Girl Anachronicles

I fell in love back in 1992: Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released, and I became a fervorous fan immediately. I was awed by Gary Oldman’s performance as Dracula / Vlad Tepes, I swooned at the sexually charged tension in the film, Winona Ryder charmed me with her feverish portrayal of Mina, I even forgot to be bothered by Keanu Reeve’s unchangeable face of  “Whoa!”. Had they made a whole line of eyeliners / body glitter / rubber bracelets stamped with Dracula’s face and name, I would have been all over that shit (and broken my parents’ bank accounts).

I swear: I swooned for Gary in this getup. John Lennon shades included. LOL

The film also sparked an interest in all things vampire: books that ranged in quality from the classics (Bram Stoker’s Dracula itself) to the inane, fan-fiction-like dreg (I Am Dracula comes to mind), movies that gave way to other horror films (it started with Tale of a Vampire, but it gave way to other subgenres like zombies and demonic possessions), the best goth attire I could muster (which wasn’t much, given my budget and my permanent location on a tropical island), etc. Suffice it to say: I breathed, ate and lived on vampires. Big fan. BIG.

Then I outgrew that phase (sort of) and became interested in other things, but vampires held a special place in my heart.

Later came the onslaught that killed that little place in my heart: Underworld disenchanted me of the possibilities of bringing vampires to the modern world … Twilight simply did it in. Suddenly vampires were nothing to be feared or revered: they became sullen girls and moody teenagers with the odd craving for blood – a perfect ad for Hot Topic. The hordes of teenagers grasping at the shreds of the last XS-sized t-shirt of Edward Cullen were the nail on the coffin. Working at Hot Topic did no good to my perception of vampires as a literary figure of legend. Having Edward, Bella and Jacob peering out of the Twilight merchandise for hours at a time was nothing short of unnerving and nauseating.

..having to fold all the shirts every night and fix the merch display every 20 minutes didn't help either..

I eventually watched Twilight out of sheer morbid curiosity: that’s two hours I’ll never get back. It had its salvage points. They will never be enough to salvage the whole movie. Nor the series. Much less the book dynasty. Fuck you, Steph Meyer!

So it was with mild trepidation that I sat down to watch Let the Right One In, a 2008 film from Norway. From the get-go, you realize this is not the Teen Movie, Vampire® Edition crap that Twilight has been able to pull. The mood sets itself slowly on you: it’s dark and soft and gentle, yet terrible in all of its horror. Being a vampire here is not a matter of beauty, sexuality or glamour. The vampire in this story is a 12-year-old girl that travels around with an adult companion everyone believes to be her father (later on we realize he’s not). She’s not breathtakingly beautiful, nor does she prance around in stylish clothes and trendy accessories (yeah, Alix, I’m looking at you and your crappy crushed velvet choker, you stupid, vapid twat!). She’s a 12-year-old girl who got caught with this “disease”, a curse to bind her forever to a crippling hunger for living blood. She’s enlisted the help from an older lover / companion who kills and collects the blood for her so she won’t have to go out and get it herself. When he fails, she reacts like any child would: bratty, petulant, childish. There’s no infinite benevolence to her, just as there’s no abyss of evil in her soul. She’s just what she is: an eternal little girl.

Her counterpart in this movie is Oskar, a little kid who’s bullied constantly at school and has issues of his own at home. He’s got no friends at all, and has an intense desire to strike back at his tormentors. He is, by all means, a regular 12-year-old kid. When he meets vampire girl Eli, he finds in her the uncomparable comfort of kinship: someone who might understand, who seems like she’s been there, someone to keep him company. Their relationship evolves slowly and sweetly – nothing like the “Ooooh I can smell your twat from here! I wanna eat you!” stint from Edward Cullen. Keep your pants on boy! Just as slowly as the relationship evolves, Oskar starts suspecting Eli is a vampire through observation and clues from her odd lifestyle.

I swear this is the way it really went!

Another thing that caught my attention was the feeding process. At first Eli has her food delivered to her, but as her companion fails more and more often, she’s forced to get her food herself. I’ve seen a whole myriad of vampire attacks on screen: most of them are sexy and lustful, or macabre and cruel, maybe even funny. All of them have one thing in common: the vampire is mostly relentless and gains 100% satisfaction from sucking the lifeblood off another. Eli shares none of this with them: she’s overwhelmed time and again by the murder she’s committing. On one hand, she’s satisfying a hunger that, if left unbridled, affects her to the point of changing her physical appearance (the hungrier Eli is, the more sickly she becomes); on the other hand, she’s incredibly aware that she’s sinking her teeth into another life. The first kill scene is heart-wrenching at portraying this ambivalence. However, little by little, kill after kill, she becomes more comfortable with what she has to do.

