Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

by Ellen Datlow

  The acting in The Mist (from the King novella) is better than the script; people filling out sketchily written characters with good old-fashioned craftsmanship. And I knew, once the protag started counting the bullets, we were in for a hopeful downer of an ending. There is some attempt to show the ecology of wherever-it-is they came from. The plot itself reminds me of another ’50s movie, The Cosmic Monster (l958), where a similar hole punched in the ionosphere allows monsters to come through from another dimension.

  The Planet Terror half of Grindhouse took us back to ’70s drive-in double features: women with mini Gatling guns in place of legs; alien invasion; heroes and heroines reluctantly falling in love with the right wrong people. It’s as if American International Pictures had never stopped being ahead of (instead of behind) the curve, and if all the Corman trainees had continued turning out exploitation pictures instead of important films. . . .

  The second part of the movie—Death Proof—is not SF or fantasy.

  Stardust was this past year’s equivalent of The Brothers Grimm from a couple years ago. Unlike that movie, there was no stuff so great (the gingerbread man, the horse that swallows the kid) that you were cheesed off that the rest of the movie wasn’t as good.

  Stardust sort of sat there; if it had been either better or worse the review wouldn’t have given me as much trouble. There’s one mythic scene in the film, Michelle Pfeiffer riding her goat cart across a long, Scottish Highland-looking road. The one compensating plot point: Everyone is out after the meteorite for their own individual reasons; it means different things/goals to different characters. The analogous objects are the wagonloads of whiskey in The Hallelujah Trail (1965). This shows more initiative than most movies since then.

  I Am Legend: Third time is not quite the charm. The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (l964) is still the closest in tone to the book. Will Smith actually convinced me he could act a couple of times in this one, and there’s some swell stuff of New York City reverting to the wild (with animals escaped from zoos, etc., and passing a gas station with the sign from December 2008 with Regular at $6.29 a gallon . . . ). I know—and you will, too—people who won’t see this because “something happens to the dog.”

  The stylistic innovations in 300 were fine the first fifty times (the frozen sword-slash with its solid streak of blood), but paled by the hundredth, and they even continued into the still-frame end credits. And Spartans laughing at Athenians as “philosophers and boy-lovers” means someone (either the original graphic novel or the filmmakers) didn’t do a lot of homework.

  The stupidest preview trailer of 2007—like a ’60s movie made by someone born in l980 who’d only heard of the l960s from their aunts and uncles—was for Across the Universe. With characters named Jude, Prudence, and Lucy, you know the songs you’re going to hear (although Julie Taymor, the director, knew enough to leave one of the songs exegetically to the end credits, outside the narrative).

  Surprisingly, the movie works on its own terms (some of the chronology is slightly askew, but the ’60s mostly depended on where you were—some places got hotter quicker than others). Some striking visuals (as, of course, you’d expect from the director of the stage version of The Lion King). But it’s not all empty visuals, and in the old phrase “the personal is the political,” I didn’t want my money or my time back, which I had sure figured I would after seeing the massively wrongheaded trailer earlier in the year. But friends with some taste convinced me to see it.

  The Last Mimzy’s heart was in the right place—unfortunately they chose to update it (from the original WWII period) to these post-9/11 times, with Homeland Security involved.

  They did concentrate on the characters, and they left their hands off the CGI stuff until the climax, a very subdued use of it these days. It’s no Grand Tour: Disaster in Time (made from Kuttner and Moore’s “Vintage Season” some years ago), which knew how to approach the story (even though it, too, was updated). But it tried. (The thrice-removed narration didn’t help, either.)

  When I’d heard that they were making Ghost Rider, I hoped it would be the first-incarnation Old West version: no, it’s Nicolas Cage on a chopper now. (The Old West version is in one scene, when a ghost horse whose hooves strike sparks on the road rides alongside the cycle—it’s of course the best scene in the movie, and it should all have been like that.)

