One Less Avenger to Make Life Worthwhile...

The world lost two great men yesterday: because Patrick Macnee was John Steed and John Steed was Patrick Macnee.

The “espionage craze” of the sixties gave us Spies high and Spies low. It gave us James Bond of course, but it also gave us the Mission: Impossible team, John Drake, Matt Helm, our man Flint, Kelly Robinson & Alexander Scott, Solo & Kuriaken, Maxwell Smart, Boris Badinov, and a host of others. It was deep and far-reaching in our culture in a way that it has never been since. Those of us born in that era grew up with spies in our blood. 

For some of us, the greatest among all of these were The Avengers. If the name evokes images of star-spangled costumes and green-skinned behemoths, you are thinking of the wrong Avengers. That group took their name from a small team of British spies made up of both professional and amateur operatives: most often it was a team of two, sometimes as many as three or (rarely) four, but from the mid-1960s through the early 80’s the pivotal member of that little team was John Steed.

Steed has been characterized “the perfect British gentleman,” but for me that description falls far wide of the mark. It’s true that Steed had the polish of an English gentlemen, but English gentlemen do not go around hitting people over the head with bowler hats lined in steel. English gentlemen are often stuffy and conservative; Steed was neither of those things. Rather, John Steed was a man of the world, who knew how to enjoy life and how to get right down into it and play without ever mussing up his suit. 

It was this playfulness of spirit that marked Macnee and Steed. Other actors have portrayed Steed over the years, but have always ended up embarrassing themselves in a role that was never meant for them. Ralph Fiennes infamously played Steed in a disastrous “major motion picture” (opposite an equally miscast Uma Thurman and Sean Connery, whose portrayal of the villain pretty much consisted of trotting out his own worst personality defects for the world to see) that captured the quirks of the beloved TV series but missed its heart. Fiennes emphasized the “English Gentleman” bit and came off a right twat: never smiling, never enjoying himself.

The John Steed I knew (and the man who created him) was generous with his smile. He had a great, warm smile and he shared it even with his enemies. Like Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, his smile was disarming, and it might proceed a generous serving of champagne or a blow across the face. Life’s a game, after all, and what’s the point in playing it if you can’t enjoy yourself — whether you’re fighting an Evil Genius or sharing some well-earned downtime with your stunning partner in Avenging? 

The Avengers was a shining moment in television history, especially for the two seasons that featured Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel; and Patrick Macnee was its heart.

As an actor, Macnee did not have a broad range and was the first person to admit this. He was more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it, and in fact had given up acting entirely when the role of John Steed in The Avengers came along. Perhaps he knew instinctively that it suited him. Perhaps he thought of it as a lark. Certainly when the equally playful Diana Rigg joined the cast, the show became something akin to the games of espionage that we played in the long summers when school was out. This was where John Steed and Patrick Macnee became one — and the two became the most wonderful role model that any young man could have. 

For in the face of Great Evil, John Steed paused and raised a glass. He took the time to let his partner know how very much he enjoyed their company. Then and only then, armed with grace and Good Feeling, would he plunge into the fray.

— Freder.
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Enter Mister Borgman

This past month has made a believer out of me: if the Moon can control the tides, who knows what effects the other planets can have on this, that and the other thing — and I am all too happy to blame this rotten past month, and all of the ways in which it has failed me and I have failed myself on the combined retrograde of both Mercury and Pluto. 

It’s been a vampire month. It’s been bed enough that I’d have been better off to just crawl under a rock and pull it in after me; as it is, the best time I’ve spent during these weeks has been in front of the telly.

To call the Dutch film Borgman a “vampire movie” would be to set up unreasonable expectations in prospective viewers. There are no fangs, no bloodsucking, no capes, none of the Hollywood tropes that people expect when they hear the word. Indeed, going into Borgman without knowing anything, it would be reasonable to believe, at first, that you were watching a plain psychological thriller about an oddly charismatic type worming his way into a well-to-do Dutch family; but that wouldn’t explain some of the oddnesses that run throughout the movie… and most of the negative reviews (in the minority) that I’ve seen about the picture seemed to have been written by people who failed to make the connection, who saw these oddities as just being weird for the sake of being weird.

But once you have accepted the fact that Borgman is all about a strain of vampirism that we have not seen on the screen before, it all makes perfect, horrible sense. As the movie opens, the titular character — a wildly hairy yet fascinating hermit-type played by Jan Bijvoet (the resemblance to Charles Manson is no doubt intentional) — is being hunted by a priest with dogs and stakes. His lair is concealed in the forest, underground, with escape tunnels dug under the roots of trees. None of this is explained; nor is anything explained that follows, including the silent dogs that let themselves into people’s houses at night, or the mysterious scars on the backs of Borgman and his “family” of murderers. That Borgman possesses some overt supernatural ability is expressly stated: sitting nude astride a sleeping woman, he affects her dreams with the power of his thought. He moves silently, swiftly, and unseen when he wishes it. And yet when the time comes for murder, Borgman’s crew use altogether conventional methods. 

