FAHRENHEIT 451 (2018)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In an essay related to Ray Bradbury's classic FAHRENHEIT 451, I called attention to this passage, the closest the author comes to voicing an aesthetics of good and bad literature:

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

I then pointed out that although 451 is replete with many examples of mediocre writing-- mostly televisual in nature-- the reader never knows what sort of literature Bradbury would have found vile enough for this usually mild-mannered author to resort to the rape metaphor. But I like to think he might have considered HBO's adaptation of his novel, directed and co-written by Ramin Bahrani. to belong to the "worse than mediocre" category.    

There are two ways to *potentially* render good adaptations of established works, though neither method guarantees success.

The first to attempt to make the adaptation as faithful as possible to the original. There are many such adaptations, ranging from the excellent to the serviceable, and sometimes the approach is problematic given the difficulties of the work-- one example being Ray Bradbury's dubious cinematic adaptation of Melville's gargantuan MOBY DICK.

The second method is to make the adaptation partly unfaithful because the adaptor has different priorities than the original artist, but he still produces key aspects of the source work even if his overall theme is different, as was the case with the 1982 BLADE RUNNER with respect to the Philip K Dick novel. 

Francois Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT 451 is another example of a divergent adaptation that transcends its infidelity, and I suppose Ramin Bahrani may have had some notion of doing the same. What Bahrani and HBO produced, though, was a lame travesty of 451, quite possibly motivated by a desire to capitalize on the author's name.

Trufant's rendering might not have mirrored Bradbury's passion for the written word, but at least the French director had some notion of capturing the dissonance of a world where firemen burned books. Bahrani's only goal was to make a dull anti-totalitarian drama, in which the burning of books played a minor role. 

There's also a strong indication that Bahrani sought to change the story into one of modern race-conflict into a future setting. Not only is rebellious fireman Guy Montag played by Black actor Michael B. Jordan, he's given a White opponent in the character of Captain Beatty, played by Michael Shannon.

In the book, though Captain Beatty is Montag's pre-eminent opponent, representing the repressive government of book-burners, he's secondary to the female influences on Montag's consciousness: wife Millie, who's become totally brainwashed by the anti-book culture, and Montag's neighbor Clarisse, the elfin young girl who opens Montag's mind to new experiences. In the HBO version, Millie is replaced by a home computer, and Clarisse becomes, of all things, a police informant (!) 

In compensation, Bahrani builds up the relationship of Beatty and Montag into that of mentor and student, even surrogate father-and-son. Montag's father was a fireman too, implicitly killed by Beatty so that he could become Montag's "new daddy"-- though the symbolism is hurt by the fact that in 2018 Jordan had just passed thirty, making him a peculiar choice for the "son with a bad dad" trope. Jordan and Shannon fire up their weak characters with considerable passion, but they can't make these lousy characters seem real. Shannon, by the way, gets to play a Spike Lee White Guy by the way Beatty flagrantly uses the Big Evil Forbidden Word.

The rebels against the government, called "Eels" for some reason, aren't a bunch of pacifists memorizing books, so Bahrani transforms them into dime-a-dozen revolutionaries. I suppose there are worse adaptations than this one, but it's certainly near the bottom of the barrel.      

 

AMAZONS AND GLADIATORS (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

While my recent screening of BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS yielded only stinky cheese, AMAZONS AND GLADIATORS offers a more pleasing aroma.

In the BATTLE review, I said that it was no sin to be unoriginal, only to be lazy. In GLADIATORS writer-director Zachary Weintraub produced a cheese-fest consisting mostly of sexy men and women fighting each other, motivated only by a routine revenge fantasy. And the feminist tropes of the film are just as superficial. Nevertheless, GLADIATORS is never lazy but delivers its conflicts with considerable energy.     

