Root Territory

We should count ourselves lucky nature doesn't generally seem to know what it's doing. A young family finds out just how bad it can be to earn the wrath of powerful forest beings in 2015's The Hallow, a rigorously effective horror film reliant on sharp but subtle character work.

Adam (Joseph Mawle) and Claire (Bojana Novakovic) have come to live in a beautiful old house in a remote, beautiful Irish forest. Unfortunately, they're there because Adam is working with a company preparing to deforest the area. The local people try to warn Adam and Claire about the Hallow, or fae folk, who will not look kindly on trespassers. A scientist, Adam doesn't listen, of course.

The film begins with a wonderful piece of tension as Adam wanders the woods, taking samples of weird black goo, with his and Claire's baby Finn in a harness on his back. One has to remember Adam doesn't know he's in a horror movie before saying, "Why the hell are you going into that creepy cottage with your baby on your back? Why are you handing weird goo when you have your baby?!" But it's entirely credible. People probably do get too accustomed to carrying their babies everywhere and just don't think, particularly a scientist on the trail of some weird new organism.

So the Hallow appear to have some basis in fantasy science. I wonder if audiences would accept the idea of them being magical anymore. Maybe not. Otherwise, from amongst the influences cited by director Corin Hardy, the film most resembles The Evil Dead as the bulk of the movie features the protagonists fighting for their lives against a menace from the dark woods at night whose powers are unpredictable and possibly unstoppable.

There's even a book that resembles The Evil Dead's version of the Necronomicon.

Unlike The Evil Dead, though, there are a few consistent ground rules. Like the fact that the Hallow are put off by iron and light. The latter makes the film's bad lighting choices particularly unfortunate. I always dislike bright flood lights used for night in the country--the potential for tension from a realistically pitch black forest was mined again and again in cheaper horror films from the 70s. Here, though, it's a particularly odd choice when Adam and Claire are trying to get the generator working to turn on the house lights while it appears to be broad daylight outside.

Some of the lighting makes the forest look really pretty but there are other ways to create beauty on screen that doesn't sabotage the logic of the horror.

The only other problem I had with the film was its pretty unimaginative sound design. The Hallow make that same dry throat clucking noise the ghost kids from Japanese horror films make. I wonder if there's a name for it.

Visually, the Hallow are great combinations of costumes and make-up with really lovely designs that support the concept of it being some kind of disease that causes derangement along with physical changes.

The movie mainly works, though, because of the constant sense of guilt that comes along with the punishment the Hallow seek to inflict on Adam and his family. Adam loves nature and he has to deal with the fact that he works for a company that wants to destroy it, something he may have suppressed but is forced to face in the form of living monsters.

An Unfamiliar Cat

Well, it's the end of the semester. I know this because I saw End of the Semester Cat to-day. The last time this cat approached me was at the end of last semester. It's not so strange, maybe--I took the trolley almost all semester this time so I only parked in the neighbourhood off-campus where the cat lives a few times. I saved a whole lot of money I otherwise would've spent on gasoline by taking the trolley and I was able to do a lot of reading.

End of the Semester Cat started calling out to me from quite across the street and then ran out to meet me. She has a good memory. She also left the moment I started to leave so I think she's good at reading body language and taking cues.

I took a final exam to-day for a class on literary criticism. The exam was partly on a novel from 2000 called White Teeth by Zadie Smith. She was only in her twenties when it was published so I had to overcome jealousy while reading it. It's not a bad book though it's not my cup of tea being a Post-Modernist examination of normal people in first and second generation immigrant culture. I had to write an essay on the book for class and in doing so I came across an interview with Zadie Smith where she said something I really love:

It was lovely to have such a large audience with White Teeth, but it was unnerving to have people come up to me and say, "I love this part of the book" -- and it's the part of the book that is similar to their own life. So the Indian guy will say, "I loved Samad, but I didn't like that stuff with Archie at the end." The black woman will tell me, "I loved Hortense, but why all that stuff about the kids?" You want people to read the thing that isn't them. I abhor the idea, if you're an unmarried woman in your early thirties, of reading Bridget Jones; or if you're a guy in your late thirties, of reading Nick Hornby. You want to swap those books around. All across western readership people want this comfort reading. They want to have a reflection of themselves. I think really great fiction doesn't always give you that. I never pick up a book about a young, mixed-race woman in London. That doesn't interest me. And, of course, that's the book I get sent constantly by publishers. They think I want to read books about young, mixed race girls in London. That's the last thing I ever want to do.

