The Spiderwick Chronicles is a superb fantasy movie that towers over its Narnian and Dark Materialed rivals despite, and possibly because of its non-epic, almost domestic scale. Although ostensibly for children, the filmmakers made a laudable decision to allow the threats to be very, very real, to be genuinely scary, and to avoid easy, mawkish endings. As one would expect, the heroes win and the villains lose, but winning does not make all the heroes’ problems go away. In fact, it is my great pleasure to report that the classic fairytale ending of “they all lived happily ever after” is not even remotely applicable.

The performances throughout are spot-on. The script is tight with just the right amount of flourish to spark up the necessary slower, building scenes. It speaks volumes that the producers invited John Sayles to the screenwriting team. Sayles, for those who don’t know, is widely regarded as one of the great American filmmakers of the 1970s. He specialises in small-scale, low-budget independent movies (if I could recommend one of his films, check out Lone Star) and his skill in drawing big character out of small dialogue is second to none. Probably Sayles joined Spiderwick on the recommendation of his frequent collaborator David Strathairn (who plays Arthur Spiderwick), but the fact that the producers took him on shows that they were serious about making a good film with solid characterisation and were not willing to fob off the audience just because they are children and watching a fantasy film. And Spiderwick has a line that is destined to be quoted everywhere.

Vengeance or death! … Hopefully vengeance.

Quibbles: my only major reservation is the disservice the script does to the older sister in the movie. She starts as an intelligent young woman with moxie, but as her younger brother becomes more and more self-assured, she becomes less and less. It’s almost as if her brother’s rise is counterweighted by her own diminution. By the end of the film she is looking to her brother with big puppy eyes for her next instruction.

I am aware that the film has considerable divergences from its source books. For instance, the children in the book are shifted five or six years older than in the books. But not having read the books I can’t comment on the overall effect of these changes for good or bad.

I have a bigger quibble–although not with the movie itself but rather with the fantasy genre as a whole. The tropes of Spiderwick are drawn straight from the folklore of Europe and yet it is set in New England, USA. It seems myopically ahistorical to me to assume that brownies and sylphs and ogres have lived in America the whole time. Perhaps they stowed away on the westward ships–in which case there is a great idea to be had in the clash between the invading European mythology and the Native American. Who wouldn’t want to read about Puck hunting Coyote in the Columbia River Plateau after Chief Joseph’s surrender to take Coyote’s place as the trickster of the New World?

For those of you who thought that math classes were a waste of time because you were never going to visit whichever country it is where they speak algebra, Matt Bailey has done a detailed statistical analysis of the notoriously high mortality rate of red-shirted crewmen beaming down to the planet - and he has mathematically proven that they can improve their chances of survival by a massive 84% just by getting Captain Kirk laid.

Oddly, though, I couldn’t find any mention of this in this paper on Why Humans Have Sex.  Maybe they surveyed the wrong people.

Over on No Fear of the Future, Jess Nevis has posted an entertaining historical retrospective of Chinese science fiction that could only be made better if it had actually happened.

Fanqi Mieville’s Mengzi Street Station (4698). Mengzi Street Station may be a controversial choice. Mieville seems to have as many detractors, or at least readers who are unable to derive any enjoyment from his work, as devotees. But Mieville is the leading figure in what might be called the New Decadence.

And our own Stephen Dedman chips in with an instalment in what should prove to be a fertile field: a history of films that fell foul of circumstance, ego-clash, or Hollywood politicking and were either cancelled or transmuted into something unrecognisable from the source material. Anyone who has ever wanted to see Orson Welles’s original vision for The Magnificent Ambersons will be a sucker for this stuff. Stephen has written the untold story of Starship Troopers, the version that clung to Heinlein’s story.

Unlike Paul Verhoeven and Edward Neumeier, writer/director/producer Smithee was not only a huge fan of the novel but a great believer in the idea that films should be as faithful as possible to the source material - as evidenced by his thirteen-hour director’s cut of Atlas Shrugged.

A little over a year ago, Claire McKenna, best known as a prolific short story writer, suddenly switched focus and started working on a low-low budget Sci Fi movie based on one of her own short stories, ‘The Liminal’. I’d been getting excited emails from her occasionally with shooting photos attached. A couple of rubber tentacles turned up at a party at my place once – and good quality tentacles they were too. Yeah, sure, I’ll be in it, I promised at some point. Well, the point finally came and so I caught the 6.30am 36-seater plane from Albion Park airfield and flew to Melbourne last weekend.

