jürgen fauth’s muckworld

I shelve my Alan Moore books next to Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, and I am sure all three postmodern masters would get a healthy kick out of this wildly imaginative third book to Moore’s Gentlemen series, which draws on a vast storehouse of influences and blends them into an ecstatic new whole. The last time around, I wrote “Just when you thought you understood the parameters of where the story can go, Moore pulls another fast one” — and that was when we were still with the original Victorian group of heroes (Allan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, and Mr. Hyde) and happily confined to Kevin O’Neill’s clear, appealing artwork.

Black Dossier explodes all that. Framed by a storyline set in an alternate version of the 1950s, the book concerns the theft of a book that, in the comic, looks like the one you’re holding in your hands. Along with the comic book adventure, the Dossier also contains a facsimile of a lost Shakespeare play (Fairie’s Fortunes Founded), fascist propaganda booklets warning of sexcrimes, the life of Viginia Woolf’s Orlando in nine illustrated chapters, a sequel to the erotic classic Fanny Hill, a few pages from a Beat novel featuring our heroes, reprinted postcards from Shangri-La, cutaways of the Nautilus, and section in 3-D (goggles are provided.) While the first two books concerned a Victorian team of heroes, Moore uses Black Dossier to sketch, through the various fragments, the history of several British incarnations as well as French and German teams that included the likes of Fantomas and Rotwang.

The ease with which Moore accesses high and low culture is truly mind-boggling: Ian Fleming, Herman Hesse, Charles Chaplin, H.P. Lovecraft, and George Orwell are added to the already impressive list of influences (and I’m pretty sure I missed a good third of them.) Any imaginary creation is fair play for Moore’s ambitious tale, and the density of ideas is absurdly high, as if Moore was cramming an entire series’ worth of characters and storylines into a single book.

A word about Moore and the movies: he’s famously taken his name off all adaptations, and rightfully so — most of them have been dreadful (worst of all, incidentally, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Moore’s best effects are always inextricably bound up with the medium of comics, and this holds especially true for Black Dossier, which is essentially unfilmable (and wouldn’t work as a novel, either.) I positively dread Zach Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen.

Like The Tempest, Black Dossier ends with a monologue by Prospero (himself an Extraordinary Gentleman), who celebrates one of Moore’s grand themes: the power and paradoxical reality of imaginary characters. “If we mere insubstantial fancies be, how more so thee, who from us substance stole? On Dream’s foundation matter’s mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou’ve fashioned fashion thee. Intangible, we are life’s secret soul.”

The League of Extraodrinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, 2007. *****

• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
• The 2003 Movie Adaptation
• Wikipedia: LGX
• Discussion on Barbelith
• Salon review by Douglas Wolk
• PopMatters

Bill Campbell as all-American hero rocking an art-deco jet-pack, Jennifer Connelly in 30s evening gowns, Timothy Dalton as scenery-chewing Errol-Flynn stand-in onboard burning Nazi zeppelins — The Rocketeer is good old-fashioned serial-style action-adventure full of pulpy twists tempered by a wholesome gee-whiz attitude. Based on the comic book by Dave Stevens, the character also inspired a Cinemaware video game I used to play on my Amiga (screenshots). Not to be confused with Raketenmensch Tyrone Slothrop.

The Rocketeer. Joe Johnston, 1991. ***

Here’s a climactic scene at the Griffith Observatory:

A booby-trapped tale of wartime love and guilt, adapted from the great Ian McEwan, who has been mining the darker recesses of desire since First Love, Last Rites (1975). Joe Wright directs an excellent cast — Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, and newcomer Saoirse Ronan — in what begins like a standard period piece but ends up transcending the format with a sharp-eyed inquiry into the power of fiction to destroy and redeem; I haven’t been able to get this movie out of my head. Atonement opens on December 7; if you haven’t read the novel, I highly recommend staying spoiler-free.

Atonement. Joe Wright, 2007. ****

Instead of the spoilerish trailer for Atonement, here’s a clip from Andrew Birkin’s 1993 movie based on McEwan’s The Cement Garden, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg:

Robert Zemeckis’ high-tech “performance capture” adaptation of the Old English poem turns actors–Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn, John Malkovich, Angelina Jolie–into rubbery action figures. Only Crispin Glover, covered in a disgusting, festering texture, manages to infuse some sort of twisted soul into his Grendel. I saw this in 3-D, which is sorta groovy if you’ve taken some preventive aspirin, but it also further increases the sense of artificiality. The action sequences have all the excitement of a video game cut scene.

Beowulf is only one of a slew of recent movies that wouldn’t have been possible without The Lord of the Rings, and Zemeckis lifts dozens of shots directly from Peter Jackson. Of course, Tolkien in turn would be unthinkable without the Anglo-Saxon poem — and so we come full circle.

