From the archives: Halloween

Tuesday, October 31, 1995: Caitlin (6) is an Egyptian princess for Halloween.  Drew (4) is a house.  Sarah (2) is a pirate.  Everyone is very cute.  

Saturday, Oct. 31, 1998: This year Caitlin (9) is a soccer player, Drew (7) a witch, and Sarah (5) a vampire.  Spence (2), tiger-face make up all wiped off, just falls asleep.  Sarah is a bit possessive about her candy.  Drew shares cheerfully.  Caitlin comes back all loaded down, and starts yelling at the mere prospect of encroachment.  I pilfer anyway, but not as much as Spence, who keeps emerging with someone else's suckers.

Saturday, October 30, 1999: By mid day anticipation is rising, and we enjoy a kind of Halloween countdown.  Sharon makes Sarah (6) a superb bat costume.  Caitlin (10) reprises last night’s zombie ensemble.  Drew (8) simplifies, making herself a witch out of a simple hat and cape.  I carve out everyone’s pumpkin designs. 

Caitlin goes trick-or-treating with Amber Garn.  I take 2-4 down 8^th south, through Sage Creek Circle, to the trailers and out to South Main.  Spence (3) is nearly terrified by a life-sized vampire at the Lucas place.  He also has a fit every time someone rings a doorbell. 

Tuesday, October 31, 2000: The kids dress up for school.  Sarah (7) is Bill Nye, and Caitlin (11) is a hippy.  Drew (9) is a garbage bag.  After school it’s rainy and cold.  Drew decides to be a vampire, since the public apparently just didn’t understand that garbage bag thing.  As usual we lose Caitlin (up to Amber’s), though this year she actually wanted to stay with the rest of us.  Drew and Sarah go across town to join Heather and Ethan Wolz. 

Matty’s (2) nose is running, and he’s wayward and distractable anyway.  So it’s just Spencer the bat (4) and me, out pounding the pavement.  We have a very nice time.  As usual, I’m struck by his sensitivity, articulateness, sweetness.  We walk a bit, drive some, walk a bit more.  I notice how, unlike conditions that prevailed during my (our) own childhood, it’s completely scattershot around here.  We have neighbours, to be sure, but there’s not much sense of a neighbourhood or community.   

“Spence, do you want to go to the Wolfgramms'?”  “Well, I want to stay in the car now.  But you can go.”  Drew and Sarah appear to have had a grand time.  I get the camera out, and Drew gives me a great interview about all of Sarah’s many boyfriends, or in other words, boys that she prefers to play, sit and eat with, and that seem to want to spend great amounts of time with her. 

Now everyone is back.  They compare their gross candy.  We watch Laughton's The Night of the Hunter.  What a great family cinema session!  All are transfixed together, spooked, chilled, saved by Lillian Gish.  Just as good as any book-based storytime.  

Wednesday, October 31, 2001: Caitlin’s surfer dude costume looks suspiciously like Caitlin (12) always looks.  Drew (10)  is upset, as she seems to be every year.  She and Sydney R. were going to be co-nerds, and then yesterday Sydney announced that she was going to be a scarecrow instead.  So Drew feels discouraged and abandoned and self-conscious.  Then Sarah (8) steps on her nerd glasses and breaks them.  Sorrows!

After school I pick up the Brooksiders.  Drew won’t talk, but it sounds like things went pretty well.  Everyone wanted to try out Sarah’s costume, so she’s happy.  We managed to get Spencer (5) to go, so that’s good enough.  At home we pause, refresh our costumes, make up the boys, and then head downtown.  Throngs!  In some ways we have public-spirited businesses appreciating the fellow citizens that patronize them.  But I also sense arms twisted, and notice that the candy is of a rather poor quality.  Of course these greedy, grabby kids don’t deserve too much more or better.  All this doesn’t apply to me or mine. 

We all walk up and then down together.  Drew always goes up ahead, then sort of waits for us.  The girls help the boys.  Matt (3) seems a bit overwhelmed.  People put treats in his bag and he sort of stands there, wondering why.  There are a lot of people around here that we know, or that Sharon knows.  I guess we belong here, more or less.  I notice that when women see each other for the first time in awhile, they say things like, “oh, you’ve got another baby!”  Best part: the girls and I walk home through the crisp October air and the vivid fall colours.

