I finally made it through the rest of Pearl Jam this evening. That led me to a CD of Pet Shop Boys and then three Peter Gabriel songs, most of which were known to me already. The same with Peter Paul and Mary (“Ten Years Together”), which I’m on now. Once I’m done with PP&M, I have 16 hours of “P” (Pink Floyd through Processor) before getting to “Q” …
I’ll leave the next letter until tomorrow or later.
This afternoon I tossed “Archangel” in the DVD player; last night (early morning) I watched “Slither.”
Spoilers follow.
I saw the trailer to “Slither” on Apple’s trailers site before I left for Berlin, I think. It bombed at the box office but was well received critically for the most part. It’s a “horror-comedy” of sorts.
The tropes are all common but the plotting is tight enough. An alien-infested meteor crashes outside a redneck southern town and the little bugger infects and takes over the body and mind of Michael Rooker (“Grant”), the husband of Elizabeth Banks (“Starla”), the local beauty who married the older, wealthier man straight out of high school. She’s now a high school biology teacher, and the topic we see during a short scene is evolution and survival of the fittest … cue alien invader. Nathan Fillion plays the sheriff, who’s been carrying a torch for Starla for years; he’s the ah-shucks, good-looking, straight-shooting if not terribly sophisticated guy she should have gone for. As the alien gets hungry it starts killing local pets, then kidnaps the town trailer-trash loose-woman to turn her into a host/mother for all the slithering, brain-sucking jelly-beans that show up in the movie’s second half. Eventually the cops and the mayor, who’s fond of shouting “cocksucker” (he’s a Deadwood reject), figure out that Grant is bad news, that something is really wrong, and, finally, that they’re under an alien invasion.
They posse sets a trap for rapidly-mutating Grant at a local farm, but Grant leads them to a barn with trailer-slut-mother, the babies are hatched and start taking people over, and when they attack the house of the yokel used in the hunting expedition (taking over the twin girls, mother, and father), we are introduced to the 2nd female protagonist, the eldest daughter, who is attacked while taking a bath — this lends the movie poster its image — but since this is a PG-13 movie, all we get are her calves and shoulders. Soon the sheriff, mayor, Starla, and the daughter make a run for it. The mayor is turned into a flesh-eater, Starla is set up as a sacrifice to Grant, and so the sheriff and daughter get ass-kicking duty.
The plotting and writer were tight in one particular instance. This is an “alien” invasion, but how do we know so? Or rather, how are our characters to know this? For all they know, there’s just some funky squid-snail-Grant-mutant running around killing things, and then, *poof*, there are slithering slugs turning neighbors into zombies … but how do we know where they came from? How do our hicks learn to defeat them? Kylie, the daughter, is attacked by a slug, which tries to get to her brain by entering her mouth, but she bites down on it and tries to pull it out, and in the process she gets glimpses of the alien’s “collective memory” — where it came from, how it destroyed other worlds, that it has merged with Grant’s consciousness, etc. We see sparks — and the conceit, which is a good one, is that these beasts are all connected through a sort of telepathy, or, perhaps radio transmission, an electrical signal, perhaps. This electrical signal is also how they control a body/host, and Kylie, while not taken over, still gets some of the “mind melding” … so she, once she pulls the slug from her mouth and escapes, becomes our insider-source of information on 1) where the alien came from, 2) how it works, and 3) how to defeat it.
Sounds reasonable enough to me.
Slither would have been even better as an R-rated movie.
This afternoon I watched “Archangel,” which is based on a Robert Harris novel of the same name, and it stars Daniel Craig, the new James Bond (“Casino Royale,” 2006). I’d only read one Harris novel, his 1992 “Fatherland,” which depicts an alternate history in which the Nazis won WWII.
I liken “Archangel” to a Russia-oriented “Da Vinci Code” by way of Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita.”
My “logic” goes as follows. In “The Master and Margarita” we have a “present day” Russia / Soviet Union narrative (the cold North) and an old, Christ-era Rome / Jerusalem (hot South) narrative that deals with Pontius Pilate. The two are woven together, and I won’t give much away except to say that they are parallel tales, almost allegorically linked, so we see a Master-Pontius (or Master-Christ?) parallel and a Russia-Rome parallel. Let’s continue the Russia and Christianity parallel as a conceit for a moment. The idea behind “The Da Vinci Code” is that Jesus married Mary and had a child, who had children, etc., down through the ages, such that several ancient and seemingly extinct European royal dynasties were actually the-line-of-Christ … the rightful rulers of Europe, so to speak. In “Archangel” the idea is that Stalin, mythical figure of the U.S.S.R. (but not as long dead as Jesus) had a child, and this fact was hidden upon his death, until a long-secret diary is found, exposing the truth. As in “The Da Vinci Code” an American professor gets involved with the daughter of a dead man in the middle of the conspiracy, and as in that story our protagonists are being chased by a couple different groups, the (secret) Police are involved, and the identity and motives of the bad guys are not exactly clear. The difference — to give a few things away — is that in Dan Brown’s novel there is a conspiracy to keep things secret; here the bad guys want to make Stalin’s son public knowledge, after years of secrecy, so as to put Russia back on the right track. It’s where “The Da Vinci Code” could have gone in the future, when it was time for the “rightful heir” to be revealed and try to return his/her line to the throne.
And the movie follows genre or fiction conventions: if you reveal a gun, sooner or later ….
