My Life as a Dog

My Life as a Dog (aka "Mitt Liv Som Hund") (Lasse Hallström, 1985) Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) is having a tough time being a kid (as they all do, until they learn they're a grown-up).  Curious, precocious (and, as they say in Airplane!, has a severe drinking problem), he's surrounded by adults who know more than he does, but seem to not know how to enjoy it.  His older brother is a bullying creep, his Mom (Anki Lidén) has TB and can't handle her two kids. Dad's half a world away, absent.  All he can do is go through life with his dog, Sickan, and his schoolmates.  Life is routine enough to control (barely) but once Mom gets sent off to a sanatorium, he gets shipped off to his Uncles.'  One's officious and no fun at all.  The other works in a glass factory amongst a collection of misfits.  Much more fun.  There's his Uncle perpetually building or repairing, the grandfather who likes to be read to from lingerie catalogues, the acrobat who's a little crazy, the sculptor who specializes in erotic glass (which the foreman habitually shatters), and the plant hottie, who everyone has designs on.

Then, there are the kids, especially Saga (Melinda Kinnaman), a tomboy, who's trying to pass, and takes out her frustrations by boxing.  For Ingemar, it's a virtual smorgasbord of curiosities and mysteries, even as he OCD's his way through life, pin balling from one misadventure to another, trying to fir in and missing the most important things.

Like Fate.

He's young enough to think "out of sight/out of mind"—Sickan's in a kennel, Mom's in the hospital. Nothing changes. He rolls with the punches, and he'll hook up with the missing later. Life is the day-to-day. The future there's always time for. When he thinks—over a book, or on the odd story that's stuck, burr-like, in his brain, like the first pooch in space, Laika, who went on a one way trip—it's over the backdrop of a star-filled sky, visible but unreachable, and the visual representation of an uncaring Universe—beautiful, cold and beyond comprehension.

But his most important aspect, that informs all of us, is he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and slowly, if unsurely, he's growing, becoming more aware.

And the title is apt.  He is living a dog's life—kept, with the advantage of being cared for, but never in control, always at the mercy of the world and its random charities and acts of kindness.  But also, a victim of its constant indifference.  In the process of making our way across the river of life, we are buoyed by the rocks beneath our feet, occasionally losing our footing, attempting to stand straight and not go under.  We learn our way, negotiate our path and find our place.

My Life as a Dog is a fine portrait of the child's experience, and everybody's.  It ends with a sense of becoming and is Hallström 's best display of life's messy, unruly experience.  Even though he's gone further in his ambitions, taken more risks, this is his most well thought out, complete and realized film on the complexities of the shared experience he has been reaching for his entire career.

Olde Review: The Seventh Seal

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.


"The Seventh Seal" aka "Det Sjunde inseglet" (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

An odd combination of films await those in 130 Kane this Saturday night: Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" and Ken Russell's "The Devils."

For those of you whose only experience with Ingmar Bergman is his wildly splintered and heavy film "Persona" from last quarter's ASUW series, "The Seventh Seal" will seem to be made by another man. At this time, Bergman wasn't so experimental, so strange. He was, as he is now, alive and vibrant with the charm of film-making and his '50's films ("The Magician," "Wild Strawberries," "Through a Glass Darkly") although dealing with "heavy" subjects of God and Death and self still possessed a lightness in the telling, a lightness that carried over from his beginnings in films and was lost in the dark broodings of his late '50's and '60's films. There was a time for comedy, and time for deep-think in the space of the best Ingmar Bergman films.

There are many characters in "The Seventh Seal," but at the film's hub are two. The most important is The Knight, who is played Max von Sydow, the supreme brooding actor. The Knight is home from the religious wars where the quest for God has been fruitless—where the point of the quest, after the year's ox-killing has been lost. But the quest for God continues. It has to. God can't be in the war, but can he be found outside amidst plague, witch-burnings and ignorance?

