Die Hard

Nothing Lasts Forever [1979]
Written by Roderick Thorp

Die Hard [1988]
Written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza
Directed by John McTiernan

Reading Roderick Thorp's Nothing Lasts Forever really demonstrates how likable the characters in Die Hard are. First, you have Bruce Willis as John McClane. He can be a smartass, but he really cares for his wife and kids. That outer shell of sarcasm (and later blood and soot) cover a surprisingly loving guy. Bonny Bedelia's Holly McClane is equally tough as nails and equally vulnerable. Even the villains are charismatic. On paper, Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber is one of the coldest, most calculating baddies of 80s action cinema. He is calmly orchestrating the murder of a good score of people so that he can pull off the heist of the century. But he's so damn suave. And he's not prone to any sort of delusions; he may play the freedom fighter for the cameras, but he really couldn't give a toss about the Asian Dawn Movement. He wants his detonators so he can get the six million dollars worth of verabonds in the vault.

Nobody in Thorp's novel is so involving. The protagonist is Joseph Leland, perhaps the crankiest ex-cop in history. Imagine Andy Rooney at his least pleasant, then toss in a healthy dash of intergenerational friction and you'd be getting closer. Season with a good dose of hypocritical self-pity and a dash of self-piety and you've got our "hero." Ol' Leland is part of the Greatest Generation, and damn it if these young kids with their computers and their drugs and their mass media haven't begun to destroy society. Things just aren't like they were! Sure, he was an alcoholic, but his daughter Stephanie (and by extension everyone under forty) keeps fucking things up so much they make him look like a saint.

And let's not get started with these terrorists. They're all one-dimensional caricatures of Eurotrash scum, middle class kids who want to play liberator to mask they're innate bloodlust. Though they play at extreme leftist politics (a galling game at that!), they don't really have a cause. They're just bored and European...and thus decide to kill capitalist industrialists. Of course those guys are jerks, too. Instead of the Nakatomi Corporation we have the Klaxxon Oil Company, which has just brokered a deal with the oppressive government of Chile. So when Gruber whacks Rivers (the Takagi surrogate), you really can't feel all that bad. It's like if someone killed the head of Haliburton. No love lost.

Much of this reactionary claptrap could be ignored if the story had any sort of momentum. One of the reasons that the film still holds up is because it's exciting. The novel's narrative is extremely patchy. Each action sequence is followed by Leland's self-serving ramblings about his broken marriages and what a fuck-up Stephanie is and how he was an alcoholic and blah, blah, blah. For someone fighting for his life, Leland devotes a lot of time and energy to extraneous bitching, none of which makes getting through this short book any more enjoyable.

Thorp has no problem with throwing people he doesn't like to the lions. Both Stephanie (the Holly McClane character) and Deputy Police Chief Dwayne Robinson are given fairly ignominious deaths. But that's OK, 'cause neither character was as wonderful a person as Leleand. I mean, sure, he was an alcoholic and he has a terrible marriage track record and he didn't really do a great job of raising his daughter, etc. (We were reminded of all these facts about fifty times throughout the narrative at seemingly regular intervals.) But everyone else is part of these newfangled times and thus are essentially interchangeably corrupt and expendable. But thinking that other people are expendable is part of this crazy modern philosophy that's turning the world into a giant Los Angeles (the horror!).

There's a major difference between a flawed protagonist and an asshole. John McClane is the former, Joe Leland is the latter. I simply can't recommend Nothing Lasts Forever. If I weren't reading it for this blog, I would have chucked the poorly written little time-waster after about the first fifty pages (and that's being generous). Stick with the movie. Whenever I see Bruce Willis in schlock like Breakfast of Champions (the worst film ever made) or Grindhouse (a blasphemy unto the hallowed name of trash cinema), I like to re-watch Die Hard and remind myself that he can be a good actor if given a decent part.

However, I gotta admit that my colon clenches at the thought of this summer's Live Free or Die Hard. So much for nothing lasting forever, eh?

The Thing

"Who Goes There?" [1938]
Written by John W. Campbell, Jr.

The Thing [1982]
Written by Bill Lancaster
Directed by John Carpenter

If I've learned anything from The Thing, it's that being a scientist totally kicks ass! You get to hang out in the Antarctic with dogs and helicopters. You get a private arsenal of guns and flamethrowers. You get a pinball machine and computer chess. You get lots of booze and some weed. And you get to rock out to old-school Stevie Wonder ("Superstitious" to be exact). The only problem is that you could become infected by a malevolent amorphous extraterrestrial. And then Kurt Russell would have to set you on fire. (Which, as deaths go, would still be one of the top 10 most awesome ways to check out.)

