasing their giant monster output in general. The studio shifted away from broader science-fiction epics like The Mysterians: the same year that King Kong vs. Godzilla ignited the box-office, Toho’s more ambitious and expensive science-fiction movie from the team of director Ishiro Honda and special effects creator Eiji Tsubaraya, Gorath, made a poorer showing. From now on, Toho would push that they had monsters and were ready to hurl them against each other for audience’s viewing pleasure.

After briefly considering a King Kong re-match, G-series producer Tomoyuki Tanaka turned to a hometown hero: Mothra, the monster-goddess from the popular 1961 Ishiro Honda film of the same name. Mothra was the point where the Japanese kaiju film came into its own as a specific cultural style different from the US model that first inspired it. The lovely yet powerful Mothra was a perfect foe to put in the opposite corner from Godzilla — at least in terms of box-office appeal. From a story and special-effects perspective, it was a trickier idea: Godzilla fighting a giant mystical moth?

But the creative team came through in an astonishing way: Mothra vs. Godzilla is the height of the Godzilla series and one of the finest monster epics ever put on film. This is the movie to show people at the start of a Godzilla odyssey, since it captures so well the Japanese interpretation of the giant monster genre, has Godzilla at his most charismatic yet menacing, and is more fun than most amusement parks.  Eiji Tsubaraya was at his zenith with visual effects; after some wonky optical work in King Kong vs. Godzilla, the effects here are seamless, especially the scenes featuring the miniature Twin Fairies (the shobijin, played by pop singing duo The Peanuts). The two monster battles, with Godzilla against the adult Mothra and then against two larval Mothras, are thrillingly staged and scored.

…

Read More Read More

Fantasy Out Loud IV

Fantasy Out Loud IV

Comments 6 comments

ReluctantBack in 2011, I penned the first in this occasional series with an attempt at rating and relating the fantasy titles I’ve read aloud to my boys, then aged seven and eleven. They’re now two years older and two years larger, if not wiser (though they are sometimes that as well).

Sadly, older child Corey no longer cottons to a bedtime story.

Evan, however, is not only game, he’s adamant that he receive his daily dose of out-loud fiction. The question as always is what to read? What’s appropriate? And what does “appropriate” even mean?

Right now, Evan’s big wish is to see Catching Fire in the theaters. He was too young for The Hunger Games, but he’s now read all the books (on his own, like most of his fourth grade classmates), and seems quite keen to revel in the filmic gore of Panem bloodletting. We’ll see.

While that debate simmers, the fare of late has included L. Frank Baum’s The Magic Of Oz, Colin Meloy’s Wildwood, Mollie Hunter’s The Walking Stones, and Avi’s Crispin: The Cross Of Lead. Plus a short, Kenneth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon.” Evan chose the Oz title, and I chose the other four.

…

Read More Read More

Lay Down Your Weary Year

Lay Down Your Weary Year

Comments 13 comments

time-enough-at-last-350x263“It… is… later… than… you… think.” — Arch Oboler, Lights Out radio program

10…

There’s that classic Twilight Zone episode about the bookwormish little gentleman who has a list long as his arm of books he’s always wanted to read, but who is constantly thwarted by the day-to-day demands of society and pressures of life. He happens to be down in the basement library stacks when a nuclear war breaks out. He emerges to find every other human being gone. After this revelation sinks in, he heads back to the library. Cut to hours or days later: he has amassed piles of books in the order he plans to — finally — read them all.

And then…the unexpected happens. The ol’ TZ twist. In this case, his glasses fall off, and he accidentally steps on them. In the closing shot, he stands there, blind as a bat without his reading glasses, with a look of utter despair on his face that dwarfs any emotions he may have felt on realizing that the rest of his fellow creatures were gone. With the books, even authors long dead were still with him. Now even they have been wrested away, leaving him truly alone.

