Movie: The Rook
Jul. 31st, 2009 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amediaThere are a few different movies with this title; this was the one from 1993 (according to the credits) or 1994 (on the IMDB). We got it free from Jaman. It's a sort of murder mystery that takes place in an alternate 19th century. And before you go, "WAY COOL!" let me say that while I desperately wanted to love this movie, I couldn't even bring myself to like it. :-(
It's supposed to be Kafka-esque, but you know, part of the joy of Kafka's work - or perhaps better said, part of what contributes to the palpable horror - is Kafka's skillful use of everyday familiar details to allow the reader to grasp the strangeness of the twist. In this movie, nothing was familiar; everything was the twist. That might work for a half-hour episode of The Monkees, but not for a murder mystery or even for a pseudo-mystery that's really meant to be a complex allegory about ... um ... something. There were just enough allusions that we could be sure that we were in a world with a different history, but not enough to grasp the significance of any current situation the characters found themselves in. As far as the mystery went, even the clues that were offered didn't help the audience because we couldn't tell what they meant in context.
I found myself missing the internal consistency of works like The Difference Engine or The Golden Compass. The Difference Engine made me believe in a recognizably Victorian England with the plausible changes introduced by the computer; this movie had an early form of the computer, but it also had respectable women who smoked and drank in public, jukeboxes that played swing music, and corpses wrapped in clear plastic ... The Golden Compass offered a very different relationship between church and state, but dropped hints now and then (I laughed out loud at the mention of "Pope Calvin") as to how that had happened; this movie alluded vaguely to some sort of revolution against a church-controlled government - actually, that's MORE specific than the movie was - which was centrally important to what little plot there was, and utterly obscure.
The ending was probably supposed to make us go OOH and AAH and WASN'T THAT MYSTERIOUS? but my reaction (and TODS') was, "Meh."
[ETA: TODS, who has taught on nonsense, said that this reminded him more of Ionesco than Kafka. We had a very interesting lunch discussion about it.]
It's supposed to be Kafka-esque, but you know, part of the joy of Kafka's work - or perhaps better said, part of what contributes to the palpable horror - is Kafka's skillful use of everyday familiar details to allow the reader to grasp the strangeness of the twist. In this movie, nothing was familiar; everything was the twist. That might work for a half-hour episode of The Monkees, but not for a murder mystery or even for a pseudo-mystery that's really meant to be a complex allegory about ... um ... something. There were just enough allusions that we could be sure that we were in a world with a different history, but not enough to grasp the significance of any current situation the characters found themselves in. As far as the mystery went, even the clues that were offered didn't help the audience because we couldn't tell what they meant in context.
I found myself missing the internal consistency of works like The Difference Engine or The Golden Compass. The Difference Engine made me believe in a recognizably Victorian England with the plausible changes introduced by the computer; this movie had an early form of the computer, but it also had respectable women who smoked and drank in public, jukeboxes that played swing music, and corpses wrapped in clear plastic ... The Golden Compass offered a very different relationship between church and state, but dropped hints now and then (I laughed out loud at the mention of "Pope Calvin") as to how that had happened; this movie alluded vaguely to some sort of revolution against a church-controlled government - actually, that's MORE specific than the movie was - which was centrally important to what little plot there was, and utterly obscure.
The ending was probably supposed to make us go OOH and AAH and WASN'T THAT MYSTERIOUS? but my reaction (and TODS') was, "Meh."
[ETA: TODS, who has taught on nonsense, said that this reminded him more of Ionesco than Kafka. We had a very interesting lunch discussion about it.]
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-31 09:16 pm (UTC)Except for "Pope Calvin". That's funny. "Cardinal Hobbes"?
;)
L
no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 08:03 pm (UTC)