Drew is preparing to be bummed because no one’s going trick or treating with her (since, as usual, she didn’t bother to arrange anything).  Then Caitlin’s friends call to say that they’ve got some extra tickets for the haunted house they’re going to, and Caitlin actually invites her sisters, and everyone feels very happy.  The girls take the boys out to collect some candy, and then, with Sharon with them, leave me with the little ones and go off together.  At home we have a nice time.  Claire (6 months) drops off early, and the boys go happily to bed.  I look through their candy, naturally.  Much later the travelers come back, very happy, full of detailed accounts of their adventures, enjoying each other. 

Friday, October 31, 2003: Caitlin (14) and I do some errands.  She reads two Lemony Snicket books in a matter of minutes.  The ward has a trunk or treat, organized by the new primary presidency.  Claire (2), the clown!  We also have a handsome vampire and policeman. 

The big girls strike off by themselves.  Drew (12) is dressed in a nun outfit that she paid $13 for.  Sometimes it’s fun to spend your money.  Sarah (10) is a mad scientist.  Caitlin doesn’t doesn’t deign.  They all go of with neighbour Sadie to get some candy and toilet paper people.  Later they come back to watch a movie.  I show them Night of the Living Dead.  Suddenly they’re not so sophisticated and superior.  C & S fall asleep, while Drew talks and reasons her way out of her anxiety.

Friday, October 29, 2004: We watch Tashlin/Lewis's The Disorderly Orderly for family cinema.  Caitlin (15) laughs, generously and easily.  She has it within her, and often without her, to be a good pal.  There’s in and out viewing with this film—what is Sarah (11)  mad at now?—but overall we have out and out rejoicing.

Drew (13) is a great looking pirate.  She goes to a swim party that is attended by two people.  She comes back and wants, as usual, a movie.  We try Kolchak, the Night Stalker, of ancient family memory.  To me it looks pretty threadbare.  Sarah is unmoved, and looks on scornfully.  Sophisticated Drew argues with the screen and hides under her blanket.  You never know how things will strike you.

Saturday, October 30, 2004: Utah, or no trick-or-treat on Sunday.  We do some yard cleaning.  Mum teases Sarah about last night’s movie.  “I didn’t scream.  I gasped.”  Sharon, Catilin and Sarah go to Springville’s last football game, through which their perfect season gives way to defeat and epic poor sportsmanship.

We watch Altman's Popeye.  We also have costume preparation, overseen by the ever-ready Sharon.  Spence (8) has a fit because he doesn’t like any of the available hats.  Claire (3) sums up the various family roles, starting with herself.  “Witch.  Vampire.  Grim Reaper.  Hippy.  Pirate.  I don’t know.  Horrible woman.  The nicest guy.”  We go to the ward trunk or treat.  Costumes for grown-ups are silly.  Kids scatter to participate in various dark rituals.  Drew goes to Sydney’s, Sarah to the Garns' house, Caitlin to who knows.  The little ones are spent, or chilled, by those few turns around the parking lot.

Sunday, October 31, 2004: Caitlin and Drew go and get their temple-baptismal recommends.  Then they improvise scatological lyrics to the tune of Search, Ponder and Pray.

Monday, October 31, 2005: Sarah (12) is sick.  I tell her about Patrick (the very recently deceased cat).  She wells and withdraws.  For the rest of the day she mourns, quite markedly, with dignity and with deep feeling.  I didn't do that very well, did I? 

Spence (9) took a really excellent costume to school.  He and Mum thought hard about and worked hard over it.  They cut a curtain in half, put in a hole for the head, added armour and accoutrements.  Voila! a Crusader.  Cool!  There he is, combining fancy and history and engagement and intelligence.  And all they could do is ask if he was a girl.  Spence isn’t exactly happy about that, nor is he exactly unhappy.

I get home.  We’ve got a new cat!  Given the happy and sad of Patrick’s tenure, here’s not much Dadly denying to be done.  It's Rita, as in the meter maid.  She’s a tiny black pointy-chinned creature, hiding there under the couch. 

