Something Wicked This Way Comes: (1983. dir: Jack Clayton) It looks like it’s going to be about young boys and that troublesome passage into adolescence via the delicious metaphor of a malevolent, nocturnal carnival. Rather, it’s about the aging of men, and the sorrows and regrets of passing into middle years while feeling your choices are all behind you.
The atmosphere is lovely and autumnal, the carnival is dark and sumptuous, threatening and enticing in equal measure, but the story is ham-handed and allows its “alleg’ree” to stand in the way of our total immersion.
This movie was the first time I ever saw Jonathan Pryce, who is menacing indeed as the urbane and supernatural carnival ringleader, and it provided a much-appreciated first comeback for Pam Grier as the exotic embodiment of what Gabriel Garcia Marquez used to maddeningly call "the mangrove swamp" of female carnality.
The Carnival is a travelling Walpurgisnacht, and like all Walpurgisnacht feasts, this one's purpose is to ensnare souls, and souls are ensnared through weakness: in this case, the normal adult longing for lost prowess or beauty or opportunities. Children have a better chance, as they do not yet despair, but one of the boys in question is weak in his impatience for the onslaught of adulthood, and so makes himself easy prey for the crepuscular forces.
There are good, shiver-inducing pieces: at its epicenter, the carnival has a carousel which will age you or make you younger, depending on which way it turns, and the lightning rod salesman is a nice touch. It is a Disney film, so between Walt and Ray Bradbury, who wrote the novel, the aroma of nostalgia is pretty thick, but it works alongside the main theme to evoke the loss and regret and yearning.
I was disappointed with it in my youth when I saw it in the cinema, with its broadly-painted, one-stroke characters (the one-armed barkeep who longs for his days as a football hero, the portly barber who yearns for exotic women, the hatchet-faced librarian who once was a great beauty). The adults, as too often happens in movies ostensibly aimed at children (although I would argue this is really made for the masculine middle-age-crisis set), even the Jason Robards character, who is given much screen-time and whose soul is laid bare for us, seem simplified to exist almost solely in relation to the children, either as help-meets, tormentors, or as travelling moral lessons.
So I'm still disappointed with it. But if you keep your expectations low, you'll find small treasures abound in this movie's cobwebbed corners.
Dorian Gray: (2008. dir: Oliver Parker) A decent enough re-telling of one of the world's great horror stories. It's visually luscious in a way that would make Wilde happy, I think, and captures the sensuality without overdoing. It's well-acted and well-written, with the necessary padding (the novel itself is slim and, to its credit, leaves many details to the imagination) more than reasonably well done.
The trouble, and it's inherent in the story itself, is the same that one comes up against when filming Lovecraft: the titular portrait is itself the final shock, and while Wilde used our imaginations to bring it to life, what possible visual can give it sufficient shock value to evade anticlimax? Although the build-up in this one is just about perfect (a stunningly gorgeous portrait to start with, slowly growing hollow-eyed, festering and maggot-ridden), in the end it just looks like a picture of the Cryptmaster, and how scary is that?
Apart from that daunting obstacle, though, Dorian (Ben Barnes) is beautiful, Colin Firth is equal parts over-intellectual and too-much-debauched as the louche and ultimately conflicted Lord Henry (much more conflicted here than he is in the book, I think), Ben Chaplin is about perfect as the barely-closeted, magically gifted artist Basil Hallward, and the camera moves with lovely grace and ease between them. It lacks the heavy menace of the old black-and-white Gothic George Saunders version (and lacks Angela Lansbury, too, who is stunningly vulnerable as Sybil Vane), but it has a rather effective coda and final shot, making up for earlier disappointments.
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