Upon its initial release, The Thing met with considerable critical derision and audience disgust. Bob Bottin's literally eye-popping SFX work was just too much for early 80s audiences to digest (pun intended). Many critics grumbled that Carpenter had merely remade a classic, 1951's The Thing From Another World, and diluted it with gore and slime. Eventually, The Thing would find a second life on home video; it is now recognized as a modern classic of science fiction/horror and a benchmark in the history of special effects. However, it is still not uncommon to see the film referred to simply as a remake, a notion which will serve as the focus of this post.

Both The Thing From Another World and The Thing are based on John W. Campbell, Jr.'s short story "Who Goes There?". The first film is derived from the first half of the story, the latter from the second half. The notion that the Antarctic scientists discover the Thing's ship and bring the alien into their camp is used in the 1951 adaptation; in Carpenter's Thing the xenomorph uses the body of a husky to infiltrate the camp. But the 1951 monster is no shape-shifter. It's actually an intelligent space vegetable which vaguely resembles Karloff's Frankenstein's monster (and is played by a pre-Gunsmoke James Arness). Campbell's constantly mutating alien is reintroduced in the '82 Thing, and along with it comes a wave of paranoia unthinkable when trying to fry a killer space carrot.

Anyone could be the Thing. It could be Kurt Russell. It could be the black guy who does the voice-over work for US Navy commercials. It could be the farmer from Babe, the guy who married the mom in Six Feet Under. It could be Wilford Brimley. (Yes, the Quaker Oats guy.) And there's no way to know who's a monster until they explode into a slimy, writhing mass of tentacles and teeth. Campbell's Thing-infected scientists transform, but the author never dwells over their metamorphoses. Carpenter on the other hand gives us every gory detail.

The major discrepancy between short story and movie is the ending. Campbell finishes his tale with an improbably happy finale. He sets up the possibility for some ambiguity (and thus some lasting dramatic tension), and then off-handedly dismisses it with a sentence. Don't worry, all that messy "Thing" nonsense has been completely tidied up. Oh, and we might have just discovered the secret to unlimited energy and anti-gravity. Carpenter's ending is much darker. I won't spoil it here; just don't expect a tidy, rosy conclusion (not that you would based on the preceding hour and a half).

If you've got the stomach for it, you really need to see The Thing. It's a masterpiece, a rare film which deftly balances extreme gore with genuine creeping terror. For a fun follow-up, check out the song "The Thing" by the group Engorged (www.myspace.com/engorged) on their seminal Where Monsters Dwell album. It's a five minute deaththrash summary of the plot complete with samples from both Thing films.

And remember....KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!!!

The Ninth Configuration

Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane! [1966]
Written by William Peter Blatty

The Ninth Configuration [1980]
Written and Directed by William Peter Blatty

The Ninth Configuration is a film destined for the Cult Classics section of the video store. It's about Vietnam and veteran readjustment. It's about sanity in an insane world. It's a wacky/serious psychiatric hospital picture in the vein of King of Hearts or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's a Gothic "dark, scary castle" picture. It's a Catholic discourse on God's silence in response to the evil that plagues creation. And it's a sequel to The Exorcist about a character who got five minutes of screentime in that film...and was upstaged by Linda Blair pissing on the carpet.

That character is the astronaut to whom Blair's Pazuzu-possessed Regan remarks, "You're going to die up there." His name is Captain Cutshaw and on the launching pad of his moonshot he had a bit of a freak out. Now he's in an imported German castle in the Pacific Northwest that the Marines have converted into an experimental asylum for vets who lost it in 'Nam. Are Cutshaw et al. really beyond the pale, or are they faking it to stay out of harm's way? Marine psychiatrist Colonel Kane is sent to assess the men and evaluate if they can return to duty or not. But, not surprisingly, Kane himself has terrible secrets that are roaring to escape.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that Kane was written and published before The Exorcist, and that the astronaut in that book/film was unnamed. Correct and correct again. After the phenomenal success of The Exorcist, author Blatty used his newfound Hollywood clout to write and direct the film version of Kane. He got a better (and spoiler-free) title, updated the story, dispensed with some unnecessary (and relatively flat) buffoonery involving a paranoid senator and the general hounding him for funding, and shifted the locale a few hundred miles north. The uneven tonal shifts of the novel are finessed and equalized; the decision has been made to take things a bit more seriously from the get go, and we're clued in to that fact by the film's moody atmosphere and music. There are still some smart bits of comedy (the dogs learning Shakespeare bits still amuse me), but an outer darkness rings and reins in the absurdity. Oh, and there's a kick ass bar fight and a minor miraculous denouement.

