Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

June 20, 2003

Incredible Bulk

Everyone's going to be writing about Hulk this weekend. I doubt I'll go to see it again, but since Universal previewed it in my city after my newspaper deadline, I'm going to take a few days to digest it before writing about it at length. And maybe even take in a few more reviews - what the heck truly offended the sense and sensibilities of Tony Scott in the New York Times? (Personal offense seems to be indicated.) Let's see if Bruce Banner turns out to be a big green Rorschach test.

The Window of the Ghoul

That is, at least when you behold The Eye, a supernatural kiss from the other side, an eerie Asian sibling to The Others. Going wider Friday is this smooth new Hong Kong-made horror by the Thai-born Pang Brothers, its becalmed style punctuated by bursts of spine-tingling terror. I don't mean to sound like I'm writing a quote; it's just that good.

Delicate, patient, yet freighted with dread, their story of Mun (Lee Sin-Je), a 20-year-old woman whose vision is restored by a corneal transplant eighteen years after losing her sight is a fully-accomplished counterpart to what Mark Pellington seemed to attempt in his absurd yet tingly The Mothman Prophesies.

Mun's acclimation to the world of sight is accompanied by perceptual snaps and brittle editing instead of the sort of gore-and-bore a director like Takashi Miike might fashion. Mun's first sights resemble the out-of-focus world of the lifetime myopic who won't submit to the knife of the radial keratomist. She starts seeing things, yes, everything is new, spooked and spectacular. An unfamiliar night-light gloaming alternates with daylight's blinding bright. But there's residual memory on the transplanted corneas. Unsettled spirits seize her nights and days.

There were some cool special-effects driven notions about how to depict what's known as "facial vision"-the impressions that motion were once believed to leave on the skin of the face of the blind or sight-impaired--in this spring's Daredevil, but the Pangs play with simpler means. Start with the main titles alone: fingertips poke from behind a stretched-taut white sheet, like beads of Braille letterform, or worse, an anxious, restrained creature under the skin, ready to poke out into the glare of life.

Seen and not seen; heard and not heard; directed indirection. With their third feature, the Pang twins masterfully array those dialectics of the horror film vocabulary. These pan-Asian filmmakers return film to the form of dream, a gale-force maelstrom of what Harvey Kurtzmann and the other artists at Mad Magazine used to call "eyeball kicks." (Of course, the already-sold American remake from Tom Cruise's company will have more rigid rules, a painfully obvious structure and reams of explanation, honing some of the nerve-jangle down to logic and a PG-13 rating.)

Like the new wave of Asian horror that is fathering the new wave of American remakes, the force of The Eye lies in cross-cultural suggestiveness. The ideas about ghosts and visions are ka-POWs that speak to any audience in Asia, but to American anxiety and trepidation as well. What unspeakable-and unspoken-things does the human organism fear just walking down the street each day or night? The many films and filmmakers discovered by festivals and critics and only just now trickling onto American arthouse screens have a one-up on American moviemaking. They're not required to reduce their visions to the tattoo of plot points. The stippling of impression in mad profusion is completely acceptable, to their financiers, and as time has proven, disparate eastern cultures as well.

The Pangs are severe and sure editors, and understand vision and sound. Adept at the shock of the "Boo!" -- knowing when fwwwwwaps, shrills and zzzzsschhaas of sound can take the breath away -- they're also adroit at the vocabulary of blur. In art and video of the past couple years, everyone thinks they're Gerhard Richter, working the artful smudge, the painterly swipe. One current example, both notable and dull, would be photographer Thomas Ruff's manipulations of internet pornography. But for Ruff, blur is a formal matter, an indulgent mannerism. But even with their glossy, commercials-honed skill at composition and pacing, such effects are all part of the fabric of the Pangs' film. Everyday dread, the sort tamped in our cultural by a fistful of SSRIs, is more about the loss of love, hair, a paycheck. The Pangs are getting closer to meta-fear, the fear of being afraid.


"Eyeball violence" is a phrase of colleague of mine has often used before he utters the words, "Oh nooooooooooooo!" Trying to describe The Eye in simplest terms to a couple of friends has elicited a similar reaction in others: one woman's piercing pale blue eyes were visible a split-second before her hands flew up to protect her sight (instead of ears) from the very idea of The Eye. (The movie's more about memory and death than threat to the eye itself: no homages to Dali and Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou here.)

"It takes time for the eye and the brain to work together," the doctor reassures Mun and her family once she begins to see. The Pangs take ninety-eight minutes to wreak havoc between eye and brain, and I was gratefully tremulous for at least ninety-seven of them. And yes, you should keep at least an eye open.

Your Fifteen Terabytes of Fame are Up

No theater in Chicago has booked the IMAX Matrix, and I couldn't bring myself to spend three hours in brilliant seventy degree weather to watch it last week in New York. But goofy academic Slavoj Zizek, recently caricatured in a New Yorker profile, weighs in weightily in the current In These Times, enacting his own Burly Brawl of intellectual condescension. "If part one was dominated by the impetus to exit the Matrix, to liberate oneself from its hold, part two makes it clear that the battle has to be won within the Matrix, that one has to return to it," he writes. "The filmmakers have thus dramatically raised the stakes of the Matrix series, confronting us with all the complications and confusions of the politics of liberation," he continues, interpreting the film through a reductionist political perspective. "And they have put themselves in a profoundly difficult spot: They now confront an almost impossible task. If the forthcoming part three, The Matrix Revolutions, is to succeed with anything like a happy ending, it will have to produce nothing less than the appropriate answer to the dilemmas of revolutionary politics today, a blueprint for the political act the left is desperately looking for."

 

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