Fracture Lines

The Boy and I went to see Oz, the Great and Powerful the other night. And this should warn you; if you haven't seen it yet and want to - there be Spoilers About Oz Ahead.



Anyway, the original plan was to go see the film playing down at our local St. John's theater as Family Movie Night. But the Girl felt poorly (she had been fighting a stubborn cold for the past day) and she begged off, asking her mother to stay home with her.



Had it been her brother I would have suspected that he was sandbagging, using the cold as a face-saving way to avoid seeing a film that (from the trailers we'd seen on television) had some fairly frightening moments.



But Missy is a fearless little soul and she seems to have a much firmer grasp of what is fiction and what is fact; she can view films and stories and television that scare her older brother witless without so much as a shiver. "That's not scary." she will announce in that flat tone that little girls who are dead solid certain of themselves can employ.

So, instead, the Boy and I drove to "downtown" St. Johns in the spitty rain and ran inside the arcade that shelters the doors to the old building.

The moviehouse is a great old place; it has been showing flicks since it was built in 1925 (as "McCreadie's Venetian" - see the picture below) and as we waited in line at the small ticket window I couldn't help imagining that some earlier St. Johns father and son - perhaps even the father and son that had moved into our little house when it built just three years earlier - had waited in line for the original Wizard of Oz back in '39.

I got myself a beer (a nice dry-hopped IPA, too, to celebrate the repeal of the Prohibition of McCredie's day) and a slice of pizza to go with the Boy's popcorn and soda; the joint is now a theater-pub sort of place, very popular here in Portland since the advent of the McMenamin's chain. We settled in with our snacks through the endless previews (although the Boy did like the looks of the upcoming entry in the G.I. Joe franchise so I may be in for another movie night soon, just me and him...)

And then the film began.

Let me say upfront; it's not a "great movie". Frankly, I loves me some Sam Raimi and expected better of him. It's overlong. It drags in stretches, and the opening Kansas sequence is kind of a bust. And I wasn't able to pin down what the hell Michelle Williams was trying to do as Annie/Glinda. Was she trying to seem flirtatious? Mysterious? I have no idea. She's very good at cute and spunky, though, and that went a long way towards making her Glinda likeable.



But that really didn't make a difference. A Wizard of Oz movie isn't about "good" or "bad"; it's about magic.

And flying monkeys. And even MORE bizarre creatures. And little girls made of porcelain. And wizards, munckhins, and spectacle.

And Oz has all that in job lots.

The Boy liked the heck out of it. He was frightened by a couple of the scarier moments - he really is a very gentle little guy for all that he pretends to be rough and tough. He loved that the Head Witch (Evanora, the future-wicked-witch-of-the-East) could throw lightning like Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars,



and (true movie geek - or at least Star Wars geek - that he is) noted that Evanora/Palps both turns her sister into Darth Vader...



...AND has a final throwdown with Glinda/Yoda in the throne room/Senate Chamber complete with lightning sumo.



I enjoyed it, too, for what it was; a sort of simultaneous riff on and tribute to the original. It hit all the canonical nodes (flying monkeys, green witches, munchkins, Winkies marching around chanting "Ore-e-o") while being very much different in spirit. The 1939 Wizard was all about home, and finding your place, and reaffirming the beliefs and loves you'd always had and never appreciated.

The 2013 Oz is about the journey, and exploring new worlds, and finding in them and within yourself new beliefs and loves you hadn't thought you had or ever could have.

But, oddly, the one thing that I really, truly, genuinely loved about the film was China Girl.

I have to stop here and admit something; there's a point in the film where the Wizard and his faithful companion Finley are heading out to the Dark Forest to find and destroy the person that they've been told is the Evil Witch (she isn't, but that's another story). They get to a crossroads, and there's a signpost; one arrow reads "Dark Forest". The other reads "China Town".

And I hate to admit this, but for a moment my mind stopped dead, gibbering.

China Town? In Oz? China Town?

I had a sudden mental image of a pigtailed, squidgy-eyed, bucktoothed cartoon Chinaman - Chink-ee from Gene Yang's American Born Chinese - bowing and chanting "Me doo-ee washee? Velly good washee! Ah-so, Chinkee Chinaman velly good washee-washee!"

I hate it when I do that.

Remember that I was a kid in the Sixties. The popular memory of that time was the Summer of Love and hippies in sandals and VW Bugs. The reality was very different, and included a lot of vicious, open racism. It wasn't just about whites and blacks. I vividly remember hearing a Chinese friend of mine, a slim quiet girl named Anne Kwong, called a "slope" by one of the drumline thugs my freshman year in high school; to my shame I did or said nothing.

But the worst part of that sort of thing is how insidious it is. A lot of that time, and a lot of those thoughts, and words, and images, still live inside my head and struggle to escape, usually at the very worst moment.