Halloween night is pretty quiet.  Sarah is still under the weather, but she goes to Kelsey’s house to plunder a bit.  The crusader, the fairy and Batman join the ward trunk or treat in Artistic Circle, and then seem satisfied with that.  The bigs go to the Lifferths, and they come back. 

Claire (4) jumps up to the back of the couch.  Then what happened, exactly?  Did she fall, or jump, or both?  There are no big crashes—nothing to speak of, really.  But where she’d been tearing around with her customary verve and abandon, she now stops and grows suddenly small.  She holds her left arm.  “Take me to bed,” she wails, if a wail can be so tiny.  New parent over-reactions have been succeeded by the calm perspective of the elderly.  In other words, this’ll be fine.  But that is a broken arm if ever I've seen one.  

Monday, October 30, 2006: Sharon works hard on Matt’s (8) costume, and gets it done.  It’s triumphantly good.  And, despite the fact that it doesn’t have that store bought sheen, he’s sweetly and sincerely grateful about it all.  The Star Wars costume that your mother actually made is somehow just a little less morally suspect. 

Wednesday, October 31, 2007: We put costumes together for school.  Matt (9) is happily Luigi.  He looks good, darn it.  Claire’s (6) idea of wearing plush princess clothes with her vampire makeup is quite brilliant.  Spence (11) notices that pirates actually dress kind of flamboyantly, and that the (excellent) ensemble that Sharon has put together for him is completely made up of girls’ clothes.

Caitlin (18, at BYU) calls me with that bleary, I want you to know that I just woke up voice.  Can I meet you at noon?  I have something I need to tell you.  That fills me with anxiety, which I repress until the time comes.  It turns out that she had to tell me that she’d coloured her hair.  Rascal. 

Sharon, Drew (16)  and Sarah (14) go over to set up a spook alley at the church.  Drew is cheerful about it.  Sarah is offended that she has to fold some service into her plans.  Drew has on some ridiculous running shorts from DI/1976, with tights underneath, and high heeled leather boots.  It’s a complete botch job.  She looks rather stunning.  For the second time in two weeks Sarah has opted for a gothic/emo get up.  Again I ask, is she being drawn that way?  She looks superb too. 

I freshen the kids’ moustaches and whiskers and undead make up.  Claire puts her own blood on.  They have fun over at the church.  I feel put off, surprisingly.  Freeloladers!  Who are these strangers who third helping’d their way through all of our refreshments?

I take the youngsters over to the Memorial Park church, and then to go up and down in the Brookside subdivision.  We hop out.  A little girl is happy to see Claire.  She shares her feelings with her parents.  “Which one was she?” they ask  “The vampire without any teeth.”  At the next dismount Claire jumps out just as Spencer (11)  steps on her cape.  Yank!

Back at home we watch Topper Returns.  All are charmed.  It was nice to watch the boys enjoying this.  No nightmares either. 

Drew comes back.  !, again.  She’s dressed as a boy, of the gangster variety.  She tries out a bunch of shambling walks and gestures for us.  We kind of stare.  It’s that Twelfth Night, earthquake-y effect, not nearly so implausible in the flesh.  No wonder Orsino was troubled!  It’s the eyebrows, she calmly tells us.  Sarah comes back too.  She’s still mad.

Kids abed, big people watch Del Toro's regretable Mimic.  Those black people, says Drew.  Singing, and swearing, and sacrificing themselves.

(And she was going to be a cowboy...)

Thursday, October 30, 2008: Sharon goes to the chiropractor.  Apparently he adjusted her uterus, which is something you don’t hear about everyday.  

Friday, October 31, 2008: Brookside has a Halloween costume procession.  What a strange, apostate practice this is, inexplicable, removed from any cultural, historical or religion root.  Pretty fun, though.  You get a sense of the kids’ home lives from the way they present themselves.  I guess that’s cultural, economic and spiritual substance, or at least disclosure, after all. 

Lots of nice little Brooksiders get big smiles and wave brightly.  “Hello Mrs. Duncan!”  A little guy flings his plastic cutlass and bounces it off his mother’s head, thirty feet away.  Matt (10) and Claire (7)  look good, and happy.  Spence (12)  joins us, a bit perturbed.  Christopher and Alan and Jay were riding him about not wearing a costume, even though they knew that he was wearing one. 