The answers are hard to come by, and even harder to come by while being pursued by another hold-over from the wars, the second most important character being Death. Death pursues the Knight and they engage in continuing battles of wits and of chess. The two opponents are only the hub of the story. There are others: the Knight's man-servant whose musings are concerned more with life that what is beyond; a troupe of actors; a wood-cutter and his adulterous wife. Bergman combines them all in a film that wheels between light and heavy in tone, but always excellent in quality.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on January 8th, 1976 (thirty-three years ago today)

Sounds like I ran out of time there at the end--I usually only had two or three minutes per film to talk. So, I didn't even mention the stark black-and-white photography that has become so iconic, along with Bergman's simple personification of Death--an actor dressed entirely in a black cassock, with just his face appearing...in sharp contrast. And the image of The Knight playing chess with Death has been copied, parodied, purloined and done...well, to death. In "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey," they played "Battleship."

It sounds bleak, and it is—it is the Plague-Years, after all. But the film ends with a touch of hope and sacrifice, that even after all the Knight has seen—and not seen in the form of God—he can still cling to ideals. Typing this out, it occurs to me that the film we're reviewing tomorrow has a lot in common with Bergman's masterpiece.

Life Sucks for a Teen-Age Vampyre (In Love)

Or, "Fangs for the Memories"

Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) may be the palest student ever to transfer to Forks High School from Arizona. For some reason her inability to maintain a tan is given a pass by her class-mates (who all try a bit too hard acting like fun-loving "with-it" teens-in-the-woods), but the constant topic of conversation are the equally pale Cullen family.

The Cullens keep to their ruby-lipped, paler-than-pale selves. They don't mingle and are a clique unto themselves. When the weather is good (rare in Forks, Washington out there on the Olympic Peninsula) the Cullens don't show up for school, but instead "go camping," as the story goes. Bella, a natural klutz physically and socially, is drawn to the unattached Cullen, Edward (Robert Pattinson). And why wouldn't she be? Like the rest of the Cullens he always appears to be walking in an undercranked slo-mo dream state, the chiseled delicate face of a Orlando Bloom/Johnny Depp/Jude Law, stops careening vans like Superman, growls like Elvis, and has the hair, neuroses and doomed bad-boy presence of James Dean, and perfect skin that glows translucently in the sun-light like diamonds . He seems particularly drawn to her, too. He can't eat, can't sleep, and has a lean and hungry look all the time.

It might be love, but maybe it's the vampirism.


It must be nice to be Stephanie Meyer right now. She's making a ton of dough off of recycled ideas and the cross...uh, sorry...combining of similar genres to create the biggest literary sensation since....well, since "Harry Potter" claimed to be literary. The "Twilight" series mixes equal parts Gothic Romance, standard Romance novel tropes and vampires and comes up with "Dark Shadows." Except Dan Curtis came up with that idea in the 1960's, so toss in a healthy dose of Judy Blume, and you produce what 'tweenettes have been swooning over the past couple years.

Now, here comes "Twilight," the movie, and like the "Harry Potter" films it distills the essence of the plot without communicating what makes both of those series fun reads in the first place. Instead, everything comes across just a bit cheesily dramatic: Edward is all lowered gaze and wolfish teeth, and Bella (the name clues you in that Meyer is being a bit playful with her writing) is all heaving commitment. Edward's self-loathing for his disease puts up a barrier that confuses and messes with Bella's head (the only mind that Edward can't read), and his affliction just attracts her all the more. Which is bad for Edward because he and the other Cullens subsist on only animal, not human, blood (which he says is like humans on a steady diet of tofu: sufficient, but not very satisfying--a nice touch, that), and Bella is a constant temptation. "You're like my form of heroin," he says to her. And for all the romantic hooey of "the lion falling in love with the lamb," it feels a bit more like falling in love with a T-bone steak.

Yeah, well, I love chocolate, but not enough to marry it.

