Quit Your Day Job

Lee’s note: The following guest post is taken from an email from John of Matterings whom I occasionally exchange long emails regarding the nature of the universe (I say occasionally simply because I quite often take more than my time responding). Over at Matterings John is also collaborating with another friend of Quit Your Day Job Becca from No Smoking in the Skullcave and I urge you all to visit!

Oh and while I’m at it - I forgot to mention that I’ve done a guest post over at Aussie Bloggers about an Australian connection to the X-Men.

I’ve heard people react with mixed feelings to Hellboy.

The first time I showed it to my mother (who’s actually a very cool person to watch movies with) she wasn’t at all sure. After watching it a couple more times on my own (after a healthy pause) and really deciding I liked it, I showed it to her again one evening - and she really liked it the second time.

I don’t know how much difference it makes not having read the comic (which is referenced in the movie anyway, so that a kid meeting him on the roof immediately recognises him from his comics)… but parts of the film felt very much like reading a comic, thanks to the way the shots were framed - the sequence where Hellboy is looking down at the professor’s funeral procession being a prime example.

I guess I’ve grown a fascination with Guillermo Del Toro’s work (especially his fascination with clockwork and mechanisms and stuff - which appears in Hellboy, in Mimic and in the little bit of Kronos I have actually seen, and seems from the trailer to feature in the Hellboy sequel)… I liked his sense of the otherworldly. Although I had mixed feelings (again with the mixed feelings) the first time I saw Mimic, I thought the scene where the heroine confronts a figure in a subway station, only for it to sprout wings, reveal its insect nature, fly down the passage and carry it down the tunnel, was brilliant.

I guess I’d like to see Pan’s Labyrinth (I keep seeing it in some catalogues I get sent and meaning to order it, so I probably will), which everyone says is a very intense film… and he’s just released an intriguing-looking ghost/horror tale (forgot the title, but I saw the poster).

Not seen more than bits of Kronos, but I know it’s been critically acclaimed… So maybe for me there’s a sense of going on a journey into this director’s imagination and seeing what happens when it spends some time with my own.

To be honest, I hadn’t been aware of Del Toro as a particular filmic entity when I first saw Hellboy, that connection has grown stronger since then, but maybe that’s what draws me to the film (as a writer, I often rework stuff, develop it, re-edit, develop it… and so that sense of developing things, watching them grow and change, very much informs how I look at stuff… I think it’s something comics can do particularly well, in a way that the filmic media has only relatively recently cottoned on to).

Also, I love moments in Hellboy, like the scene with the kid on the roof, and the lovely scene where he tells the demons in the Hell dimension to let his girl go… “because for her I’d come over, and then you’ll be sorry.” (plus, I’m a sucker for a big, tentacled monster - especially when fighting them is fun, rather than laden with a hopeless sense of Lovecraftian doom)

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