Yes. So many wrong-headed reviews and reactions I see to books and movies come from people complaining they had no-one to identify with because there was no-one who resembled them in some superficial way. One of the greatest things about art is that it allows you to step into someone else's shoes. Wanting someone like you in a novel is like going to France and wanting to eat at McDonalds. That people are losing touch with this suggests to me a diminishing of empathy and imagination.

If Looks Could See

Ah, how nice to wake up in the afterglow of HBO's five or six drips of story from Game of Thrones. There were some satisfying moments last night and a few disappointing missed opportunities.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Just as she was about to become Zatoichi with a quarterstaff, Arya's given her sight back. Already! Three episodes in. It makes it all feel a bit pointless. I can understand, though--she's the point of view character in a place that already messes with the senses. It's hard to have a blind point of view character in visual media--you can do it in books or audio plays but whenever you can see things a character can't that immediately puts you on different footing from them. I wonder if Arya's blindness might last a bit longer if George R.R. Martin ever publishes a book again, though.

Yeah, I'm beginning to doubt he ever will. Not that I've read any of the books he has published but I feel kind of sorry about it because the show was much better written back when it had plenty of source material to burn through.

So we still can't see Jon Snow's penis, which is purportedly smaller than Jesus', but that's okay because we also can't see Daenerys' breasts due to her refusal to show her body from now on. She giddily expressed her reasons recently on a talk show as being a lack of balance between the number of women's breasts and men's penises. Which reminds me for all the dragons we've seen on the show we've seen no comparable number of basilisks, which is obviously a crime. We have seen some penises and I'm pretty sure we've seen zero vaginas. But who's keeping score? I suppose I might be too jaded to know how breasts rank on the immoral meter.

The real disappointing thing, though, was seeing Melisandre look so excited to see her magic actually worked but before she could say much of anything Davos inexplicably kicked her out of the room--with which she inexplicably complied--just so he could say, ain't this shit weird?

And then, after all the trouble they went through, Snow hangs up his cloak and stalks off. Why did they go to the trouble, anyway, especially after the Wildings had taken over Castle Black? What did they need Jon for, exactly?

Well, I should talk about the good stuff. Nice to see Diana Rigg and Julian Glover back though Glover being reduced to a fart joke was pretty sad after the trouble the show had gone to to suggest there might be something more to him. Jonathan Pryce was wonderfully effective in his creepy sit down with Tommen.

Apparently Varys' "little birds" were children? So he's had time in Meereen to give out enough candy without anyone noticing and develop a network of kids? Good thing suddenly the Sons of the Harpy aren't able to pop up anywhere they want in gold masks. Blocked by Tyrion's mojo, I guess, or the writers, as usual, not being interested in thinking through the logistics.

Skyrim sure has paid off for Max von Sydow who after his voice in the trailer, along with the great music, basically sold the game for Bethesda was quickly cast in Star Wars and Game of Thrones. His role here is much better than in Force Awakens. I still don't care about Bran but it's cool having the knight from Seventh Seal guiding us through flashbacks of the show's lore.

Finally, yes, it was nice to see Ramsay finally being slapped down by reality a little bit. Of course, realistically, the bearded guy shouldn't have a hard time organising a coup against a prick whose duplicity and sadism is well known. Roose was right last week in his line about a mad dog being put down but in this case the mad dog has somehow been able to coast through several fox hunts. The sooner Ramsay is written out the better.

Is there any reason for Ramsay to keep Rickon alive? I suppose he probably will but I can't think of a reason currently. To torture him? I guess Ramsay might be that stupid. Not sure why Ramsay was meant to care about Osha.

Twitter Sonnet #869

A beige and black spherical bean came down.
Identical the belt was looped for farms.
The last red sequin broke the backless gown.
We call the straws what polls would call our charms.
Two pines have redefined the fruit of lungs.
The upside down echo condensed a thumb.
A finger taped beneath the desk expunged,
The team can now proceed into the crumb.
An ashen knee surprised the picnic bad.
They thought somewhere within the bog were ghosts.
A small construction crew revealed the lad.
Around the bones were packed the peat and hosts.
A stutt'ring internet in protest drools.
The shining tape reluctantly unspools.

Dream Colour versus Reality

It's fine and easy enough to say you're going to live according to your own principles and not give a damn what anyone says but the practical reality of doing so can be pretty rough. A wealthy widow finds this out when she tries to marry a younger man with a meagre income in 1955's All That Heaven Allows. Directed by Douglas Sirk, the intense Technicolor at work breathes life into a story that would seem otherwise peculiarly tame.

