High Fidelity

I've been stuck on High Fidelity for months.  Too much to say.

Perhaps more than any other film, I distinctly feel how much I've changed since the first time I saw this one, way back in that little movie theater in Nelsonville, Ohio more than a decade ago.  

Back then, I sat there with the girl I was seeing, and over and over, I saw myself on the screen.  At 24 years old, I needed a film to tell me that what I was feeling and thinking about women and music was normal.  Other people were out there, and they were like me.  (For the record, I screwed that relationship up pretty badly.  So it goes.)

Now I realize that yes, other people like Rob are out there — and mostly they are all self-involved dicks who don't deserve much more than superficiality, and probably wouldn't recognize much more if they got it.  They are doomed.

I like to think that I've made progress.  I see Rob as a sad protagonist that I can't stand.  Watching him is like looking at a home movie of myself from years ago and wishing I could reach through and strangle the sullen little kid on the screen (or at least give him a decent haircut).  

He's a calculating misogynist — the kind of man who can't stand the idea of someone else sleeping with his ex, so he goes out and sleeps with someone, as if he's in a race to move on, or enact some sort of revenge...by striking first?

Once he sleeps with someone else, he immediately goes back to obsessing about his ex sleeping with someone else!  Then he flips out when he learns she's slept with the new guy!  But...look at what you just did, asshole!  AAARGGH.  

And because John Cusack is so damned likable, what his character pulls on screen is...okay?  Funny?  His redemption is...earned?  What did he do to earn this, other than going to his ex-girlfriend's father's funeral?  He's an asshole!

That's the first time I've gone off like that about this film and this character.  Ten years ago, I understood him — I felt his pain, even.  Bitches, man!  Women — especially ones who had the audacity to dump me (when I probably deserved it) — were the enemy, and I had so much stored up anger that I should've stayed away from women altogether, but I didn't.  I kept going back out there, and taking that darkness with me.  Baaaad.

These days, I'm still obsessed with collecting music, sure, and I spend a shitload of time and money in record shops and on eBay looking for stuff, and yes, I'm still self-involved (hello...blogging?), but...would I pull this shit?  No.  

I'm not perfect.  I still make plenty of mistakes with other people, but somehow I found a girl who stayed, and accepted all the faults and obsessions and stupidity and mistakes.  She stayed.  But more on that in a minute.

If not for the demise of physical media and my own canny move to stay in grad school through pretty much the entirety of George W. Bush's first term in office, I likely would be running my own record shop into the ground these days, hoping beyond hope that digital downloads and the death of physical media wouldn't be my undoing.  Of course, owning my own record shop also depends on if health care were affordable and if I could afford to pay myself a living salary and if the bullshit of owning and running a small business weren't so soul-crushing.  That's a lot of "if," but whatever.  

Mostly, record stores seem like a good life, but they're not.  "It's retail hell," my friend Stevie Ray used to say.  He went out of business a few years later.  But record stores are still cool, you know?  I idealize them.  They're fucking great.  They're my church.  Not like in Empire Records, which was nothing like any decent record shop I ever knew (more like a Sam Goody or the like).  No — record shops have an allure, a palpable attitude about them, and that hazy, nicotine and vinyl and incense smell.

Record stores are a fantasy that doesn't really deliver — at least not for me, anyway.  I know plenty of people who work in shops and have great lives and are happy.  I just couldn't get there, for whatever reason.  Loved the free music and the conversations.  Hated the retail drudgery.  But no job is perfect.  If record shops paid $60k a year, we'd all work in one.  Maybe.

Still, as a customer, I can't stay away from them.  Tangent: I once heard my dad telling someone about when he was maybe my age, and he'd work all week, and wake up on Saturday morning with this itch, like he had to go out, because there was a bargain out there.  He went out some weekends and would come back with all this stuff — a lawnmower, a car, a piece of furniture — never records.  Dad doesn't give a crap about music.  But I feel the same pull a few times a week — like if I don't check the shops regularly, I'll miss some amazing bargain, like when I found The Jimi Hendrix Concerts for one damned dollar, or both Traveling Wilburys CDs for $2, or when I found this for $90.  You miss stuff by staying home.  I don't club.  I don't karaoke.  I don't camp or climb rocks or ride a bike or take some martial arts class.  I dig around in record shops.  I might love that more than I love writing.

