Paprika

I recently watched a movie called Paprika, directed by Satoshi Kon, because I really enjoyed his work on Paranoia Agent and Tokyo Godfathers. The movie is about a device that allows others to peer into dreams, and the effects of it's misuse on the subconscious of others and the difficulty of separating dreams from reality. There is a lot of confusing, twisted imagery that necessitates watching multiple times, which is alright, because this movie is beautiful and interesting enough that a person will actually want to. The animation is detailed and smooth, and the extremely realistic designs clash wonderfully with the surreal dreamscapes. The music is also very abstract and bizarre, featuring lots of digital voices and a mishmash of instrument choices, especially the theme that follows the growing dream parade that stampedes through peoples' minds throughout the movie. One of the major themes is the concept of a person's persona, or the mask that they put on to hide their true self, with several characters having alternate dream avatars, which include the titular Paprika herself. I found myself completely pulled into this film, attracted to the twisting plot and the intricate, clever action dream sequences, and I felt that it does an amazing job simulating the bizarre state of dreaming and the relative difficulty of recognizing being within a dream far better than the later Inception did.

Interview With The Vampire

Interview With The Vampire is often considered one of the primary sources of the popularization of the modern “romantic” Vampire story. Beforehand, while there was the occasional vampire-based sexual metaphor story, Vampires were treated more as gruesome, unpleasant monsters, reminiscent of the original Dracula and Count Orlak of Nosferatu. Anne Rice's Vampires are presented as bloodthirsty and powerful, but also seductive and hedonistic, depending on the individual. Vampirism becomes less mystical and more physical, cutting ties to religious imagery and traditional weaknesses, and it's treated both as a blessing and a curse by several different characters, some of them blinded by the sheer power and pleasure it brings and others distressed by the backsides to unaging immortality, bloodlust, and weakness to sunlight. Surprising me, the protagonist ends up being fairly overshadowed by Lestat, the villain of the book, despite his not even appearing for a large portion of the novel. He's controlling, petty, and egotistical, and his subtext with Louis becomes ridiculously clear early on, including Lestat forcibly “adopting” a young girl into vampirism to keep Louis from leaving. And in the process, he certainly does leave an impression. The book does feature a framing device in the titular interview, but it doesn't really have too much importance as anything BUT a framing device until the very end, where the unnamed interviewer wishes to become a vampire despite the warnings of Louis' story and leaves to find Lestat.

Personally, I've never been one for vampire stories in general, so this one took me quite some time to finally get through. It also didn't really leave much of an impact on me, and I found myself have to reread to recall much of the plot. I can definitely see why the books, and the genre as a whole, are so popular, but they simply don't mesh with me.

Jeff Smith's "Bone"

I probably enjoyed Bone more than I did anything else I read this semester. I started reading it and barely stopped until I had finished it a few days later. Everything about this book drew me in, from it's deceptively varied character designs, to it's enormous, fantastic, sometimes even surreal setting. When I first started reading, I was surprised by the stark difference in appearance between the simple, cartoonish Bone siblings and just about every other character in the series. It provided a strange, but unique set of protagonists and oftentimes seemed as though someone had plucked cartoon characters from the 1930's and suddenly dropped them into an enormous Tolkienesque world, and it works far better than one would expect. 

The story gradually progresses from cheerful and idealistic to something surprisingly dark, but the shift never feels awkward or out of place. I think my favorite part of the series is that it very rarely, but not never, really loses its humorous touch, even once the very serious plot points kick into gear and horrors like the Lord of the Locusts enter the picture. The characters all play off of each other perfectly, recurring gags work themselves into unexpected places (I will never get tired of “STUPID, STUPID RAT CREATURES!”) and there's a certain darkly amusing juxtaposition of the Casper-like Fone Bone playing the hero against gruesome monsters like Kingdok. However, when the series actually does choose to play itself completely straight, it pulls no punches whatsoever, and the impact is staggering. The violence isn't softened at all, and the old, unspoken rule of never presenting a major heroine being roughed up and scarred as a male hero would be is entirely averted. I'm probably going to reread this over break, just because it's left such an impact on me. 

