Best Albums of the Year (ish)

I have a bit of a weird relationship with music. I feel like it’s my mistress, rather than an equal partner in my life; instead of working diligently to find new things and communicate in new ways, I tend to discover a new artist or album, fall passionately and quickly in love, listen to that new thing almost exclusively for a few weeks and then either drop it (The Unicorns, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin) or integrate it into my normal rotation of music. I rarely listen to the radio (sorry, friends at The Zone, it’s not for lack of trying!) and my workplace only recently became iPod-compatible, so the odds of me finding something that happens to be relevant can be fairly rare. This year the lineup does consist of many recent releases, but since I don’t listen broadly enough to be able to judge my favourites against their unheard peers, and since self-indulgence is a treat we all love to snack on during the last weeks of a year, allow me to present the albums that have been my love affairs for the past 350-odd days.

1. Broken Bells, Broken Bells

Back in 2008 I thought I loved the Shins, but in reality I was overzealously throwing my support behind whatever Natalie Portman wanted, a widespread condition now known as “Garden State Syndrome” (or, “How A Television Actor Managed to Singlehandedly Ruin Indie Culture For The Rest of Us”). I own two of The Shins’ albums, but never listen to them anymore; there was always something about the overall feel of the band’s music that put me in a weird mood, which I could never quite pinpoint. Broken Bells, consisting of Shins frontman James Mercer and producer/singer/professional-Tin-Man Danger Mouse, fixes absolutely everything I didn’t like about The Shins while retaining all the stuff I did, like Mercer’s melancholy-puppy vocals, weirdly haunting lyrics, and their electro-indie experimentation aspect. While I felt like the latter never quite worked when The Shins tried it alone, the addition of Danger Mouse makes the music lusher and more interesting. A song like “Your Head is On Fire” would have been an okay Shins song, but as a Broken Bells song, with its accompanying string movements and multi-layered sound effects, I feel it works much, much better. I hope these guys collaborate again, because this first album is rad.
Best Songs: “The Ghost Inside”, “October”, “The High Road”

2. The New Pornographers, Together

I heard a review of this album somewhere that accused The New Pornographers of essentially doing the same thing for the past ten years, but doing it very nicely. Now here is where I reveal that I’m not actually a music snob, but frankly, well, I don’t mind. To my ears, The New Pornographers have indeed evolved over the course of their five albums, usually in the general direction of “larger production values and less Dan Bejar”, but I’ve enjoyed each of their works more than the last, and Together is no exception. It’s basically more of what they do, yes, but it’s done so well, with catchy and complex tunes that are put together in such an endearing way, that I just can’t help it. The big opening and closing numbers (“Moves” and “We End Up Together”, respectively) tie the entire album together brilliantly, and I like nearly every song in between, even Dan Bejar’s numbers, which I’ve needed a lot of time to understand in the past. I love The New Pornographers, and I love this album. That’s just how it is.
Best Songs: “Moves” “We End Up Together”, “Crash Years”

3. Stars, The Five Ghosts

For a long time I think I was worried that Stars had blown their wad early, so to speak, on 2004’s absolutely fucking beautiful Set Yourself on Fire, which is still required listening for anyone who’s ever had their heart broken by another person. Their next release was In Our Bedroom After the War, which I remember trying very hard to like, but the fact is, I listen to it so rarely that I basically forget it exists. This is not the case with The Five Ghosts, which was released over the summer and is infinitely more assured of itself than its predecessor. Whereas In Our Bedroom After the War struggled to find a theme and tried to say a lot of very general things in a very muffled way, The Five Ghosts is distinctive and fearless, a musical meditation on death and life and the travels in between. The songwriting is sharper, the melodies catchier, and the transitions between slow ethereal (the gorgeous opener “Dead Hearts”) and dance-ready synth-pop (“We Don’t Want Your Body”) flow smoother. I don’t think that the vocals, which have always been Stars’ ace in the hole, need mention, but I’ll mention them anyway: Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan continue to be one of the best vocal duos in indie music today. The biggest selling point for The Five Ghosts is that I keep finding new little things to like about it each time I listen, and that’s really some of the best praise you can give an album like this.