I'm Rob's age now.  But aside from the obsessive record collecting and the occasional (mostly harmless) navel-gazing, I like to think I'm a different guy now.  What changed?  I watched as my friends married off, had kids, bought houses, etc., and I didn't understand.  I kept collecting records.  I kept blowing money.  I kept having these aborted relationships with women.  Two dates, maybe even three, and then nothing.  Flameout.

Eventual solution?  Self-imposed exile.  Done going through the motions, telling the same stories, doing the same things.  I kept going with my gut: "Maybe this new girl is the one."

Finally, I had the same epiphany that Rob has around the 1:40 mark in High Fidelity: "I've come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."  The film helped me get there.  I sort of traversed the same arc he goes through.  On New Year's Eve, 2005, I hung out with some friends, had a great time, and felt hopeful about 2006.  My friends would later say that something about me had changed.  They'd never seen me that way.  What way?  I'm still not sure.  Maybe I was just at peace for once.

And then, along came my wife, our life together, our home, and Rufus, our little house rabbit, who is a total asshole, but we love him anyway.  Boom, almost all at once.

The thing about High Fidelity is in the epiphany.  Music and the messages therein shape how Rob views the world and the people around him, and it's all just fantasy.  And after a while, it's easy to get tired of the fantasy, because the fantasy doesn't deliver.  The bitch about fantasies is that they're perfect, and you can't have that.  

Record stores sound great, until you have to actually do some work or listen to shitty music or stock something you know is awful.  Takes a real adult to work in a record shop and not be an asshole to everyone who buys something you don't like.  That stuff never shows up in the fantasy of sitting around listening to music all day and talking to people about Bowie or whatever.  How cool is it that Nick Hornby sets this book in one of the most fantasized, romanticized places?

High Fidelity isn't really about music.  High fidelity is just another phrase for commitment, and the peace that comes from letting go of the rest of what doesn't matter.  I'm sure there's some Buddhism in here somewhere.  

When you commit to somebody — really, really commit to something real and steady, you get something that transcends the fantasy (even if you get worn out women's underwear occasionally hanging in weird places in the house, or endless piles of shoes placed near virtually every door, or half-full glasses of water left on virtually every flat surface).  

What at first seems like less than the fantasy actually ends up being more than the fantasy, and by miles.  You get to come home to something.  (I say this with the utmost respect for people who come home to an empty home for whatever reason, and do not intend to brag or whatever.  I've done the living alone thing, and by choice, even, and although I like my current situation better, if my marriage doesn't work out, I'm living alone in a shabby apartment for the rest of my life.  Living alone was great, too.)

Yeah, you might still slowly piece together all the deleted Bowie albums on Rykodisc (the ones with the bonus tracks you can't get anywhere else), or maybe you suddenly start putting together the Stones' discography on SACD, or maybe you go through a phase wherein you spend so much money on music at the Borders going-out-of-business sales that you actually wonder whether you'll single-handedly resuscitate the company and/or the entire record industry.  Or maybe that's all just me.

But that doesn't mean I want any of that superficial, material stuff more than the person, the rabbit, the house, the kids (someday), and so on.  All that collecting, that obsessing, that itch on Saturday mornings to go out and find a bargain even as physical media sits on life support...it's all just providing a great soundtrack for a pretty good life.

The Hidden Fortress

George Lucas freely admits taking inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, a film about two meek, bickering peasants who meet a tough general and set out to help a princess. Sound familiar?

The last time I watched this film, in 2007 (I think), I had a flatscreen tube television. I remarked at the time how good the picture was, with just the right amount of grain and flecks of age that add rather than detract from the viewing. Now that I have a much bigger, flat panel HDTV, I'm pretty amazed at how good the DVD looks. I spend most of my time thinking about that when I watch this film.

Simply put, Criterion's 2001 DVD edition looks great. Sharp detail is evident throughout, but especially in scenes that take place in rocky areas (which comprise most of the film's locations). You can see textures in the rock, individual pebbles, clouds of dust, and fine grain in the film. I'm geeking out a bit at how amazing this DVD looks — a DVD, not a Blu-Ray, mind you.