I just want to comb this comic, break it down, and pick through the pieces to see what makes it tick. I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a classic series of science-fiction/humor media that I found myself entirely sucked into. I didn't have time to listen to the radio play, but I had a copy of the collected book series, which I read earlier in the semester. I thought I would just read the first of the books, to get a palette for the humor, but before I knew it, I had read all of the books collected. A combination of the dry wit, the absurd situations, and the downright cynical outlook on the universe kept me engaged, although I felt the final book of the series was frankly just a downer. Hitchhiker's Guide is one of those series that rewards its readers for really paying attention, as it frequently jumps back to previous events and adds new layers of dramatic irony atop, playing it for as much humor as possible. It especially wrenches as much laughs as it can out of the complete and total destruction of the planet Earth, one of the very first events in the story. It mocks the concept of humans considering their existence important, revealing that our creators are essentially just intelligent mice, and that we were only ever the THIRD most intelligent animals on the planet. The series as a whole is perhaps best known today for the classic gag of “the answer to life, the universe, and everything” being 42, where it's pointed out that finding the “answer” is pointless when we don't even know the “question.” Even the numbering of the books mocks the trend for planned trilogies to slip into later books, which the fifth being labelled as “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Trilogy.” The entire series is a delight, no matter what medium I look into with it, and I get the feeling I'll be rereading it every few years to discover what other jokes I may have missed on my first run. Although, perhaps I'll skip “Mostly Harmless,” next time. It's just far too bleak a conclusion for such a silly, lampshade-happy lampoon of a series.

Channel Zero

Channel Zero wasn't really a book I enjoyed. I had a lot of trouble following the story, and a lot of it just sort of blended together as I read. I did like the concept behind the main character and her interview in the story's midpoint was probably the high point for me, as it brought up a lot of thought-provoking points about the accuracy of media reporting. I also enjoyed the concept of her tattoos mocking the absurd range of corporate advertising, and the use of background news reports mixed into the dialogue was clever and well executed, but after that, the book falls apart for me. A mixture of the stark black and white, the mostly uninteresting character designs, and the high-contrast backgrounds made it fairly difficult for me to read as cohesive, and my overall lack of interest in its politically driven, media saturated plot meant I didn't really have much drive to go back and clarify things. In addition, I found the concept behind the backstory a bit too farfetched, even for a media dystopia. The notion of the United States becoming a self-declared holy land, where everything is driven by censorship screamed too much of hyperbole for me to be able to suspend my disbelief. While other stories ,such as Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, also go for this exaggerated realworld state-turned-dictatorship setting, I was still able to engage myself with them on other levels, such as character arcs and a completed, but open-ended plotline. I don't know if Channel Zero was simply a plot more relevant for the time it was written, or more likely, simply is incompatible with my tastes, but I'm not exactly rushing to reread it.

The Hobbit

The Hobbit is one of the definitive “Hero's Journey” tales, and a book very obviously written with an entire universe in mind. Tolkien's method of writing was very precise and perhaps overly detailed. He knew where each of his characters were at all times, what their motivations were, who their entire family line was, and exactly what their long-term roles were going to be in the world of Middle-Earth. He didn't so much write fantasy stories as he crafted his own personal universe and then dropped us smack dab in the middle of it, and his handprints can be felt all across the genre of modern fantasy and the popularization of intricate worldbuilding in fiction.

Now, I grew up seeing the Lord of the Ring film series first, and have tried on multiple occasions to get into the books themselves, but the writing style was just a bit too dry and tedious for me to enjoy, although that hasn't stopped me from attempting again and again. So it was to my pleasant surprise that the Hobbit was able to pull me in as well as it did. I polished it off in two days and tried LotR again, but it just didn't give me the same appeal. Hobbit was a bit more light fantasy than it's sequel series, and you didn't have to fully immerse yourself in the world to follow the story quite as much. While they start out deceptively similar in setup, as tales of simple men tricked into going on long quests, LotR expands into an epic tale concerning the politics and history of Middle Earth, crafted around a large cast with a great many things to keep track of, and The Hobbit stays a relatively simple journey with a few exciting roadbumps on the way. It's far lighter in tone and many of the book's memorable scenes are the kind you'd expect from a fairy tale, as opposed to LotR's high fantasy battles. Instead of the great war everyone expects, the climax features Bilbo actually serving as a negotiator (although another, unrelated war ends up breaking out with the first two sides teaming up to fight off the antagonists from earlier in the plot, but I digress).

In that sense, I much preferred The Hobbit, as I favor a crafty protagonist over one who simply handles a weapon and armies well.

But perhaps that's a simple bias, coming from a short, unimposing hobbit of a man as myself.

Takashi Miike's Audition

Audition is an interesting and unsettlingly realistic horror story based around deconstructing the Japanese concept of a Yamato Nadeshiko, a perfect wife as seen through traditional Japanese values. A widower named Shigeharu decides he's finally ready to date again, and decides to set up a fake film audition in order to find a woman he finds suitable. He narrows it down to an attractive young woman named Asami, and discovers that she is herself enamored with him. As he examines his relationship further, however, he begins to note a horrifying atmosphere surrounding Asami's past, and he realizes just how far she's willing to go to ensure that he remain hers, and hers alone.

