VARIOUS THINGS

RIP to a hero of Your Humble Narrator’s, the great radio dramatist & triumphalist liberal patriot Norman Corwin, passed on way too young at 101.

Though I’ve loved old-school radio drama ever since I heard War of the Worlds as a kid, it was seeing a live performance of Corwin’s classic airwave comedy My Client Curley, starring my dear late pal Tim Reader, that really got me jazzed about trying my hand at the medium. A few years later, my pal Julie, who directed that show & later worked on several of my Sun Sounds productions, kindly gave me a copy of Norman Corwin’s Letters. I was both humbled & exhilarated at the craft & polish that Corwin put into the prose of his private correspondence.

Corwin’s best-known work may be On a Note of Triumph, his word-concerto broadcast on V-E Day in 1945. Here’s a passage from the Prayer section which I wish we’d all make a daily devotion (it was later included, by the way, in a standard prayerbook for American Reform Judiasm):

Lord God of test-tube and blueprint
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and give instruction to their schemes:
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend:
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of the little peoples through expected straits,
And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come for longer than posterities can see ahead,
That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.

Can I get an Amen for Brother Norman?

Check out this terrific review of Pat Buchanan’s latest jaw-droppers…

I wasn’t able to get to it before it opened last weekend, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s acknowledge the title character of the new version of The Thing, now in theatres.

My review:

All it means, really, is “object,” yet somewhere along the line in American pop culture the word “thing” came to mean something scary, a monster, a freak. Maybe it says something about humans that it’s what’s undefined, not consigned to a pigeonhole, which raises our collective gooseflesh.

Despite short stories like Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” & Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” & despite the disturbing ‘40s-era radio play “The Thing on the Fourble Board,” the usage was probably truly popularized by the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World, with James Arness, who passed on this June, in the title role. Based on John W. Campbell’s 1938 pulp tale Who Goes There?, the film was remade by director John Carpenter, simply as The Thing, in 1983.

The Thing in question in the 1951 version is a vampiric humanoid vegetable from outer space, discovered frozen in the ice near a U.S. military/scientific outpost in the Arctic. Accidentally thawed out, he wreaks deadly havoc until he’s outdone by American ingenuity & cooperation.

Carpenter’s remake sticks closer to Campbell’s novella. Discovered in Antarctica this time, The Thing is the ultimate chameleon, an amorphous mass that can assume the shape of a human host. But whenever its cover is blown, it suddenly unravels into a squealing, twisted, tentacled horror out of Hieronymus Bosch, & starts tearing everybody in the vicinity apart.

The film, with Kurt Russell leading a pack of top-notch character actors, is also pretty gripping. If there’s one, you know, thing that the movie world didn’t especially need right this minute, it was probably one more version of The Thing.

But we’ve got one, directed by the impressively-named Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. Despite the identical title, it’s not actually a remake, but rather a “prequel” to Carpenter’s film, set in Antarctica in 1982, among the Norwegian researchers who make the initial discovery, & soon aren’t sure who’s human & who’s a Thing. The cast is full of manly types, but the resourceful heroine is a young American paleontologist, well-played by the incredibly adorable Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

This Thing takes an ill-advised excursion away from the outpost near the end which strains its convincing feel a bit, but up until then it’s a fairly tense, austere little thriller, with a soundtrack full of the unnerving pulses & thrums that used to make up Carpenter’s minimalist electronic scores. Some pretty shocking special effects are deployed, too, but van Heijningen derives most of the film’s atmosphere from his teasing out of the suspense & paranoia. He rather deftly keeps you wondering who the monsters are.

But while this Thing is a passable piece of work, I can’t find any pressing reason why needs to exist. The original is a fascinating study in Hawksian attitudes toward American collective strength against a generic common enemy. Carpenter’s The Thing has a more cynical, individualistic, spaghetti-western ethos, & a correspondingly thicker sense of paranoia.

The new film, conceived as a direct prologue to Carpenter’s, adds no new dimension, &—I hate to sound like a Luddite broken record on this topic, but—it loses some punch thanks to the CGI’s lack of solidity. There was a surreal poetry, a gravity, almost a horrific beauty, to Rob Bottin’s “practical” (mechanical & prosthetic) effects in the ’83 film that the computer-generated shocks in the new film, above-average though they are, can’t match.

The effects in Carpenter’s Thing could make you doubt the person sitting next to you. The effects in the new film make you doubt what you see on the screen. Rightly.