We went downtown for main street trick or treat.  More socio-economics.  Very nice weather.  Kids liked it.  Me too.  Back at home, Spence and Matt are battling.  The latter too careless, the former too nag and nitpicky.  Trunk or Treat.  Freeloaders, like last year, but I feel more calm about it.  Spencer goes up to Alan’s for a party.  Sarah (15) goes to Kelsey’s.  Matt goes with Celeborn.  Claire is off with Peyton M..  Drew (17)  is feeling a bit poorly.  We watch Phantom of the Paradise, just like brother Scott and I did, so many years ago. 

Everyone comes back.  Spence complains that they kept saying they were going to watch Journey to the…, and with 3D glasses, but that they never actually got around to it.  He also observes that Matt, and especially the confident Celeborn, spend so much time blabbing about the subtexts and exposition for their narrative games, that they don’t ever actually play.  Drew thinks Claire is a weenie.  But she allows, as we hear those three interacting, that she’s pretty darned good at standing up to pushy big people.  Now Drew goes to Mary R.'s house to watch an alleged horror movie about killer bees.   

Sarah gets back, also a little disappointed.  It seems that the climax of their spookfest was a celebration of God’s intervention in men’s affairs.  Now Drew returns.  Her report is that she told Mary not to rent that killer bee movie, begged her not to, and that she did anyway, and that all regretted it.  Je me souviens.  All these social hopes, and they’re so often to usually to always dashed.  Vanity.  And probably not that great a tragedy. 

Films with wolves in them (ambiguity...)

Peter and the Wolf

UK, 2006

Music by Sergei Prokoviev

Directed by Suzie Templeton

This is an amazing demonstration of perspective, especially when set against the way more familiar Disney version.  When you view the familiar from a different angle, it's suddenly not so familiar anymore.  In fact, the incontrovertible can suddenly become unrecognizable, or inconceivable.  When comparing the two films, Disney and Sterling Holloway emerge as being ideologically overdetermined.  Important questions arise.  Who says that the wolf, in his habitat, following the directives of instinct, is the bad guy?  Why must everything always end in conquest?  Sentimental beasts and apple-cheeked boys will win you your point, but that doesn’t mean you’ve won it fairly.  (The Disney is not only ideological, but also archetypal as well; there’s room for liking and critiquing both.)  Given the pretty convincing contemporary Russian milieu here (executed by a bunch of Poles and Brits), who’s to say that this sleeping, grudgingly affectionate, probably alcoholic Grandfather is all that much better than the Darwinian clarity and nobility of the wild?  In support of this idea, note the feral beauty of the child.

The pre-wolf interlude that goes on outside grandpa’s compound is really light and funny.  That’s a neat trick, since the (hilarious) cat is trying to kill his evolutionary subordinates this whole time.  The advent of the wolf is electrifying.  The design of these creatures!  No second chance for Sonja, this time.  The comic invention and technical execution of what follows is quite awesome.  Look at those fore/mid/backgrounds!  The battle on and around the ice (Eisenstein, 1938?) is really distended, with the result that the child really earns his laurels, while the wolf maintains our admiration.  As for the shocking conclusion, it’s like Nora Helmer slamming that door, or Huck Finn embracing damnation.  Not only the writing on the wall, but the wall come tumbling down.  

The familiar tale, narrated by a different familiar voice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB66bInIXAY

The film you may not know: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7jkJU9p0N0 

Fantastic Mr. Fox

US, 2009

Written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach

Directed by Wes Anderson

Wait—is this even a kids’ movie?  Kids' lit maven Charlotte Huck’s requirement (to be for kids, a book must have a child protagonist) isn’t universal, and Dahl might have been one of the writers that most pushed that envelope.  (But not as often as it might seem.  Charlie, not Willie W., was the  protagonist of that book.)  But Huck’s point still deserves consideration and partial/frequent implementation.  The point is, what is the child’s entrée here?  Ash, say my boys, but I think that they’re being too flexible.  One senses a second motivation behind the adaptation of this property.  

Is that little, resonant wolf thing that happens near the end a key to the whole exercise?  Something about Rossellini on Chaplin, Godard on Lewis, maybe Anderson on himself?  Say what you will about mannerism, lack of discipline or decorum and such, but I’m a free man.  If that’s what Anderson is up to, it’s pretty self-regarding.  Given the evidence the film provides, it’s also true.  The increasingly mannered (though always pretty) geometries of the live action films work perfectly here.   