From what I've read, The Hidden Fortress is Kurosawa's first widescreen film. Here's a good blog post on that, if you're interested. He's watched and written about each Kurosawa film in a bit more scholarly way than I'm doing here.

I'm fortunate to have the Criterion release with the 3.0 "Perspecta Sound" mix, which gives the soundtrack a bit more room to breathe. Other Criterion DVDs are plain old mono. If you're a purist who likes old films in mono, that might not bug you. (That track is an option on the 2001 disc, too.) I just prefer the breathing room.

My relationship with Kurosawa films seems to be on and off. I go in phases where I'll want to watch a bunch of his films in a week or two, and then I'm done for a while. I do that with all my favorite directors. Kurosawa is interrupting my Hitchcock phase right now, but I'll get back to Hitch soon enough.

As I watch Kurosawa's films and write about them, I get more interested in other Japanese filmmakers, but don't really know where to start. I've only seen one Yasujiro Ozu film (Tokyo Story), and virtually nothing else. Much of Japanese cinema is a blind spot for me. I need to fix that.

Herzog-Kinski and The Burden of Dreams

Werner Herzog is the kind of madman I can get behind. (For that matter, so is Klaus Kinski.)

Herzog was part of the New German Cinema, which was marked by younger filmmakers working on shoestring budgets but tackling large ideas and drawing a distinct influence from the French New Wave. This era of film is a bit of a blind spot for me, as I've only seen some films by Herzog and Wim Wenders. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films have been on my agenda for some time, specifically World On A Wire (1973). I'll get there someday.

My wife got me the Herzog-Kinski DVD set for my birthday this year. Ever since then I've been stuck, because I kept waiting for that chance to go back and do Aguirre, The Wrath of God, followed by Cobra Verde, followed by Fitzcarraldo, in order to get back to alphabetical order again.

But then I felt compelled to pick up Burden of Dreams, which is a documentary about Herzog's struggles in making Fitzcarraldo, much like Hearts of Darkness is a documentary about Francis Ford Coppola's adventures in making Apocalypse Now. As soon as I bought Burden of Dreams, I screwed up everything.

In an effort to get back on track, I'm watching the whole Herzog-Kinski set in the order Herzog filmed them, squeezing in Burden of Dreams after Fitzcarraldo, and combining them all here. That's not exactly alphabetical order, but that is seven films in all, people. I'm Herzog-Kinski crazy! (And if I don't get through them all at once, I might never blog again.)

First, Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) —

Aguirre, The Wrath of God is the first collaboration between Herzog and Kinski, and in many ways sets the tone for the DVD set. None of Herzog's films are particularly easy to watch, but the ones with Kinski really tap into insanity.

Various stories and legends date to the production of Aguirre, with tales of Kinski and Herzog threatening each other with firearms, and at least one incident when Kinski fired a gun into a tent full of actors and crew members, shooting off someone's finger.

Aguirre is second in command on a small expedition to find El Dorado. In short order, he usurps command of the expedition by encouraging a mutiny, then naming a fat patsy, Don Fernando de Guzman, as the new "emperor" of El Dorado.

Ah, but Don Fernando gets to like his power, and Aguirre can't have that. Aguirre and his men also can't have Don Fernando eating all the food and throwing the expedition's only horse off the raft (it swims to shore). The film is a slow burn as Aguirre slowly takes over and quietly lets his madness loose.

The first time I watched Aguirre, maybe a year or two ago, I was struck by how Herzog got such a muted but maniacal performance out of Kinski, who was famously explosive. Here, he's under control, but just barely. Off-camera, the two were a volatile mixture, but on camera, they somehow made great films together.

Aguirre was shot entirely in English, which sort of gives me a weird choice when I watch. Do I let it go in Herzog's native German and disregard the bad looping, or do I watch it in English, as it was shot, and enjoy mouths synched to dialogue? I chose the latter. If Herzog shot it in English, then it was meant to be viewed in English by English speakers. One day, if I learn German, I'll go back and watch it that way.