Akira Kurosawa was late to colour film--he didn't make one until the late 60s--and his complaint was that colour films looked like postcards. Maybe he had All That Heaven Allows in mind but I found it absolutely wonderful. There's a world created here, not just with colour but also shadows, I want to crawl into and just relax a while. Look at the powerful blue dress on Agnes Moorehead.

She's not the star of the film, she plays the best friend of Cary, played by Jane Wyman, who has two kids in college, the father, Cary's husband, having died a couple years earlier. In the country club social circle, several older men are eager to fill the vacant space in Cary's home. No-one can handle it when Cary chooses her gardener, Ron (Rock Hudson).

Jane Wyman was 38 years old in this movie, which makes the other characters treating her as old seem funny, though it is mentioned in dialogue she had one of her kids at seventeen so it technically adds up. What's really funny about it is how stark an example it provides of Hollywood's weird treatment of women when they hit 35. In 1948, seven years earlier, Wyman won an Academy Award for playing a childlike young woman in Johnny Belinda. In 1950, she played a kid just trying to make her break as an actress in Stage Fright. Five years later, she's an old lady.

Rock Hudson was only eight years younger than her but that is a pretty abnormal spread for a Hollywood picture in the 50s--unless it's a movie starring Joan Crawford or Marlene Dietrich. Neither Hudson or Wyman give bad performances but they're not exactly amazing, either--Hudson has that distinctly 1950s way of answering a woman's concern with a smug "Uh huh." The writing isn't bad, especially if you take it as code for a more transgressive relationship, like the mixed race couple portrayed in the 2002 film Far from Heaven which pretty heavily drew inspiration from All That Heaven Allows.

All That Heaven Allows sets up a conflict between a hazy, mainstream impression of Sigmund Freud and a somewhat firmer grasp of the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Cary's daughter, Kay (Gloria Talbott), handily delivers exposition on society's impressions of what an older widow should do with her life, inaccurately quoting Freud on the subject and giving a glib, imprecise definition of the Oedipal complex when her brother complains about Cary's red dress. After Kay learns about Cary's relationship with Ron, the certainty of Movie Freud deserts her as she falls to weeping beneath a Technicolor glass rainbow.

At the home of Ron's vaguely beatnik friends, Cary finds an open copy of Walden and is deeply moved by two quotes combined for the film:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Though as one of the rich old men points out at a cocktail party Cary takes Ron to, one has to have money in order to afford the luxury of being disgusted by it. The movie never provides a counterargument for this, nor, of course, does it mention that Thoreau was pretty well off himself. But like Thoreau's work, there's a real beauty in the film's celebration of personal liberty.

Don't Leave the Pond

I took this picture of a crow across the street from where I live yesterday. In the general see-sawing of the weather, the past couple of days have been cool and rainy. The pendulum swings back to hot about a week from now. It really feels much more like early spring than May in the way Autumn has become hotter than summer.

At the university yesterday, I came across this turtle making steady progress up a hill.

He was striding confidently away from the koi pond towards the hard, inhospitable library. Probably the rain had confused him. I picked him up and carried him back, setting him on the edge of the pond.

He just looked at me as though to say, "What's your problem?" I imagine with all the students normally clustered around the pond the turtles are pretty used to people.

I hope he didn't immediately resume his march the moment I left.

I only had time to listen to one Doctor Who audio play this week, a 2007 story called Valhalla. It's interesting for apparently being a Seventh Doctor story set not long before the events of the TV movie that introduced the Eighth Doctor--he's travelling alone and thinking about hanging up his hat, applying to a career placement office on Jupiter's moon, Callisto. It features Michelle Gomez, who currently plays Missy on the television series, as a one-off companion named Jevvan. So she's met both the Scottish Doctors.

She's very good, too, giving some imaginative inflection to lines for a character who's basically an average office clerk. The story, written by Marc Platt, who wrote the very good Seventh Doctor television story Ghost Light, is not terribly remarkable, being an alien invasion in the midst of a colonial revolution. But it's pretty good for that.

From Red to Green

You think gold digging is easy work? Talk to the dame in 1931's Red-Headed Woman who exercises all her conniving and energy to move up a ladder of rich guys to the top. This charming film has a thin veneer of morality that can't conceal its real tale of a cheerful sexual mercenary.