Rod Serling provides his usual wry commentary in the coda of the closing narration, but everyone who’s seen that episode (“Time Enough at Last”, 1959, starring Burgess Meredith) remembers that final scene — within the context of the story’s simple little narrative, that pair of broken glasses is somehow, improbably, more devastating than the destruction of the human race.

…

Read More Read More

Skyfall: In Which a Pulp Hero Meets the 21st Century

Skyfall: In Which a Pulp Hero Meets the 21st Century

Comments 11 comments

Skyfall_wallpaper1 Let me offend as many readers as possible right at the start by stating that Daniel Craig is the best James Bond the screen has yet known. The man is equal parts chiseled granite and lithe predator; he has charm, but he withholds it whenever possible, forcing us to catch it on the sly, as if we’re at a peepshow. Nobody in movies today looks better in a suit.

Yes, Sean Connery was great, but the role of Bond requires a greater world-weariness than Connery, at least in his nineteen-sixties roles, could bring. Roger Moore brought out 007’s upper-crust prep school tastes, but he was never believably dangerous; he actually needed Q’s endless gimmicks to survive, as Craig surely does not. The various Bond inhabitors since have filled the shoes without fleshing out the man. Only Craig does justice to the flinty, ruthless public servant that Ian Fleming originally envisioned, without reducing the character to a dusty fifties history text: Cold War Tactics 101, With Style. Daniel Craig makes 007 both contemporary and relevant.

Skyfall (2013) opens with a shot of an approaching figure, out-of-focus, stalking down a dim corridor. When the figure gets close enough, the image locks on at last: it’s Bond, of course, weapon in hand, but the initial blurriness is central to the film. Skyfall presents James Bond between epochs, uncertain of his exact identity and purpose. Is he still a tool of the Cold War establishment, of traditional spy vs. spy operations, or does the world now require him to be something new? To be (as he is in the extraordinary credits sequence) reborn?

…

Read More Read More

The Man Who Was Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The Man Who Was Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Comments 5 comments

G.K. ChestertonLast week, in a post about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, I said that certain habits of Gaiman’s plotting reminded me of G.K. Chesterton. It seemed to me that I’d referred to Chesterton fairly often in my posts here, so I did a search of the Black Gate archive. I found that I had in fact mentioned Chesterton a number of times, but that neither I nor anyone else had yet written a post for Black Gate specifically about him or any of his works. I’ve therefore put together this piece to give an overview of the man and his writing. It’s insufficient; Chesterton’s difficult to describe, more so than most writers. But one has to begin somewhere. He’s an important early fantasist, admired by figures as diverse as Gaiman, Borges, Alberto Manguel, and Slavoj Žižek. There’s even a movement to canonise Chesterton, a late convert to Catholicism, as a saint. Many of his writings are online, so you can judge him for yourself; you can find a list of texts on this page, a part of this site dedicated to Chesterton.

It’s almost traditional to say that Chesterton’s writing was defined by paradoxes. It’s not entirely accurate, I think. It’s more precise to say that in both his fiction and non-fiction he often put forward propositions structured something like: “It is frequently said that x is the case; but it is not true. In fact the very opposite is true.” From which point Chesterton would then explain, clearly, simply, and with a common-sense air, just how the opposite of everyone’s assumption was the actual state of affairs. In feeble imitation, I might put it this way: it is not true that Chesterton was a writer who delighted in paradoxes. In fact the very opposite is true. He was a writer that delighted in showing that apparent paradoxes were nothing of the sort, and were easily explained by an appeal to reality. We must not forget that Chesterton studied as an artist; and artists, perhaps more than any other sort of person, are concerned with finding the proper perspective on things.

…

Read More Read More

Why I’m Here – Part One

Why I’m Here – Part One

Comments 16 comments
I don't want to be this man
I don’t want to be this man

A couple of times this past summer I felt really old. Somehow the classic sci-fi/fantasy books I grew up reading weren’t well known to younger readers (really, you don’t know who Manly Wade Wellman is?!?) or even all that important anymore. In the forty-year span of my sci-fi and fantasy reading life, the genres’ audiences had changed.