For the record, I've noticed a bizarre tendency toward animal cruelty depicted in Herzog's film. Aguirre is no exception. Pushing the horse off the raft? That's brutal and savage behavior. Seeing the horse standing on the shoreline, watching the raft as the men float away...it's heartbreaking. But I'm a softie. For some reason, the shot with the monkey at the end (Kinski literally throws it into the river) doesn't bother me nearly as much as the horse. I don't know why I feel this way. I can't tell you everything.

Second, Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht (1979) —

Betcha didn't know Herzog and Kinski teamed up for this 1979 remake of the F.W. Murnau vampire masterpiece, didja? All those people doing remakes (and those decrying remakes, for that matter) in the 21st century could learn much by looking back on the remakes of the previous century. This one, however, is entirely in German, and isn't exactly Herzog's best film, so most Americans don't even know this one exists. (I didn't until I put this one on my Amazon Wish List two years ago.)

Herzog is pretty faithful to the Murnau adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel (what does that even mean?). Seeing Herzog's take actually makes for a neat comparison to Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Dracula, and really serves as a nice bridge — a kind of missing link between the Hammer Films series of Dracula films and Coppola's. (Read: A quality film popping up amid a series of B-movies.)

Kinski's vampire makeup seems great. The ear prosthetics look pretty good, and his fangs are fine, but his fingernails...

...is he wearing Bugles on his fingertips?

Oh, before I move on, you should know that Bruno Ganz plays Jonathan Harker here. When Ganz was young, and especially in this film, he looks a lot like Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. See?

(Ganz, at left, German.)

(If Harker had one of these, Nosferatu wouldn't have fucked with his woman.)

Who is Bruno Ganz? You might know him as Hitler:

The third film in the set is Woyzeck (1979) — 

This is Herzog's very low key film based on an incomplete morality play by German playwright Georg Büchner, who died before finishing the script. The film centers on a hapless soldier who is a victim of poor leadership, abuse, and dishonesty. He also earns money by participating in experiments — you know, like a grad student.

Woyzeck has a child out of wedlock with Marie, who loses interest in him and entertains (somewhat ambiguously) a hunky drum major — not like college, but like military instead. Woyzeck gets wind of this and confronts her, but...you know what? I'm giving too much away here. I will say that the animal cruelty thing comes back here. Some guy slaps a monkey on the head really hard around 2/3 of the way through. It's a bizarre scene.

Woyzeck is another Herzog-Kinski collaboration in which Kinski depicts a character who is unstable at the outset and subsequently falls apart. Kinski spoke at length about his experience making the film immediately after Nosferatu. More madness, but not more of the same. That's what I'm finding is the strength of this collaboration — all the shades of madness laid out together like some macabre palate.

That brings us to Fitzcarraldo (1982), which is my favorite Herzog film —

Here, Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo, an opera lover so passionate, so irrational, that he decides to bring opera to the rainforest. He's convinced that this goal is worthwhile, and that people — not just the natives, but his opera-loving bourgeois acquaintances — will come if he just built a magnificent place. He's like a Christian missionary crossed with Ray Kinsella from Field of Dreams. 

Among other things, I think of the Santa Fe Opera House when I watch Fitzcarraldo. Outside Santa Fe, out there in the high desert, away from everything, there's this opera house where my wife used to work. She spent a summer stock season there in the costume shop. Since then, we've seen two movies — Crazy Heart and The Tao of Steve (odd double-feature) — that prominently depict the Santa Fe Opera. Anyway, when I visited her, we never made it out there, but many, many other people came out — and from miles away. People will come. So to whatever madman had the idea to put an opera house in the middle of the desert, I'll say this: you were right.

Fitzcarraldo, on the other hand, had a jungle to deal with, as well as a string of terrible circumstances that amount to a combination of bad luck and bad planning. Even the premise sounds waaaay more ridiculous than building an opera house in the desert. Opera in a city in the jungle? Funded by rubber harvesting? What are you, crazy? Don't answer that.

I mean, just look at that movie poster. Klaus Kinski, hair everywhere, blank stare into the distance, pointing at a boat that men are attempting to drag up a mountain. The Sisyphean parallels are obvious, and much has been written paralleling the two stories.