Remember, back when I wrote about "Dracula," and said that it was a metaphor for raw hetero-sexuality? Here, it's spelled out in big block letters Barbara Cartland could read with her lowest level bejewelled spec's: a vampire's blood-lust is just lust with everybody's formal-wear on. And penetration is penetration. Edward is the good boy with manners enough not to soil his lady-love ("killing" her for real, not just her reputation), while Bella is the willing maid panting for "it" (Kristen Stewart basically fulfilled that same role in "Into the Wild"). In one particularly heaving bedroom scene, they kiss to test how far they can restrain themselves (him to chomp on her, she to have sex with him) and just when things get a little out of control, he heaves himself against the opposite wall--like he was spring-loaded, or something.

That scene, and a lot of others, boast some of the most poorly done practical effects work done since Clark Kent's "skimming" run in the original "Superman" movie. We're in the post CGI-realm, folks, things could look a lot better than the FX one would expect on "Smallville."

That's another issue: Director Catherine Hardwicke makes "Twilight" looks cheap. I've seen Billy Burke ("Fracture")before, and Elizabeth Reaser (she was wonderful in "Sweet Land"), but they're the only recognizable faces in the film, and the movie seems to have a film of murk all over it. As they filmed it in the Northwest--Oregon substituting for Washington (nice work, again, Washington Film Board!)--it might be fog getting under the lens. These books are making ga-zillions of dollars, you'd think they'd throw some money at the adaptations.

It takes the film a bit to get going, because Bella has to do research to discover what vampires are--seemingly being out of touch with culture her entire life--but it does spring to life in a decidedly unexpected way: when the two kids have to meet the families. Edward turns a bit paler meeting Bella's cop-dad, and the joke about the Cullens having Bella over for dinner is nicely mined for uncomfortable laughs. "Bella, you're about to go to a house full of vampires, and the only thing you're worried about is making a good impression?" is the best line in the film. Then, it all goes completely south with a vampire baseball game (seriously) and a tedious version of "The Most Dangerous Game" with a trio of "bad" vampires, who are evidently playing for another team. At that point, everyone stops thinking and starts doing stupid things when there is so much at...stake.


But just when one thinks there's not enough blood in the genre that hasn't already been regurgitated along comes this modest film from half-a-world away that covers a lot of the same unconsecrated earth as "Twilight' but gives it a poignant spin.

"Let the Right One In" (aka "Låt den rätte komma in") introduces us to Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a child of divorced parents living in an apartment block in a Stockholm suburb in 1982. When first seen, one could mistake him for a Renfield-type, babbling to an unseen person to "squeal like a pig" while brandishing a knife. He watches from his window as a car pulls up in the middle of the night, and a man and a girl get out and move in to the apartment next door. Cardboard is put up in the windows and things go quiet.

Then, strange ritualistic murders begin happening around town, and Oskar's fellow students are warned to beware of strangers in the night walking home from school. Oskar has his own problems with an unholy trinity of bullies that regularly taunt him--they're the reasons for his revenge fantasies played out in the safety of his own home. About the same time, he makes the acquaintance of a pale girl named Eli (the excellent Lina Leandersson), who's about his age..."more or less," she says. When she learns of his bully troubles, her answer is simple: "Oskar, hit back. Hit them harder than you dare. Then they'll stop." Eli gives him the courage to do just that, and he begins to take weight-lifting classes.

Eli has her own problems: her benefactor and procurer has begun to make mistakes and the towns-people are getting suspicious, as the attacks become more random and more vicious. Eli and Oskar grow closer, deciding to go "steady," as events threaten to tear them apart.

"Let the Right One In" may sound sweet, but the savagery of the attacks is anything but—director Tomas Alfredson stages them swiftly and suddenly, and they can catch the audience by surprise. Plus, some of the happenings have a giddy violence that may produce uncomfortable giggles along with the chill up the spine (not unlike those of the excellent, though little seen, "Exorcist III"). There is visceral, grisly horror in the story of the both supernatural and all-too-human varieties. The vampires of "Twilight" are ethereally pretty in the sunlight of the Northwest. In the similar light of Sweden, the results are decidedly different and more spontaneous. To say more would rob the film of its twisted charm, something that can't be said for the cob-webbed cliches of "Twilight." That an American remake is in the works is news that can be regarded with its own brand of horror.

