Blog | Deborah Lipp | Author, Priestess, Witch

Monday Movie Review: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) 7/10
Hellboy (Ron Perlman), a demon foundling raised by humans, works for a secret US government agency that combats supernatural threats. Together with Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and Hellboy’s girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), they must prevent Prince Nuada of the Fairy (Luke Goss) from raising the indestructible Golden Army in a final war against humankind. Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro.

The first Hellboy movie created a conventional Judeo-Christian universe of evil demons and dark forces that must be battled by warriors of light. Hellboy is a demon struggling with a massive nature vs. nurture conflict. This is almost invariably how the supernatural is portrayed in movies and on TV; anything supernatural is either evil or deeply conflicted, and has a connection to Hell. The original movie also connected Nazis and demons, which is a comforting way of viewing evil; it is large and colorful and Satanic, rather than banal.

This movie drops all of that and posits a mythic, even Pagan, worldview. There are mythic beings and there are humans, and they war because they are different, with neither being evil. Hellboy II explores the nature of these worlds living side-by-side, and the anger in the mythic realm at the increasingly destructive presence of humans. Again, Hellboy is asked to choose sides; he sure doesn’t look like he belongs among the humans. This is all much more interesting than the same-old-same-old Dark Evil Forces™ storyline, so I wish it had occured in a better movie.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed myself; Hellboy II brings a lot to the table. But it’s also cliché-ridden, and del Toro doesn’t know how to construct a plot worthy of his premise. Hellboy’s conflicts with Liz are lowest-common-denominator stuff—they fight because he’s messy? Really? She claims it points to a deeper problem, but can’t articulate what that problem is. Instead, the conflict devolves into a (very, very funny) comedic scene of the two guys (Hellboy and Abe) getting drunk and whining about relationships. Most of the structure is on the too-easy-to-write side; meet the new boss, encounter with villains from a childhood story, supernatural artifacts at an auction, Liz has a secret that Abe knows and doesn’t know how to tell Hellboy, the sidekick gets smitten with the beautiful new character. Some of the folkloric elements are absolutely delightful, but the elven beings bear too much resemblance to Tolkein, and the garbled Irish mythology (Nuada is the son of Balor? And has a twin sister?) doesn’t help.

What does help is a fantastic cast and great visual beauty. Ron Perlman is, again, perfect. Something about him is so much larger than life that, in the monster makeup, he’s life-sized and utterly human. Selma Blair can bring depth and complexity to a shampoo commercial, and newcomer Anna Walton is haunting as Nuala. These are well-drawn and interesting characters, and the actors really embody them.

So, yeah, it’s a summer blockbuster. Stupid plot tricks are easy enough to forgive. It’s a fun movie a cut above the typical fun movie. And by the way? Two silly scenes that seemed like they would get old and never did; I laughed and laughed.

Goddess of the Week: Sarasvati

July 13, 2008 / Deborah Lipp / Comments Off

Sarasvati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, and art. She is often depicted holding the tools of all of her powers; holding a pen, holding a book, and playing the sitar. She also holds a mala (prayer beads).

Her colors are white and yellow. Her creature is the swan. Often she rides a white swan, or is seated on a white lotus next to a white swan.

In India, schoolchildren worship her to help with their studies and teachers to help with imparting knowledge. Her birthday, Vasant Panchami, is a school holiday (it falls next on January 31, 2009).

She is part of the triplicity of great goddesses (Tridevi) that consists of Sarasvati-Lakshmi-Kali. These goddesses are paired with the triplicity of gods: Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva. In general, Hindu myth will marry these six in neat pairs, but there is a story that Sarasvati and Lakshmi (goddess of abundance) are both wives of Vishnu. As co-wives, they bicker and compete, and this is why you can have either a life of abundance and plenty, or a life of art and creativity, but not both.

Brady’s “Fox Hunt Inn”

July 10, 2008 / Deborah Lipp / 6 comments

Brady’s “Fox Hunt Inn” (complete with quotations) is a restaurant not far from my office. I’ve never been inside, but the other day the deli’s parking lot was full, so I parked at Brady’s and walked over.

It was like I was in Language Hell. And Restaurant Hell. And Restaurant Language Hell.