I watched Fitzcarraldo on Netflix, but I can't recall how I arrived at the film. I just heard about this film about a crazy man who tried to haul a boat up the side of a mountain to save time going down a river and then up another river. There's a point in South America where two rivers come within a few hundred yards of each other, and nearby is a sizable piece of land on which unclaimed rubber trees grow. Fitzcarraldo sets out to claim them, make money from them, and build his opera house. He concocts a plan to drag a boat up a 40-some degree incline, over land mind you, and get it to the other river so they can get to the rubber.

The cinematography, in combination with that Popol Vuh soundtrack, just captivated me. (Popol Vuh also did the soundtrack for Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Nosferatu, and Cobra Verde, as well as Heart of Glass, so if you're into Krautrock soundtracks, here you go.) Listen to the Popol Vuh tunes and tell me you can't draw a straight line from that to the post-rock wanderings of Explosions in the Sky. It's gorgeous, soaring stuff.

I actually found myself wondering whether the film would have an ending at all, or whether the whole thing would fall apart, as Herzog's ambition parallelled Fitzcarraldo's in many ways. Herzog has written and spoken extensively on the troubles he faced while making the film — and much has been written by fans, scholars, and critics lauding Fitzcarraldo.

I've never enjoyed watching someone fail (okay, that's a lie — I love watching sports teams fail if I can't stand them). But in this case, Fitzcarraldo's journey and the collapse were so painstakingly orchestrated that I couldn't look away. I still can't. The sheer operatic ambition of it all just breaks my heart and I can't help but connect to about a million other things in my life and tip my cap to Fitzcarraldo for trying and to Herzog for succeeding, because even in spectacular failure, Fitzcarraldo's got my respect, and Herzog definitely earns it here.

I suppose the reason why Fitzcarraldo is my favorite is in the madness. We're not watching a cruel, sadistic madman, or a jealous soldier coming apart, or a bloodsucking killing machine, but the kind of madness that comes from reaching too far with no apprehension and expecting nothing but success. Hubris is a form of madness, I think. That's Fitz.

I'm inserting Burden of Dreams (1982) here, as it seems fitting to watch a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo immediately after watching it.

Herzog was 37 — my age at the time of this writing — when he made Fitzcarraldo. What have I done with my life? Yikes.

I'd heard that Jason Robards was originally cast as Fitzcarraldo, but didn't know much else about the production. I didn't know, for instance, that Robards got dysentery and couldn't continue with filming, and I didn't know that Mick Jagger was originally Fitzcarraldo's sidekick in the film, but couldn't continue with the picture because of his commitments to some rock band recording their 1982 album Tattoo You. Enter Klaus Kinski again to save the day, and Herzog starts over filming from scratch.

Behind the scenes, the film production was just as fascinating as the film itself (if not more). Rumors plagued the production — locals thought Herzog's crew would do one or more of the following:

1) Rape and murder everyone.
2) Dig a canal and sever a portion of an isthmus so that it maroons everyone on a man-made island.
3) Rob everybody and leave.

So Herzog wasn't just faced with the logistical issues of making a full-length motion picture in the middle of the Amazon jungle in the late 1970s, but he also faced political issues and general mistrust from the locals. Oh, and then Robards and Jagger dropped out of the picture. 

I look at Burden of Dreams in much the same way as I see Lost in La Mancha, the documentary of Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film Don Quixote. Of course, Herzog succeeds while Gilliam didn't, and the two stories are so different, but a large-scale film production is a large-scale film production. Seeing them struggle to make something that looks so effortless on screen is fascinating.

I was hoping to see some document of the Herzog-Kinski relationship in Burden of Dreams, but I'm nearly 35 minutes in and so far, nothing. They appear to have gotten along swimmingly. Of course, with about an hour left in the film, that could change.

In one scene, we see Herzog and his assistant director working with locals — non-actors — and filming a couple hundred of them approaching in canoes. They're smiling, giggling, awkward, and completely screwing up the shot by looking directly into the camera and smiling. Of course, Herzog's insistence on shooting everything during "magic hour" doesn't help matters. 

He's often accused of doing things "the hard way" on purpose, but he's got this vision and he's undeterred and doesn't want to hear excuses. He'd be a great boss, I'm sure. 

He even hired prostitutes for his film crew, to keep them from co-mingling with the natives after so many months of filming. He knew it would present serious cultural problems, so he found Dominican hookers. I'm not sure what to make of all that.