Its most horrifying moments occur in the plain light of day, under dreamily sunny skies. Few words are spoken. By the time we realize that Borgman is not psychological suspense, but in fact a full-on Horror Movie, it’s too late: we are in the vampire’s spell right along with the doomed family. Gradually, we realize that he is not interested in the adults, but only working through them to get at the children of the house. Fresh blood is what his family seeks. The final scenes play out in almost complete silence, and are as quietly chilling as anything you will have ever seen onscreen.

As such I think it’s the best modern horror movie in many a moon; destined, if it can find its audience, to become a classic of the genre. It has both the sense of cunning playfulness and the visual restraint that all really good horror movies must have (its single most graphic moment occurs in a dream); and it presents a very old monster in a strikingly fresh and modern way; Borgman himself has the weight of a Great Cult Figure in the making.

Borgman is unrated in this country, but would probably be a soft R or a strong PG-13. It has some mild sexuality, more than one usage of the word “fuck,” some intense and unnerving scenes, and one very brief flash of bloody violence.

— Freder.
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Brave New World

If you come around here often enough, you’ll know that I’ve already made a couple of posts about Peter Jackson’s trilogy of movies based on The Hobbit. Here’s one more, one last post, in which New Developments emerge from the corners of Fandom to change everything. Even if you don’t like Tolkien or movies based on his books, read on — something interesting is happening here.

I think of Jackson as a talented, driven, hard-working man who has no sense of self-control and never knows when to stop. For The Lord of The Rings, New Line was very hands-on with its investment and insisted on Jackson working with a team of producers who somehow kept his excesses under tight control. Since the success of those movies, he has been given carte blanche on every picture he’s made; and in all that time he has failed to produce a single movie that wasn’t bloated beyond the capacity of any sensible audience to endure.

Mister King Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the world, isn’t even introduced in Jackson’s movie about him until about nine hours into the runtime. He then spends about fifteen hours fighting dinosaurs, five hours trashing depression-era Manhattan, and I know he spent around three hours staring lovingly into Naomi Watts’s eyes before finally dropping from the Empire State Building. As I recall, it takes a half-hour for him to hit the ground. And that’s in the theatrical release! God only knows how many hours those bugs chomp on Andy Sirkis’s head in the extended version.

Well… I’d better cut to the chase myself.

Turns out there are other people out there who agree with me that three long movies are more than a little bit excessive to adapt Tolkien’s 300 page novel to the screen — and some of them are doing something about it.

For someone of my generation (mostly grown up before the VCR came along and began radically altering our culture), it’s nothing short of a revelation to learn that the technology we have today, available to everyone, is now so powerful that anyone with the Will and the time on their hands can make their own re-cut of Jackson’s movies — and post it online in full high-definition video and sound.

That’s right — there are a few fans out there who have re-cut Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy into a single three-hour movie. And they haven’t just shortened it: they have re-arranged some scenes, restructured others, and basically shaped their own unique movie out of the piles of footage that Jackson so thoughtfully provided them.

I’ve downloaded one of these versions, watched most of it — and am amazed at what one fan can accomplish. All the bloat is gone, all the sub-plots are gone, all the fart and belch jokes are gone; at last we have a movie that  can stand side-by-side with the Rings Trilogy, occupying its proper proportions to those films… and here’s what’s even more jaw-dropping: it looks and sounds just as good as the theatrical release! 

The first hour of Jackson’s An Unexpected Journey is compressed neatly into 25 minutes, with no sense that we as viewers are missing anything. Beyond that point, Underhill Editor has mainly lopped out all of Jackson’s CGI Action excesses: the barrel ride down the river, which lasts an eternity in Jackson’s version and features orcs and elves flying around shooting arrows all over the screen, now lasts a few seconds and plays out just as it does in the books: the dwarves simply float down the river to safety. It is an absolute joy to watch. 

A few transitions are slightly awkward, and in the final reels the editor is forced to get quite ruthless (he solves the problem of The Battle of Five Armies simply by having Bilbo unconscious for most of it) — but what’s amazing is that the thing isn’t choppier than it is: the editor has even worked on the music cues so that the soundtrack flows smoothly. 

