The Mist

(HERE BE SPOILERS, BIG SPOILERS)

I’m not sure what I finally think of The Mist, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella. Its premise is pure B-movie: a bunch of folks are holed up in a small-town supermarket as an otherworldly mist – one filled with ugly, terrifying, and very deadly creatures – creeps across the world. Sounds damn good to me, and I liked the King novella a lot when I read it many, many years ago. The movie, though, has some great stuff and some really not-good stuff.

The setup is strong, and it leads to some brilliantly horrific scenes, like one in a darkened pharmacy overrun by – well, overrun by things you don’t want to run into. There’s also a great bit when several characters are trapped in a car and some barely-seen behemoth stomps by; Darabont captures not just terror, but convincing strains of awe and wonder, and at times like that the film is almost Spielbergian.

Almost. As soon as that thought bubbled up in the theatre, I became keenly aware that Spielberg would be doing this with much more visual style.

(One side note. While the film is remarkably faithful to King’s novella, I do give Darabont points for one very wise change. In the novella but not the film, the male and female leads have a quick hookup. I guess there’s no sex like Trapped in a Supermarket by Giant Bugs from Another Dimension sex.)

On the downside, you have to sit through a lot of clunky dialogue – most of it lifted directly from King, from what I remember – and some ridiculous hammery from Marcia Gay Harden, playing the supermarket’s resident religious loonie. Seriously, they should take away her Oscar for this one. Holy shit.

You also have to endure some half-hearted attempts to dress up the pulp thrills with thematic resonance, such as in a painfully expository scene in which the characters discuss the thin facade of civilization that masks humankind’s essential savagery.

Just to be clear, I’m not complaining that The Mist actually has some ambitions – I’m all for thematic resonance, even for pulp thrills. It’s the half-heartedness I object to: if King/Darabont really want to say something, surely they could say something that hasn’t already been said, and more eloquently, a hundred times?

For example, one angle that seemed underexploited to me was that the mist forces the characters to engage with nature – even a gruesome burlesque of nature – in a way that almost nobody has to any more. Which could have led to a more nuanced exploration of what place values and meaning have in a purely “natural” world that runs on the laws of the jungle. The humans wonder what the mist means – hence the religious loonie’s prominence in the plot – and what their own lives mean in a mistified world. But the giant spiders that prowl around out there don’t think about what it all means – they just want to eat something and avoid getting eaten by something else.

And then there’s the ending, which was radically reworked along the journey from text to film and which is, as everyone agrees, a holy-fuck moment. Let’s just say that a small band of weary survivors runs out of gas – literally – and makes a very dramatic decision about what to do with themselves. But if they had just held on for five more minutes….

I’m pretty sure the King novella ends on the word hope (it’s amazing what you remember of something you read when you were 16), and the necessity of keeping on keeping on is one of its main themes. I suppose the movie’s ending offers the same message – but this time delivered as a very stern lecture.

I consider myself more or less an atheist at this point in my life. Nathan points out here that faith in a guiding almighty is not a matter of choice, that you don’t choose whether or not to believe, and I wholeheartedly agree, since I would love to believe but can’t seem to any more. And that’s not because the world is a horrible place or evil goes unpunished or any of that stuff. There are no reasons per se. I just look around in my, er, soul for belief and find none.

OK, getting off track, sorry about that. So: I consider myself more or less an atheist at this point in my life. But one holdover of my Catholic upbringing is a gut superstition that it is not your place to decide when your time is up. That is decided for you.

That said, the controversial decision made by the characters late in the film still seems like an eminently reasonable one to me. And I really don’t know what Darabont was trying to get at by immediately (immediately!) showing us that it was the wrong decision. Was he trying to send a choose-life message? Or did he just consider it a sardonic O. Henry/Twilight Zone twist, albeit an exceptionally cruel one? Me, I was just left scratching my head; the ending didn’t so much tilt the movie’s tone as obliterate it, leaving nothing but empty bafflement.

(Finally, on a lighter note, one thing has always totally undermined King’s novella for me, and likewise this movie: I almost laughed out loud every time the word “mist” was used. “There’s something in the mist!” “I’d like to know more about this mist.” “We have to try and get out of the mist!” Bear in mind that the “mist” in question is a classic pea-souper that covers everything and allows no visibility for more than a couple of feet. So what human would look at it and call it anything but “fog”? However, no one in the novella/movie is allowed to use the f-word at all – because John Carpenter already had dibs on “The Fog.”)

