I Wonder, Wonder Who, Who-oo-ooh, Who (Who Wrote the Book of Life)

I wanted to like The Book of Life a lot more than I did but I could not help having quite a few reservations. For example, there is a scene in the early part of the film in which a group of schoolchildren encountered a mysterious blonde museum guide. Despite my being the type of person who was once accused by a Hispanic co-worker of waving the Mexican flag, I could not help but find some of the comments this guide made about Mexico in this scene to be a bit over the top. (For that matter, I found it a bit odd that the guide was voiced by the same actress who played Kelly Bundy, but that's a topic for another day.)

It didn't help that we're never told where that scene took place or whether those children the museum guide talked to were supposed to be American or Mexican. Plus some of the story elements (the affection the kids had for Lady Death or the apelike image of one of the Mexican hero's ancestors) seemed deliberately calculated to raise an eyebrow or two.

That said, I liked it more than I expected to and my inner Percy Jackson fan especially liked the fact that the old Mexican folklore tale that allegedly inspired this movie was in fact an old Greek myth. (What? You don't think Hispanics can be familiar with Greek mythology? Please think again.)

Of course, the Ray Bradbury reference at the end was also a nice touch.

If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how this movie compares to Coco. Especially since most of the TV ads for that movie make it seem like The Book of Life II.

Cuento de Mi Id

“The Harrowing”

It is said that there are seven gates through which one must pass on the way to the underworld and that at each gate, one must discard an article of clothing to demonstrate one's vulnerability to the Ruler of the Underworld. Whether the rules were the same for men as well as for women, Theadora did not know. Nor did she know what became of one's clothing after it was discarded. She only knew that somewhere during the course of her journey, she had evidently miscounted. Either that or the sages were wrong -- there were eight gates through which she must pass.

At the first gate, she abandoned her shoes. The path before her was still strewn with small rocks and pebbles yet she deliberately chose to bare her feet before she bared any other part of her body.

At the second gate, she stripped off her stockings.

At the third, she took off her earrings.

At the fourth, she slithered out of her skirt, and at the fifth, she discarded her blouse.

At the sixth, she unhooked her bra and walked topless into the increasing darkness.

At the seventh, she shivered in the cold as she looked up at what had to be the largest gate she had ever seen in her life. The path was made of smooth stone now but that was not what bothered her. For after she walked through this gate, she would be naked. Not just naked, but butt-nekkid, nude, bare as a baby's bottom, sky-clad, naked as a jaybird, in puris naturalibus, wearing only a smile, clad in her birthday suit, in the altogether, adorned by air, decorated by dew, dressed in nothing and wrapped in emptiness. She had nothing more to abandon.

And yet on the other side of that gate, she came upon an even larger gate.

She rubbed her hands together and felt something on one of her fingers. But of course. Her wedding ring. She mumbled a quick prayer of forgiveness to her departed husband and took off the ring. She would never see this ring again, she thought. As it hit the stone ground besides her, the gate slowly opened and before her sat the Ruler of the Underworld. A figure that few people could view without going mad and that few madmen could view without going catatonic.

In a glacial voice the figure bade her step forward.

Theadora did so, shivering in the dark cold.

She knelt before the figure as the elders had taught her and murmured her prayer.

Then she waited.

After a wait in which every second seemed to take a century to pass, the Ruler spoke.

“What... do... you... want?”

“I want...”

Suddenly her throat went dry. What did she want? Part of her wanted to run away -- to scream and run back through the eight gates before it was too late. But that was too easy. It also seemed too much like the type of thing that the thing on the throne would want her to do.

She looked upon the unspeakable once again. Dared to look it in the eye. The thing was older than old, so wrinkled that Theadora could hardly tell if it were a man or a woman. It wore a wrinkled robe that threatened to fall apart any second and reveal the creature's nakedness. Its hair was just short enough to disguise its gender -- too long for a man, too short for a woman. Theadora got the feeling that the Ruler had been old when the Creator Herself had been young. She then got the feeling that the Ruler might even have once ruled the Upper World in a far older past, before its world was replaced by the present one and its powers confined to the world of the dead.

“I want my mother,” she said.

The Ruler smiled. It was an evil smile, one that hinted at infinite malice, but it was a smile.

Then the Ruler laughed. For centuries it seemed to laugh and then it would pause for a moment and start right up again.