It is brisk, and sometimes, it must be admitted, too brisk. If Jackson had followed his original plan and given us just two Hobbit movies it might not even have been necessary. I know that there will be times when I actually do want some extra flourishes, times when I actually will re-visit Jackson’s films in their entirety… but I now regard them as “The Extended Version;” while for me the Definitive Cut, the one that I will watch every other year in conjunction with the Rings trilogy, is the one created by the Masked Man (or woman) known as “Underhill Editor.”

•

Now as you might have guessed, all of this Highly Illegal. I just can’t even imagine how many copyright laws this violates. So I’m not going to give you any links, you’ll have to find it on your own. “Underhill Editor” is a kind of creative Robin Hood doing all of us fans a great service; it’s my hope that the Copyright Police of Nottingham never manage to pin him or her down.

In order to get my greedy hands on a copy, I had to learn about something that was completely new to me: Bit-Torrenting. 

The sound you hear is that of Doors Opening. And all I have to say is, “Oh, my.”

That, and perhaps the same thing that the recut Hobbit makes me say: “Ain’t technology wundafil?” 

Yeah, I’ll probably be commenting on more movies in the near future.

— Freder
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The Zircus in Action!

This is just one of several YouTube videos created by Rach Jardine, TarotNinja, showing my Zirkus Mägi tarot deck in action. Take it away, Rach! -- and when you're done, why not head over to my commercial site, Tarot by Duck Soup?

Ticking... Ticking...

It occurred to me this morning, with some sadness, that my Grandparents on both sides of the family have been dead and out of my life for longer than they were ever in it. On my Dad’s side, both of his parents have been gone for damn near forty years. First his mother to dementia, then, while I was still in high school, his father — who was mowed down in the street by a young dunderhead driving with a girl in his lap.

My mother’s parents died in the mid-eighties: first her dad, who went quite suddenly one morning while he was getting dressed, and then her mother, who lived on several more years in decreasing health and increasing grief and bitterness.

It pains me to think that the mid-eighties are now thirty years gone. They’ve been gone more than half of my life.

It’s true that my grandparents live on in my memory, and that they were of such great importance to my youth that their impact is still felt by me today, all out of proportion to the amount of time I actually had with them. I miss them very much. That I am relatively safe and secure today (although that could always change in a flash: life has a bad habit of doing that to you) is entirely due to the efforts of my Grandpa Claude. I wish that I possessed an ounce of his sense.

Now my mother has been gone for five years, and to a great extent those five years have whooshed by in a blur worthy of Quicksilver or The Flash. I hope and trust and am pretty well sure that I will not live long enough to be able to say the same thing about her that I can now say about my grandparents.

I can pretty much guarantee that most people of my generation do not think of ourselves as being old: although we see increasing signs of it on the horizon, and young people seem to go out of their way to make us feel ancient. But we are not living in the world of our present anymore. As my friend BC pointed out to me recently, we are living in those decades and years that we used to look ahead on with awe, wondering what it would all be like and if we would have our flying cars by then. We are living in the future. 

Which makes me think, “Damn, enough of this chain of thought. Shake a leg. You have work to do.”

— Frede.
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"GO" Already. Just GO!

In a fit of boredom the other night, I signed up for HBO-GO, the new service from the company created to support people with AppleTVs or Amazon Fires or suchlike similar devices. Not more than an hour later, my seven-day free trial came to a premature end when I logged into iTunes and cancelled the thing.

It wasn’t (really, it wasn’t) that I’d been promised access to the complete HBO library, whereas what was really on offer was maybe less than half of what I presume their library to contain (no Tales from the Crypt, for instance). No, what really prompted me to git outta town while the gittin’ was good was simply this: everything that HBO has ever made makes me feel Icky.

I knew that I wasn’t going to like Game of Thrones, the series that everybody and her second cousin is raving about. I am just not a fan of the genre, that sort of mediaeval royal intrigue where the whole show involves everyone just plotting against everyone else, everyone just waiting for their opportunity to slide a knife between the next person’s shoulder blades. This is just simply Too Much Like Real Life to interest me. I got enough of it working at the Waterville Morning Sentinel and at Colby College and other places: since the real world is so very much like that, why would I want to spend my free time watching TV shows about it? My impression of Game of Thrones, never having seen a frame of the show or read a word of the books, was that it was just More of The Same, only with tits and gore.

I didn’t expect it to be shoddily made as well. And yet, right there in the first five minutes of episode one, there were obvious tire tracks in the snow when the riders went out to… do whatever they were going to do. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, this is just crap workmanship. Then, after a bit, it seemed like something scary or gory was going to happen, so I hit the fast-forward button: and yes, right there in the first five minutes, off goes someone’s head and plop! into the snow. 

Ick. This is just Not for Me. I backed out and tried Deadwood instead.