The pieces of the script I’d seen looked interesting. My character was called Melusine and I had dialogue. I was also set to get a cephalopod beak and flail about in the surf wearing latex tentacles, which sounded pretty neat. I am not an actor. I have no talent whatsoever, but Claire insisted that I was the one to play Melusine so naturally I said yes. Several other SF writers and fans have parts in the project too.

Miranda Siemienowicz plays Naiala, the Liminal love interest of Arkady, who is played by Stephen Gleeson, one of the few participants in this project with any kind of acting talent or experience.

Miranda drove us out to Claire’s place in Point Cook, one of those new land release suburbs full of kit homes and young families. Nicknamed ‘Maralinga’ because of its post-apocalyptic vibe, it was used in the film and acted as Claire’s base of operations. The crew consisted of Claire, her partner Eric, friend Edgar, his daughter Jane and Claire’s mum. The house was strewn with the detritus of a year’s filming. Tentacles here, tripod legs there, gaffer tape and boxes and boxes of weird unrecognisable stuff. We waited for another actor to turn up – she was scheduled to play an squid warrior woman too — but she didn’t show, so eventually we hit the road without her.

We piled into several cars and drove to a lonely stretch of seaweed-strewn beach lined with weathered wooden holiday shacks. No sand to speak of, just shells and blobby purple seaweed. The waves were suspiciously brown tinged, and the water looked very cold. I was supposed to be getting into that water, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Claire handed me a wetsuit that looked to be sized to be worn by a 12-year-old child. “You’ll fit into that, no worries,” she said. With much heaving and huffing, I did manage to squeeze into it, but oh no! I had the darn thing on backwards! I’ll bet that never happens to Nicole Kidman! With assistance, I peeled it off and squished back into it the right way ’round. Zipped up, I found that I was almost completely flat-chested, something I am seriously not sans wetsuit. I couldn’t breath either, but the good news was that it cut out the chilly wind blowing in across the water. Or maybe it was just that I had no circulation in my arms and legs. Whatever.

Edgar and Claire’s mum covered the wetsuit in black plastic and gaffer tape. I then got to watch the “grotto” scene being filmed. This involved Claire’s mum and Jane, swathed in black plastic and sprouting multiple tentacles, sitting like, well, shags on a rock, while at their feet Naiala underwent the painful transformation from Liminal to human form. Naiala (Miranda) was wrapped in white raincoaty-stuff. On cue, Edgar chucked a bucket of blue slime all over her legs and Miranda howled in transformational agony. She did a good job of it. Very convincing. I started to wonder if maybe I was the only one in this film who couldn’t act after all. Once the filming was complete, Miranda strode gracefully into the surf, trailing lengths of semi-opaque white raincoat in the breeze in an attempt to wash the blue yuck off her legs.

Meanwhile, Stephen had been wandering up and down the beach looking for a decent stretch of water for us to film in. I found a jellyfish on the seaweed. I froze. Jellyfish freak me out completely. I didn’t want to go in the water. I really should have read the script before I said yes.

Claire said we were doing my land scene next. This involved more squishing and squeezing. The pants part of the squid suit looked way too small, but somehow I managed to fit my big butt into them with the help of Claire’s Mum, Edgar and a roll of gaffer tape. I also got long rubbery octopus tentacles. I wet my hair, lay in the seaweed, got more seaweed dumped all over me, in my hair and behind me propping me up into a lounging position.

But all attempts to affix a cephalopod beak to my nose failed miserably. I wasn’t monstery enough. So Claire got out her emergency makeup kit and started drawing all over my face. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but the looks on everyone else’s faces convinced me my humanity was fading.

Finally I was ready so Claire told me to act. All I had to do was look tragic and point ahead to the grotto where Naiala’s transformation scene will be edited in. Uh, that’s more easily said than done when wearing five-metre rubber tentacles. I flung one of my tentacles limply in the appropriate direction a few times.

“Yeah, that’ll do,” said Claire. “Get those legs off and get into the ocean.”