But of course, the "China Town" of Oz isn't "Chinatown". It's just what the words say it is; a China Town.

A town made of china.



The China Town sequence was Raimi at the top of his game, and the main character you meet there - the China Girl - was a creation of absolute magic. While I'm an animation fan and a CGI enthusiast in general I'll be the first to admit its limitations. It is very difficult to get a genuine "performance" out of a CGI character; the essential inhumanity of the pixels always seems to force its way through onto the screen.

But when you meet China Girl there is none of that.



I'm not sure why. Some combination of the character design itself, the voice acting of Joey King as well as the way the other actors play off her, and Raimi's direction. But the overall effect is winning, and winsome, and very poignant. I defy you not to love the little character. She's terrific.

And this is where I link to my friend Maia's blog. Because her little girl QQ was another person who fell in love with China Girl.



QQ is a lucky girl; her mom and China Girl got together to make some real magic happen. Go ahead and read her blog post; it is achingly sweet.

But the thing that makes it as touching as the character herself is the teardrop at the heart of the story of the little girl in Denver who is going to sleep tonight with her new friend. As Maia says;

"I'm sure that it did not escape her that this character is an orphan, left without a family or a country, and that she is desperate for a family. Also that she is fragile and injured, but also stubborn, tough and brave."

And - in very different but very similar ways - both are China Girls, who have to find a way to find a new belief, and a new love, with a new family they never expected or hoped to find.

I won't pretend I didn't tear up reading about little QQ's quest for, and meeting with, her little china doll friend.

The other night, though, there was none of that sweet sentiment.

The Boy and I rode home having a discussion of near-critical geeky mass about the parallels between Star Wars and Oz (we agreed on Palps-Evanora-Yoda-Glinda-Vader-Theodora but never could decide who was the Luke Skywalker character; Boy held out for the Wizard, while I insisted that there was no direct match).

The house was dark and silent; we brushed our teeth together barging against each other quietly. He washed his face and gave me a hug and I breathed in the boy-and-popcorn scent of his hair against my cheek. And he went into his bed to burrow into the immense pile of stuffed friends inside, and I went to the computer to blog-read and wait.

And, surely enough, about an hour later I heard the sound of crying.

At first I wasn't sure whether he was awake or not. He's had "night terrors" before; horrific things that simulate nightmares but are far, far below the dream-layer. This wasn't one of those. Boy was barely asleep, frightened by the afterimage of some frightful moment in the film. He was shaking, and crying, and (unlike the night terror state) scooted quickly over into my arms.

I kissed his forehead, still slightly damp with fear, and told him that I had stayed up to watch over him. I asked him if he was frightened by the scary parts of the movie and he nodded, shrinking deeper into my arms. I suggested that, instead, he might dream about how he could make a place for a puppy we might foster over the summer; how he could build a house for the puppy, and make a place for it to play, and all the ways that he could show the puppy that it was safe and loved and welcomed.

And, whether it was the pleasant thoughts of pets, or the sound of my droning on, or the steadiness of my arms around him, the Boy's eyes started to droop. He roused himself to give me a final hug, and tunneled back below the top layer of stuffed critters.

The bare leg that remained exposed looked very fragile and unprotected, like China Girl's as she lays shattered amid the ruins of her family. For we all have our fractures, don't we? Our planes of weakness, the mend-lines of our old breaks like the patterns of ancient porcelain that run across our limbs, like China Girl's.

Or sometimes across our minds, or our hearts.

I stood in the twilit doorway listening the the sound of the Boy's breathing, peaceful again, gently closed his door until just the faintest pillar of light remained streaming out of the room and turned back into the darkened hallway.

狼獾皮!

(N.B. - I apologize in advance for my bad Mandarin, but I had to guess at the Chinese word for "wolverine"...)

When I read that the MGM producers of the new Red Dawn remake had decided to bail on China as the replacement for the original concept of Soviet, Cuban, and (don't giggle, now...) Nicaraguan invaders in the wilds of West Buttfuck, Idaho I didn't so much as blink.

You can see why; the old Commies just ain't what they were, sure, and China...well, China is the Holy Grail of marketing. You can't make bank on selling Western movies to Chinese audiences when they are the baddies.

I tried to see them using some sort of Arab terrists but couldn't get past the whole "Successfully crossing an entire ocean full of U.S. carrier battle groups with civilian freighters loaded with a gajillion Al Qaeda tanks n' shit" concept.

I gotta admit, though; NORKs?

I didn't see that one coming.

But what I could, and did, see coming was this shit:

What makes this even more ridiculous is that in 1984 there really was a big, scary enemy out there that might have done a "red dawn" (OK, without the Nicaraguans, who would have maxed out the Texaco card halfway through Sinaloa). There really was a possibility that U.S. civilians might have had to choose between red and dead.

But...North Korea?

It's enough to make a fucking cat laugh.