"I don't even miss him," Herzog says in reflection on his collaboration with Kinski — one of the bonus features on Burden of Dreams. He's got a point, that their collaboration spanned five films, but Kinski did hundreds of movies and Herzog more than 50 himself. 

"I don't have dreams," he says moments later. Then how does he know what dreams look like? He frequently refers to events of dreams, the visuals of dreams, etc. Well, maybe he's not having sleeping ones, as he says. But he's been a busy, busy man trying to visualize what they might be.

The final film in the Herzog-Kinski collaboration is called Cobra Verde (1987) — 

Cobra Verde is the last collaboration between Herzog and Kinski. Prior to owning this set, I'd never seen this one — just heard and read about it. Kinski is Cobra Verde, a bandit who is hired by a sugar plantation owner to oversee his slaves. Instead, Cobra Verde impregnates all of the plantation owner's daughters. Yeah, he's virile.

As punishment, he is sent to Africa to resuscitate the slave trade — a certain death mission. He succeeds somehow, and then leads a revolt against the local king, a brutal man who preaches death to the white man. He leads a revolt by amassing an army of women — who are more brave than their male counterparts. He also fathers more than 60 children. Hello!

Cobra Verde is a pretty film with gritty subject matter, and the last narrative film in the Herzog-Kinski set. This DVD apparently comes from a pristine transfer of the source, with only a few flecks and scratches. The toughest part of watching this film is the soundtrack. You get the German 5.1 track, a German 2.0 track, and an English 2.0 track. 

Kinski and several of the other actors spoke most of their lines in English, while many of the other actors spoke whatever their native language was (much like Sergio Leone's Italian westerns, which were often shot in Spain). So if you want to watch the film in English, you don't get 5.1. But if you want to watch badly synched German, you can have 5.1. I don't get it. The film sits in this weird gray area between languages, which would be fine if the English track was in 5.1 also. It's a minor quibble.

Finally, My Best Fiend finishes the collection. This documentary about the Herzog-Kinski relationship is the perfect cap to this marathon (and the DVD cover says a lot):

Watching all the films in one week has been pretty grueling. Of all the films, my favorite is Fitzcarraldo for its sheer audacity of spirit, but Aguirre is a close second. I love Herzog's work and admire him very much, but too many of his films in rapid succession can be quite heavy on the soul. I look forward to watching something a bit lighter soon.

Hellboy/Hellboy II: The Golden Army

I'm pretty sure Guillermo Del Toro would've screwed up Middle Earth.

After watching much of Del Toro's work, and re-watching the two Hellboy films tonight, I'm convinced that no one in The Hobbit would've had eyes, and if they did, their eyes would've been in screwed up places.

Every damned scene would be preoccupied with gears and machines and cranky whirly things with sharp bits, and all the beasts of Middle Earth would've been far hairier and about 10 times more macabre than Tolkien ever envisioned.

Things have a funny way of working out. Del Toro left work on The Hobbit, leaving no one except Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson to do the films. You know, the way it should've been in the first place.

Del Toro is perfect for the Hellboy films, though.

I enjoy the Hellboy movies, even though I never read the comic. You don't have to be a fan of the comics to enjoy the films, though.

I've been a comic collector since the early '80s, usually picking up copies of The Amazing Spider-Man and whatever else caught my attention, but stuff like Hellboy was a blind spot. I had a tough time with the comics of the '90s, which were often far darker and more violent than my Marvel heroes. Sandman, Hellboy, Preacher, Hellblazer, and others were a bit too much for me and my upbringing, all fire and brimstone and going to Hell, etc. I got over my hangup, read Preacher and most of Sandman, and never got around to the other two.

Both Hellboy films are spectacles of Guillermo Del Toro's and Mike Mignola's imaginations. Few directors could take Mignola's Hellboy story and infuse his own distinct vision as organically as Del Toro here.

All the attention to the inner workings and gears of things such as time pieces and other machines are distinctly Del Toro (for more of that sort of thing, check out his earlier film, Chronos). Maybe the most organic combination of Del Toro's and Mignola's vision is represented in Karl Ruprecht Kroenen, a blend of maniac and machine who won't die and must be wound like a clock.