The ocean was looking browner than ever. Here goes nothing, I thought. I put on plastic flip-flops and waded into the waves with Stephen, flailing my octopus arms wildly just because I could. Claire got into the water too, her camera protected by underwater housing. She filmed Stephen’s scenes first. He was supposed to go underwater, then burst out, look around, realise where he was and freak out. Or something. But the water was far too shallow. He couldn’t get far enough under it. They had to shoot this scene several times. We all waded further out, but the water wasn’t much deeper. It was, however, rougher, and soon all three of us were being knocked all over the place. Claire’s tripod floated away. It headed for shore so she didn’t bother to chase it. She filmed the scene where I, mighty Liminal warrior woman, attack Stephen. I tried my best to look menacing and throttle him with my tentacles, but those things were so damned hard to control, and the waves were knocking both of us all over the place.

Finally Claire decided the footage we had was as good as it was going to get. We were knocked over a few more times, then dragged ourselves back on dry land where I was released from the corset-like constriction of the wetsuit and resumed my true human shape. Claire’s mum gave me a Mars bar. I like Claire’s mum.

So we dried off and headed back to Maralinga for a BBQ. I wanted to go to the bottle-O, then someone pointed out that I had blue makeup and black lines drawn all over my face, so Steve volunteered to go instead. Back at Claire’s place I found a tube of foot exfoliant in her bathroom cupboard and I used it to scrub the blue muck off my face. Took me a few goes, but eventually I was human Caucasian-coloured once more.

Some other people came round, we had BBQ, chatted, drank and watched Team America on Claire’s whopping huge back-projection screen. I tell you, those puppets had it completely over me, acting talent-wise.

I have only tedious memories of past film-making endeavours, but ‘The Liminal’ shoot was so much fun! Even though I didn’t get to wear a cephalopod beak after all, deliver dialogue or keep the tentacles.

Claire McKenna’s film ‘The Liminal’ will premiere at Convergence 2: The 46^th Australian National Science Fiction convention, 8-11^th June, 2007.

For more pictures, check out Cat Sparks’s Melusine Flickr set. A small sample follows:

Cat Sparks and her tentacle tippet

Cat and Stephen Gleeson shortly before the tragedy at Vic Market

Miranda Siemienowicz, all smiles because she got the wetsuit that fits

Experience the terror!

I have this theory that some objects cause effects in culture similar to the gravitational effect a body such as a planet or comet causes in space-time. You know that demonstration: space as a flat sheet of rubber pulled taut. Billiard balls sit upon it, the indentations they make representing the effect of gravity. Roll a marble along the rubber sheet and it curves towards a billiard ball. You with me?

Anyway, imagine the billiard balls are memes. The marble is the consumers’ attention. Memes can assert dramatic impact on the marble, trapping it in orbit for awhile. Marbles have rockets embedded (independent thought) and thus can ignite engines, pull free of the billiard ball’s gravity well at any time and continue the journey through flat rubber space.

The further the marble gets from a billiard ball’s gravity well, the less able it is to understand what attracted it to that particular billiard ball in the first place.

Why am I thinking about this? Because last night myself and three friends watched Snakes on a Plane [IMDB entry]. We wanted to kick back, eat pizza and watch some dumb big arse Hollywood flick on my big arse plasma screen TV. We were not looking for quality, we were looking for amusement. I remember some of the reviews when the film was released in the cinema. The movie was supposed to be big shiny fun.

But you know, I reckon ‘Lazy Writers on a Plane’ would have been a better title. I expected the film to reference other disaster films. I expected the film makers to know why we were watching it, and put some clever little twists in there as rewards. But they didn’t. They ran through a checklist and ticked a bunch of boxes. Or worse — It’s like the producers assembled a room full of children, sat them round a table with crayons and butcher’s paper and asked them to draw every place on the human body that you can stick a snake. “On his willie! That’s very funny, Timmy ­ he can pretend it’s a fire hose. ‘Up the fat lady’s clacker!’ That’s a good one, Mary… ooh, in the eye. Very imaginative, Rebecca. Extra marks for that one.”

I mean, they had a kickboxer on the plane. Did I doze off and miss the big snake kickboxing sequence? I guess that might have cost too much to film. We had a plane, we had snakes all over everybody, then the plane landed. At rental price $2.95, I felt cheated.

So here’s the thing: The film looked so old and so dated, even though its only been out of the cinema a few months. IMHO, this is because my three friends and I, travelling on our imaginary marble, were seeing it from a position well removed from its billiard ball gravity well. As a source of gravity, Snakes on a Plane is a gas giant. No hard surface. No molten core. Just a memetic indentation. Yet had we seen it when it first came out, I reckon we all would have thought it was fun.

