Another world, another time ...

It seems I'm learning all the time lately that bits of my favorite songs originated in movies.

First it was the bit from THX 1138 in the opening moments of Nine Inch Nails' "Mr. Self Destruct," as discussed here, and now it's the opening lines of The Crystal Method's "Trip Like I Do," which it shares with the opening lines of The Dark Crystal.

I actually need to reverse the order there. I found out about the Dark Crystal "Trip Like I Do" connection a couple months back when I listened to a pair of episodes of The Next Picture Show podcast, which compared Crystal with last year's Kubo and the Two Strings. In the Crystal-centric of the two episodes they played that opening narration, a familiar passage from my numerous times listening to "Trip Like I Do" over the years. I'd still only seen The Dark Crystal once, back when it first came out -- or at the very least, I saw it twice then and not since. Let's just say I saw it only once. I might logically have concluded from the name of the band and the reference to crystals in that opening monologue that the two were connected, but I guess I just didn't think much about it.

Last night I finally sat down for my second viewing of The Dark Crystal, satisfying an appetite first whetted when I heard the podcast, and made possible by a library rental. (Took me a while to get around to it, though -- the movie is due back today, which is why I watched it last night.)

I expected The Dark Crystal to engage and kind of horrify me, but look very dated. The reverse was actually true. I thought the puppetry and general look of the film held up better than I expected, and I was a bit bored. At the very least, not as captivated by the story as I expected to be.

But let's touch back to that horrifying part. There are a couple of things in this film that are pretty disturbing, like the way the Skeksis (Skekses?) use the crystal to drain the life force out of the Podlings, making them stare at it Clockwork Orange-style. I guess it would be more disturbing if they then killed and discarded them, but like a number of oppressed creatures in this film, the entranced zombie Podlings do get their life forces back at the end. (And the dog Fizzgig survives getting kicked down one of those bottomless pits of fire, it was nice to see.)

When I was a kid I was always more disturbed by the Skekses (let's go with that as the plural), and I'd actually kind of forgotten the beetle-looking Garthim. I enjoyed their creature design but they didn't really scare me, possibly because I was comparing them to two similar monstrosities from the same time period -- those tall, robed skeletal things from Time Bandits and the Wheelers from Return to Oz.

That probably makes a good transition. This is an appropriate time to have watched The Dark Crystal because it comes on the heels of three related first-time viewings in 2016: Labyrinth, Return to Oz and Legend. Those movies came out in 1986 (the first) and 1985 (the second two), which made them a few years later than Crystal. But clearly mid-80s fantasy has been interesting me lately.

Yet more interesting is how I'm rating them. You'd figure that the one I saw at the time would hold a sentimental sway over me while the three newcomers would be the ones that couldn't make much an impression on me 30 years after their creation. The reverse seems to be true. If I had to rank those four I would rank Labyrinth first, Return to Oz and Legend second and third in whatever order (I'm having a hard time choosing as I sit here) and then The Dark Crystal last. So that means the two Jim Henson films bookend the others. It could be a straight-up matter of their narrative quality, or it could just be that the other three movies make for an interesting first-time discovery for a man in his 40s, a man inclined toward nostalgia, as I suppose we all are lately.

The last Dark Crystal-related thought to cram in here is that this story holds a unique position in my personal history in a way I will tell you about right now.

When I was a kid I owned the novelization of The Dark Crystal, and not long after seeing it I undertook the task of reading it. But I didn't get very far.

To this day I will always remember the opening lines of this novelization, which were:

"It was Jen. Jen alone."

For some reason, these five words represented such a peculiarly uninviting opening to a book that I just put it down right then and there and never resumed. So to this date, the novelization of The Dark Crystal remains the fewest amount of words I've read in a book that I abandoned. (Followed closely by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, about a minute of which I listened to on audio book before deciding that it wasn't for me.)

Okay, I'll see you "another time ..."

Tarsem's inspiration

If you've read my blog a lot you know that Tarsem Singh's 2000 film The Cell is a favorite of mine, the kind of favorite I revisit about once every two years. Which is pretty often, considering that two of my top four movies of all time are films I haven't seen once in the past ten years. (A discussion for another time.)

In fact, today happens to be the two-year anniversary of my last viewing of The Cell, meaning that it's definitely time for another one. And there could be no greater encouragement than having just finally seen for the first time Ridley Scott's 1985 film Legend, which now seems like an obvious source of inspiration for The Cell.

