So it turns
out that the purple thing from the last thing was Louis’ own sense of emotional
wellbeing, desperate to have him back in a last minute plot twist of
mind-boggling dimensions. He burnt it with a make shift flame hose round the
back of a local Nandos and walked off into the sunset, gargling to himself and
thinking of all the fine china he could afford now he was a possible
schizophrenic.
The creature wasn’t dead. It leapt on his back, all purple and stuck, screaming about it’s immunity to fire as a result of being a metaphysical construct of his own mind, that he needed it to be a full man, to shield him from the sunspots careering in front of their vision. ‘Why did I walk into the sun?’ He wondered, but what he really meant was ‘I need a superhero’, but what he really meant was MY EYEBALLS ARE POPPING. The creature squealed as a DVD player made of liquid heat seared its way into his arm. It was a film by James Gunn. They flailed together for a bit more, just to keep things interesting, then the movie started.
SUPER
dMYD DVD
Starring
Rainn Wilson
Y
Two old men sit at a chessboard screaming at
each other, one’s wearing frat-boy shorts and a baseball cap and he’s all ‘KICK
ASS!’ and the other’s in an Edwardian wig, he’s giggling and mumbling ‘Oh, how
delightfully SUPER!’ under his breath. He wins; the pieces fly in the air and
embed themselves in the Kick Ass Octogenarian’s skull in a breathtaking display
of overt symbolism and kinetic-mahogany wood magnetism. In the declining spate
of superheroes going all ‘real’ recently nobody seems to have noticed that
they’re all rubbish and about as realistic as Michael Fassenbender’s Magneto
accent. They’re balls – Super’s got
balls, it represents a troubling jump closer to our everyday world in that the
hero is a barely-functioning sociopath with a love for blunt objects and
screaming, whilst Ellen Page portrays his kid sidekick as a genuinely
terrifying nerd rapist obsessed with blood, swearing and bone fractures. It’s a
film au fait with all the tropes that have gone before it, smacking clichés
with clever wit and dumb set pieces that’ll have you spewing beer onto your
shoes and gaping in amazement.
It’s knowing and it knows it, too stylised to
be the true dirt-bag Mean Streets grit fest that the genre’s
crying out for, but at least that lets it shoehorn in musical sections and
increasingly-amusing animation, as well as letting Kevin Bacon play a bastard
in both this and the appallingly inferior X-Men
First Class. The two films are a six degree-nightmare – fresh from Kick Ass, Jane Goldman and Michael
Vaughn fucked up with Fox’s demands on the dwindling X-Franchise, whereas they
should have done something like this: no budget, no constraints, barely any
morals, it’s the film Ass-Kick wishes
it could have been, even with that swearing purple girl, and as such deserves
it’s place on any comic book fan’s DVD rack, albeit littered with Dorito crumbs
and stinking of whiskey. Swearing purple girls? Purple girls swearing? Girls
swearing purple?
It was a girl. Louis’ emotions were a purplewoman, poured into the shape of a gigantic orb designed to protect him from the
flares of our sun. He sat there, encased within his own mind, as it gently sang
him a lullaby with the vocal range of Sarah Vaughn.
All hell’s
a poppin’
My Icarus
Line
The lava
fields tremble
We’ll have
a great time
You’re
stuck in your own head
Way out in
the stars
No way to
get back home
No door left
ajar
And the
people can’t hear you
They don’t
give a damn
There’s one
guy who knows you
He’s
Charlie Kaufman
He’s
written a movie
It makes
little sense
But if
we’re to escape the infinite density following the collapse of this star we’d
better watch it and understand the analogy I’m trying to sing
The purple face looked angry, if beautiful.
Realising that physical attractiveness was the only emotion worth bothering
about, Louis woke up and watched the film, lighting a cigarette by scratching a
match against a jagged edge of hi passing purple jollity. It sparked.
ADAPTATION
dMYD DVD
Starring
Nicholas Cage and Nicholas Cage
Y
There’s room for guttural emotion, there’s
acres for vicarious thrills and stomach twists and tear ducts. There’s the
sensual people, you’ve seen them, a billion strong and twisting round the
corners of the world’s cinemas, queuing and jonesy and waiting for Saw Five and Hostel Eight and Final
Destination Forty Five Thousand and Fifty Seven. They need the kick that these
visceral bastard films can bring. There are movies that make you feel, and
they’re great, but there are movies that do that and are also very clever; the
remove between feeling and thinking is the key to all things. And Charlie
Kaufman’s having trouble with it.
A
beautiful film and an extremely clever one, like Citizen Kane Adaptation
layers itself in different levels of reality and perception, but unlike Orson
Welles’ fabupiece it has the sense to tether it’s ruminations to three very
different characters, each representing the different types of attachment to
life that Kaufman’s talking about. Chris Cooper’s Orchid Thief is the man with
real sorrows, the chump who lost his mother in a car crash and fills the void
with collecting everything under the sun, while Meryl Streep quietly nicks the
film as a journalist who can only connect through the thief, his life becoming
her fiction, letting her engage with a world that she’s lost by looking through
other people’s lives. And then there’s the brothers Kaufman. Charlie’s problem
is that he’s seeing the world through too many filters, a man looking at Susan
Orlean looking at John Laroche, the endless adaptations of the title. And he
has to write a film about it. That he succeeds is a testament to Kaufman’s
genius, that it’s entertaining as well is a small miracle, mainly down to the
healing hands of his brother Donald, a sad casualty of the film’s descent into
crowd-pleasing and probably one of the greatest characters ever created.
Nicholas Cage deserves a vat of credit here for downplaying his roles and
understanding what’s going on in the first place, delivering possibly his
finest performances in a lifetime of great (in both senses of the word) turns,
ably backed up by everyone around him.
The result is a film that has to be seen to
be understood, to be felt and thought about and immersed in to get all its
twists and depths. A writer’s movie on the surface, adapting a little deeper
lets you see it for the accessible piece it really is, the perfect mid-point
between Malkovich’s monkey-shines and the outright insanity that is Synecdoche New York. As such, it’s
probably Kaufman’s best, and by default one of the greatest movies ever made,
with a level for everyone and a joke every five seconds.
But if you watch it on any form of
mind-altering substance you’ll soon find yourself trapped in a flimsy analogy
being hurtled at billions of miles an hour around a callous ball of burning gas
an insane distance from your home, your pets and the people you love. Louis
slipped in his emotion orb, struggling to grasp the slick sides of his
hopefulness and courage as they slathered around the inner surface of the ball.
It was getting hotter, and he’d only managed to stuff his fear into the pockets
of his jeans. He was sweating.
‘I get it!’ he screamed. ‘It’s to do with the
film! Both of them! SORT OF!’
His
emotions smiled and gave him a peck on the cheek, forming the words ACCEPTANCE
in huge purple lettering. With a flash they were sat in a plastic replica
Winnebago dangling off the edge of the Hoover Dam.
He started to comedown. BUT WHICH WAY?
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