Best Songs: “Dead Hearts”, “We Don’t Want Your Body”, “How Much More”

4. The Zolas, Tic Toc Tic

Anyone who knows me will commence rolling their eyes here, but I can’t help it, I’ve been in love with The Zolas from the moment I saw them from the front row at Rifflandia, and like Jets Overhead’s No Nations, I keep expecting Tic Toc Tic to get old but it never ever does. There’s nothing that I don’t love about The Zolas: I love their bombastic orchestration, I love the segues into weird time signatures (see: the brilliant bridge of “Marlaina Kamikaze”), I love their prominent use of the piano; I love the fact that they wrote an apocalyptic love song (“The Great Collapse”), I love their playful and weird lyrics, and I love the fact that whoever wrote them is clearly a helpless nerd like me. Tic Toc Tic is playful and mournful and angry and filled to the brim with energy; it’s probably my pick for best album of the year, the very definition of an instant classic, and anyone who disagrees can duke it out with me behind the bleachers during recess. Bring it on.
Best Songs: basically all of them, but if I must choose, "The Great Collapse", "Pyramid Scheme", and "You're Too Cool."

5. Great Northern, Trading Twilight for Daylight (Bonus Track Version)

I know comparatively little about Great Northern, other than that they are a boy-girl duo (at least on the vocals) and they make that dreamy piano-driven electro-indie that basically everyone else does. I have a few tracks by a band named Winterpills that you’d swear is exactly the same band, just more acoustic. They are less rock than Metric, more straightforward than Stars. But over the summer they utterly captivated me, and I basically listened to nothing but Great Northern. I have a real love for that dreamy, low-key indie sound; it’s not mind-bendingly complex, it’s not intentionally alienating, it’s not autotuned and horrible. It’s just pretty to listen to, really damn pretty in fact, and that might mean that it is bereft of some kind of deep meaning, but I don’t care; Great Northern is just lovely.
Best Songs: “A Sun a Sound”, “This is a Problem” (Bonus Track), “Low is a Height”

Honorable Mentions:

Best Soundtrack of the Year: John Powell, How to Train Your Dragon

Best Classical Discovery: Harry Christophers and the Sixteen, Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli

Album I Need More Time With: Frightened Rabbit, The Winter of Mixed Drinks

The Album I Fell in Love With While Listening to it at 2am in the Emergency Room Because My Friend Gave Herself a Concussion: Death Cab for Cutie, Transatlanticism

How to Watch a Silent Movie

Last Friday was an AMAZING day to be alive (Olympics? What Olympics?); after two years of restoration, the most complete copy of Fritz Lang's 1927 science fiction masterpiece Metropolis had its premiere screening in Berlin. Metropolis is one of my favourite films of all time, but over a quarter of it was hacked off by editors and censors shortly after its premiere and lost, assumed gone forever, leaving the remaining film with a few nonsensical plot holes and untied threads. The best version assembled to date (which, yes, I own on DVD) inserted title cards explaining what was missing, but a complete copy was found in Buenos Aires in 2008; only one of the missing scenes was too damaged to be repaired, putting Metropolis back into as complete a form as humanly possible, and damn near close to the original.
Watching the people of Berlin watch this film over a live streaming feed, I was fully aware that I'm one of the only people I know who was super thrilled about this. Most of my friends put up with my devotion to the silent era of film history the same way people will put up with their dog excitedly slobbering all over their shoes when they come home; those who do love silent film are few and far between, I find, and many many more simply write them off as boring and unwatchable.

There's a reason I have the passion for silent films that I do. Movies have been around for only about 115 years or so, but they were the kick-start of the entire 20th century technology boom. Silent film was necessary due to the constraints of technology, but a movie--a visual story told on film--was a brand new medium and filmmakers embraced it by creating an entirely new storytelling language using a camera. The high days of the silent era--the 1920's, mostly--is where the best comedies of Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton were made, where the original monster movies were born, and where German Expressionism utterly trumped anything Hollywood could offer and provided a basis for everything from The Matrix to film noir. It's an essential part of our history and the films still stand up today as brilliant pieces of cinema.