The Ninth Configuration is the second in Blatty's "Trilogy of Faith," being followed by The Exorcist III. (Sorry, John Boorman's literally abysmal The Exorcist II: The Heretic has no place within the Blatty canon.) Each film deals with the problem of retaining faith when contested by evil. The Exorcist portrays spiritual evil, The Ninth Configuration portrays human evil, and Exorcist III combines the two in the form of a Satanic serial killer. In each, a troubled Catholic uses the wickedness around him to reaffirm his faith in the one true church. There's usually a martyrdom in there somewhere, too.

Admittedly, it can all get a bit heavy handed. I had to grit my teeth when Cutshaw ecstatically muttered, "He gave his life for us." And as viewers we're never really in doubt that the path of righteousness will be proven true and just. But the acting's good, the dialogue (when not devoted to sermonizing) is sharp, and the sum of the parts yields a truly unhinged spiritual redemption film for which there is no real comparison.

If you're up for some gonzo Catholicism and you need a break from Mel Gibson, give The Ninth Configuration a try. After all, where else are you going to see Christ crucified on the moon?

Diva

Diva [1979]
Written by Delacorta [Daniel Odier]
Translated by Lowell Bair

Diva [1981]
Written by Jean-Jacques Beineix and Jean Van Hamme
Directed by Jean-Jacques Beneix

"I don't like fidelity. A screenplay has to be creative even if it's based on a novel. If it tries to be the same thing, it doesn't succeed. I ask the filmmaker to be completely free and not to repeat the book. I want to enjoy creativity, not repetition." - Daniel Odier

So then, by decree of the author, the film Diva cannot be the same as the book. The unwritten assumption of the blog so far has been that a successful adaptation requires being a faithful adaptation. The classic argument against such a position is that, as both book and film are essentially equal, it makes having two editions redundant. Ironically, I had never felt that particular sense of bored déjà vu until I popped Diva into my DVD player.

Of all the texts encountered so far, Diva has been the most cinematically written. The pacing is perfect, with an assured balance between character development and exciting action sequence. The moped chase through Paris has to be one of the most well-written set pieces I have ever come across. Due to its position roughly halfway into the book, we know that Jules will survive, but the whole thing is so gripping that we must read on. For some reason, I couldn't maintain that oh so precious disbelief during the movie's chase. By all technical and aesthetic standards it was just as good, but a terrible "been there, done that" vibe seemed to dampen my enthusiasm.

Would a literal filming have been better? Should Alba have been 13 and not Vietnamese? Would the frisson be increased by making Saporta's role more transparent from the get go? Had the damn thing been too hyped up by all and sundry, making the viewing a textbook case of expectations raised too high? Did I just want to plough through the DVD so I could return it to the library and go back to my reading? I honestly don't know. But my gut feeling is that this particular experiment has been a bit of a bust. I'm sorry, but I'm just too lukewarm about the whole thing to really break into any sort of heady analysis. Let's just go the verdict and pray for better results with the next comparison.

Neither film nor book are classics by any stretch of the imagination, but each are diverting enough in their own right. Ultimately, having one negates the need to have the other. I hate to admit this, but you can probably skip the book; it's had less of a cultural effect in America than the film. And if you really need to be able to discuss Diva at a cocktail party or to impress a date, the assumption will be that you're talking about the movie. Should you need the book, just fall back on the introductory quote and you'll be OK.

We'll be seeing more of Jean-Jacques Beneix in future posts. Let's hope I'll have more to say when we get there....

The Most Dangerous Game

"The Most Dangerous Game" [1924]
Written by Richard Connell

The Most Dangerous Game [1932]
Written by James Ashmore Creelman
Directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack

So far in this series, when we have discussed adaptation our primary focus was on plot: Do book A and movie B tell the same story? Do the same characters do the same things? For our reading of the two incarnations of The Most Dangerous Game, it would be more profitable to examine tone and its relation to genre. How do short story and film tackle the subject of hunting humans?

The topic is grim, and the narrative (regardless of medium) is often unceremoniously dropped in the "horror" bin, sometimes to be regaled as one of the "good" examples of this generally reviled class of fictions. But the two "Game"s are hardly horrorshows; while both dabble in the macabre (particularly when dealing with Zaroff's trophy room), the primary aim of neither story nor film is to horrify. The terror which pervades the hunting sequence of "Game" is different than that generated by (and I cite these instances as great exemplars of their type) Sally's pursuit in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Ripley's mad dash through the Nostromo at the climax of Alien. No, the sense of the abject which serves as a traditional litmus test for horror is all but absent as Zaroff chases Rainsford (and, in the film, Eve) through the jungle.

