Tuesday, May 4, 2010

THE WOLFMAN

The full moon, the projector’s white eye, the lit cherry at the tip of Rajiv’s one-hitter. He explains cinematic materialism: Kubrick’s D.P. developed a new steadicam, so The Shining is a film about long hallways. He likes to skip previews, worries they pop the visual cherry. Which reminds me: the globe of Emily Blunt’s right breast, glimpsed around her flawless white back. The 19th-century hymen is the proto-screen which interpellated the movie camera into being.


I like when you can tell the screenwriter’s been recently therapized—this one’s a sure bet, in which a son (Benicio) kills his aged but supernaturally strong dad in order to claim the sister-in-law who kills him, in turn, to save him. He thanks her for it, and dies. Hugo Weaving continues in the role he perfected: authority’s coolly ruthless hand. But when he shoots a mirror we know he too will end up werewolfized. The beast must be slain to preserve the family and the town, but we’d do well to recall it’s only he may strike the System Itself and, in some small measure, win.


A breathless Blunt to del Toro, mid-courtship: “What’s it like in New York?” Owooooooooooo. His character’s an actor, played Hamlet, as dogface del Toro himself always plays Brando, hushed and almost formal between explosions. An animal equals a lunatic, so the doctors strap him to a special chair they crank down into an ice water bath—holy hell. All the while sticking him with those old-timey syringes with the finger-loops. I confess: I’m a cat person. Hamlet, the moon, the bestiary children learn. Am I afraid of the raving monarch that I—like every little boy—once was? But one feels calm, calm, calm before the plenitude of this feast.

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