The film takes some time to get the ball rolling, but the pace starts to accelerate around the time the audience begins to wonder about Asami's mental stability, as she sits in her completely unfurnished apartment seemingly alone, simply waiting for Shigeharu to call after her audition. Once Shigeharu starts suspecting things the movie quickly ramps up, jumping around the timeline a bit to establish the circumstances under which Asami's insecurities and violent clinginess developed. By the climax of the film, it starts unraveling, becoming unclear what is real and what is being imagined, including a horrifying trip to Asami's apartment and the fate of her ex-lover (featuring a stomach-churning vomit sequence involving few fewer “special effects” than one initially hopes) and a disturbingly well-done torture scene in Shigeharu's home after Asami discovers that he has a family and she's “not the only one he loves.” The story has very few morally sound characters and it's resolution is ambiguous, but it's plausibility as a worst case scenario in dating makes it one of the most unsettling films I've ever seen.

Let The Right One In

Let The Right One In is a unique take on the genre of Vampire films from an adolescent point-of-view that combines horror with a boy-meets-girl, coming of age tale. The main character is a bullied boy named Oskar who's fascinated with serial killers. He meets a girl named Eli who's just moved in with her father, Hakan. It's very quickly shown that these two are not who they appear to be when Eli appears to Oskar in the freezing snow in her casual wear, completely unfazed by the cold, and her “father” starts murdering people and draining their blood.

The film plays around with the cliches of modern vampire stories by featuring a vampire that was turned before their sexual maturity, eternally stuck as a child, as opposed to the young adult or full-grown vampires that are usually seen in fiction. The title refers to the superstition that vampires can only enter a dwelling when invited, and at one point, Eli demonstrates what happens when she isn't invited with very unpleasant results. She is also not capable of feeding by herself as her victims will fight back and she is very uncomfortable with personally killing people. Thus she requires assistance from a guardian. The movie implies that Eli was not actually a girl at the time of turning into a vampire, with an incredibly brief shot of a castration scar, and as such, her statement of “I'm not a girl,” takes on a double meaning, with both, “I'm not female” and “I'm not human.”

Oskar assures Eli that he doesn't care about her issues and that he loves her anyway, and she promises to watch over him with his bully problems. By the end of the film, Hakan has died after feeding Eli one last time, Eli horrifically murders Oskar's bullies and he runs off with her, promising to stay with her and keep her fed, possibly eventually falling into the same exact role that Hakan had.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Being familiar with the pop culture image of Frankenstein, the sort of, “mad scientist breaks laws of nature and unleashes a lumbering, curious brute of a monster upon the populace,” makes actually reading the original story a very bizarre experience. The legacy of the story is completely different from the novel that began it all. The first thing I noticed is the framing device, or rather, the series of framing devices that make up the entire book. Instead of the bulk of the story being presented to us straight on, we are told stories within stories, with the primary viewpoint being that of an explorer writing to his sister. The layers add on as Doctor Frankenstein dictates his story to the man, eventually going even deeper once the monster reveals its intelligence to Frankenstein and the audience, and describes its life experiences watching a downtrodden family from a distance. 

The characters of the novel are far more complex than the pop culture icons they would spawn. Victor Frankenstein is not simply a mad scientist pushing past nature’s limits, and accidentally killed by his own twisted creation, but a man with depth. He is a genius, although one prone to poor decisions, and his monster’s malice is primarily borne due to his inability to take responsibility for his actions. The Monster himself is a tortured soul, created with no outlet for his pain, and no reference for his morality. He is genuinely shown none of the sympathy or understanding he deserves, and his hatred for mankind is fully understandable for a creature of a blank slate whose viewpoint has being constructed entirely under prejudice and fear.  All the monster wants is companionship, and he attempts to force Frankenstein to provide him with such, rightfully pointing out that the entire situation was the doctor’s responsibility. Frankenstein becomes paranoid that the monsters will reproduce, and backs out of his promise to create a mate, despite knowing the Monster will lash out at his loved ones for breaking his word. This is another example of Frankenstein’s problems stemming from his poor judgment, as he could have simply rendered the female sterile.

Frankenstein’s words attempt to convey the lesson of seeking happiness instead of ambitiousness, but his actions speak more loudly in teaching us to carefully apply both knowledge and common sense.

Genre conventions of classic horror

-Dark lighting
-Always at night
-Overly dramatic music stings
-Dramatically spooked animals
-Man VS. the laws of nature
-lightning strikes, everywhere
-Unnecessarily large castle homes
-complicated secret passages
-Black and White film, even after color is possible
-Young, attractive female victim character, usually blonde
-rural, superstitious European villages
-Wolves howling at all times
-Bats hanging everywhere
-Crows out during night (despite not being nocturnal)
-Lightning is magic and can do anything.
-Hammy mad scientists
-Philosophical line from the hero after the defeat of the monster
-Long, dark tower stairway, lit by candles
-Dungeons, filled with torture devices, bonus points if skeletons of previous victims still inside