The thing is, you don't need to be a high-falutin' film scholar in order to enjoy silent movies, and I completely understand why most people my age don't get them: we're used to the movies we know, which use a completely different visual language. It's not just the inclusion of sound; with sound came the need to redefine the language of filmmaking, the acting methods, and the way stories were told. I think people go into silent films with the wrong mindset and miss out on something truly fascinating as a result. And so, here are my tips for how to watch a silent movie, in hope that it might inspire some of you to give them a try:

Tips To Remember for the First-Time Silent Film Viewer

1. The Difference in Time Periods

Like I said, with the wrong (read: 21st-century, Michael-Bay-esque) mindset, silent film seems antiquated. Remember that films from this era were some of the earliest of their kind, and the special effects may seem primitive right now (though some still look spectacular today) but at the time they were revolutionary. You are watching the birth of some tropes that have become standard for us today. Respect it. This is especially true of the very early silent films of the 1900's and 1910's, which seem clunky and badly paced but were really experiments in the spectacle of seeing this stuff in a movie theatre.

2. No Dialogue = Expressive Acting

Every silent film parody I've ever seen has made use of this fact: the actors in silent movies seem to be exaggerated, over the top, and silly to our modern eyes. But this is an essential part of the filmmaking language of the silent era and is also reminiscent of theatre; with no dialogue, movements needed to be larger than life in order to come across onscreen. Smiles will be big, frowns will be big, changes in expression and emotion will be marked by a closeup of the actor as he or she contorts their face. But it's never as bad as the parodies would have it seem, and in most films the acting is very good; the large expressions fit well with the hyper-stylized sets and stories. Metropolis has some really hammy moments, but if you give yourself over to the moment and the situation, you'll lose yourself in the characters and feel what they feel. The best silent film actors were expressive, in one way or another, acting with their bodies and faces and often coming across as more imaginative and appealing than a lot of the going-through-the-motions bland stuff we see today. Jennifer Aniston, I'm looking at you.

3. Spectacle, Spectacle, Spectacle.

I touched on this briefly in point #1, but it merits more explanation. Silent films, being pretty new, were very tied in with the simple spectacle of what was on the screen. An excellent example comes from Metropolis, where the shift change in the workers' city is shown from several different angles, and the shots are repeated a few times--not exact, but similar. It seems overly obvious; a modern filmgoer will see the first few shots of hundreds of men walking in tandem and understand the concept immediately. But the mere ability to show these sorts of things on film was a large part of the language of silent movies, and thus many of them have visuals that seem to hang on a beat too long to our modern sensibilities. We've become accustomed to insanely fast editing in film and television, but it wasn't always that way; silent films linger on their visuals because it was rare and difficult to accomplish many of the more impressive shots, so the filmmakers got the most out of them that they could.

4. Yes, the Title Cards Are Silly

Oh, you betcha they're silly. But remember, silent films needed to convey that information quickly and easily, which often meant a distinct lack of subtlety in them; combine this with 1920's cultural norms and some of the title cards are downright hilarious in their silliness. If the cards are translations from another language, it's often even weirder, so bear with it. The cards convey the basic information you need to know that can't possibly be expressed visually--backstory, essential plot-related dialogue, etc--leaving the rest of the story to be told in a completely visual manner. The leanness of the title cards meant that the actors and filmmakers had to make sure the story came across clearly, and they accomplish it beautifully most of the time.

5. Racism.

Yup. Sucks to admit it, but the 1920's were a pretty racist time, especially in the United States, and seeing downright offensive stereotypes of money-grubbing Jews or "magical Negros" wasn't uncommon. One of the most influential films of all time, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, is also one of the most racist, fully supportive of the Ku Klux Klan's actions and portraying African-Americans (played by white actors in blackface) as the worst types of rapists and savages. It's not something you have to agree with in order to be amazed by the filmmaking prowess, and while it's uncomfortable, it's a simple fact of the era.

6. That Weird Pacing Thing

Silent film actors often look as if they're moving slightly faster than normal people, and it can make the entire film look downright weird. This is due to silent films being shot at a different frame-per-second rate than modern films; 24 frames per second is the standard now, but at the time the frame rate was pretty ambiguous, with films being shot anywhere from 16 to 23 FPS, and then hand-cranked when it came time to project them. Modern projectors will speed them up to 24 FPS, making the films look as if they're moving faster than they should. It takes some getting used to, but it's all part of the charm, and the frame rate of most of the really great silents isn't that distracting.