May it never see the light of day.

"Twilight" is a Cable-Watcher.
"Let the Right One In" is a Matinee.

Olde Review: Persona

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a bit of a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This is a companion piece to "The Fires Within"

"Persona" (Ingmar Bergman, 1967) As opposed to the approach Malle takes with "The Fires Within," Bergman takes a totally different tack--he lets you know right from the start that "Persona" is only a movie, not reality at all (and as an ex-projectionist, my sympathy to the fellow who has to show it Saturday night!). It is another Bergman film dealing with the supernatural. But for Bergman the supernatural does not come from beyond, it exists within us, within our personalities.

An actress (Liv Ullmann) is admitted to a hospital when she falls silent, unwilling to speak. A nurse (Bibi Anderssonn) is put in charge of the actress' care. For therapy, the two women live at a house on the seaside, and it is at this point that the supernatural forces of the soul take over.

The two women--the nurse, talkative and light; the actress, silent and brooding--begin to resemble each other, to merge psychically, take on each other's characteristics...and I find that I really can't go on with a synopsis of the story. For at this point, what one sees in the film is almost totally subjective. You have to explain what goes on to yourself. I can't do it for you, even if I were to try.*

Bergman can be a light and breezy film-maker as is evident in "The Magic Flute" and his '50's comedies. But at other times, his films can be claustrophobic and suffocating almost beyond endurance (and I think Bergman realized this in "Persona," for at one point he lets up, forgets the story just for a moment, and explodes the creen with fast, fleeting, and irrelevent images**--a filmic explosion to relieve this build-up in tension).

William Bayer in his book "The Great Movies"*** says this about "Persona" and its creator, Ingmar Bergman.

"It is not his obscurity that is so frightening about Bergman. It is his intensity. there is such tension in "Persona" that it comes at times to be an almost unberable experience. One senses a man revealing his anguish at the furthest extremes of cold fire, compelling attention by the blazing sting of total chill. In "Persona," the faces of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Anderssonn are incandescent with this intensity. Their interchange is so intimate that at times we want to avert our eyes." "The Great Movies" (p. 190)

It is all very heavy stuff. And I'm not sure the majority of UW students will be able to understand--be able to deal--with "The Fire Within" and "Persona."

But they are there...as a challenge.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM October 29, 1975

A little condescending there at the end, I think. Perhaps I should have said I HOPE the majority of UW students wouldn't be able to understand or deal with the movies. They're disturbing films, and they resonate more, the older one gets and the closer one gets to the Edge of the Abyss. Perhaps I should have said that. Who knew?

As for what happens in the film: is it an empathy, a Jungian merging of souls, a familial bond, a lesbian love, possession, a psychic experience? Is it like pet-owners resembling their dogs? Is it the two women influencing each other so much that it becomes impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends?

There's a line from the wonderful "Tucker: The Man and his Dream." I've always loved the dialog where Abe Karatz (Martin Landau), Tucker's financier semi-explains why he stays with the visionary auto-maker despite the financial risks: his mother, in her poor English, tried to communicate that you shouldn't get too close to people "or you'll catch their dreams. She meant germs. But she said 'you'll catch their dreams.'"

Maybe it's as simple as that.


*It sounds like a cop-out (in the language of that day), but it really isn't--"Persona" is such a personal film, that one's life-experiences, even one's fleeting subconscious thoughts, will influence what one sees in "Persona:" is it an empathy, a merging of souls, a familial bond, a lesbian love, a psychic experience? Quite literally, your guess is as good as mine. Bergman could have come out and said something preposterous like "this is based on the Norwegian folk-tale of the two sea-nymphs who become one with nature--of warring clans who find that they have more in common with what separates them, and when you attempt to care for a tyger, you become the tyger!," but what fun would that be? We all bring something unique to the table. Isn't that what a smorgasbord is all about?

** Irrelevent? I actually doubt that, now. Film is edited together for a reason.

*** Sadly out of print, and not to be confused with Roger Ebert's series of collected essays. I can't even find it mentioned at Amazon.com.