Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (French, 2010). Directed by Luc Besson. Louise Bourgoin, Mathieu Amalric, Gilles Lellouche, Jean-Paul Rouve, Jacky Nercessian. (107 minutes).
This one’s an unclassifiable soap-bubble, so light and frothy and yet charming in its own way that it survives its own essential aimlessness. Directed by the action-movie factory Luc Besson, it presents us with the exploits of Adele Blanc-Sec, from the French comic-strip heroine, who proves early on that she has the tomb-raiding skills of a Lara Croft or Indiana Jones, but is substantially less super-competent when she returns to Paris and finds herself having to break an elderly professor out of prison in order to control the rampaging pterodactyl that is only an incidental by- product of her pressing need to revive an Egyptian mummy. Meanwhile, a wholly incompetent police inspector, interested only in his next meal, also finds himself assigned to track down that pterodactyl, and remains perpetually thirty seconds behind all the evidence around him. What is it with these French police inspectors, I wonder.
One of the great oddities of this film is that, sleek and eye-popping as it is, it is by no means an action movie. Yes, Adele does demonstrate her resourcefulness in that tomb sequence, but once she gets back to Paris there are no other action sequences of note; the climax involving all the mummies is marked by a straight-faced politeness in which everybody, alive and undead, behaves with a remarkable degree of civilized concern for their social obligations. Again, an American movie would no doubt end with a building on fire, and a fight to the death amid massive property damage. This one gives you the exact opposite, and it’s so charming and unexpected in context that attempting any analysis of it would make it collapse like a soap bubble. It’s a movie that could only exist inside itself, and it excuses the slightness of its story and its deliberately anti-climactic conclusion by getting by on charm. It also helps that it has at its center one Louise Bourgoin, who is adored by the camera. The pleasures are slight, but they are undeniable.
Finally, because it has its own sense of strangeness even if it isn't, strictly speaking, science fiction or fantasy, check out the Korean charmer Castaway on the Moon (2014), which contrives to strand its protagonist on a deserted island — in the middle of a major modern city, from which he cannot avoid seeing skyscrapers whenever he looks up. It is a treasure indeed, and should keep you going until we meet again next month.
❑
In The Magic Lantern, multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee Adam-Troy Castro reviews and reveals under-appreciated films worth talking about. This column will alternate with The Remake Chronicles, in which A-TC examines the stories that movies keep returning to.
Roots of Spec Fic: The Greater Evil of H.P. Lovecraft by Jay O'Connell
I have this t-shirt, pictured below, which says “Hey Cthul-Aid,” with this colorful squid-pitcher thing busting through a wall yelling, “R’Lyeehh!”
People love it.
They stop me on the street and say, Hey! Cool shirt! I’m guessing maybe one in ten of them have read a single word written by H.P. Lovecraft.
I’m fiftyish. I could bore you about rotary dial telephones and three channels of TV and walking miles to the comic book store, about 2001 in cinemascope and my wondering what my job would be when I worked on the moon… I won’t, but you need that background for what’s to follow.
I found myself recently in a Facebook discussion on former Weird Tales editor Darrel Schwietzer’s wall, where people were discussing the rise and fall of deceased grand masters, mostly Heinlein, because of the recent biography, and it emerged that pretty much anything with Lovecraft’s name on it has held its collector value.
While Heinlein’s star is gently eclipsed, his doorstop-thick, overly-sexual novels now eyed with disdain by many, H.P Lovecraft, the far less prolific, far more sexist, racist and generally phobic, remains even more fixedly glued into the genre firmament.
Odd, no? His bust, sculpted by Gahan Wilson, is the World Fantasy Award. (Though this has become controversial. You can see the petition to change the award to a bust of Octavia Butler here.)
Early fandom is passing into memory, my father’s generation who read the pulps in their teens or twenties, the first to buy hardcover and softcover SF, and with them fades the generation who have read The Book that is our genre cover to cover. Our genre is about a century old, and people rarely last longer than a century. Of course folk tales are older than the written word, but when I say genre, I mean that thing we point at when we say it: SF, fantasy, and horror with supernatural elements, with a coherent, systematic core of internal logic.
When we overhear the two Orc guards in the Lord of the Rings referring to each not by name, but by number, we understand that from Tolkien on, Fantasy quivers in the shadow of a mechanized, rationalized post-Enlightenment world. You can run from modernity but you can’t hide.
Of course, you can try — which brings us back to Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Lovecraft is a bridge between many worlds. His work blends fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Unlike Tolkien or Dunsany, he tips his hat to the primacy of science, but instead of looking forward to Disney’s World of Tomorrow, of lawful Asimovian robots and the heady joys of Galactic Empire, he cowers before the Horrible Truth of Cosmicism.
The Horrible Truth in UFO conspiracy theory resembles Lovecraft: humanity is a transitory speck awash in a vast, violent cosmic sea. Our science is on the verge, always, of revealing to us just how tiny and pathetic we are, and how easily and quickly we will be swept away, should something important wake up and take notice. In the Horrible Truth, the bad news isn’t that there is no God — there are Gods… but they are monsters.
Naturally, this message is immensely popular, and is the basis of endless books, films, role playing games, video games, card games, and t-shirts. What? Say that again? How the hell did that happen?
Cosmicism opposes a religious world view which puts mankind at the center of a sane creation, and, also, repudiates any secular vision of humanity’s ascendants in a rational universe. Regardless of what you think of HPLs prose or politics, the notion that this vision could be compressed into the solid bedrock of so much of popular culture stands as incontrovertible testimony to the man’s peculiar genius.
H.P. Lovecraft gets into your head, and he never leaves.
We