Connell opts to create a thriller. The bulk of his short story involves Rainsford drawing upon all of his hunting skill to rig lethal booby traps for Zaroff. Both men are portrayed as ruthlessly pursuing their goal, the death of their opponent. In particular, Rainsford holds no illusions about the outcome of the game; either he or Zaroff must murder the other. The means of death dealt by the traps aren't pleasant: crushing or impalement. We may cringe once a trap is sprung, but Connell never revels in the ensuing gore. His narrative is a model of economy; stopping to rubberneck over the mangled remains would only detract from the heart-stopping pace of the hunt.

Pichel and Schoedsack cut the two impaling traps, but give us a guided tour of the dreaded trophy room (complete with head in a jar)! Combined with scenes of Rainsford killing one of Zaroff's hunting dogs, it provides a deliciously nasty little taste of pre-Code filmmaking. But, again, the directors aren't out to horrify. In fact, when these gruesome elements are placed within their tropical context, the film is revealed as a jungle action picture. Zaroff and his Cossacks are the Slavic analogues to the African headhunters of any number of adventure yarns. (In one ludicrous moment Zaroff even refers to his people as being "savage." So much for the ethnic warrior pride of Taras Bulba....)

What most stands out to a modern viewer of The Most Dangerous Game is its similarity to the next year's King Kong. Schoedsack, actress Fay Wray, and producer Merian C. Cooper would all reuinte for the giant gorilla move which would be filmed on several of its predecessor's sets. It's hard not to smile seeing Rainsford and Eve race across Kong's infamous log bridge (watch out for the spiders!). Their jog through the Death Fog swamp is replicated by several (doomed) sailors in the Brontosaurus chase sequence from the ape picture. Even the music is similarly composed and utilized.

The story and the film are worth your time, each for different reasons. Check 'em both out, if only so you can see the inspiration for a thousand subsequent B-action movies, notably 1993's Hard Target. It's John Woo directing Lance Henriksen trying to kill Jean-Claude Van Damme! How can you go wrong?

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Who Censored Roger Rabbit? [1981]
Written by Gary K. Wolf

Who Framed Roger Rabbit [1988]
Written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman
Directed by Robert Zemeckis

In a "making of" doc that accompanies the 2-disc DVD version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, executive producer Steven Spielberg enthuses about how he loved the idea of a human detective working with a zany cartoon rabbit. That makes about as much sense as watching Saving Private Ryan and saying, "Gee, that opening scene was sure intense; war must be great!"

Despite its postmodern trappings, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? is fundamentally a mystery novel. Eddie Valiant is the archetypal private dick with a love for the sauce. His distaste for 'toons runs parallel to the casual xenophobia of classic noir. We could easily replace "'toon" with "colored" throughout the novel and come to a sardonically accurate portrait of racial integration (and white fear and disdain for it) in major metropolitan areas during the post-war era.

Wolf's 'toons aren't film stars; they're essentially models. Comic strips are reproductions of still photos of posing 'toons. Most 'toons speak by having word balloons appear above their heads. Some, like Jessica Rabbit, suppress this to "pass" for human.

There are no car chases with gruffly likable talking cabs or star-filled detours into Toontown. There's no "dip," no Judge Doom, and no weasel goon squad. Jessica is a heartless bitch who posed for some porno pics as she was clawing her way to the top. Roger is by turns a love-struck idiot and a plotting, back-stabbing little shit.

And there's a genie.

Basically, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? and Who Framed Roger Rabbit are two entirely different stories with overlapping characters. They share exactly one line of dialogue (spoken by Baby Herman), and even that meets with slight alteration.

This is what bugs me about the standard-issue Disney adaptation. They take a perfectly good source work (be it a Märchen, a kid's story, or even a classic novel), bowdlerize it, toss in some catchy musical numbers and marketable plush-toy sidekicks and release it into the American collective unconscious like some sort of Burroughsian thought virus. And then they soak up all the credit and the cash. The Roger Rabbit that lives in the public's mind isn't Gary K. Wolf's...it's the Disney Corporation's. It lives alongside Disney's Snow White, Disney's Pinocchio, Disney's Aladdin, Disney's Hercules, and Disney's Quasimodo---all pale shadows of their original incarnations. And these shadows are further diluted by the continuous flood of straight-to-video sequels, theme park rides, and TV series.