First of all, the quotes around “Fox Hunt Inn” are confusing, but perhaps not fully unnecessary. Perhaps there was once a place called Brady’s that was known colloquially as “Fox Hunt Inn.” What that place was doing in Bergen County, New Jersey defies logic, but just suppose. It has thin but real plausibility.

Around back, in the parking lot, the sign says (among other things) “Great Food!” Now that bothers me. The quote marks are not only unnecessary, the phrase itself is beyond insipid. It’s as purely generic as if it just said Food. Or, y’know, “Food.” I imagine a restaurant reviewer somewhere saying that Brady’s has “Great food” and the proprieters thinking, “Wow, fab pull quote, but let’s not attribute it to a real reviewer because we might get sued.”

I spend too much time thinking about these things.

Finally, as I was walking back to my car with my gyro, I noticed the sign out front with today’s selections. They included an Enchilada Special and Sweet & Sour Pork. And now I’m mad. Brady’s “Fox Hunt Inn” should have fish & chips, bangers & mash, and Yorkshire pudding. Not, I repeat NOT enchiladas. What is the world coming to?

Quotes of the 40s: All Solved!

July 9, 2008 / Deborah Lipp / 2 comments

I hope the odd hours gave different people a chance to play. You always ask for that.

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Late Tuesday Trivia: Quotes of the 1940s

July 8, 2008 / Deborah Lipp / 9 comments

1. Strange that a man can live with a woman for ten years and not know the first thing about her.
Solved by Hazel (comment #4).

2. I’m going crazy. I’m standing here solidly on my own two hands and going crazy.
Solved by George (comment #1).

3. This is the land of milk and honey for the health racket. Every woman in California thinks she’s either too fat or too thin or too something.
Solved by Melville (comment #6).

4. Ever hear of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? That was our crowd.
Solved by Evn (comment #5).

5. Yeah, yeah, I know that bromide. Something borrowed, something blue – old, new! Rice and old shoes, carry you over the threshold, Niagara Falls – all the silly tripe I’ve made fun of for years. Is this what I’ve come to? I can’t go through with it. I won’t marry you and that’s that!
Solved by Dawa Lhamo (comment #8).

6. Hey look, Mister – we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don’t need any characters around to give the joint “atmosphere”.
Solved by George (comment #1).

7. My dear, since Eve picked the apple, no woman has ever been taken entirely unawares.
Solved by Amy (comment #3).

Trivia will be a nighttime event today

July 8, 2008 / Deborah Lipp / Comments Off

Or tonight.

So busy now.

Monday Not-Movie Review: “Mad Men” Season 1

July 7, 2008 / Deborah Lipp / Comments Off

Mad Men Season 1 (2007) 10/10
It’s 1960 and Don Draper is the Creative Director of Sterling Cooper, a mid-sized Madison Avenue advertising company. The series follows the lives and uncovers the secrets of Don, his secretary Peggy, the staff of Sterling Cooper, and their families.

Okay, so I haven’t watched a movie in two weeks. Has that ever happened before? But my Mad Men DVDs came, and I’m obsessed with this show. Yes, so obsessed I’ve got a blog.

You’re probably not watching Mad Men, even though it was on everybody’s “Best of 2007” list and won awards and shit, because it wasn’t well-promoted. But season 2 starts on July 27 (AMC, 10pm Eastern), and there’s a season 1 marathon on July 20 (AMC, noon-1am), and you can watch the first episode of season 1 online. But why do you care?

Each Mad Men episode is constructed like a movie. The strongest influences on th show are The Apartment and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. (If the opening credits don’t remind you of Vertigo, and Saul Bass in general, you’re not paying attention.) I was noticing that episode 3 pulls a trick that Notorious is famous for; it folds in on itself. In Notorious, it’s a back-to-front reflection, with the final scene echoing the first scene, the penultimate scene echoing the second, until it meets in the middle. In the Mad Men episode Marriage of Figaro, it’s divided in two; the first half in the city on a Friday, the second half in the suburbs the next day. Each half begins and ends similarly, with similar events happening throughout. You don’t really notice it cognitively (unless you study it obsessively) but it gets under your skin, building the sense of claustrophobia in the second half.

I could choose any episode to discuss its imagery and motifs. Episode 5, Babylon, is about exile, and we see people isolated from each other, strangers in their own lives, romances that cannot be, and the longing for a promised land. We see that simply, in scenes of home life, extramarital affairs, and advertising pitches.