  It’s not as bad as the remake of The Wicker Man a couple of years ago, which was the biggest waste of celluloid since Manos: The Hands of Fate.

  By the way, Cage is in the fake movie trailers in Grindhouse, as Fu Manchu.

  John Cusack, the actor who’s taken the most chances with his career of anyone currently working, was in 1408; he’s usually not in films that sledgehammer you with effect after effect. There are some genuinely disturbing scary scenes early on (and one true scene; he’s an author doing a book-signing and a reading, and there are four people in the audience). It starts out as the usual, with a nonbeliever spending the night in a supposedly haunted hotel room (the title one, like the one in The Shining), and goes quickly downhill and sideways at the same time. Cusack’s good—it’s everything else that lets him down.

  Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. The kind of movie that killed off Robin Williams’s screen career, only now it’s happening to Dustin Hoffman. As a friend said, “Hit me over the head with the whimsy-stick one more time!” The questions raised in the plot are left unanswered, and the block-of-wood McGuffin doesn’t figure in the dénouement. And it’s about the wrong character. A special-effects misfire: truly forgettable.

  Sweeney Todd was not a 2007 movie, not in Austin anyway.

  I look forward with trepidation to the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still this coming year. It won’t work unless it’s postmodern or it’s period. If it’s period, why remake it—just colorize the original and put half a billion in advertising it. If it’s pomo, will the 2008 audience understand it as well as the cinema-literate audience of 1951 understood the original?

  There was no equivalent to The Prestige this year.

  PAN’S LABYRINTH: DREAMING WITH EYES WIDE OPEN

  EL LABIRINTO DEL FAUNA (THE FAUN’S LABYRINTH)

  TIM LUCAS

  Tim Lucas is the editor and copublisher of Video Watchdog, the influential monthly review of horror, cult, and fantasy cinema, and the author of several books on film, most recently Videodrome and the multiple-award-winning biography Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark. He is also the author of two horror novels, Throat Sprockets and The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula. He resides in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  Guillermo del Toro was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, but Pan’s Labyrinth is unmistakably a crown jewel of the Spanish fantastic cinema, possibly unprecedented in achieving commercial and critical success in America despite del Toro’s refusal to produce an English-language dub track. Until now, the Spanish-language branches of the genre (those native to Spain and Mexico) have typically yielded a volatile hybrid of the genre’s most garish and refined attributes, a heady sangria of blood, profundity, fruit, and Carnivál. With its masked wrestlers, brain-eating warlocks, and doll people, Mexican horror has long been among the genre’s most ghettoized subgenres in terms of international profile, yet—as del Toro’s latest film reminds us—it also boasts a heritage encompassing such masters as Luis Buñuel, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Juan López Moctezuma, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Likewise, Spanish horror runs the gamut from the eroticized pulp of Paul Naschy and Jess Franco to acclaimed art house titles such as Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1974) and Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes (1997).

  Something that Spanish-language horror has always done exceptionally well is stories involving the very young and the very old. Guillermo del Toro bridged this generational gap into a single fable with his 1993 feature debut, Cronos, which also established his ongoing fascinations with insects, machinery, and religious iconography. Almost from the very beginning, del Toro has shown extraordinary promise of becoming the g
reat unifying and uplifting force that Spanish horror and fantasy has always craved. He has taken a deliberately checkerboard approach to his career, following each new commercial project with a job more progressive and personal in nature. Make no mistake: even del Toro’s commercial work (Mimic, Blade II, Hellboy) is stylish and above average in intelligence, but his personal films—Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and now Pan’s Labyrinth—are like no other films currently being made. Del Toro is a Mexican descendant of Cervantes, Francisco Goya, Jean Cocteau, Mario Bava, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Italo Calvino, Bruno Bettelheim, and David Cronenberg, whose most insistent impulse is to study from all angles the volatile story of twentieth-century Spain through the impact of its suppressive history on the frontiers of the Spanish imagination and subconscious.