Then it stopped.

“Are...you...sure?” it asked.

“I am,” said Theadora.

“Very...well,” said the figure on the throne. “Come... to... me.”

Theadora walked forward. The figure stood up, dropped its robe, and glanced down at Theadora, no doubt expecting an expression of shock or alarm.

Theadora refused to let the tiniest expression cross her face. Not even when the creature embraced her. Not even when it kissed her. Not even when it thrust its tongue between her teeth and its hands between her legs and pressed her upon the hard ground.

The ruler's embrace was cold. Very cold.

And then...

“Arise...” It said.

It sat back upon its throne and wiped itself with the remnant of its clothing. “Go... back... through... the... gates...

“By... each... gate... there... will... be... a... piece... of... cloth-... ing...

“Put... it... on....

“Do... not... look... back...

“If... you... ev-... er... re-... turn... here... a-... gain... you... had... bet-... ter... be... plan-... ning... to... stay...”

The ruler seemed to be smiling, but Theadora could not tell.

She turned, dabbed at the liquid between her legs, and walked up to the last gate.

There on the ground lay a ring.

She bent down to pick it up, not caring what sort of view she gave to the figure who sat behind her. As she put on the ring and walked through the gate, the mighty gate closed behind her.

Keep walking, she thought. Keep walking.

At the next gate, there was a scarf.

At the one after that, a pair of earrings.

Wait a second, she thought. I don't like this trend.

At the fourth gate, there was a pair of shoes.

Wait a minute, Theadora thought. It is almost as if it wanted me to stay naked.

At the fifth gate, there was a bracelet.

At the sixth, a pearl necklace.

At the seventh, a bra.

And at the eighth...

At last, she thought. A dress.

She ran forward into the sunlight.

Reached behind the gate to pick up the dress.

The gate closed.

Leaving her in sunlight...

And in the middle of a busy intersection.

“Wait a minute,” she thought. “I didn't enter through here. The Lord of the Underworld tricked me.”

As the eyes of a hundred passersby stared at her, she tried to put on her dress.

But as soon as she put it on, she heard...

“For heaven's sake, Theadora. How dare you act like that in public!”

She turned toward the voice.

Saw a pale figure standing in the middle of the intersection.

Then the gate re-opened and a mighty wind blew the figure away into the darkness beyond.

“Wait!” Theadora shouted.

The gate closed.

Nothing remained to mark its existence but her memory.

She was still pounding on the pavement where it had existed when the men in the white coats arrived.

The Road to Hell Starts at 42nd Street: The Lady in Red



Oh, it figures. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have every other film critic on the Net waxing nostalgic over the B-films of the 1970s and yet the one such B-film that keeps popping up in my mind is one of the few films that no cybercritic apart from me wants to remember.* I am referring, of course, to the 1979 effort The Lady in Red.

Why do I remember this film so fondly? Well, for one thing, it was one of the first B-films writer John Sayles wrote prior to becoming famous with more respectable efforts like Lone Star and Return of the Secaucus Seven. Moreover, it is his one attempt at writing an old-time gangster movie -- and quite an interesting attempt at that.

The movie has a somewhat memorable performance by actress Pamela Sue Martin, a former TV star who back in 1979 was most famous for playing girl detective Nancy Drew in ABC's The Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew Mysteries. In many ways, the character Ms. Martin plays in this movie -- farm girl Polly Franklin -- was similar to the character of Nancy Drew. Both characters were rather sweet, clever women with a capacity for getting in trouble. Yet they were different.

For one thing, Ms. Franklin came from a more rural environment than Ms. Drew. She had a more tragic story arc than Ms. Drew and she encountered problems Ms. Drew never ever encountered on the TV show. It has been said that this movie was Pamela Sue Martin's first attempt to change her image from that of the goody two-shoes-ish Nancy Drew, a change she would later complete when she got a role in the 1980s primetime soap opera Dynasty. Ms. Martin had several nude scenes throughout this film in which viewers saw far more of Ms. Martin than would have been possible in her Nancy Drew days. She also had some sex scenes as well, and it is no coincidence that that this movie used to be shown after hours when it hit the cable channels.

The character of Polly Franklin was based on Polly Hamilton, the real-life girlfriend of Depression-era gangster John Dillinger. Did the movie accurately portray Ms. Hamilton? That is a question for the viewer to decide.