Much has been made of the pitch-perfect depiction of the era, complete with smoking, drinking on the job, rampant sexism and sexual harrassment, and routine racism and anti-Semitism. Yet Mad Men is one of the most feminist shows on television. One episode focuses on female desire, and two female characters discover masturbation; one of whom is even able to discuss it (albeit with an enormous amount of hemming and hawing and blushing and shuffling). These are women discovering whether or not they can be free, and can succeed, and can have their own lives, and desire is an important part of that.

On Mad Men, no one behaves predictably, and everyone has a secret self they dare not share. They hide desire, they hide rage, they hide mistakes. And, like real people, the things they say are not the things they think; words are masks; they are advertising pitches, not truth.

The DVD package is robust. The first release is a limited edition box that resembles a Zippo lighter. Some people have reported trouble fitting the DVDs back into the fancy but perhaps impractical box (I’m not having trouble). The extras are top-notch, including commentary tracks for each episode (often more than one), and several high quality additional features.

If you watch the first episode (which I strongly recommend), you may be irked by a couple of coy jokes (like the line about how there’s “no magic machine that makes copies”). That’s not what the show is about, and the winking is pretty much gone by episode 2. Other than that, I think the first episode is an excellent representation of the series.

Gods of the week: Marduk and Tiamat

July 6, 2008 / Deborah Lipp / 2 comments

(We’ll see if I stick with this…I might switch it to a different weekly topic. For now, it seems enjoyable and interesting.)

You are probably familiar with the Genesis 1.7: God made the firmament and divided the waters. And perhaps, when you were a kid, you said, as I did, huh?

In Babylonian creation myth, the waters were also divided in order for the world to come into being. There were sweet (fresh) waters and bitter (salt) waters. Tiamat, the bitter waters, was the goddess who created the world, and was also a sea monster. Apsu, her husband, was the sweet waters. In the blended waters of Apsu and Tiamat, all the gods were born. Marduk was one of their children.

Marduk was a storm god, a sort of Babylonian Zeus. He rallied his brothers and sisters to make war on their parents. They were (understandably) reluctant, both because, hey, parents, and because their parents were immensely strong. Sea monsters, y’know.

But Marduk had weapons; the mace and spear as well as the lightning. And he said to his brothers and sisters that if they served him in this battle, the gods would be able to rule over nature, they would have power to change fate.

When the gods attack, Apsu urges Tiamat to fight back, but the goddess will not harm her own children, and ultimately allows herself to be killed. From her body, Marduk creates the world, and rules over the gods.

There’s a lot of metaphor and cultural history going on in this one story. Many interpret it as patriarchy defeating matriarchy, and order defeating chaos. You can certainly see how natural powers (sea monsters) are overwhelmed by civilization (the spear and mace). Joseph Campbell points out that matriarchy is always tied with fate, with the inevitability of natural cycles. As society develops, the desire to rule over nature is profound and, to a great degree, necessary, and Marduk represents the success of that desire. It’s easy to look back a few thousand years later and say, BAD IDEA, but living past the age of forty, eating nutritious food, taming animals for husbandry and the land for agriculture, these were all damn fine notions.

Tiamat is the inevitability of being overpowered by nature. Nature is, and it is bigger and stronger than you. But Marduk is the civilizing force that overcomes her; that says, we will not be destroyed by fate or by flood. And that, too, is worthy of worship.

Useless psychic powers

July 2, 2008 / Deborah Lipp / One comment

So, I had to get my tires balanced. There’s a joke in there, but whatever. I read a novel while waiting and then it feels like enough time and I get up to check on when my car will be ready just as the guy is printing my receipt. So I said, “That’s a useless psychic power!” and he laughed and relayed the following story:

Trucker comes to him for work periodically. Trucker tells him this story. He was driving and had a sudden, compelling intuition that he had to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket. So he stops at the first available place, gets on line for the register, and the guy in front of him is just about all rung up and paid and done when at the last second, he says “You know what? I’d like a scratch-off ticket.”

Guy in front of him won a million dollars.

Great story, right?

Thing is, people say, If magic works, why don’t you do magic to win the lottery? Har har, snort snort, because the people who say that are always people who think magic is bullshit. But the truth is, everyone is doing magic to win the lottery, so it’s a crowded field; it ends up putting you on line right behind the winner.

Deborah Lipp