  With Pan’s Labyrinth, the whole of his work and creative reach is brought into brilliant focus—and this is surely the reason why so many critics have hailed it as del Toro’s masterpiece. Some closer to the genre may argue that The Devil’s Backbone was also a masterpiece, but certainly Pan’s Labyrinth is del Toro’s first magnum opus, a film that encapsulates his purpose as a filmmaker while simultaneously proving his ability to touch large numbers of people. We should take heart from its global success; not only because del Toro was able to produce such a film on his own terms (and not without sacrifice, as he diverted his entire salary to areas where it was more needed), but because, in this day and age, he has proved it is possible for even a sophisticated work of the fantastic to find a receptive American audience despite a resolute refusal to be Americanized. It represents a simultaneous triumph of the fantastic cinema, international cinema, and art house cinema.

  The film is set in a rural area of fascist Spain in 1944. The young heroine, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), is the daughter of Carmen (Ariadna Gil), the widow of a tailor, whose loneliness and fear for her daughter’s future led her to accept the proposal of Capitán Vidal (Sergi López). Vidal, a stern and time-obsessed second-generation officer, has his expectant wife and stepdaughter brought to his present headquarters despite the precarious state of her pregnancy—“A child should be born where its father is.” An imaginative child, Ofelia has retreated from worrisome reality into her books of fairy tales and she finds the woods surrounding Capitán Vidal’s encampment rife with possibilities for fantasy. An insect found inside an old tree becomes a fairy, which introduces her to an inscrutable Faun (Doug Jones) who recognizes her as Princess Moanna, whose “real father” is the King of the Nether-world. The Faun presents to Ofelia The Book of Crossroads, a blank book that fills with hidden illuminations at her touch. It helps her to better understand the three tasks she must complete before the moon is full: she must somehow obtain a magic key from the belly of an enormous toad inhabiting a hollow tree in the forest; she must use the key to gain access to a special dagger in the possession of the terrifying Pale Man ( Jones); and the third task involves spilling innocent blood, necessary to opening the gates to the seven circular gardens of Moanna’s palace.

  One could, with painstaking difficulty, write dozens of pages in praise of the film’s visual ingenuity, its sensitive performances, or its amazing talismanic monsters (the Pale Man particularly vaults immediately into the pantheon of horror greats). However, for me, the ultimate key to the film’s importance is the success with which del Toro couches his fantasy in a parallel historic reality; it is what makes the film Spanish and what also makes the film universal, which suggests to me that Pan’s Labyrinth is that rare work of art invested with the totemic power to bring people and nations together.

  On first viewing, the film’s fantastic segments are consistently surprising, but subsequent viewings emphasize the myriad ways in which the fantastic episodes mirror what is simultaneously happening within the film’s turbulent reality. Capitán Vidal has set up his headquarters in this precise spot because the surrounding woods are full of rebels. Therefore, the rebels are the liberal and liberating force living outside common detection in the woods, like the fairies inhabiting Ofelia’s universe. Before she has her first fantastic experience in the woods, Ofelia witnesses the servant Mercedes accepting ampoules of antibiotics to consign to the rebels, which may plant in her subconscious (or conscious) the suggestion of unseen life thriving in the woods. Carmen’s precarious pregnancy mirrors the instability of Spain, and Ofelia’s beseeching of her unborn brother not to hurt their mother when he is born gives voice to her fear that Vidal will have no further use for her once she gives him a son. Ofelia’s burgeoning transformation into Princess Moanna, and its linkage to the cycles of the moon, relate to her pubertal age and the coming of her menstrual cycle. The tree in the woods, from whence the fantasy originates, is unambiguously designed to resemble a diagram of the female reproductive organs, and these dimensions recur on a blank spread of The Book of Crossroads in a menstrual-like flow of blood that presages her mother’s near-miscarriage. When Capitán Vidal attempts to tease the rebels out of the woods by filling a storehouse with everything they require, from food and medicine to “real” tobacco, Ofelia’s fantasies send her into the realm of the Pale Man—she is given an hourglass to time a visit she must not overstay, mirroring Vidal’s death-obsessed preoccupation with time, and the Faun cautions her that she must take nothing from the Pale Man’s opulent banquet table or face terrible consequences. Ofelia cannot resist plucking two plump grapes (testes? ovaries?) from the impressive table spread and eating them, which prompts the Faun to close her out of her fantasy world temporarily, but, when the rebels manage to turn the tide against Vidal, the Faun reappears to offer Ofelia one last chance. The Faun’s denial of Ofelia also coincides with Vidal’s murder of Dr. Ferrerio (Álex Angulo), the man whom he entrusted with the responsibility of delivering his child, his own stake in the future.