Add to that the bone-stupid racism of the 2012 version AND a critical mass of the dummies who want to see it?

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

We don't have enough race problems with the mouth-breathing goobers and Republicans (but I repeat myself...) in the U.S. we need this?

All this and a remake of Sabrina, too?

Maybe the Bible-beaters are right; maybe we are living in the End of Times.

Sheesh.

Chestnuts Roasting I: Miracle on 34th Street

As John Lennon used to say: "So this is Christmas..." Eric Idle...ummm, didn't say it quite that way.

You know how I feel about this whole business. I'm more with Idle than with Lennon.

Mind you, my likes and dislikes don't really matter. We've had Christmas this and Christmas that and Christmas the other damn thing since practically Halloween. But now that we're on the dark side of Thanksgiving, well...

This year is turning out to be interesting, however. The kiddos are caught up in the usual Christmas greed, obediently parroting the gimme paternoster at every huckster on the television. Missy, especially, is turning out to be a sucker for cheap, shiny plastic crap. A commercial for anything aimed at kids, from Benadroos to Bandryl will produce her immediate Pavlovian"IwantthatcanIhavethatwillyougetmethat?" She's not completely unreasonable - there are no tantrums or tears if she hears "no", but through repetition this does not become endearing.

The Peep, who at seven-and-a-half is a more experienced consumer, has opted for quality over quantity and wants only the largest and most costly Lego toys. These, by the way, I am now utterly unwilling to provide to him based on bitter experience. As objects the damn things are fiendishly expensive; as toys, completely worthless, being both heavy and fragile. The disassociated pieces of but the "Republic Attack Shuttle" and the "AT-TE" walker ,now intermingled with a dozen other smaller Lego objects, stand mute witness to this.His grandparents can bankroll his Lego addiction, if they want. I'm getting him a bicycle.

Oh, and he has decided he doesn't want to kill a tree for Santa. He wants to get a fake tree. No pink ones, mind, and it can't be plaid or otherwise obviously "fake-y". But he wants to get a plain green fake tree. And it can't be before...

Christmas Eve.

I'm tempted to go with it just to see what happens. And then dance an antic hay on the ruins. It'd be the Perfectly Awful Christmas.

But then there's being the grown-up thing. Sigh.


Of course, the other inescapable element of Wenceslausery is the sudden metastasizing Christmas specials and Christmas movies and Christmas television episodes.

Don't mistake me; like any kid of the Video Era I grew up with the idea that television, not the angel of Bethlehem, announced the Savior's Birth. I was raised on Christmas commercials, Rudolph, Charlie Brown, and the Grinch (although I am glad that I am too old to have my eyes seared with the awful Ron Howard/Jim Carrey live-action version; talk about a childhood trauma...) as more important to the Greatest Story ever told as the Big Guy from little Galilee. In fact, I would say that my "Christmas" - the ideas and images that made the holiday a reality for me - came from the cathode ray tube rather than the Bible, the church, or the stories.

Perhaps one of my favorite celluloid Christmases is the one in the George Seaton "Miracle on 34th Street".

C'mon, I know you've seen this thing. It may be the biggest Christmas chestnut after "It's a Wonderful Life", and it's certainly less glurgeworthy. It's a breezy confection of a yarn, with Ed Gwenn as the whiskered gentleman that everyone doesn't quite want to believe is really Santa Claus. John Payne makes a sensible good fellow of a hero as Fred the attorney who defends "Kris Kringle", Maureen O'Hara a gloriously mature and completely desirable Doris, the Macy's executive whose little girl Susan is the pivot on whom the movie turns. Susan, played by a dark and brilliant young Natalie Wood, is the perfect center; wise and foolish, cautious and loving, skeptical and credulous. As a kid she's the cool big sister you wish you had, as an adult, the bright, loving little daughter.And, of course, the movie is full of great little bits of work. Gwenn discovering what people with beards shouldn't blow bubble gum. "Susan" is full of inside knowledge on the Macy's Thanksgiving parade she's picked up from her mother, who has organized it for all her young life. The brilliant gimmick that lets Fred "prove" Kris is THE Santa Claus through the inspiration of the overworked mail sorter who convinces his foreman to send "all them Santy Claus letters" to the courthouse.It's practically perfect; gently sentimental without treacle, loving and respecting its holiday without glurge. It's one of the few Christmas pictures I can sit through without wincing.

Oh, and did you know that 20th Century released it in May? Seriously. Weird, yes, but there it is: May 2, 1947. You can look it up.Now this is America. And as you know, here if something works once, that means it needs to be done over. And bigger. With more stuff. And preferably in color.

And that's what happened to "Miracle". Actually, it happened FIVE times; two one-hour television versions in the Fifties, a musical in the Sixties (but all sorts of awful musicals happened in the Sixties, so it wasn't exactly the worst of its type...), a TV movie in the Seventies, and, finally, a theatrical movie in the Nineties.