Most of the action takes place in a fictional Roman province, "Panne," supposedly "60 years after the death of Christ." But it's a very mutable history, for its villain is the real-life Roman officer Marcus Crassius, famed for putting down the slave revolt of Spartacus. In this tale, Julius Caesar fears the popularity of Crassius (Patrick Bergin) with the Roman people, so the emperor appoints the soldier governor of Panne. Crassius resents being exiled from Rome, so he becomes a tyrant to the common folk under his reign. As one of his depredations, he kills the mother of heroine Serena and consigns the young girl and her sister Gwyned to slavery. As adults the two of them (played by Nichole Hiltz and Wendi Winburn) are trained as dancers, but their beauty attracts the attention of Roman officials. Gwyned (she of the oddly British name) becomes reconciled to a ritzy captivity, but Serena kills a Roman who tries to rape her. Luckily, there's an Amazon captive (Jennifer Rubin) close to hand, and the warrior-woman not only helps Serena escape, she paves Serena's path to join the Amazons of Queen Zenobia.

There was a historical Queen Zenobia who battled Rome, but she wasn't a contemporary of Crassius (and neither lived just 60 years after Christ's death). Real Zenobia also had no association with the Greek legends of Amazons, but this one-- who's not a major character here-- rules a tribe of female warriors who live out in the forest. They don't steal men to mate with but are defined purely as rebels against Roman authority. Serena trains as a woman-warrior and nurtures a desire to be revenged on Governor Crassius. Ultimately, after a lot of complications, Serena gets the chance to duel Crassius to the death in his low-rent imitation of a Roman arena.

The most amusing feminist trope comes after Crassius' death, when the assembled Amazons, having put down the small contingent of Roman soldiers, warn the arena-patrons never to abuse women, or they'll face Amazon vengeance. GLADIATORS is more compelling, even in its cheesiness, when it simply depicts women as willing to fight for justice-- even if these justice-fighters just happen to all be unbelievable hotties. There's no attention to how the Amazons came to separate themselves from patriarchal rule, nor is there any sense of their even having a culture or religion; they only qualify as a "weird society" by the mere fact of being an all-female tribe. There are a few puzzling scenes where a wisewoman utters predictions of Rome's imminent doom and even claims that Serena will play some role in that downfall. Only at the end does the prophet provide closure, claiming that Serena's Amazons will participate in the sacking of Rome, alongside the more typical suspects, the Goths and Vandals. I don't think that Goths, Vandals or even early converts to Roman Christianity would be very welcoming to Amazonian customs. But within the movie's terms, I suppose the apparent fulfillment of the prophecy falls into the uncanny domain as well.                     

KONG: RETURN TO THE JUNGLE (2007)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological. metaphysical*

Wow, what a shame that the makers of KONG THE ANIMATED SERIES didn't just hang things up with the first of their two DTV movies, KONG: KING OF ATLANTIS. That big-monkey flick was merely mediocre, but RETURN seems a betrayal of even the small coterie of fans that the show might have garnered.

RETURN, a CGI animation, was produced a couple of years after 2004's THE POLAR EXPRESS, and RETURN shows a similar problem with making living creatures seem alive. All the regular characters I summarized in the KING review look like super-streamlined facsimiles of their hand-drawn counterparts. Kong and his human handlers go through their usual routines, but they have little sense of physical continuity.

The one element that a KTAS fan might like about RETURN is that, unlike KING, the main villain here is the one who appeared in the majority of the half-hour episodes. In most episodes, Professor Ramon de la Porta would seek some evil goal, the Kong group would intervene, and Porta would use stolen tech to create some colossal animal-human hybrid to fight Kong. Porta's career reaches some closure in RETURN, though he has to share the fiend-stage with a new villain, a big game hunter who'd like to put Kong's head on a wall.

The CGI animation also takes away from the big-monster action, and as if the writers got tired of the hybrid-schtick, this time the anthropoid crusader only fights a T-Rex. Maybe someone thought of this opponent as a callback to the 1933 KONG, but I may be giving the producers too much credit. The series and the first movie are at best blips in the history of TV animation, but RETURN doesn't even deserve blip-status.                

BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The standard legends about Amazons assert that the warrior-women lived apart from males, except when they raided neighboring villages and kidnapped men for temporary stud service. Alfonso Brescia's Italian trash-peplum gets that part right, but adds the idea that the Amazons ruled by Queen Eraglia (Lucretia Love) keeps some males as slaves.