This Pre-Code film stars Jean Harlow as Lil who's grown tired of risking her neck sleeping with bootleggers. So she decides to use her sex appeal on the self-righteous son of the rich boss at the office where she works as secretary.

I say it's a Pre-Code film but the Hays Code did technically exist at this time. Studios just weren't forced to take it seriously until 1934 so that moral veneer I mentioned may have been the haphazard effort to follow the word while blatantly violating the spirit of the law.

The trouble is that Bill (Chester Morris), the first guy Lil seduces, is about as substantial as a wet paper bag. He acts like a paragon at all times, even after Lil hoodwinks him into marrying her. He kneels in front of her and proclaims his love. If he's really such a good guy that means he means it. So how can he turn on her so fast when he learns she's been sleeping with the bigger fish, Gaerste (Henry Stephenson)?

Bill's former fiancé Irene (Leila Hyams) tells Bill she knows he's with Lil for the sex and thinking logically about what's going on we have to conclude she's right. There's really nothing to show he's anything but a massive hypocrite or a shallow jerk. At least Lil knows what she wants and Harlow invests the character with terrific charm. These factors conspire to make Lil the most human character in the film otherwise populated by thin moral shadows. How could we fail to root for her?

Twitter Sonnet #868

Invasion took the helmet left at home.
The field was held by collars wet with dew.
The meaning shifts with balled emoji chrome.
A blade was broken, cracked on canting flu.
In soil brought from moons were cucumbers.
A deft adjustment shifts the feather east.
From ground a hand was grown in grey embers.
From thread and needle stitched a dryer feast.
If one can't join for fear then must one beat?
The stars inside the seed arranged the yolk.
Imprisoned wire caught the heart with meat.
A granite cloud descends to grind the folk.
Expectant trees awoke to find a rose.
A turtle's book lay open where it grows.

The Dollar Gut

I've been studying current U.S. politics for the past thirty minutes. I admit I haven't been paying very much attention having mostly been concerned with mid-17th century English politics over the past year. But even I haven't been able to avoid contemplating the nightmare Murder Clown named Donald Trump. Clown is the best term for him--he looks ridiculous but is actually scary. Scarier now that he's got the Republican nomination sewn up. Though I've seen several articles talk about how very far behind Hillary Clinton he is in the general election polls. Not to mention the fact that the only prominent Republicans who aren't disgusted at the thought of endorsing him range from the lobotomised to the emotionally paralysed. It's the walking dead Chris Christie and Ben Carson shuffling against the likes of Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, John Boehner, and even all the Bushes.

The only flaw in this attack ad is the music but attack ads of all stripes tend to have no instinct for score.

I never thought I'd say I had respect for Mitt Romney but I have to say, yeah, looks like he has some genuine integrity. Mostly I bet most of these Republicans would switch to Democrats if it weren't for the spectre of, well, Arlen Specter who had a long and respected career as a Republican until he switched to Democrat and promptly lost his seat in the next election.

I wanted to get a taste for what pro-Trump press was like so I did a search for "U.S. conservative news". I guess that was the wrong thing because sites like The Weekly Standard and The New Republic have just as many caricatures and anti-Trump opinion pieces as any liberal site.

One worrying thing is that, looking at the Twitter accounts of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump, Trump has the most followers, ahead of Hillary Clinton's 6.14 million at 7.97 million. Sanders, of course, only has 2.11 million. Which is not due to negative attacks from Trump who has this to say on his Twitter:

May 4:

"What a great evening we had. So interesting that Sanders beat Crooked Hillary. The dysfunctional system is totally rigged against him!"

"I would rather run against Crooked Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders and that will happen because the books are cooked against Bernie!"

To-day:

"Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats—both with delegates & otherwise. He should show them, & run as an Independent."

Donald Trump calling Hillary Clinton crooked is like Boss Tweed calling Ulysses S. Grant crooked. Whatever special interests might be influencing Clinton, Donald Trump is who I imagine pictured in the encyclopaedia for the entry on corrupt special interests. A selfish, tacky, racist, misogynist, dim witted bully who buys his way into everything and acts like he earned it? That's Donald Trump. While Hillary Clinton was putting her career on the line in the 90s for universal healthcare, Trump was building a living parody of American capitalism.

Anyway, if Hillary is so crooked, Donald, why'd you invite her to your wedding? Why did you donate money to her foundation?