Critics talk about the Dahl contribution, naturally.  I see a lot of William Péne du Bois too: diagrams and trajectories and such.  What’s unexpected and pleasing is how kinetic and wild the film is, how frequently it more or less runs amok.  That Heroes and Villains sequence!  (In another register, Old Man River!  Anderson's music selection can seem mannered too, until it starts glowing.)  Numerous eating and digging sequences make the same impression.  Otherwise, lots of pleasing drollery, some fine voice turns, some good Andersonian family melancholy, and some pretty dire and bracing violent conflict.

Been there! (Hot off the presses)

Sarah and Dad, Los Angeles, Oct. 18-Oct. 22, 2012

USC:

Doheny Library (which we didn't actually visit)

  UCLA:

Drake Field and Stadium

The Getty (!):

Bologne, Dou, Van Huysum, Rubens, Gericault, Corot, Khnoppf, Degas, Van Gogh ...

More adult films (and I guess they sort of are of that kind, come to think of it...)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Sweden, 2009
Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

This is an effective package.  The mystery is mysterious, has some heft, resolves in a satisfying way.  It raises bigger issues which, though (over) familiar—villainous patriarchy as the root of villainous capitalism, or vice versa—are fair enough.  The double-barrel detecting is also effective, what with two insufficient methods and two incomplete (circumstantially, dispositionally) characters combining to lick the platter clean.  The character part of this equation is a bit strained, but movies seek symmetry, so that’s okay.  There’s some effective cinema here as well.  The photo sections evoke Antonioni's Blow-Up, and aren’t too disadvantaged in the comparison. 

The rape sequence?  Very unpleasant, and not just for the obvious reasons.  Part of it is due to the social worker’s contrived, hyperbolic wickedness.  Yes, it makes Lisbeth’s vengeance satisfying.  It also justifies the monstrousness of that vengeance—he only got what he had coming.  And when you think of it, the punishment that she inflicts is not only infernally imaginative, but purgatorially (Dante) apt; the punishment not only corresponds with the offence, it equals the offence.  The episode is grotesque, but it isn’t just gratuitous.  It’s a cynical, probably defensible statement about the nature of power and its exercise.  It is also a dire antidote to that exercise; here and subsequently this woman is refusing to be a victim.  This episode is also structurally important, constituting a challenge to the main character, the surmounting of which prefigures her intervention at the film’s climax.  This is the first step away from rootless and wasteful inertia, her first step on the road to a form of selfhood. 

The thing is that like a lot of screen violence and sexuality, this whole thing works better, is more standable and palatable, as an idea, and not as an idea visualized.  And maybe, in the end, the idea isn’t that great either.  The eventual culprit here is a more privileged, powerful, pathological version of the social worker.  He is monstrous, and of course we feel justified when he is brutally dispatched.  After helping to solve this mystery the journalist is vindicated, because it turns out that the guy he was trying to expose at the beginning of the film, the which effort led to his temporary downfall, is guilty after all.  By this we learn that Capitalists are also monstrous rapists.  Mark Achbar’s The Corporation agrees, and there’s sure a lot of supporting evidence.  But even if that extreme thesis were true—it’s not, always—then it could only have hate-generating, desensitizing consequences.  Hard films should sometimes be made so we can talk about hard things.  But in the end they probably just harden us.  

Rooney Mara, who is connected to this property, invokes an unseemly forebear:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kai7tS3vcmY

Bridesmaids

US, 2011
Written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumalo
Directed by Paul Feig

This is too much, objectively speaking.  From the perspective of this particular, partly representative, quite spectacularly talented writer/star, too much may be just right.  At least that’s how she feels, and her perspective deserves some consideration.  When talking to kids about sex, aren’t you supposed to call things by their names?  Since this is Juvenalian satire, and since scorching outrage lies so close to the comic surface, then it seems appropriate that we would be in for a bumpy ride.  Whether or not the viewer wants to get on is a whole different question.