BATTLE has a rushed look even for an exploitation flick, possibly because the Italians wanted to "mockbust" Terence Young's more expensive production, THE AMAZONS. That's probably why the three credited writers (one of whom was Bruno Corbucci) took the obvious tack of ripping off THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. After the women warriors kill the headman of one village, his daughter Valeria (Paola Tedesco) decides to oppose Amazon tyranny. She hires handsome bandit Zeno (Lincoln Park) and his fellow rogues to train her people to fight.

It's not an irredeemable sin to be unoriginal, but it is to be lazy. Though Valeria is not much of a heroine, most of the Glam-azons are good looking enough to provide the sort of spectacle the movie needs. But the battles, even when not performed by stuntmen in drag, are unexceptional. And since the script has no interest in examining Amazon society from any sort of feminist angle-- which, admittedly, would be very atypical for any Italian film of the sixties or seventies -- BATTLE becomes something of a slog, rather than a fun if mindless peplum.

In addition to the "weird societies" trope, BATTLE also employs "outre outfits" in that the Amazons sometimes fight wearing outsized masks, whose real purpose was to conceal the masculine nature of the ladies' stunt-doubles. Over twenty years later, the show XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS also made frequent use of masked Amazons, though I don't know if the producers did so for a similar reason, or if someone on staff saw BATTLE and thought that the mask-thing was cool-looking.    

FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Though I reread Ray Bradbury's book before re-screening Francois Truffaut's adaptation, I won't address most of the alterations. A few served to prune unnecessary excrescences like the Mechanical Hound. Others were more puzzling, like the director deciding that the two women in the life of rebellious protagonist Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) -- his near-catatonic wife and the young teacher who inspires Guy to investigate the forbidden activity of reading-- would both be played by Julie Christie. I thought this created the expectation that the teacher-character was going to be the wife's romantic replacement, when in truth Truffaut's film is almost as unconcerned with Eros as Bradbury's novel.

The most important difference is that, whereas Bradbury accurately said that 451 was the story of a man's romance with the world of reading, I don't think Truffaut captures much of RB's passion for books. I know nothing about how the 451 film came about or why Truffaut wanted/consented to take on the project. But what I see on the screen is Truffaut using RB's projection of book-burning fears as an excuse for a lot of arty futuristic visions.

In the prose 451 one of RB's main complaints is that future-humans have sacrificed their sense of an existential connection to the complexity of life-- what Bradbury calls "texture"-- by becoming over-fascinated with beguiling, superficial images. This critique works tolerably well when one is immersed in the texture of prose, but not so well when one watches a movie. For that reason, I felt Truffaut was less invested in the repressiveness of the book-burning firemen, and more with the hallucinatory entertainments in which Guy's wife Linda loses herself. Similarly, Truffaut wrote original scenes showing the scholastic experiences of Clarisse-- who's not a teacher of any kind in the book-- and working in scenes of her child-students, when the book lacks any significant children. Possibly Truffaut, who gained fame for a coming-of-age film, THE 400 BLOWS, just had a yen to show what education would look like a learning-bereft culture-- though if so, he didn't bring much to the table. Probably the only sequence in the film that cineastes cherish is the conclusion, wherein Guy finds his way to a colony of "book people," who show their dedication to the printed word by becoming living records of literature.

The book FAHRENHEIT 451 earned great regard with what I would call "elitist critics," those who validate fiction only when it puts forth some utilitarian intellectual proposition. 451 the movie does not quite so beloved by the intellectually arid, though it is one of the first commercial films within the SF-genre that ought to be deemed "elitist art." Perhaps the Truffaut work, with its roots in ironic storytelling, loses something even for those readers, as soon as it's contrasted with the immense passion within Bradbury's sci-fi drama.                   

SCANNERS III: THE TAKEDOWN (1992)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychology*

Despite having the same director and writer as SCANNERS: THE NEW ORDER, the second sequel to SCANNERS doesn't rise to the level of competent genre-material. It does give viewers many scenes of Scanners tossing people around with telekinesis, but it screws up the psychological motifs that could have made for a better film than the original.