7. Darkness and/or Downright Degradation

I'm not referring here to the film's content, but rather the actual movie itself. Silent films were shot on nitrate film, which breaks down over time and is also extremely flammable. Most were made over 90 years ago at this point, and even the best DVD restorations cannot take out some of the darkness inherent in the degraded film reels. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a good example; at times you can just barely see the picture in the center of the screen, with the rest having gone dark around the edges. I think it's all part of the charm, but I'm an old-fashioned girl.

And above all, if nothing else, remember:

Silent Film is a Different Cinematic Language.

So yes! With these tips and tricks in your brain, go forth and find yourself a good old silent film to enjoy. And, if you find yourself converted, drop me a line and let me know.

Five Films That I Should Have Seen Years Ago

A few weekends ago I was rather ill, so while lying in bed I took the opportunity to watch some truly nasty little films about horrible things happening to people, including several that, as a film nerd, I should have seen years ago. I've been thinking about that special list of films, the "shame films", which cause my peers to recoil in horror at learning that I've never seen them; they're modern masterpieces, but I've never gotten around to them. My pride prevents me from listing examples that are still unseen, but the film that kick-started this train of thought was Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream.
Yes, I admit it, I'd never seen Requiem for a Dream before. And, frankly, I'm actually happy I waited this long, because now I have the right mental tools that enable me to appreciate it, despite the fact that it rattled me so greatly. So here's my list now, reflecting on all this. The films I watched over that weekend will be indicated with a *.

Five Films That I Should Have Seen Years Ago, but Am Grateful I Waited To See.

1. Requiem for a Dream* (2000), Darren Aronofsky

I remember seeing a trailer for this while watching television in my cousin's house in Montreal one summer, and even the trailer unsettled me in a very private way. I knew it was something I'd need to wait to see, because I knew it'd be disturbing, and my god, is it disturbing. Requiem is brilliant--though everyone probably knows that--featuring absolutely outstanding camera work, editing that will make you wonder if you're really as sober as you think you are, and a third act that never, ever lets up, carrying the characters to places that are too dark to stomach. It's a relentless, difficult film to watch, and if I'd seen it earlier, I'd never be able to step outside the horror I felt at the end and be grateful for Aronofsky's ability to provoke that kind of emotion. He has my respect, but it'll be a while before I see this one again. Like House of Leaves, Requiem for a Dream has a spot in my top films, but I need recovery time before a second viewing, if I'm ever that brave again.

2. American Psycho (2000), Mary Harron

This is probably one of Christian Bale's best performances, and I was a Newsies fangirl who wanted to see him as much as possible, but this one would have utterly horrified my more girlish sensibilities when I was younger. It's gory, it's got a lot of freaky sex stuff (especially for junior high, where I was when the film came out), and it's also relentless, in its own way. With both my psychological background and the habituation to film violence (something that only happened a few years ago) that I have now, I can appreciate the sick humor in the film as well as Bale's awesome descent into madness without thinking too much about that chainsaw thing.

3. Welcome to the Dollhouse * (1995), Todd Solondz
Also: Happiness* (1998)

Black comedies didn't truly become funny to me until I graduated high school and became the cynical bitch I am today. And Todd Solondz's idea of black comedy is probably some of the blackest ever conceived, utterly bleak and pessimistic and depraved, and sometimes not funny at all, but that nasty little part of you wants to laugh anyway. I'd heard about Welcome to the Dollhouse before, but not Happiness, Solondz' delightful 1998 romp about pedophilia and sexual depravity. Both have some pretty dark moments, though Dollhouse not so much, and I can appreciate them as strange, taboo-probing cinema, if not masterpieces. If I'm squicked by them now, several years ago I wouldn't have slept for days.

4. "Kids"* (1995), Larry Clark

My goodness, 1995 was a depraved year, wasn't it? Seems that way. Kids, often known as the debut of actresses Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, is a day in the life of a couple of teenagers in New York, particularly 17-year-old Telly, self-professed "virgin surgeon" (in the very first scene we see him coercing a 12-year-old girl) and, unknown to him, HIV positive. The film was no picnic when it first came out, shocking audience members across America, but was probably the least horrifying film of the weekend for me, partially because I was such a sheltered kid that the last thing on my mind at age 15 was sex. Not easy, not pleasant, not necessarily a great film, but interesting.

