Wash Your Hands After Reading

A lot of people have been asking me about the movie “Contagion,” which came out in theatres a couple weeks ago and directed by Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies & Videotape, Traffic, Ocean‘s 11-13). It seems weird to say I enjoyed it, but I did, though it certainly lacked a strong story arch of typical Hollywood films. It’s more of a factual timeline: what procedure would we follow if this sort of global health crisis actually happened. Who are the important players. How bad could this situation actually get? The answer seems to be pretty damn bad. The good news, you get to see Gwenyth Paltrow cheat on Matt Damon and then die. The bad news is, after watching it you will probably think you are going to die. I know I did!

The movie starts with a woman (Paltrow) at the airport in Chicago, talking on the phone to the man she just cheated on her husband with. She looks tired. If you walked into the theater without reading the title or knowing anything about the film, you’d think this was some sort of relationship drama or thrilling crime movie where a husband goes insane and kills his cheating wife. This movie is not that exciting… in a typical sense. Again, you’re fascinated to see how bad things will get before they turn it around, and the answer again is quite bad. But the film has a very slow pace and focuses more on presenting a ton of factual evidence than titillating us with gruesome death scenes.

In fact, they kind of gloss over the five billion people dying part. We see mass graves, lines of carefully packaged bodies (they mention they’ve run out of body bags so have to make due with taped trash bags) and empty streets with garbage piled up. We see many people die, but only one main character. This is Kate Winslet, who plays a young CDC worker in charge of organizing disease control in one city. As she tries to make the local government officials see just how terrible the situation becomes, she eventually succumbs to the illness herself, dying in one of the very makeshift hospital facilities she helped to set up.

The mystery of how the disease started and spread definitely added to the “excitement,” almost like it was a CSI episode, showing close ups on different characters as they encountered Paltrow’s character and in turn were infected. The waiter who picked up her martini glass. The Japanese business man whose dice she blew on in a casino. The British model-type who picked up Paltrow’s phone when she forgot it on the bar counter. It both fascinated and terrified me, even if you ignore everyone around you, you can’t ignore the germs they’re shoving in your face.

I think that’s what is most compelling of all. Not the film itself but my reaction to it. It has in the time since made me so conscious of how often I touch my face. There’s actually a line in the movie, we touch our faces something like two thousand times a day. That seems insane. But then you add on to that number every time you hold your phone up to your face, after you set it down on a table, or in a pocket, or dropped it on the ground. Not to mention if you eat something and use silverware, which unless you just washed it before eating has either been sitting in a tray or worse for hours before you shoved it in your mouth. It all takes me back to my History of Sickness and Disease course back at U of M. Remember the days when we didn’t know about hand washing? No wonder we all died from the flu. And movies like Contagion seem to suggest that sure, our science and our knowledge of hygiene has improved, but as humans, we’re still disgustingly filthy creatures. How many times have you been in the bathroom at a public place and watched someone half ass wash their hands after using the facilities? Enough to make a movie like Contagion seem chillingly possible.

If Rats Could Hold Scissors, This Is What Would Happen

From the man who brought you the Hellboy movies, and that freaky white eyeball hand monster in Pan’s Labyrinth, comes a brand new horror film based off of a 1973 TV program where the monsters are a hoard of tiny gray hunchbacks armed with scissors. That film is: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, written and produced by Guillermo del Toro.

I heart this man. He makes fun movies, and he makes lots of fat jokes about himself. What’s not to like?

So, the latest bit of awesomeness from Mr. del Toro is not only this film, but a companion book entitled “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood’s Guide to Dangerous Fairies.” Leave it to Guillermo to turn fairies into murderous beasts. It’s not the most original recipe for horror. You start with your average creepy New England house and throw in a supernatural creature that only one person can see. In this case the baddies are evil, teeth-eating “fairies,” who try to lure the young, mentally-unstable Sally into their fiendish games to chomp on her chompers. But del Toro couldn’t be average if he tried and the resulting film is anything but boring. (Though to be fair, the fairy attacks get a little redundant before the final girl vs. fairy battle royale.) Highlights include an old timey Victorian nature painter getting sucked into a furnace after he smashes out his maid’s teeth and Katie Holmes being thrown down some stairs. Weeee!

If you like the sort of flick where a person may or may not be getting her head ripped to pieces in a bear trap, then this is not the movie for you. If however, you enjoy suspense and creepy houses and insane historical figures, then by all means you should definitely see this film. I can’t compare it to the original, because in my opinion, the 1970s never happened, thus the original doesn‘t exist. Sorry to everyone ages forty-one to thirty two. YOU WERE NEVER BORN!