Long ago, in the Age of Heroes, I wrote an essay about “hyperfiction” that used the cheap carnival effects of early 3-D movies as metaphor for the teething troubles of a new form. I was tickled to see that even at this late stage, 3-D still means “Poles in Your Face,” along with all manners of swords, naked torsos, dripping saliva, and flaming arrows. It’s true that Neil Gaiman’s script manages to put a somewhat interesting spin on the original epic, but first and foremost, Beowulf is self-satisfied spectacle. I’d rather play God of War. Opens Friday.

Beowulf. Robert Zemeckis, 2007. **

• 300
• Beowulf and Grendel
• Beowulf at Rotten Tomatoes
• Wikipedia
• The trailer:

At a screening for Sunshine last month, Danny Boyle confessed that he felt directing romance was not his strength. After seeing his late-nineties bestseller adaptation The Beach, it’s easy to conclude that he’s on to something with that self-assessment. How else do you explain that when Leonardo DiCaprio and Virginie Ledoyen are having edenic sex on a remote Thai island, the most memorable thing about it is the Moby soundtrack?

In all fairness, Alex Garland’s tale of a utopian beach community run by an overprotective Tilda Swinton was hokum to begin with. At the time The Beach came out, I was living in my own tropical paradise of sorts, and like most things, it’s neither that good nor that bad. The Beach oversells its utopia at first, just to turn around and sell it out for the thriller finish, when sharks and evil pot farmers create trouble in paradise. But what kind of utopia doesn’t have a library or a movie theater, anyway?

The Beach. Danny Boyle, 2000. **

Speaking of true friends and good writers: this week marks the release of Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen, an anthology of cinematic shorts that features a story by my friend and fellow Center for Writers graduate John Minichillo. John’s story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” is called “Blind Man in the Halls of Justice.” Editor Steve Cohen pitches it as A Civil Action meets Scent of a Woman, but I see it as 12 Angry Men crossed with Half-Baked. Alexander Payne could do a fine job directing it.

The official site for Next Stop Hollywood hosts excerpts, information for writers who want to be in the next edition, and a list of great movies based on short stories, including Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Killers, Freaks, and Animal House. (They should add Away from Her ASAP.) My copy’s on its way.

This skilled BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel is a lesson in structure: the intricate plotting of the Victorian crime story has been simplified by screenwriter Peter Ransley, but the carefully layered revelations still affect and surprise. Casting is excellent, with Elaine Cassidy and Sally Hawkins as the tender lovers embroiled in Dickensian intrigue and Imelda Staunton as baby-trading Mrs. Sucksby. The academic in me is itching to write a treatise called “‘You Pearl:’ Voice, Identity, and Female Desire in Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith and Marcy Dermansky’s Twins.”

Fingersmith. Aisling Walsh, 2005. ****

• YouTube is full of fan-made Fingersmith music videos, but they’re bound to spoil it.

Dulce et decorum est, the movie. A bunch of Spartans swear they’d rather die than surrender or retreat, and then they do just that. Like Sin City, the images of 300 have been heavily post-processed to closer resemble Frank Miller’s comic book, and when there isn’t a slow-motion battle going on, the camera lingers over tableaux of warriors on a mountainside, trees hung with corpses, a fleet tossed about in inclement weather, and sweaty nymphs doing double-duty as corrupt oracles.

It’s all about as exciting as a half hour of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, without the rest of The Lord of the Rings to support, y’know, the characters. Instead, there are lots of speeches, about how freedom isn’t free, about how the only glorious death for a soldier is on the battlefield, and about how, yes, Spartans never surrender. Which is too bad, because Sparta is under attack by the Persians, led by debauched and sexually ambiguous Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro.) In waves resembling nothing so much as the levels of a video game, the good Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) has to fight the turban-wearing villains while he is being stabbed in the back by treacherous politicians who refuse to support the troops and send reinforcements.

I saw 300 on an IMAX screen, and I’m still wobbly from the intense overdose of machismo and stupidity. The best thing I can say for the movie is that it steals liberally from John Boorman’s Excalibur. It looks interesting enough, but so does Triumph of the Will. In the world of 300, there is no room for art, negotiation, or weakness; there is only room for the strong. At the screening, outright murder brought great applause, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find an Army recruiting station outside the theater. Huah!

300. Zack Snyder, 2006. *

• Here’s a battle scene [via]
• And here’s the trailer
• 300 on RottenTomatoes
• The Battle of Thermopylae on Wikipedia
• 300 at GreenCine Daily
• THIS… IS… METAAAAFILTAAAAA
• Fuck you and die, 300 - ReverseShot
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