It's still roughly 10 years from the time of the original film, and though I don't remember much about NEW ORDER, it seemed odd to me that the general public now knows what Scanners are and what they can do. Some time back Elton Monet, a scientist who's been researching the Scanner phenomenon, adopted and raised to maturity two European kids, Alex (Steve Parrish) and Helena (Liliana Komorowska). Both have the requisite psychic powers, but for some reason the script doesn't venture to explain, Alex suffers none of the usual side-effects of his in utero mutation. In fact, at a party whose attendees all know what Alex is, the partygoers ask Alex to perform a trick with his powers. The trick results in a friend's accidental death, so Alex goes off to a Thailand monastery to learn how to control his powers. A better script might have made more of Alex's search for spiritual clarity, but the Thai-trek is just a plot-point.

To be sure, Alex gets secondary status because Helena is the star of the show. The young woman-- who incidentally remains friends with Valerie, Alex's ex-girlfriend-- suffers migraines whether she uses her powers or not. Her adoptive father reveals a new project: chemical patches that may be capable, after adequate testing, of eradicating the Scanner side-effects. However, Helena steals the patches to anneal her suffering. In nearly no time, the untested tech unleashes Helena's "Miss Hyde." She kills her adoptive father and enlists a small army of institutionalized Scanners to become her agents, and one of the first things she does is to send her pawns to Thailand to kill Alex.

Perhaps the dumbest subplot involves Helena to get revenge upon a scientist at Elton's institute who tortured her when she was a young girl-- wait, what? What was Elton doing at the time, and how did the guy get away with such actions? I think the writer might have been evoking the old "good father's who's really a bad father" trope. But he lacked the guts to give Elton such a personality, so this nugatory scientist was used to provoke Helena to vengeful violence.

Naturally Alex and his girlfriend save the day from the bad sister. Since the FX scenes are only fair, the sole reason to watch TAKEOVER is to watch Komorowska pull out all stops as a psychic super-villain.        

ORGY OF THE VAMPIRES (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

The alternate title for this film, VAMPIRE'S NIGHT ORGY, is closer to the original Italian title. But what's the point of emphasizing "night" when the movie's main conceit is that Tolnio, the town where all the "orgies" take place, is so overcast that vampires and other horrors can walk around with no problems.

The little I've read about director Leon Klimovsky suggests that he had no great enthusiasm for horror but simply regarded the movies as routine labors. I've seen all but two of his fear-films and regard only THE WEREWOLF AND THE VAMPIRE WOMAN as better than average, though that was probably because the writers stuffed the narrative with so many incidents that the movie seemed dream-like. But there's nothing dream-like, or even very sexy (save for one scene) about ORGY.

 This time the reigning vampire-aristocrat, the Countess (Helga Line), doesn't plan to "pull up stakes." So instead of just inviting one outsider to her dismal domain as did a certain Count, she sends for a half-dozen professionals to service her mansion. Most of these earnest jobseekers are cannon fodder for the horrors of Tolnio, and even the leads Luis and Alma (Jack Taylor, Dianik Zurakowska) are pretty one-note. This wouldn't be a problem if the starring monsters were more interesting, but they're almost as desultory in execution.

What are the monsters of Tolnio? Well, the Countess is a fangs-and-all vampire, but she seems to be the only one. All of the other townsfolk seem to hanker more after flesh than blood, and I could easily believe that ORGY started out as a "town of cannibals" idea to which someone added a vampire to snare the lovers of sanguinary specters. But despite the addition of a measly subplot about some sort of "ghost boy," the Countess' scemes are the only one that inject some "life" (so to speak) in the dull proceedings.

In one scene, the Countess (quite fetching though the actress was pushing forty) seduces the twenty-something tutor, beds hi, fangs him, and then tosses him to her cannibal minions. She doesn't seem worried about other feedings, for she doesn't attack anyone else until the climax. As Luis and Alma steal a car and flee the evil town, the Countess stows herself in the back seat and waits till they're driving to attack. Alma kills the vampiress with a handy stake, but her body dissolves into worms and mold. And when the couple takes the nearest constables to the site of the murders-- no Tolnio, nor even a vague rumor of some cursed place that once existed there. Aside from the pulchritude of the two primary Euro-babes, this is one dull ORGY.