The Cool Handmade Digital Nightmare

It's ironic one of the most highly regarded technological dystopia films is a great example of hand painted backgrounds. 1995's Ghost in the Shell used many computer techniques that were novel at the time but looking back the film seems far more remarkable for what at the time was quite unremarkable. The drizzled rust and sandwiched skyscrapers, the splotchy square signs, all have a ragged, organic quality that doesn't come with computer painted backgrounds. It complements a film with beautiful animation that is much more about mood and aesthetics than Akira or Blade Runner.

The "Ghost" of the title is another way of saying "soul" as synthetic characters like Motoko (Atsuko Tanaka) ask themselves whether or not their ghosts are real. The movie doesn't try to compete with Blade Runner on this but rather covers the topic just well enough to put us in the right frame of mind for the cinematic exercise.

The credit sequence, which features loving close-ups of Motoko's naked body being assembled, might recall Jane Fonda undressing at the beginning of Barbarella. The unwise critic who is comfortable using the term "male gaze" would easily miss the point here with the dull, recursive observation that these male filmmakers are examining a woman's body to serve heterosexual men. Thinking on this line misses the question posed by the visuals; at what point does what we're seeing stop being a doll and start being the shape of a creature we instinctively respond to as human? Yes, it's erotic because eroticism is part of human nature.

Director Mamoru Oshii's recent comments that Motoko was never meant to look Japanese are redundant to anyone who's seen the original film. Even compared to Japanese characters in anime who look European for no apparent reason, Motoko's chin and nose are distinctly not Asian. The fact that she has a Japanese name is a reflection of the cultural mishmash in the environment common to this and other cyberpunk stories where, like all other aspects of identity, the origins of names or facial features are lost in an impenetrable haze of intermingling groups of people. There's the kaleidoscope not only of genetic mixture but artificial augmentation based on both practical and aesthetic influences borne of who knows what traditions, propaganda, or fads.

Like the contemporaneous Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell is ultimately about the loneliness of inevitable psychological isolation and the panic of merging identities. Ghost in the Shell, though, only touches on the topic in explicit dialogue, primarily making its argument in visuals of beautiful, mutilated android bodies and similarly mutilated cityscapes.

The Squirrel Stands Again

I saw the Standing Squirrel at the trolley station again this morning. I managed to get stabler video this time. And this time the battery on my camera ran out before the squirrel moved. In fact, the squirrel never left the rock while I was there.

Music is from the ballet Gayane by Aram Khachaturian.

Twitter Sonnet #867

Ovid's avocado ovulates gods.
In Keats, the cleats unseats the peats of ghosts.
If Moses knows his poses throws his odds
Then Pac-Man tax man klaxons clamp on hosts.
A game regained the claim to blame the tot.
Informed, the born have shorn the loris wig.
It chafes the mace apace with lace for plot.
I trust we must combust the lusty pig.
To free the bee from glee we see your sock.
When tongues or lungs expunge the plunge we fall.
When each impeach of leeching breeches talk
The chances ranches branch to Blanche are tall.
We go to grow the slowest flowing moss.
Against the fence, the wince evinced the gloss.

Game of Clouds

Being on Game of Thrones must be one of the greatest acting gigs ever. In two episodes, Maisie Williams, who plays Arya, has done basically the same thing in the same place for a scene that lasts maybe five minutes. Everyone has about five or ten minutes of story and then they're getting cast in Star Wars or X-Men or any number of prestigious or high paying films. It results in a show that's made up of five or six brief scenes where something dramatic needs to happen. Normally the collectively twenty minutes or so of story from the first two episodes set in Castle Black would be pretty naturally placed in a single episode. But with all these fragmented tid bits of drama in every episode, for some reason it's only recently occurred to me that the show is a soap opera.

Well, it still has one key difference from soap operas--things that happened four years ago are still relevant to the characters now. Whereas on a soap opera, a character who is one year a street thug might next year be a CEO with few of the characters showing any real recollection of this character's previous economic and social standing. But like a soap opera, Game of Thrones is decreasingly interested in making sense or being consistent. The show has always had a problem for its blind spot regarding the lower classes, but the hyperspeed melodrama in which the show has engaged since last season has made this problem even clearer. The show remains entertaining to watch thanks to genuinely good performances, beautiful locations and costumes, and surprising character developments and juxtapositions--those last two being characteristics of soap operas, too. But, hey, I'm not here to knock soap operas. Churning out a script every day is an impressive feat for the writers and delivering decent performances is a perhaps even more impressive feat for the actors, which is why so many of the best actors in films have had their beginnings in the world of soap operas. But when a show has the time and money of Game of Thrones, one tends to expect more substance.