As the movie starts out, Polly is singing the title song from the movie 42nd Street while she collects eggs from the chickens on her widowed father's farm, even going so far as to improvise a clumsy but heartfelt imitation of 42nd Street star Ruby Keeler's dancing. Movies obviously play a big part in Ms. Franklin's life, and since her father is not depicted as being a warm and loving patriarch, it is not hard to guess why.

When Polly goes into town, she can not resist parking by the local movie theatre which just happens to be showing 42nd Street. Assuming that no one is watching, Polly helps herself to two movie photos posted outside the theatre, only to find herself being watched by a slightly older lady in red. (Not necessarily the lady in red of the title, but a lady in red, for sure.) The woman proves to be part of a gang of bank robbers who may or may not be affiliated with notorious bank robber John Dillinger. She abducts poor Polly at gunpoint and forces her to stand on the getaway car's running board while her gang tries to outrun the local cops.

Poor Polly is eventually released unharmed, but her troubles do not end there. She is interrogated by the police, seduced by a reporter, and beaten by her father. And that is just in the movie's first half-hour. Eventually she runs away to Chicago, where she starts work in a garment factory and gets involved in a new mess of trouble. Every time she seems to be out of one crisis, she winds up in another, going from one bad situation to one far worse until she ends up working in a whorehouse. Circumstances beyond her control force the whorehouse to close, and Polly starts working a relatively honest job as a waitress. But then she gets involved with John Dillinger and then her life gets even more complicated.

She is falsely accused of being the infamous “lady in red,” the notorious femme fatale who lured Dillinger to his death in front of -- you guessed it -- a movie theatre. She resolves to avenge herself on the true culprit and along the way, decides to stage a bank robbery to get back at yet another nemesis. Eventually her life comes full circle and she finds herself pulling a gun on an innocent farm girl the same way a gun was once pulled on her. And guess what? By that time, she really is a lady in red. Do Polly's actions affect the farm girl in the same way the original Lady in Red's actions affected Polly? Sayles wisely prefers to leave the answer to that question to the audience's imagination.

At the end of the movie, Polly is seen hitching a ride to California. Are her troubles over at last? Probably not, but Sayles has enough compassion for his protagonist to give her a brief respite. And that is one of the reasons I like this movie more than the usual B-grade gangster film. Sayles' script shows a genuine compassion for Polly's plight that I rarely see in such movies.

That does not mean that the script does not have its share of clunkers. There are quite a few scenes that are way too melodramatic -- even by B-film standards -- not to mention a “I am Spartacus” moment in a garment factory that comes across as being far less realistic than it should be. Sayles never once seems to show a cop in this film who has the public's best interests at heart, and he is hardly subtle when depicting the misogynistic religious sentiments of Polly's father.

Yet he never once depicts things in such an unrealistic fashion that I find myself rolling my eyes and saying, “Oh, yes, stuff like this could never have happened back then.” It might not have necessarily happened to one person, but I often got the feeling that it did happen. After all, farm girls did get beaten by their fathers back then. Farm girls did tend to run away from home when they were beaten. And of course, runaways did -- and do -- tend to come to sticky ends in the big cities of any era. As much as one would like to think elsewise, the exploitation of female factory workers and prostitutes was not something Sayles just made up for the sake of the movie.

As for the direction, Lewis Teague is not likely to be numbered among the great film auteurs of our time. But like Sayles, he keeps things moving at a fast rate. After seeing all too many modern B-films that go on and on and on with storylines that are not quite as exciting as the filmmakers think they are, I was quite surprised at how fast-paced this film seemed. Sayles likes big speeches as much as any screenwriter, but he also knows something about how to pace a story so that I learn just enough about a character to have the story make sense without getting so bored that I start glancing at my watch.

The result is not likely to get a thumbs up from the Merchant-Ivory crowd, but then this movie was not aimed at that crowd. I like to think that the fact that this movie still rattles around in my memory more than a decade after I first saw it means something positive. Of course, it could simply mean that I have the same taste in movies as director Quentin Tarantino. But I prefer to be a bit more optimistic than that.


* Okay, Quentin Tarantino remembers it quite fondly, too, because he used it in a recent film festival, but he does not count as a cybercritic.