5. "Jurassic Park" (1993), Steven Speilberg

Yeah, this one's pretty shameful to admit, too, but I would have been four years old when Jurassic Park first hit theatres, and I was a bona fide scaredy cat for most of my life, terrified by such things as the martians from Mars Attacks (*shudder*) or certain parts of Fantasia. Dinosaurs were fascinating--from an early age I wanted to be a paleontologist--but they were terrifying, too, and seeing this film at 18 still scared the shit out of me, though it was in that fun, breathless sort of way. As it stands, Jurassic Park proudly sits as one of my favourite popcorn movies; had I seen it as a child, I would have hated it.

There are more, but that's a good number, at five (ish), and I don't update this blog nearly as much as I should, so voila. I'm working on a massive essay on the director Tarsem Singh, so look for that someday. Until later!

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5 Books I Can Never Put Down

First of all, I'm thrilled to say that my good friend Ze Doktar Von Hammerstein is helping me give my blog a bit of a shot of colour, so to speak, which I feel is needed, especially if I end up contributing to projects of his that are better left explained later. So look for pretty changes up soon!

That said, I'm currently reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", which I'm only really a quarter of the way into, but can barely put down; it's sad to say, but this is the first book in years that has sucked me in like this, and it's immensely enjoyable. I used to read a lot more, mostly before I discovered the internet, and I think it might be time to return to the habit of reading more and surfing less. My taste in books has always been a bit strange, and I am nothing if not prone to random lists, so here are the 5 Books I Can Never Put Down, in no particular order:

1. "The Silence of the Lambs", by Thomas Harris

Before Harris went certifiably nuts and destroyed the credibility of one of the greatest villainous characters ever committed to page (or screen) through two insipid, truly silly books, he committed one brilliant, beautiful novel to our bookshelves, and that is "The Silence of the Lambs". It's brilliantly written, utterly fascinating, and shockingly cold in tone--one of the many things that the film adaptation got right smack dab on the money was the tone of that world--and I've read it more times than I can count. Every time I pick it up I end up reading it all the way through, and each time there are new things I find to love about it. Hannibal Lecter is never as good anywhere else as he is right here, utterly hypnotic, and he'll worm his way into your inner monologue until you start to worry about nice Chiantis (well, Big Amarones, in the book) too.

2. "Fight Club", by Chuck Palahniuk

Oh, good old Chuck ruined a lot of regular, realistic fiction for me. Once you've read his immediate, almost-poetic prose for books on end, once you've witnessed soap made from mothers and the eating of live lobsters and all the other absolutely crazy shit he's written, it's nigh impossible to go back to any sort of "regular" novel, especially one in which people undergo subtle changes and make their lives better (like 90% of novels, it seems). The catalyst for ruining almost all other books for me forever was "Fight Club", not as great as the movie (for once!) but still pretty damn fucking fantastic. Say what you will about Chuck, he's certainly memorable, and he's never boring. Even when I'm not necessarily a fan of his choices (I found "Snuff" to be sadly rote and unoriginal), he's still good for a couple of moments of jaw-dropping WTF-ness, and while I love almost all his novels, "Fight Club" remains the best of his work, and my favourite.