The 1994 movie version, for some reason, has been in heavy rotation on the usual calbe channel suspects lately; Lifetime, "Family", Hallmark. Its really kind of intriguing, in a sort of true-crime-story way, to see the difference between the America that had just emerged from the abyss of World War 2 and the one that was the Sole Superpower, the Indispensable Nation, the gigantic economic and political colossus then at the height of its power and wealth.The players are all there; Richard Attenborough as Kris, trying to look Gwennishly charming and succeeding in looking merely dyspeptic. Dylan McDermot replaces Payne, looking more intent but less decent. Elizabeth Perkins, whose ability to play vulnerably intelligent women I truly enjoy, does so here and deftly as always. Mara Wilson does a decent job as Susan, although she never manages Wood's luminosity or her skeptical intelligence (which is a problem, because the story calls for convincing the prenaturally adult Wood to feel and love childishly to be a Santaesque labor, whereas Wilson comes off as just a nice kiddo).

John Hughes directs.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that the story was perfectly suited for the sunny, lighthearted good sense of the Forties. The original never felt strained, never lectured, never brooded or pouted. It was a straightforward tale of whimsy, well-told, but with a good-humored wink towards the audience.

The Nineties version has none of this. It is uneven in tone, sometimes childishly callow, sometimes cynical, and adds a disturbingly strong, wildly out-of-place thread of religious piety to the plot, disturbing since the entire story is based on the central reality of that very Anti-Christ of American commercial Christmas, Santa Claus.

I should add that the religiousness comes across to me as rather mean-spirited, not presented as a sort of warm God-fuzzy but rather as a failure on the part of the irreligious. You first encounter it when Fred comes over to have Thanksgiving dinner with Susie and her mom. They don't say grace, you see, and Doris (inexplicably renamed "Dorie" in this one) is made to act embarassed and contrite about it. Because people who don't have God or religion can't really be good people, right?

The tone is very reminiscent of the sort of "Christmas Wars" then being fought at the time the remake was made, and the film shares something of the sour and accusatory tone of the time. Very unpleasant.

The injection of God and worship into the original cheerfully irreligious story is jarring in more ways than just the way it places God and Santa uneasily alongside each other. It rips the wonderful setpiece out of the climax of the story.

Instead of the endless chain of letter-carriers tromping into the courtroom with their bags and bags of Santa letters - proving that the U.S. Post Office believes Kris to be the "one and only" Santa - we have a very strained and badly skewed moment involving the little girl, a Christmas card with a dollar in it (WTF?) and the motto "In God We Trust" circled with hi-lighter.(Don't get it? Me, neither. The film has the trial judge go into some long-winded explanation about how the U.S. Department of Treasury can believe in God with no hard evidence so the people of New York can believe in Santa Claus in the same way (conveniently ignoring such precedent as Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984) in which the Supreme Court held that the motto has "lost through rote repetition any significant religious content" and called it mere "ceremonial deism"). Yeah, yeah, I don't buy it, either. It's crap, and badly written crap, at that).Not content with replacing the best scene in the flick with a pottage of claptrap, Hughes then proceeds to add one last bit of bizarre business. His Dorie and Fred get married (at Midnight Mass, no less, slamming your head against the Jesus is The Reason For The Season wall again in case you forgot the whole "In God We Trust" thing) and then go house-hunting.The house thing is right out of the 1947 original, where city-bound little Susan wanted the Forties American Dream House in the 'burbs for Christmas. In that version the house is the setup for the punchline (Kris really IS Santa, see..?) as well as the Fred-and-Doris kiss-and-let's-get-married-and-be-happy-families that makes the Happy Ending of the story. Fade to black.

In the Hughes version, same setup, except instead of just wanting the house for Christmas Susan had Three Wishes (John Hughes - Brilliantly Original Thinker, eh?); a dad, the house, and a baby brother. When they get to the house, Susan announces that she now has ALL her wishes. Fred and Dorie goggle at her, at each other, then down at Dorie's womb. Booiiiinnng! Santa is like Christmas' Fertility God, see? He puts babies in ladies' tummies!

WTF?

Anyway, I don't enjoy the Nineties version enough to sit all the way through it, but it keeps turning up like the mouse the cat keeps dragging inside no matter how often you toss it into the yard. So I've now seen almost all of it mow in bits and pieces.

And between the nonsensical alterations, the strident piety, and the overall dark and charmless tone, the newer version of "Miracle on 34th Street" just seems to me to say something very unkind about us Americans of 1994 and 2010. I know the flaws of the Forties, I know all about the flaws of the people who lived at that time; they were and are my parents.

But it just seems that the sort of people who made that movie were different people than the ones who made the last one, and that based on the difference between the films, the changes that occurred in the people weren't particularly good ones.