Flowers & organs & plants & animals

• Plants and Animals, “Guru/Sinnerman” (buy digitally here)

This has jam-band trappings, I suppose, but it just sounds like great jazz to me. The repeating vamp/pulse of the bassline holds things steady while guitars & bongos orbit in crazy looping flares. And then, holy bonus, it morphs into “Sinnerman”! No one can do it like Nina Simone, but still, I’m usually inclined to be charitable with other versions – God bless ’em for trying and all that. This one holds up nicely; I like the distended phrasing on the vocals. (The whole thing also reminds me very much of Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun,” another song I dearly love.)

Plants and Animals are apparently from Montreal, and this is from a four-song EP called with/avec that’s definitely worth seeking out. One song, “Who’s Lola?” comes off like a veritable mini-suite a la The Who 1967. Another one, “Faerie Dance,” is beguilingly pretty, and I have to give them props for having the stones to call a song “Faerie Dance” without, well, being Marc Bolan.

What with/avec also really reminds me of is this:

• Six Organs of Admittance, “School of the Flower” (buy here)

See what I mean? The arpeggiated little guitar riff maintains coherence the same way the bassline does in “Guru/Sinnerman,” allowing everything else to twist & howl at will and setting up great furnace-roar electric guitar work.

School of the Flower was probably my fave album of whatever that year was – 2005, I guess. Alas, I find the two Six Organs records since, including the brand-new one, pleasant enough but not that interesting or inviting. To my ears Flower had a sonic variety and a loose, associative quality that they haven’t recaptured; the stuff since then seems dry and schematic in comparison. In fact, it’s with/avec that sounds like the Six Organs album I’ve been waiting on for a couple years.

The hum is coming from H.E.R.

I’ve always dug what I’ve heard of the band Birdbrain – jittery horn-based rhythms being welcome in my life – so I checked out with interest this new band H.E.R., which contains two Birdbrain overlaps, singer Yvette Perez and trombonist Peter Zummo. (His Zummo with an X CD has been a mainstay on my stereo over the past year as well.)

The H.E.R. album is called Songs About the Mysteries of Housework and Nature, so clearly there are thematic ambitions here. I will leave it to other listeners to discuss those, save to say that the record conveys a distinct & effective atmosphere of anxiety.

Musically, it’s slower in tempo than the Birdbrain stuff I’ve heard, more contemplative, though still with an uneasy roil. Some of the tracks are, frankly, a little ethereal and chilly for my taste. But on others the tonal interplay of the vocals, trombone, and keyboards is fascinating – all those elements sinking into & rising up out of each other like shifting, sucking waves of quicksand. Looks calm and nearly motionless from afar but up close it’s dangerous. You lean over to listen closer and then you’re sinking too.

• H.E.R., “Unruly Place” (buy here)

Plus two related listens, one short and one long:

• Birdbrain, “Sea Cow” (buy I Fly here)

• Peter Zummo, “Sung, Played, Heard” (buy Experimenting with Household Chemicals here)

Now we’re dreaming

• Masonic, “Way Gone By”

I like this one because although it starts out pretty straight – skating-rink organ, Beach Boys sighs in the background – the band seems to get bored, stops to take stock at around the 1:30 mark. They resume cautiously, stepping slow, and then at 2:06 some unseen pair of hands picks up the song and gives it a shake, and they all slide around and try to right themselves, the drummer coming down hard, the keyboardist and the guitar player rattled, the singer sitting down and dizzy but still singing.

It’s not crazy avant-garde or anything – it’s still very pretty & chirpy – but you know.

The album is Things I Am Guilty Of and I believe it officially comes out today. Band website here.

No Country for Old Men

I haven’t felt much urgency about the Coen brothers for a few years: I thought The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Ladykillers were both duds (though I loved the gospel music in the latter), and I never even got around to seeing Intolerable Differences. But I was still excited about No Country for Old Men; I haven’t read the Cormac McCarthy novel, but from what I knew of it, it seemed like just the kind of thing the Coens could work well with.