3. "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski

This one's an interesting entry for this list because, unlike the rest of the books, I've only read it once, and, despite my love for it, may never be able to read it again. There's a long story with "House of Leaves"; I bought it when I was in the ninth grade on a dare from my good friend Leah, who is forever doing more new and interesting stuff than I am at any given moment. I tried to read it, but I was about 14, and I got about 10 pages in to the long footnote manifesto written by the second or third narrator at this point about the stripper he's obsessed with who has a very intimate tattoo of a beloved Disney character, and I put it down. For about four years.
Fast forward to me working at my old summer camp in a boring office job, and I'd brought "House of Leaves" with me, intending to finally read it. And once I got through the first several chapters, I found that I suddenly couldn't stop reading it. Never has a book been more well-suited to grab you up and get you lost in it than the immensely subtle horror story of a house that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, and, upon investigation, contains a labyrinth of possibly infinite size. But yet, it's about so much more than that, and so much less.
"House of Leaves" is by no means an easy read; there are about three (extremely unreliable) narrators, maybe more; there are pages upon pages of footnotes leading into footnotes, imitating the labyrinth itself; there are points when the text is backwards, upside-down, or blanked out completely; and there is the overarching story of the aforementioned stripper-obsessed Johnny, who is reading the same book you are and is starting to worry that the interior of his living room has a few more inches to it than it should. Reading this book was like being lost in a fog; I felt utterly wrung out by the time I reached the final pages, but I think all books should be that powerful, to dare to disturb and even repulse you. It's a rare thing for a book to gain a place in your favourites list but be too terrifying--in ways I can't really explain--to ever be read a second time, and I have immense respect for that.

4. "Perdido Street Station", by China Mieville

I rarely love science fiction and fantasy books, and find many of them overwritten, so this one has a permanent spot on my shelf precisely because it's so immediate in its weirdness that it sucks you right in out of sheer curiosity because you want to know what the fuck is up with the naked woman with a scarab for a head and that one guy who should have wings, but doesn't. And then you're a goner. The plot of "Perdido Street Station" is really almost impossible to describe, save that it contains mad scientists, steampunk flying machines, nightmare bats, the ethical dilemmas of interdimensional spiders, mutilated gangsters, a corrupt political system with an awesomely gruesome method for punishing lawbreakers, and a badger. All of it written by a guy who, to quote the literary source that alerted me to the book*, "uses the English language like Yo-Yo Ma uses the cello." High praise indeed, and deserving, too.

5. "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", by Betty Smith

Yeah, so this one's fairly normal, I guess. I read it in the fifth grade at first, and 11 years later I still have the same copy, worn away and falling apart, loved to tatters. It's a fabulous novel, though not as immediate as the other entries on this list. It's the story of a young girl growing up poor in Brooklyn at the turn of the century, and the lack of any real plot is handsomely compensated by the excellent writing and clear detail at the little things that make Francie's life so real. It's a lot to get through, but once you do you'll have a friend for life, and can go back to all the countless little moments that are so easily imagined and so fully realized.


So there's my list. For added geeky pleasure, each of the covers for the books is the actual version that I own, because I'm just like that.

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*that would be Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe. Damn right I get my trivia from those things.

Classic Horror: CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

All right, so I started out with the best of intentions, to watch these horror films in chronological order and review them, to reflect on how trends weave and change over time and how things vary over a span of a few decades of cinema. But my friend Dave came over and we ended up watching three entirely random films in the set, and knowing my tendency to procrastinate, I figured that I might as well get something out on the first film we watched, Herk Harvey's 1962 film Carnival of Souls. With school starting and my ability to do massive projects limited, I think reviewing these films in the order I see them will have to do until I get a little more used to blogging regularly--and this project is nothing if not a challenge to see if I can blog regularly. This may seem a little fragmented, but the goal here is to write something coherent and put it up. If I try to cover everything I will lose myself in the bowels of infinite draft hell.

So, Carnival of Souls. I knew the ending of this film before I even started it, due to a heavy amount of reading and a truly bizarre capacity to recall random trivia, but it's an interesting little film nonetheless. Filmed on a budget of less than $35,000 and released as a B-movie, Carnival of Souls has a plot that was fairly well-known, even for the time: a drag race ends tragically when one of the cars plunges off a bridge; the only survivor is Mary (Candace Hilligoss), a church organist who immediately moves to a new town to try to forge a new life. However, strange things begin to happen around Mary; there are times when nobody seems to be able to see or hear her, she has increasing difficulty relating to the people in her life, and she is haunted by a ghoulish man who seems somehow connected to the old abandoned pavilion just outside of town.