Words fail me. Let's face it, you've probably already seen the movie. Try reading the book now. It's a surprisingly smart and gripping little novel. Introduce yourself to the real Roger Rabbit. Find out what a little rat bastard he is. And wonder why Spielberg and the Mousketeers thought the whole thing should be reduced to big, loud, expensive, broadly played, special-effects-laden family event film.

{Oh, that's right, it's the fucking money, stupid.}

Full Metal Jacket

The Short-Timers [1979]
Written by Gustav Hasford

Full Metal Jacket [1987]
Written by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Full Metal Jacket in my generation's (and subsequent generations') understanding of the Vietnam War. For thousands of American men and women, Vietnam is a historical abstraction, photos of green-clad grunts in worn history textbooks. For those who don't have a primary connection to the conflict (like a dad or uncle who served), and this includes myself, it seems as impenetrably past as World War II. Our introduction to the terrible realities of the war comes through film, particularly Jacket and Oliver Stone's Platoon. Of the two, Jacket seems to have become the (and I know how morbidly ironic this will sound) popular favorite. Maybe because "Me so horny" is part of the lexicon and a sampled staple of hip-hop. Maybe because R. Lee Ermey parlayed his drill instructor role into a well-deserved career. Or maybe because the film, like most of Kubrick's work, is a fucking masterpiece of cinema. But like most of Kubrick's work, the whole thing started with a book: former Combat Correspondent Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers.

I cannot begin to address in its entirety the issue of Kubrick and adaptation. Through the progress of this blog I hope to look at things on a case-by-case basis. At times, the director is an exacting cinematic transcriber of text to celluloid (c.f. A Clockwork Orange). Sometimes he plays fast and loose with his source (c.f. Dr. Strangelove). Jacket is something of a halfway point between the two; in fact, the film is divided into sections which are, respectively, a to-the-letter filming and a condensation of disparate material.

Hasford's "The Spirit of the Bayonet" concerns the Parris Island training of Combat Correspondant Private Joker. While Kubrick makes some slight changes here and there (Private Pyle is now a lardass rather than an actual dead ringer for Gomer Pyle), his fidelity to the book is at times uncanny. Consider the following passage (and you'll instantly recall the exact scene in the film):

"During our sixth week, Sergeant Gerheim orders us to double-time around the squad bay with our penises in our left hands and our weapons in our right hands, singing: This is my rifle, this is my gun; one is for fighting and one is for fun. And: I don't want no teen-aged queen; all I want is my M-14.
"Sergeant Gerheim orders us to name our rifles: 'This is the only pussy you people are going to get. Your days of finger-banging ol' Mary Jane Rottencrotch through her pretty pink panties are over. You're married to this piece, this weapon of iron and wood, and you will be faithful.
"We run. And we sing:
Well, I don't know
But I been told,
Eskimo pussy
Is mighty cold...."

Dead on, nah? If anything, Kubrick (with the assured participation of Ermey) elaborates on this section of the book. What Hasford describes in a sentence, Kubrick allows Ermey to stretch into whole minutes of profanely quotable film.

Joker's wartime experiences constitute the final two sections: "Body Count" and "Grunts." Kubrick compresses these two sections into the film's second half. The adaptation is not as literal, but retains the fundamental thrust of the narrative. The centerpieces of both book sections are sniper attacks on the company Joker is attached to (first as a correspondent, then as a grunt). The setup is mostly from "Body Count" (the woman sniper in a dilapidated building), but the slow picking off of the marines is straight outta "Grunts."

Other sequences and patches of description and dialogue undergo recombination for film. We get some downtime, but Joker and Rafter Man see The Green Berets and don't meet the "Me so horny" prostitute. The rat hunt is eliminated, but the dead VC's birthday is intact. "The Mickey Mouse Club Theme" even shows up, though its placement in the movie serves as a grim coda to the previous 120 or so minutes.

From the literary perspective (my supposed grounding in this monotonous process of blog-typing), what is most phenomenal about Full Metal Jacket is its ability to translate without translation. Hasford wrote The Short-Timers in the military-slang-filled language of the marine. Even the title is a euphemism for a draftee forced to serve 100 days in country. As we have seen, Kubrick keeps this particular dialect . It would seem like a daunting enterprise (remember how they had to give out glossaries to early screenings of Dune?), but through context and cultural osmosis the reader/viewer quickly becomes acclimated to the rhythms and content of speech and description.

Sadly, all of Gustav Hasford's works are OOP. I had to inter-library loan my copy of the novel (thanks to the Ann Arbor and Grand Blanc libraries!). Should you want to read the book (and you should) and such a route is not be open to you, the complete text of The Short-Timers is available at the author's website: http://gustavhasford.com/

Read, learn and remember.