Spoilers after the screenshot

We actually have one moment among the lower classes in last night's episode where a man in tavern in King's Landing makes drunken boasts regarding Cersei's "Walk of Shame" last season. This is a reminder of the distinctly unrealistic and unexplored reactions from the crowd last season. The point of the scene now is not to explore the thoughts and feelings of the common people but rather to show Cersei is taking vengeance on each and every heckler with her cool new zombie Mountain.

I do find the contrast between the zombie magic versus the High Sparrow's religion to be an interesting, vague mirror of Catholicism versus Protestantism. Though of course the philosophy of atonement the Sparrow's people are into is very Catholic. Speaking of the High Sparrow, it's nice to see Jonathan Pryce back again.

Though even he still can't carry all the weight of establishing a religious sect made up of the common people without actually introducing us to any of those common people. Since he invoked this idea again in his confrontation with Jaimie maybe we'll actually see it explored. Mostly, though, when the Sparrow talked about how all of his followers are poor, I thought, "Yes, as extras without lines or even faces in focus they're probably being paid far less."

But the real, big problem with the episode involved the lamest character on the series to date: Ramsay, and his father, Roose, and it is again related to the blind spot for the lower classes I mentioned above. Roose lays into Ramsay for yet another display of bad foresight and stupidity about politics in the younger Bolton. Then Ramsay stabs him in the gut, instantly killing him.

This is because another Bolton son has come into the world and Ramsay's claim to the Bolton throne is imperilled. And yet, as Ramsay has long been worried about this, one has to ask, why didn't he kill his father sooner? It's obviously not due to sentimental attachment--Ramsay sheds no tear now. The answer to the question is obvious--Ramsay needed his father; presumably it was Roose the men rallied around--Roose had all the political capital both within the Bolton territories and in terms of relations with lords of other territories. Why does he feel comfortable killing his father, his brother, and his brother's mother now? He's intimidated the maester into saying Roose was poisoned, how's he going to explain the death of the baby and mother, particularly when everyone in the crowded courtyard saw him leading the woman and kid to the kennel?

One can explain all this the lazy way and say, "Ramsay is crazy." But that wouldn't explain why Roose, a man obviously so concerned with politics, has no loyal friends among his people. Is Ramsay charismatic? We hear the Boltons have lots of men, how do they feel about Ramsay? Or Roose? I ask the question again and again--who are these people?

The problem, I would say, is that the writers are coming from the perspective of modern men who have no connexion or interaction with the people who produce their clothing, food, or other basic needs so they don't know how to show how a society really works from the ground up. They also don't care and neither, I think, does the average viewer. Something with a simpler logic is desired--a soap opera. Which is fine. But it makes anyone who complains the show is too dark look pretty silly. Too dark? This is your daydream. It's a reflection of you.

I liked the ending of the episode, I like how long they milked the resurrection scene, even though we inevitably got the sudden deep breath shot. Thank the gods they preserved Kit Harrington's modesty with the cloth over his junk, heaven forbid we see the naughty bits.

Gods at Hand

A mute, unbeatable killer is held captive, wandering through the wilderness with a group of men who force him to fight for sport. The captive is a Norseman and he has one eye, the movie is 2011's Valhalla Rising so, if you're like me, you'll assume this man is Odin. But this is never said in the film--it's a movie of few words, almost more like a series of beautiful still images. The carefully posed nature of every shot interferes a little with the effect of the story but for the most part it's an entrancing rumination.

Mads Mikkelsen plays One-Eye who, after he escapes from his captors, falls in with a small group of Christian crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. One-Eye never speaks a word and seems mainly in it for the pleasure of killing. A little boy (Maaren Stevenson), who previously belonged to One-Eye's captors, seems to interpret One-Eye's silences for the Christians.

This works as an interesting metaphor and commentary for religion. The Boy is like a priest to One-Eye's god--the Boy says things people take as One-Eye's word partly because the Boy knows a little more about One-Eye than the others and can infer some things and partly because One-Eye's silence would be too infuriating to accept. As with God, in the absence of real knowledge of his will, a representative's word on the subject is needed to fill the void.

The Christians tell the boy stories of Christ which eerily match with One-Eye's story, too. Most of the movie, though, is silence as carefully composed shots with shadows arranged with perfect calculation play on faces and standing figures.

When they arrive somewhere that is definitely not Jerusalem, the Christian in charge (Ewan Stewart), seems to start channelling Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The Christians look mad next to the cool, quiet reality of One-Eye.