Now you could be a sci-fi reader without having read Dune or planning to ever read it. Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber was “shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to actually read all the way through.” This was nuts — cats-and-dogs-living-together nuts.

After my brain stopped spasming and cooled off a little, I started to actually think. Sure, there are certain — I’d say canonical — books important to the development of fantasy and sci-fi. But if you haven’t read them will somebody revoke your fandom card? If you don’t like the books I like, does that make you less discerning than I? I doubt it.

Besides, discerning is not a word I’d use for a lot of my own book choices. I mean, there’s a certain Lord of the Rings ripoff homage published by Ballantine in 1977 that I, along with the whole fantasy-reading audience, went nuts for. (You had to be there when fantasy pickings were meager.) I still love The Sword of Shannara today. It doesn’t get less discerning than that.

…

Read More Read More

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)

Comments 12 comments

Return of Godzilla 1984 PosterOther Installments

Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)
Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

With the release of the teaser trailer for the upcoming Godzilla from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures, a decade of cinematic silence has come to an end. Godzilla last appeared in 2004 in the Japanese movie Godzilla: Final Wars, which Toho Studios intended as the monster’s final bow before going on sabbatical. It’s the longest break in the iconic monster’s career, and regardless of what happens next, the forthcoming Godzilla ’14 is a reason for G-fans to celebrate. Maybe stomp a few cities. The trailer makes San Francisco look particularly stomp-able.

At this point, we only know as much about Godzilla ’14 as we’ve seen in the teaser. But it was an exciting glimpse that at least assured fans the new movie would not repeat the horrible mistakes of the first American attempt at a stateside Godzilla, the 1998 Roland Emmerich disaster.

This is the first of five (projected) installments covering the history of Godzilla on film, written and condensed for a broad audience. I hope these articles will help readers who have only a passing relationship with Godzilla — the general knowledge from pop culture osmosis — see the unusual variety of one of the longest and most durable film franchises in history. Many Black Gate readers are probably familiar with much of the information I’ll provide in these articles, but since I’ll also sling around my own opinions about the movies mixed in with the history, Godzilla fans may find parts of this worthwhile … if perhaps only to ignite arguments.

…

Read More Read More

Everything Bad Makes a Puzzle: Some Thoughts on Everything Bad is Good For You

Everything Bad Makes a Puzzle: Some Thoughts on Everything Bad is Good For You

Comments 1 comment

Everything Bad Is Good For YouThere’s a certain kind of structure I’ve lately begun to notice in certain novels. These books read like puzzles, telling one story directly and overtly while implying a second story, or highly variant reading of the first story, through carefully-placed gaps, contradictions, and seemingly-irrelevant details. Throwaway references in highly-disparate points of the book might imply a completely different way to read at least the plot and often the tone or theme. It’s something Gene Wolfe does a lot; other examples I’ve noticed lately are Joyce Carol Oates’ The Accursed, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is For Witching, and Caitlín Kiernan’s The Red Tree. I’d been trying to work out what to make of this ‘puzzlebook’ technique, when as it happened I read a completely different book that seemed to have something to say about this structure — among many other things.

Steven Johnson’s 2005 non-fiction book Everything Bad Is Good For You is an argument about the structure and cognitive benefits of popular culture. Johnson suggests that video games, for example, sharpen certain kinds of problem-solving skills, and in general that the experience of games, TV shows, the internet, and to an extent film represents an engagement with increasing complexity. Most fascinating to me were his discussions of TV and of the way TV’s grown more structurally complex over the past few decades. He seems to me to have not only accurately identified how televised stories have changed but also by extension to have suggested how storytelling generally may be changing. And that in turn perhaps implies a broader context for the ‘puzzlebooks’ I seem to be coming across more and more often.

…

Read More Read More