Juvenalian, which is to say that humour is an objective—met, often quite spectacularly—but it’s not necessarily the point.  We have a dispiriting theme here, really, and it shows up so often (from Repulsion forward, or maybe since people started blaming Eve for everything) that it must be the truth.  Sexuality tends to be discussed and enacted on male terms, the which are almost always self-serving for the male, and degrading for the female.  This is true even when the exchange or setting is not sexual, even when the male isn’t even present.  This film's pretty comic, pretty awful opening sequence makes the point pretty effectively.  From here on, for all the occasional appearances of the various male characters, Bridesmaids actually proceeds a lot like Claire Luce Booth’s The Women.  The men are a structuring absence, conspicuous in their sparseness, and altogether having a disproportionate and generally disastrous effect on our various female subjects.

Meant that way?  Not completely, probably, especially in the way the anomalous Chris O’Dowd character (aren’t actual Irish cops usually limited to New York City, and about eighty years ago?) shows up to provide some contrast and respite.  It’s not exactly that this character doesn’t work.  Rather, he’s kind of like the Charles Vanel character in Clouzot’s Diabolique, or maybe Claire Danes in The Hours.  These three personages suggest that there’s something outside all of this misanthropy, or savagery, or self-destructiveness.  They just don’t seem to belong, or have any chance of affecting the particular, hermetic worlds that they wander in to. (Also reminiscent, positively, of Adrienne Shelley’s Waitress.  Alas, in that instance the point got further proven, though this time by fatal extracinematic events.)

Thelma Todd, Patsy Kelly, misc.

This dire and demonstrable theme really registers, and remains with you, for all the apparently happy consummations at the film’s conclusion.  But this is also just as much an SNL movie, if a cut above the often fragmented and scattered SNL norm.  The norm, as well as the transcending thereof, makes Bridesmaids into a kind of comic equivalent of the Saboteur-type Alfred Hitchcock film.  You know—the ones where the cinema, or the set pieces, rise above and stay with you more than the plot, or the theme, or the whole.  As far as comic set pieces go there are some real humdingers here: the dueling dedications between Wiig’s best buddy and Rose Byrne’s insufferable climber, the obligatorily scatological, heroically staged food poisoning sequences, the entire, practically epic airplane incident (Wiig!).  Melissa McCarthy develops from potential stock figure into bawdy force of nature, with even a few pretty effective sentimental and didactical detours along the way.  The big event melt-downs that draw us to the conclusion are effective, but the emblematic sequence may be the one in which Wiig tries to get O’Dowd’s disaffected cop to help her again.  The comic variations on a very little situation—she drives by, and drives by, and then keeps driving by—practically combine Jane Austen, infinitely embroidering until that little piece of lace contains the whole world, and Jeff Beck.  She can do anything!

JB: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv4RuGP2GEk

Black Swan

US, 2010
Directed by Darren Aronofsky

They’ve been up-front about their inspirations, and the precedents are profound.  It’s The Red Shoes, of course, by way of Repulsion.  There’s some archaeological value there, I guess, a sense of artistic and cultural evolution.  Some of dance stuff is pretty great, too, and in a way that owes nothing to Michael Powell.  We get some of the infrastructure and hierarchy, and we get a lot of the preparation and rehearsal and the hard work, some by plain, direct documentary means.  Interestingly, that’s not the only method applying here.  And operatic or expressionistic approaches are okay sometimes, aren’t they? 

The prototype

Plus, what a rotten movie.  Add a bit of The Phantom of the Paradise (cool feather imagery!) to The Red Shoes and Repulsion ingredients, or a lot of Brian De Palma generally.  What do you get?  Dave Kehr wrote admiringly about Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, but paused to note that the film couldn’t seem to imagine a middle ground between oppression and chaos.  True, and as Kehr would acknowledge there is some historical and political truth to that terrible binary.  I guess Aronofsky’s Black Swan binary exists too, but there’s not much to be said for a vision that gives us nothing to choose between infantilization (Barbara Hershey’s bunker) and degradation.  Put this in the Leaving Las Vegas category of humilio-Oscars: submit to whoppingly demeaning requirements and we’ll applaud most moistly at the Shrine auditorium.  Ms. Portman is brave indeed, and apart from a bit of one-note, pretty good.  But with regard to self-sacrificing performance we should be looking to Falconetti and Dreyer, not to Lars von Trier.  Let's be fair: superb conclusion!