777 times lovelier than I'd ever seen
June 2003
June 29, 2003
Whale Rider
If Whale Rider had been a Disney movie, it would have been absolutely dreadful; made by a bunch of New Zealand indie filmmakers, it came out as a surprisingly intelligent and effective (though certainly not innovative) family drama. The plot -- a spunky Maori girl wins her crusty, traditionalist grandfather's approval, despite not being a boy -- doesn't sound promising. But despite being every bit as sentimental as that summary would suggest, Whale Rider was a charming little movie. Part of it has to do with the lead actress, Keisha Castle-Hughes. Child actors are generally abhorrently cute, but Castle-Hughes' performance as Paikea reminded me of the child actors Jafar Panahi dug up for The Mirror and The White Balloon. She's got a very natural, winning screen presence; I suspect she's going to grow up to be breathtaking; I hope she doesn't lose her on-screen comfort. And her interactions with Rawiri Paratene, playing her grandfather, Koro, are brilliantly underplayed.
Beyond the acting (and the lovely New Zealand countryside), the secret of Whale Rider, V. and I decided, is that it was willing to make her grandfather's resistance to Pai wholly credible. Her grandfather is a tribal leader who has been awaiting a chief who can resurrect the small rural town, seeming entirely populated by Maori, in which he and his family live. Koro's relentless drive to shape a new prophet has driven his eldest son to Europe and life as an artist and his second son -- passed over by the order of his birth -- to a cheerful, beer-fueled, and inert life. Paikea is named after the mythic founder of the Maori people, but she's a girl. We know how this is going to turn out, of course, but unlike the crusty-old-men with hearts-of-gold in Pollyanna or The Secret Garden, Koro's beliefs seem to have had genuine negative consequences. Even though we see that Koro's operating within the framework that he understands, and even though he's depicted flatteringly, he's run off his two children and he's in the process of running off his only grandchild. Until a literal miracle forces him to reevaluate his beliefs, Koro is a sympathetic, nuanced jerk, and children's movies could use more of the type.
June 25, 2003
Artemis Fowl
In the downtime before the appearance of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, after Red and I had picked through all the Diana Wynne Jones in the library, we picked up Artemis Fowl. Red had heard of it; it's the first book in a popular children's series. The author, Eoin Colfer, has apparently described it as his attempt to do "Die Hard with fairies". Alas, it's more like Die Hard II: a deeply cynical, deeply lazy effort that demonstrates a withering contempt for the intelligence of its readers. Artemis Fowl is a child genius, a master criminal. His father has been lost; his mother is mad; he, with his faithful butler, Butler (in a sign of bad things to come, Colfer tells us that the word "butler" derives from the name of Butler's family; the opposite explanation -- that Butler's family had been serving the Fowls since before surnames -- would have made it a clever touch rather than simply dumb), is bent on looting fairy gold. And therein lies a problem. I am happy to read a book about a Moriartyish or Luthorian twelve-year-old supervillain. I am less happy to read a book about said twelve-year-old doing battle with the Little Folk. A rule of thumb for genre literature is that you get one major suspension of belief per novel. Young genius Fowl plus highly technologically developed fairy society is two, possibly three. Given a well-plotted novel full of fascinating characters and shimmering prose, I might not kick, but Artemis Fowl struck me, as I said, as deeply lazy. A good chunk of the early book is devoted to Fowl's decoding of the mysterious book that all fairies must keep hidden from mortals. We are told that the language it's in resembles Egyptian. (Which Egyptian? That of "Tutankhamen's inner-chamber hieroglyphics." Uh-huh.) But the script as depicted in the book looks absolutely nothing like hieroglyphics, and it's not a language. It's a simple substitution cipher. Did Colfer assume that nobody would notice? Or did he think that kids would have a good enough time drawing up the chart of which symbol replaces which letter that he didn't need to come up with a better explanation? Similarly, the ending -- the ending towards which Fowl has been driving all the other characters, safe in his knowledge that he has one great trick up his sleeve which will turn the tables on his opponents -- feels dropped in out of nowhere (and from a great height, possibly from orbit). If Die Hard's climax had featured Bruce Willis calling in a SWAT team that hadn't appeared in the movie previously, I'd've resented that, too. J.K. Rowling has her problems as a writer, and I sometimes feel as if she's just going through the motions or hasn't bothered thinking through her plot, but I never feel as though she cheats. Good villains cheat; good books don't. I'll take a cartoonish Voldemort over a deux ex machine-wielding Fowl any day, thank you.