His Dark Materials will be incomplete

While it had its moments, and was based on a provocative and interesting series, I wasn’t that impressed with The Golden Compass movie adaptation. Still, I’m disappointed that the decision has been made that the subsequent books will not be filmed. It apparently did very poor box office in the US, so it isn’t a surprise, I suppose.

I have to compare it to the Narnia movie, though. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a great gilded turd, an awful piece of poor storytelling and suspension-of-disbelief shattering illogic, with nice cgi. The Golden Compass had a story that was given short shrift in the movie, was kind of a mangled mess, but was better than C.S. Lewis’s fairy tale for the inane; it also had better and more imaginative graphics. Which one of those series is going to be inflicted on us many times over, though? The one with the comfortable Christian themes, of course. It had a guaranteed undiscerning and credulous audience.

Goodbye, Vampira

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Sad news…Vampira has died. She was very young for a vampire, only 86, and there’s no word on whether it was a stake or sunlight that ended her long career as one of the rare Finnish vampires (real name: Maila Syrjäniemi). You may recall her from her important role in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

It’s the last sad whimper to the lingering death of an old tradition. When I was a young’un, there were horror hosts everywhere—you knew that if you turned on the TV anywhere at about 11 on a Friday or Saturday night, there’d be somebody in a Halloween costume introducing some old black-and-white horror movie. It was campy, it was predictable, the movies tended to be awful (although when one of the old Universal classics with Karloff or Chaney, or anything with Vincent Price, was scheduled, I made a special effort to watch it), and it was always fun. Rmember those cheap Japanese monster movies? Roger Corman’s low-budget rip-offs of Edgar Allen Poe titles, with content completely divorced from anything Poe ever wrote? That phenomenal wave of British horror coming out of Hammer Studios? Them, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Amazing Colossal Man, The Blob—all that 50s paranoia about nuclear bombs?

Many of us godless people still identify as cultural Christians because that was the background of our upbringing, but I think my late night inoculations with classic horror and sci-fi movies had a deeper, more long-lasting influence on my life than those boring, unentertaining, unengaging Sunday mornings spent in church pews. I am a cultural Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau, Morbius, Pretorius, Phibes, and even Vampira — and they were all the more important as shapers of my perspective because there was no pretense that they were real, and because their portrayals were open to criticism and mockery.

The limited representation of movie atheists

I saw the new Will Smith movie, I Am Legend, last night. In short, it was far worse than I expected, with a drawn out and rather boring beginning (Smith is lonely, everyone is dead except for his dog. Got it), and the ending felt like a stapled-on feel-good absurdity that didn’t follow from the premise—and is only a happy ending if your dream of paradise is an armed camp of Christians. The only virtue I’d heard about the story is that the hero is openly atheist … but that was a disappointment, too, because I discovered he was the wrong kind of atheist.

Atheists in the movies aren’t that common. Most seem to be cast as amoral opportunists — the villains. They are rarely cast as the hero, and when they are there is only one atheist stereotype allowed in that role, and Will Smith filled it perfectly.

The acceptable atheist is the one who has faced so much tragedy, whose life has been damaged by cruel fate to such a degree that his declaration that there is no god is understandable. He is a failed Job; he’s portrayed not as an actual contented atheist, but as someone who has broken under the burden a god has placed on him, and is therefore a sympathetic figure, and also is implicitly endorsing the audience’s beliefs about god. Job without god, after all, is just a deluded loser.

That’s the standard trope: the atheist is a broken man, a nihilist, a cynic, someone who has come to his disbelief as a consequence of a devastating emotional experience. This is the kind of atheist theists are comfortable with — but it’s not the kind of atheists the New Atheistswann are, and especially not the scientific branch. We don’t fit into their unthinking convention, which is probably why they stuck us with the label “new”.

There are atheists who look on a tragedy and cry, “There is no god,” in despair. But we are atheists who look on beauty and complexity and awesome immensity and shout out, “There is no god!” and we are glad.

That’s the distinction we’ve got to get across. We are fulfilled, happy atheists who rejoice in the superfluity of the old myths. We generally don’t have a tragic backstory — quite the contrary, we’ve come to our conclusions because we have found natural explanations satisfying and promising.

wann: who are not “new”.

Apocalyptic suckiness?

I was looking forward to the movie, I Am Legend, that is coming to Morris in the next month or so, but the first review I’ve seen is not promising. I’ve read the book and the previous film adaptations; the original I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a classic with an excellent twist, raising the troubling question of just who the monster is. The first movie, The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price is also good, and sticks to the story fairly faithfully.

The one most people have seen, The Omega Man, is awful. It throws away the ending of the story with its disturbing attempt to make people think and instead makes the protagonist a self-sacrificing hero who saves humanity … and the ending, with Charlton Heston bleeding and dying with his arms flung wide in the standard position of dying messiahs everywhere, was a self-parody of seriousness that had audiences laughing when I saw it — it turned the whole movie into a low-rent Christian allegory.

The new movie with Will Smith looked promising. The ads have all focused on the post-apocalyptic desolation of the protagonist’s situation, and since they restored Matheson’s original title (which was actually highly relevant to the ending), there was hope that it might actually be worth seeing.

Unfortunately, it’s more Omega Man than Last Man on Earth (that link contains many spoilers, beware). Worse, the Christian allegory has been expanded to consume all, and it’s set up as a conflict between evil science that creates plagues that destroy humanity vs. vague mystical prophecies and the salvation of mankind through faith.

Ugh. This is a disappointment. I’ll probably go see it anyway because I trundle through almost every movie that comes to Morris, but I expect to start gagging halfway through it now … at least it’s always good to go into a movie with low expectations. Alas, the high production values I’m seeing in the trailers probably means I won’t even get a laugh out of the ending — it takes monumental cheesiness, as The Omega Man had, to redeem a bad movie with at least a little amusement.

It takes the conservative ideologues at NRO to add that special frisson of stupidity to the reviews.

Shhhh. The end of I Am Legend is religious. And the beginning of the movie is anti-science. The military is a force for good, too. Shhhh. Our little secret. And what must be surprising to those on the Left, a movie that’s anti-science, religious and pro-military earned close to $80 million over the weekend. It is frustrating that none of the pre-release hype focused on the conservative aspects of the film, however.

Yay! It’s a plus that the movie is religious, pro-military, and anti-science! And for that extra dollop of idiocy, the guy brags about how a religious, pro-military, and anti-science movie can bring in the big bucks, and then notes that that agenda was never mentioned in the advertising. Duh.

A Golden Compass boycott?

My daughter works at our small town movie theater, and she’s got the inside scoop: apparently the locals are boycotting The Golden Compass. Attendance is down, almost the only people going are university students, the owner has had calls from people in the community complaining about the movie. Darn. I guess the theater should have booked Mel Gibson’s Passion again — that thing hung around forever here, and had loads of people showing up every night.

Ah, rural America.

The Golden Compass

I suspect that many reviews of this movie are going to begin with some variant of the sentiment, “I was disappointed.” This one is no exception. It’s just not a very good movie; it’s one that packed in lots of miscellaneous detail from the book it is based on, but thereby threw away the core of the story … and it shows. It’s a movie that races along inventively, but futilely, leaving you wondering at the end what the point of all the rushing about of armies of strange characters was all about.

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