As everyone who knows such things knows, Uwe Boll is a less-than-talented film maker who makes pseudo-blockbuster horror flicks based on computer games. So far he’s produced a trashy zombie gutchewer (House of the Dead) and a trashy scifi-horror opus (Alone in the Dark). Given how bad these films are, I was bemused to discover that another one has appeared on the local DVD rental shelves, by all appearances a trashy vampire action thriller called BloodRayne. Apparently BloodRayne has Ben Kingsley and Michael Madsen in it. Not only that, Boll is currently busy making another film even as we speak! What gives?

Out of curiosity (and because I — atypically — find myself agreeing with… well, everyone … that Uwe Boll’s films are awful), I went to Box Office Mojo to look up the figures (they’re all in US$, of course). Here they are:

2003: House of the Dead — budget: $12 million; worldwide gross take: $13,818,181 for a total theatrical run of 6 weeks.

2005: Alone in the Dark — budget: $20 million; worldwide gross take: $8,170,602 for a total theatrical run of 3 weeks.

2006: BloodRayne — budget: $25 million; worldwide gross take: $3,591,980 for a total theatrical run of 17 days.

Now is it just me or do these figures indicate that there is no way Boll should be getting funding for yet another film? After the first they might have thought “Hey, it’s a profit and he’ll get better.” But the next film’s box office was pitiful and nowhere near a profit and BloodRayne even worse, thus confirming the trend.

So what astute businessman would give Boll even more money to make another disaster? And how does he get decent actors to go in them?

Now admittedly these figures don’t allow for DVD sales. But I can’t imagine that such sales were much to write home about. Alone in the Dark went from full price to bargain bin in a matter of weeks — they’re practically giving them away around here.

Meanwhile gamers seem to hate Boll’s films and are going to them (even out of loyalty) less and less each time. And everyone else hates them, too. No one’s paying money to see these films.

So how come, in an industry where the director of a good film that does mediocre business gets severely caned, Boll can still get bigger and bigger budgets?

Meanwhile, Boll is planning to take on five of his most vocal critics in a boxing match, including Jeff Sneider of Ain’t It Cool News. The bout is scheduled for 23 September in Vancouver and footage of it will be included in his new film Postal.

One of the critics, Chris Alexander, a Toronto journalist with Rue Morgue radio and magazine, commented:

I saw this as probably the most perverse and outlandish PR stunt in the history of film. Uwe Boll is in line with Ed Wood as far as being one of the most inept filmmakers ever…. If I can get at least three hits in — one for each lousy video game horror movie that Uwe Boll has made — then I’ll be happy.

Now, to my mind comparing Boll to Ed Wood is an insult to Ed. Boll’s stuff isn’t quite as naively inept as Ed Wood’s, and they do have some sort of budget behind them. Ed Wood’s films gain cult status from the director’s endearingly profound self-delusion. But forget that! What I really want to know is: what does any of this tell us about the nature of reality?

Imagine going to see a play and not understanding a single word spoken.

Imagine going to another place and not understanding a single word spoken.

Imagine permanently moving to another country where you don’t understand a single word spoken.

Imagine writing a review about a play about all of the above.

The Arrival

Spare Parts Puppet Theatre

The Arrival is based on the eponymous forthcoming book by much-acclaimed artist, writer and all round nice guy Shaun Tan (Hatchette Livre, due October 2006). The play tells the story of Aki, who leaves his wife and child in order to make a new life and establish a home in an amazing, bustling metropolis. Equipped with little more than the clothes his back, the hat on his head and a pad of strange symbols, Aki must navigate his way through strange streets and the even stranger inhabitants. He must find a place to sleep, a place to work, a place to buy the strange items that this new land considers to be food, all while missing the family he has left behind.

The Arrival uses a blend of digital animation, puppetry and human actors to tell its story. None of the actors speak during the play, comunicating through expressions and gestures. For Aki, even gestures take some interpreting at first, and to guide him is a rough book of drawn images (pictures of food, a bed, people working) he hangs around his neck.

While I was hoping for more puppetry, the puppets were excellent. Aki finds a pet, a creature somewhere between a big blue tadpole and a small shark, that keeps him company. The animation is incredibly effective, moving backdrops to indicate movement and changes of scenes and to give the audience a feel of the metropolis (there are only three cast members). The projection of well-thought-out images enables a simple stage to represent a boat, a balloon, city streets, even a forest.