If you can't guess how the film ends, I won't spoil it for you; but while Carnival of Souls' plot has since become urban legend fodder, its execution contains some genuinely creepy moments and some really interesting subtext. The influence of one Alfred Hitchcock is immediately obvious; Hilligoss is a very Hitchcockian protagonist, a young woman with layers of sadness and secrets immersed in a world that has rejected her in such a fundamental manner as to actually turn against her. This is a film that came out a comfortable amount of years after both Vertigo and Psycho, both of which deal with women who do not quite fit into the world properly.
Mary would not be out of place seducing Jimmy Stewart, no, but her characterization is a great deal more pessimistic than Hitchcock might have made her. She is an embodiment of clinical depression in many ways: she has no libido, she goes through stages of being unable to communicate with anyone or anything, and she has no ability to enjoy that which she once (apparently) loved--this is a point of possible contention, for we are only ever told that Mary is a church organist after her accident, and thus it could be as unreal as the ghosts following her. The complete uncertainty of anything, even the things you thought you knew, is a frighteningly accurate portrayal of clinical depression, speaking as someone who has struggled down that road.

For a film shot in three weeks on a pretty small budget, the ghouls are pretty effective; the Man that haunts Mary (played by the director himself) has some pretty excellent jump-scare moments, even for jaded 21st-century viewers. Furthermore, the ghosts represent a discretely sexual, hedonistic presence. There is one scene where Mary, practicing the organ, begins to play a tune that is decidedly un-churchly in intent, making her very distinctly--if unwillingly--a seductress. As horrific ghouls and ghosts rise up from water to dance to her music, Mary's tune reaches a very distinct climax--a seduction by the things she is frightened of, but, in the end, cannot resist. It's a well-created scene, and the sexual component is not surprising in the least, for cinematic horror has almost always had a sexual component. Seduction is seduction, even if the seducers are horrific monstrosities; we are fascinated by what we cannot fathom or possess, and our emotions are so strongly connected to both sexuality and death that it is all too easy to mesh the two. Mary's story--from virginal church organist to semi-willing participant in her own destruction--is a morality tale about the dangers of straying from the beaten path as much as it is a meditation on depression, alienation, post-traumatic psychosis, and Death itself. There is something to be said for the ability to take a well-told tale and tell it in a memorable way, and Carnival of Souls fits that niche very comfortably.

The midnight hour is close at hand.

First of all, my apologies for being a most irregular blogger. I have about 10 half-written blog posts in the drafts section, but I have several horrible habits that cause me to leave them that way, and some may never see the light of day. Oh well.

That said, Boxing Day shopping caused a great blogging opportunity to fall into my lap: while perusing HMV for films I happened to come upon a DVD box set of 50 classic horror movies for the astoundingly too-good-to-be-true price of 25 dollars. This set had many films I'd never heard of, but it also had some that I've always needed to see, such as the original Phantom Of the Opera (1925), the original Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Nosferatu (1922), and at least 5 other classic horror movies that I'd normally pay about $30 or more per DVD for, damned rare things that they are. The only two films in the set that I'd previously seen were Nosferatu and, confusingly, Fritz Lang's masterpiece Metropolis--I really have no idea why it's there--which I'd (ironically) just ordered from Kino's website for approximately the same price as the entire set, minus shipping and tax.*

Now, for 50 cents apiece, I knew the transfers would likely be awful; a quick perusing of Metropolis confirmed this suspicion, because I've seen VHS copies of that esteemed film which look better than this one. But beggars rarely find themselves in the position to be choosy, and I am nothing if not a hungry film nerd. With a rarely-updated blog and my outlet-starved ability to conjure spontaneous film essays, with this post I am officially kicking off my Classic Horror project, in which I will watch each and every film in the set and publish my thoughts, with as much research as possible. The full list is linked here; I'm not sure how I want to go about it yet--it'd be really neat to do it chronologically, but much easier to just watch wildly--but expect the first review to go up in the next week or so, either way.

See you on the other side.

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* This also means I will own Metropolis at least three times over the course of my life, because once they're done restoring the complete copy they found in Argentina, I will be all over that like a fat kid on a Smartie.

The Aftershock

Taking deep breaths never works.
The oxygen doesn't care, and your blood can't be bothered to carry any more baggage.

Look in the mirror:
Are you the same person you were five minutes ago? Somehow it seems
Like you've left the building,
and Elvises everywhere instantly understand.

You could coat yourself in Kevlar and still be shaken,
cracked at the foundations,
and in the aftermath you can't be sure
if the ground is still firm enough to stand on.