Some spoilers may follow.

The plots could not be more different. One is a fantasy in which a demon is trying to bring about eternal darkness by killing off the last of the unicorns. The other is a horror-thriller in which a psychiatrist must enter the mind of a serial killer to discover the whereabouts of his last victim.

But the imagery they use? Well, I'll let you be the judge.

Both movies feature a princess character who becomes hypnotized. In Legend she's an actual princess named Lily, played by Mia Sara. In The Cell she's the psychiatrist, Catherine (Jennifer Lopez), who is only symbolically a princess in terms of the role she takes while hypnotized in the kingdom of the killer. "Queen" might be a better description than princess. Anyway, here's how they look:

That's Mia. And here's J-Lo:

I suppose you could argue that one being influenced by the other is not a given, since the costumes are more suggestive of each other than replicas. They are both ornate "dark princess" outfits -- so what?

But then there's the evil ruler of this lair, who hypnotizes these princesses. In Legend he's named Darkness and played by Tim Curry:

And in The Cell he's played by Vincent D'Onofrio and named Carl Stargher. We need two images of him to get the full breadth of the allusion, and it definitely does seem like an allusion:

One has the pronounced nipples and chest, the other has the horns. D'Onofrio's multiple incarnations in The Cell are one of its chief pleasures.

Taken in combination, there's no doubt that Tarsem seems to have been inspired by Legend. Right? I'm not saying it's a ripoff. I'm saying it's a repurposing, and a damn effective one at that.

Both films even have another male character who is involved in a climactic ceremony -- played by Vince Vaughn and Tom Cruise -- though their functions are a bit different. Vaughn is actually having his guts twisted out of him while desperately trying to break through to Catherine, while Cruise is a bit more of an onlooker as Lily prepares to possible sacrifice the last unicorn.

And speaking of which ...

Both movies feature a horse (unicorn, same difference) in harm's way. While the unicorns are ultimately saved in Legend, things don't turn out quite as well for the horse in The Cell ...

Star subterfuge

The marketing team behind Tom Hardy's new movie has brought deceit to a new level. You might almost call it legendary.

This ad for Legend contains what appears to be an overwhelming onslaught of four- and five-star reviews praising the film. And in most respects, it legitimately is just that.

But the marketing team got greedy. I guess they couldn't find exactly 12 reviews that were at least four stars, so they added a two-star review in there.

Can't see it? It's the one between Tom Hardy's left ear and Tom Hardy's right ear.

Oh, you're meant to think it's just another 4+ review. But Benjamin Lee, critic for The Guardian, tweeted otherwise:

"Incredible way of making my two-star review seem like I didn't hate the film."

What's brilliant about this is that this ad is completely not lying. There are only two stars above the words The Guardian, and that's exactly the number of stars Lee gave the film. It's misleading, for sure, but all is fair in love, war and advertising, right?

What's not brilliant about this is that someone should have anticipated that the subterfuge would be uncovered. And if they knew Lee, who sounds a bit cheeky, then they should have guessed that he might do something like this. (I don't know Lee from a hole in the ground, but anyone who maintains an active Twitter profile is liable to say anything, as we have repeatedly learned.) Either they didn't consider that, or they did a cost-benefit analysis and decided that whatever negative publicity might be generated over a calling out of such manipulation would pale in comparison to the positivity of seeing that impressive fleet of stars.

The one real design flaw is leaving "only" four stars above the head of the Hardy on the left, which is the only place on the ad that calls attention to the fact that less than the full number of stars was given. Of course, that gets us into the whole problem that not everyone uses a five-star scale anyway. Sometimes, four is the maximum number of stars, which is why you'll sometime see (out of 4) appear after the star rating. Since maximalism is the principle at play in such advertising, you'd only do to indicate that the film had received the full number of available stars. That's why you never see (out of 5), because a) 4.5 stars assumes the existence of a five-star scale, b) it's not needed with five stars because there's no commonly used scale that includes more than five stars, and c) if it's only four stars, you don't want to be honest about it only getting 80% of the way there; you want the user to retain the belief that this could be the maximum number of stars.

Of course, beyond any star-related shenanigans, this ad also commits a cardinal sin that I've written about before, using the word "unmissable," which is barely even a word. Unless we're talking about asteroids with a mathematical certainty of hitting Earth, nothing is "unmissable."

In this case in particular, Benjamin Lee would be inclined to agree.