While the plot could happen anywhere, the world of The Arrival is full of the fantastic. Aki’s homeland is overrun by tentacled monsters, transportation within the metropolis is by balloon, strange creatures run around underfoot, the staple diet consists of what looks like an egg wearing a tall beanie, and Aki communicates with his family through drawings folded into origami cranes and then set loose to fly home.

The Arrival works because Tan has been able to tap into the heart of multicultural Australia, a land of migrants from any number of linguistic backgrounds. By creating an environment devoid of comprehensible dialogue he is able to effect a level playing field where everyone is forced to use more than their ears to understand what is going on. The Arrival shows the importance of visual cues in our society, that we have more commonalities than differences. The play has something for everyone of all ages.

Makes me impatient for the book.

Whether we like the idea or not, young people in western culture get most of their cues and their role models for life from television. TV tells them what to look like, what to expect from the world and how to behave. TV tells them what to eat, what to buy and what to wear.

A modified screenshot of “The Incident”

I am not a watcher or a fan of Big Brother but I was very interested in reality TV’s precursor, Cinéma vérité when I was a film student back in my 20s. Cinéma vérité means, roughly, “cinema of truth”.

My studies led me to take an interest in the BBC/ABC co-production Sylvania Waters (1992), an early version of the reality TV that has become so prevalent today. Sylvania Waters presented a family of nouveau riche Australians who thought they were the bee’s knees but were actually a bunch of bush pigs with money ­ and that’s why viewers tuned in each week. To watch white trash make arses of themselves on national TV and remain firmly cocooned in utter cluelessness. Australian audiences lapped up its first taste of reality TV.

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Nature’s warning signs are bright red and yellow patches. Hollywood has its own warning signs and Eight Below fair sparkles with them. It’s a post-1970 Disney production; it stars Paul Walker; it is about dogs; it was “inspired by a true story” as opposed to “based on a true story” (the distinction matters); it is reworked from a highly-regarded Japanese film but takes great liberties; and its posters describe it as “THE MOST AMAZING STORY OF SURVIVAL, FRIENDSHIP AND ADVENTURE EVER TOLD.” Hyperbole in capital letters is the curare frog of cinema.

Unexpectedly, Eight Below is not only non-toxic, it is quite a nourishing little meal. While far from perfect, Eight Below is still eminently watchable, and belongs to a class of film that has almost disappeared from our screens: the adventure movie. Like suspense films, the adventure genre has largely degenerated into action, usually dotted by self-consciously inventive obscenities, ridiculously large explosions, and lashings of CGI absurdity. Eight Below has no swearing, not a single explosion, and its one CGI scene does not live up to current standards of realism but is far more effective than most because it is so well directed that one’s sense of belief is carried by the intensity of the story that unfolds rather than the intensity of the graphic experience.

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The American Godzilla is in the process of being re-born, across time and media-space and against all the odds, by virtue of one fan’s enthusiasm (not to mention talent) and the wonders of the internet.

In 1998, Tri-Star released producer Dean Devlin and director Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla remake to much pre-event anticipation and even greater post-event disdain.

Whether you think Godzilla (1998) is any good or not as a generic giant monster flick, most commentors, G-fans and Japanese citizens consider it to be a travesty — taking one of the world’s great anti-nuclear monster icons and turning it into a big-animal-on-the-run non-event. The good team of Devlin and Emmerich, responsible for such ‘blockbuster’ films as Stargate, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, stripped Godzilla of his radiation breath, his ferocity, his ‘heroic’ ambiguity, his invulnerability and his inexorable scorn for military solutions.

With all due disrespect, Ryuhei Kitamura, director of 2005’s Godzilla Final Wars, included the American Godzilla in his ‘genuine’ Godzilla film, naming him “Zilla” — because the American movie had taken the “God” out of “Godzilla”, he said. (In an apparent act of cinematic sarcasm, Kitamura has his Godzilla annihilate Zilla — who is under alien control — in a matter of nano-seconds, along with Sydney’s Opera House.) Another common fan name for Emmerich’s monster is GINO, which stands for “Godzilla In Name Only”. These snippets of pointed humour comment on the fundamental lack of understanding of Godzilla apparent in the 1998 film.

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