Well, now I’ve seen the movie, and (a) I loved it, (b) I already want to see it again, and (c) I still suspect that it was a failure. Only the Coens can make me feel this way. The first time I saw The Big Lebowski I thought it was a mess; only on subsequent viewings did I come to see it as a masterwork. And I still flip-flop on Barton Fink; sometimes I think it’s tedious, sometimes I think it’s top-shelf Coens.

(MAJOR SPOILERS RE NO COUNTRY AHEAD)

No Country for Old Men takes place in 1980. Llewelyn (Josh Brolin), an underemployed welder, is out hunting in the Texas desert and comes across a fresh massacre – dead drug dealers, a truck full of their merchandise, and a satchel stuffed with $2-million. Being an inscrutable, morally ambiguous, old-school tough guy, he of course takes the money and runs, and soon enough Mexican drug dealers, an American fixer, and the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) are all after him. So is a patient, slow-moving, dead-eyed psycho named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who, it’s established early on, would just as soon kill you as look at you. Ostensibly working for a druglord, Chigurh soon goes renegade and pursues the money for himself, though it’s hard to imagine what use he has for it, since he’s presented from start to finish as essentially an inhuman bogeyman.

Whatever problems anyone might have with the movie, I don’t think you can dispute that this is bravura filmmaking. The wide shots of Texas scrubland are beautiful and nerve-wracking. The pacing is genius, with contemplative stretches taut with tension and then suddenly lit by flares of violence. And during some of the suspense scenes – the best are the ones in which Chigurh stalks Llewelyn in various motels – the editing/storyboarding plays us expertly without pandering.

The movie also benefits from a certain hammy sensibility that McCarthy and the Coens apparently share. This is evident in dialogue that’s often pure cornpone: “Where’d you get that?” asks Llewelyn’s wife when she sees the money satchel. “At the getting place,” he replies. And when the sheriff’s deputy describes a crime scene as a mess, the sheriff says, “If it ain’t, it’ll do until the real mess gets here.” Also shamelessly theatrical is Chigurh’s weapon of choice: a compressed-air-powered cattle-killing machine that’s good for blowing off door locks and punching holes in human skulls. These little corny touches are cool with me; they all somehow work within the universe the movie creates for itself.

And there’s nothing hammy about the photography or direction: as the chase continues and the bodies pile up, the camera registers it all with a careful, dispassionate gaze, observing and missing nothing. (Except for a snatch of mariachi music in a scene in Mexico, there’s not one note of music on the soundtrack until the closing credits.)

For me, the trouble starts in the last quarter of the movie, when the storytelling suddenly gets diffuse. Until now, the movie has shown you what’s happening with great patience and care, even if the meaning behind what’s happening isn’t always clear. But suddenly, major events are treated as afterthoughts, the pivotal character (Llewelyn) is unceremoniously dispensed with offscreen in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, and it’s not always clear what’s even happening. I don’t mind elliptical, and I like movies that leave room for ambiguity, but it does seem like a jarring turn in a movie that’s been so methodical for its first 90 minutes.

Also in the last half-hour, the Tommy Lee Jones character is meant to emerge as the moral centre of a film that previously didn’t have one. But for me, at least, that doesn’t take – they haven’t done enough with him for his character to carry that weight. If anything, in his early scenes the sheriff seems complacent, albeit kindly and trustworthy. And even the meaty scenes Jones gets late in the film somehow don’t connect, or at least they didn’t for me.

Indeed, if they did, I suspect you wouldn’t have some critics complaining about the apparent nihilism in No Country for Old Men. I don’t buy that myself: the sheriff’s closing musings are clearly supposed to represent a howl at the meaninglessness and cruelty of the world. Switch tragedy for comedy, and it’s the flipside of the Cowboy’s speech at the end of The Big Lebowski about “the way the whole durned human comedy keeps on perpetuating itself.”

But if, as the movie moves toward its close, we’re supposed to start caring instead of just observing, why does the movie itself seem to care about its characters less?

On the other hand, it may be that that’s the real genius of No Country for Old Men: as we (theoretically) start to care, to move beyond being titillated and awaken our own sense of morality and wonder how it can possibly fit into this blood-soaked world the Coens are showing us, the camera itself suddenly gets queasy, turning away, unwilling to look on so coldly as Llewelyn meets his fate (and his wife meets hers).

Even if that was the aim, though, I’m still not convinced they pulled it off, again because of the failure of the sheriff character to resonate. But who knows – I still look forward to seeing it all again in the not-too-distant future.