It’s a tricky thing basing a movie around a child protagonist. Even if the film deals with serious story matter, many adult viewers simply tune right out whenever they see a child in the lead. But del Toro certainly doesn’t seem to have a problem pulling it off. Pan’s Labyrinth proved that for sure, and I feel Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark fairs just as well in that track.

The movie is fun, but to be honest, the book is what gives it that added air of mystery. Remember that dude who got shoved into a furnace in the movie? Well, that’s the alleged Blackwood who “wrote“ Guillermo del Toro‘s book. Think Audubon, a.k.a. the dude who painted every single picture in every single bird book ever printed, ever. Imagine if that dude went insane after coming across some less than typical “creatures” on his nature hikes. Imagine that those same “creatures” tried to eat his face off, and then he wrote a book so that others might avoid the same fate.

Then he went insane and bashed out his own teeth before getting turned into an evil fairy himself.

Blackwood’s illustrations are beyond weird and disturbing, which is exactly why you should at least go leaf through the book at your local purveyor or lender of bound paper goods. The cover alone displays a terrified child, entwined in villainous, Poltergeist-style tree branches, being held just inches above a sea of dark, spindly, twisted claws, ripping forth from the soil to drag the child down to hell. You will want to tear out the page and tape it on your wall so it can haunt you and inspire you to write or draw something equally deranged and brilliant.

Oh Guillermo del Toro! What amazing thing will you do next? Wait, I know this one. The answer is help write the Hobbit movies and down the line do a Cthulhu movie.

And you all wondered why I wanted to name my child after him.

This Book Could Only Have Been Improved With A Batboy

As I’ve mentioned before, when I’m trolling the bookstore for new reads (and new nerd boyfriends) there are key words I look for when reading dust jackets. These are words like “wizard,” “viking wizard,” “airship,“ and “magic orb of doom.” Is this the best method for picking out a book? Probably not. Which is why I look at the cover, too. It’s a very serious process.

This week my literary fishing yielded me an excellent choice. The title: “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” written by Ransom Riggs. I think the fact that the author sounded like a 1800’s cowboy was also a selling point. On the cover was a black and white photo of a girl dressed in a flapper-style dress… floating an inch off the ground. Peculiar indeed!

Here’s the story. Jacob, a modern day young man hears stories from his grandfather about escaping Poland before WW2. Leaving all his family behind, he went to stay at a safe house for children in Wales. Except it wasn’t just a safe house, it was a school for kids with weird abilities and powers. An invisible boy. Another with bees in his stomach. A little girl who can fly. Of course, like every obnoxious sarcastic teen, the main character doesn’t believe his grandfather, until LIFE CHANGING EVENTS force him to seek out grandpa’s alleged school of freaky tots.

Danger. Monsters. Thuggish 1940’s Welsh village folk. Other than the occasional awkward moments of teen romance between Jacob and one of the “peculiar“ girls, I thought it was an excellent story, surpassing the rather narrow framework of most young adult fiction. I liked the historical elements tied in, the attacks on the small island town by Nazi planes, the ideas of xenophobia vs. tolerance. I don’t mean to detract from the enormity of those real historical tragedies that occurred during this time period, but making Jacob’s family Jewish just added to the complexity of the work. We’ve seen over and again the Christ mythology creeping into the works of famous fantasy authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, so it’s interesting to finally see a character with a different religious background interacting with some fairy people. I’m probably reading too much into this idea, but whether or not Riggs intended this to be something of note, it certainly got me pondering. Let me clarify though, this is not a book about the Holocaust or Jewish culture. It’s just the story of a boy with Jewish ancestry who finds out his Holocaust surviving grandpa grew up to be a kin to Buffy the vampire slayer.

What really set the book apart though were the included pictures. Throughout the text, Riggs placed authentic vintage photos taken from various artistic collections to match characters being mentioned. Some were simply old-fashioned and creepy, and only gained greater meaning through their pairing with the novel. Some, however, were rather curious indeed, like the floating girl on the cover. Now in a world of modern photoshop, such pictures aren’t really remarkable, though Riggs insists that they haven’t been altered. Him, I believe, but what about the weirdos who shot the photos back in 1930 or whenever? Who knows. Maybe someone did have a second mouth growing out of the back of their head, or maybe there was a primordial dwarf who was so small they could fit her inside a mason jar.

If nothing else, real or not, the photos prove that people at the turn of the century were some real freakshows. For example, one picture shows two identical twin children in weird clown outfits with one pulling a rope out of the other’s mouth. Why was that photo taken? What does it mean? Is it part of a circus show? Or was Mommy and Daddy hitting the cocaine a little hard before family portrait day? Who knows? The book just goes to show you that even if magic doesn’t exist in our world, we will never lack for things that are peculiar.