  Del Toro’s scripts have always been remarkable for their rich imagination—we seem to feel Capitán Vidal stitching his slashed cheek back together—and literary qualities, but the density and completeness of Pan’s Labyrinth is new in his work, and at least uncommon in the filmography of any other currently active director.

  It is also the most ravishing fantasy film to come along in many years, visually comparable to Bernardo Bertolucci’s best work with Vittorio Storaro, its beauty bolstered by Bernat Vilaplana’s patient and nondisruptive cutting.

  Del Toro is also one of the finest audio commentators around, and his commentary track for New Line Cinema’s “Platinum Series” two-disc set of Pan’s Labyrinth is as personable, charming, intelligent, and instructive as one could hope. It is rare for any artist, least of all a film director, to speak with such forthright critical awareness about his work and its underlying meanings, design, influences, and antecedents, yet del Toro manages this without projecting any sense of egocentricity, pretension, or neurosis. Like a true craftsman, he never puts himself before the expression of his art, and his talk unfolds in the manner of a loving autopsy of a fully conscious and smiling entity. He dissects his and director of photography Guillermo Navarro’s use of horizontal and vertical wipes for scene transitions (“not eye candy but eye protein”), the film’s use of warm uterine reds and golds and rounded lines for its fantasy sequences and cold blues and greens and straight lines for its reality scenes, the necessity of adding CGI light bursts and sound effects to gunfire scenes filmed without discharging any weapons, and discusses how all of the film’s characters are at figurative crossroads in their lives. Regardless of how many of the film’s architectural secrets he lays bare, these revelations only enhance the pleasures of watching it again and again.

  According to del Toro, he ensured the track’s listenability and fluidity by recording it twice, in two takes each, with the end result assembled from the best scene-specific material. “I prepare these commentaries from the notes I keep in my notebooks,” he told me. “I really try and grind my initial thoughts, through my notebooks and work papers, until the initial instinct is ‘codified’ like a painting (composition, camera movement, he
ight of the camera, etc.). Actually, I could do three commentaries per disc—one thematic, one technical, and one visual—and still have notes and thoughts to spare.”

  In a business where it has become the accepted rule to let one’s audience interpret their work however it will, Guillermo del Toro is at once our most important living practitioner of fantasy cinema and his own most perceptive interpreter. As we watch his films and listen to his revelations of all that underlies his dense and inexhaustible imagery, we are reminded of the Socratic wisdom that an unexamined life is not worth living. Or, as del Toro might rephrase that wisdom, “Would there have been a story if Alice had fallen down the rabbit-hole with her eyes closed?”

  Note: This is an adaptation of a critical piece by Lucas in Video Watchdog 135, December 2007.

  NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE, NOVELETTE

  THE EVOLUTION OF TRICKSTER STORIES AMONG THE DOGS OF NORTH PARK AFTER THE CHANGE

  KIJ JOHNSON

  Kij Johnson is a previous winner of the IAFA’s William L. Crawford Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. She is associate director for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction (CSSF) at the University of Kansas and aboutSF. com, an online science fiction resource center. Each summer she teaches an intensive novel-writing workshop for CSSF.