My only real complaint with Hellboy is they used Pete Yorn's weak-ass cover of Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand." Seriously, what a perfect song for this film — if they'd gotten the original version instead of Yorn's watered down effort. Maybe they couldn't get Nick Cave's version, or maybe they wouldn't pony up the dough. Tragedy either way.

Okay, two complaints. Most of the wire work in Hellboy is awful. That gets better in the sequel, though, so I'll let that slide.

Three: Hellboy and Liz are both fireproof, but how come their clothes don't burn up? Nomex?

Okay, one more. Rasputin. Why does a man with glass eyes need to wear shades?

I'll stop.

How about Ron Perlman as Hellboy? Has there been a better casting choice in any comic book movie yet? Here's a guy who couldn't get arrested except for B-movies, random supporting roles, and video games for the bigger part of 25 years in Hollywood. But he had Hellboy's jawline.

I understand why Agent Myers was created for the first film — audiences who've never read the comic need to have that character through which they can experience this universe for the first time. They need a character to ask the audience's questions about the film world. I also understand why the character is gone in the sequel. If you've seen the first film, you know the drill, so you don't need a character to ask all the questions for the audience. Both creating the character and dumping the character are good writing choices for these movies.

As for special effects, although the first one is showing some age, I watch that climactic sequence in the first film and wonder why no one has done a competent film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu." Why hasn't Del Toro, for that matter?

The second one, made four years later, obviously has better special effects and is much funnier — I mean, Hellboy and Abe Sapien sing Barry Manilow together. But the plot isn't as interesting, and the villain looks like Tom Cruise in Matrix makeup. I'm over it.

Seen as a double feature, liking both films is easy, though.

Harold and Maude

Took me a while to get around to Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude. A film about a guy who attends funerals for fun and fakes his own suicides to torment his domineering mother hasn't seemed all that appealing lately.

I've been stuck for a couple of months, actually. Chalk that up to the grieving process, I guess. My mom's death continues to weigh on me, and I don't want to post some hand-wringing, navel-gazing stuff every day. I just don't feel like watching my movies much, but I'm not quitting. I've just slowed down.

Tonight, though, I put on Harold and Maude, and felt relieved when I watched the scene with the marching band parading by the funeral procession, and I couldn't stop laughing. Maybe I'm gonna be okay after all.

I'd never heard of Harold and Maude before taking that film genres course at Ball State in 1997ish. Although I had heard of Cat Stevens, whose songs comprise the entire soundtrack, I'd never paid much attention to his music.

After watching the film in class, I was a fan of both for life. Within the first 10 minutes, you get three Cat Stevens songs and two of Harold's faked suicides. Talk about a hook.

When Harold finds himself in therapy, he seems to be going along with the process; he's well behaved, soft-spoken — but look at what Harold is wearing on the left, as opposed to the therapist on the right:

This isn't Harold being compliant or active in his own therapy, but more of a "fuck you" to the therapist. Harold seems to make a comment on the superficiality of it all — dressing like a therapist doesn't make one a good therapist. This is what a rebellious young man would do, as he struggles with the adult world and all of those compromises, hypocrisies, and ironies.

Harold's uncle, Victor, "General MacArthur's right-hand man," according to Harold's mother, doesn't actually have a right arm. He salutes a poster of Nathan Hale by pulling on a string in his lapel that brings up his starched right sleeve. Ridiculous.

Of course, for all the commentary on death, there are several moments that take life quite seriously — Maude's concentration camp tattoo, for one. This isn't a film that deals with life and death in a flippant way, but contemplates the meaning we find in both. At one point, Harold and Maude find themselves together, their relationship blossoming like new life, and they're here:

Much has been written about this film over the years. Film scholars love Harold and Maude for the deft contemplation of life and death combined with moments that are still hilarious and disturbing 40 years later. You can read the film in the context of early 1970s American independent cinema, or you can recontextualize the film as a kind of comment on the modern tendency for people to get wrapped up in shit that isn't important at all, so much in fact that they forget how to enjoy life.

However you see the film, just see the film. Harold and Maude is a classic black comedy — the kind of film I don't return to much, but one that reminds me, abundantly, of who we've lost, how much we've lost, and all that's left behind.