MISFITS Video Picks for March 20, 2000
The Haunting (1963)
pick by Eric Heideman
The Haunting directed by Robert Wise
(Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher, The Day the Earth Stood Still,
West-Side Story, Star Trek: The Motion Picture), faithfully adapted from the
novel The Haunting of Hill House
(1959) by
Shirley Jackson (unlike the 1999 film, which has very little to do with the
novel), featuring a poignantly edgy performance by Julie Christie, The Haunting
is Exhibit A in the case for the unseen being scarier than the seen. Unlike
the
lame "remake," the original film offers no easy, safe explanations for the
phenomena in Hill House--and no closure. Let the film into your life and it
stays. In 1963 it was the best ghost film yet made; 37 years later, it
still
is.
The Matrix pick by David Christenson
John Gardner once said that there are basically two novel plots: a stranger
comes to town, and people go on a journey. Familiar to SF fans, through
Simak, Dick and other writers, is a third plot: a strange town comes to a
person. That's sort of what happens in The Matrix, and I
think it's partly
why we fans identify so strongly with it. Another reason is that it has
underlying ideas that are well thought out, if not entirely credible - human
bodies seem to me very inefficient batteries, and why would guerrilla
fighters set up a computer system dependent on a mainframe that can be
violated using simple codes? But it's not the credibility of the ideas that
matters, it's their place in an identifiably SF structure. This movie seems
familiar to us because, like much successful written SF, it has complex
ideas underlying a basic pulp plot. (In this case, the plot, like the
action/FX look, is borrowed from classic martial arts movies: prologue,
confrontation, initiation/training, followed by a payoff with some
combination of rescue, chases and confrontations.) There is a mysterious and
noirish movement to the film as well, where Keanu Reeves is the naive but
resourceful explorer and the mystery is not an urban underworld but a
different plane of reality. All of the above is expressed so efficiently,
with plenty of time left over for sheer action, that we hardly notice how
rich in theme and storytelling detail this film is. Finally, like Episode
1 the imagery is almost completely artificial, but here it's refreshingly
original. (I hear the makers are planning two sequels, the first a
cliffhanger and the second a wrap-up, a la the Star Wars and Back to the
Future trilogies.)
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