Well. The thing about Deadwood is that you can IMMEDIATELY tell it’s an HBO show because everyone says “fuck” and “cocksucker” every other word. Other than the shock value, this adds absolutely zero to the story; and “shock value” seems to be the main thing that interests HBO. In the first five minutes of episode one, we get an extremely unpleasant and hands-on hanging; in the first ten minutes someone has been graphically shot through the head, and Brad Dourif, acting even crazier than usual, gets to run a steel rod into the wound, straight through the head and out the other side — the side facing us. 

And yes, Ian McShane is as knock-down brilliant as you would expect playing Al Swearengen, the barkeep and de facto owner of the town. But — this is the lead character. The lead character is supposed to have at least some likable or redeeming quality: Swearengen has none. I just don’t want to invest even a tiny part of my life in a show about people as reprehensible as this.

At this point I did not feel up to sampling The Sopranos or Six Feet Under. I was already feeling covered in Ick. I did skate through the selection of soft-core porn that HBO also offers, and even this was bad: how freakin’ long can you watch a massage?

I said, out loud, “That’s it.”

And went on to spend a lovely two hours with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in Maytime from 1937. Much, much more my speed. Y’all can keep your Icky HBO modern world. I will confine myself to entertainment that doesn’t punch me on the nose or try to shock me every five minutes. My new motto: “Life is too short to include HBO.” But, hey — at least the “B.O.” constitutes Truth in Advertising. 

— Frede.
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An ISBN for the Zirkus

It's official -- the First Edition of my Tarot of the Zirkus Magi is now available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0988414058. In order to make that happen, I had to assign an ISBN to the deck. That number is 978-0-9884140-5-1 -- so now, theoretically at least, it can be ordered by and from brick-and-mortar bookstores everywhere.

-- But the fact is that you can get it cheaper and with less fuss and with more options direct from my site. It's available right here in the sidebar, or you can go to www.tarotbyducksoup.com and see all the other decks I have on offer. From Fortune Telling Playing Cards to Lenormand to oracle decks to tarot, there's an awful lot to see, with more on the way! Why buy a crappy mass-produced deck from the likes of U.S. Games Systems when you can get something unique direct from the artist? 'Nuff said!

-- Frede
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Light and Dark and Off the Beaten Track

It goes without saying that Hollywood no longer knows how to make movies. What may be news is that it doesn’t even know how to distribute or market the good movies being made in other countries.

Miss Minoes is a charming children’s move from the Netherlands about a cat that’s transformed into a young woman. If you’re concerned about the how or why of that, this is not your movie. However, if you just accept the premise, and if you enjoy such things in a children’s picture as: good performances (especially from the mesmerizing Carice van Houton in the title role); a child lead who is not offensively precocious; a gentle, humorous adventure in which  justice prevails and an unlikely romance blooms; and if you prefer a children’s movie that doesn’t hit you over the head with some insipid “message” about friendship or self-empowerment, then Miss Minoes should be right up your alley, cat.

The movie was made fourteen years ago, and released in America for about five minutes under the misguided and not very enticing title Undercover Kitty. Hollywood seems to have done everything in its power to bury the thing. Hollywood does this, frequently, to movies that it does not understand (does anyone remember Bamboozled?) or that threaten to outperform its own product. I found it on iTunes. Glory be to this science-fictional, content-on-demand world that we now live in, in which almost nothing stays dead and buried forever so long as the rights issues can be sorted out.

Emotions that have stayed buried for too long are the subject of the Australian horror movie, The Babadook. If you are one of those Icky people who actually enjoys the kind of blood-soaked, gore-laden exercises in cruelty that Hollywood is currently passing off as “horror movies,” (horrible movies would be the better description) then again this is not your movie. 

Unrated in this country, it deserves a PG-13 but would probably be given an R by our nonsensical MPAA system that can’t even come up with a list of standards that makes sense to itself. There is minimal blood, no gore, and the only person who dies in the whole picture did so some years before the story begins. So-called “jump scares” are nonexistent in the picture, which favors dread and suspense over shock value. That said, the emotions run very high indeed, and lead actress Essie Davis deserves a medal of honor for a performance that goes for broke and leaves nothing at the gate.

The monster of the movie’s title is seen only in shadow: but it is as dynamic as any movie monster and carries more impact than most. Without, hopefully, spoiling too much of the plot, this is a real-life monster that we must all meet, and deal with, sooner or later. The people who don’t appreciate this movie’s denouement are either too thick to “get” what the filmmaker is saying — or else they have never yet experienced the thing that the monster represents; which is to say that they have lived a blessed, merciful life so far, and cannot be faulted for their good fortune. For the rest of us, The Babadook offers a powerful release of negative emotion, feelings that we never asked for, but which inevitably take up residence in our emotional closets, ready to pounce when we are least able to face them.

— Frede

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