Let the Right One In stayed with me long after the credits rolled. It had been a while since I had been haunted by a movie such as this. The film’s greatest value and strongest asset is that the figure of the vampire isn’t portrayed as a monster or as a sexual predator (much less as a high school heartthrob). Vampirism isn’t glamorized the way we’re used to see it; we see first and foremost the little girl in relation to the little boy – all that awkwardness of the first relationship, the sweetness, the intensity, – and then we see the vampire: a sickly girl who has no choice but to feed on others to keep herself alive. Human relations take a front seat in this film: leave the glitter to the idiots, the kids in LTROI will pull your heart through the wringer.

…and you may have noticed, but I couldn’t stop thinking of how crappy Twilight was in comparison. Wait, no, there is no comparison. Let the Right One In is a movie that will most likely prove to be a timeless classic. Twilight is like a shitty version of Sixteen Candles (all respect to Mr. Hughes), but with fangs … wait, no! Scratch that …

It’s been nearly a year since we visited San Diego to attend the yearly Comic Con. Right after our return, I diligently posted and discussed my experiences there, specifically in San Diego in general, as well as in the San Diego Zoo. But I never said anything about our experience in the Comic Con itself, the main reason of our visit to SD. I think that it has taken a long while for the experience to sink in and get digested: it was so rich, so vast, so powerful… we spent 5 days dawdling around in a convention center, and it’s amazing to believe that those 5 days changed our lives a little bit.

However, I’m gonna have to postpone the review of the whole deal in favor of the highlight of the visit, which deserves its own blog entry.

Mr. Peter S. Beagle
The man who made me believe again

This happened on the fourth day of our visit, as we were walking around the show floor looking at the different booths and just gawking and being amazed by the variety of it all. But something caught my eye then, an echo of my roots; more than an echo, a stark beacon. If you look closely at the photograph above, you will see what I saw: two big posters at each side of the booth, one of Lady Amalthea, one of The Last Unicorn.

The Last Unicorn is a story that has been in my conscious since I saw it when I was a small child, so this wasn’t an “Ohmygawd, so LONG since I saw this last, I had forgotten!” kind of moment. I just wasn’t expecting it there, among all the Supermans and sci-fi characters. It caught me by surprise so much that it brought tears to my eyes, and the guy at the booth caught me at that, crying a bit, with a wide smile of amazement on my face. So he seizes the moment to start driving his sale (they were selling DVD copies, as well as books by the author), but then he twisted it around a bit and starts telling me about a legal situation the author has been going through, regarding unpaid work, including being cheated out of payment for his collaboration in the making of the The Last Unicorn movie (you can read a bit more about it here).

And then, the moment of brain-shock, he tells me that the man who wrote this wonderful story was right there. Just then and there, I started bawling my heart out … and let me explain:

Little Diana was brought up surrounded by fantastical figures, either inherited from her aunt’s toy collection or things that popped up in the toy and entertainment market. Her world included gods from the Greek and Roman mythology, unicorns, mermaids, pegasus, horses, mammoths, faeries, spirits and the occasional princess from a fairy tale. These characters had sprung up from books, drawings and movies. And one of the movies that introduced her to the unicorns was The Last Unicorn.

The unicorn, as a figure, would accompany Little Diana for years to come, until adolescence would render the unicorn incompatible with her interests and beliefs. However, in the time she allowed it so, she surrounded herself with unicorn plush toys, rubber figurines (Hasbro’s My Little Pony had a lot to do with that as well), drawings, posters, notebooks, books, movies … all things unicorn came hand in hand with as much as she could find about mermaids (which was much less, since this was before Disney bastardized Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and provoked the deluge of mermaid merchandise afterwards).

Little by little, all unicorn things were shed, and only a distant memory remained of the legendary horned beast. The steadfast belief that unicorns existed gave way to a good-natured indifference … until she met with the one who made her believe first.

Mr. Peter S. Beagle, author to The Last Unicorn, creator of the world that in its turn helped me create mine, came over to me and hugged me, and talked to me, and embraced me in his words. During the time of our conversation, I was enveloped in a warm cocoon of stories, lullabied by a soft, flowing voice that spoke of the roots of my world, of the nutrients that gave life to that humongous tree that was the fantasy I knew. He reached into my heart and blew life back into that dormant seed that was Little Diana and her steadfast beliefs.

At that moment I felt more alive and more eternal than I had felt in decades. I still choke up when I remember how it felt to be before the man that helped shape what I’ve become. No other worlds existed at that moment, only him, and me curled up around the fluid stream of flowers, magic and music his words made.

I purchased a different book from the one I already knew by heart: The Unicorn Sonata. It sat in my nightstand’s shelf for a few months, but as soon as I read it, it became water to the seed Mr. Beagle had brought back to life. As soon as I finished it and closed its covers, I realized: once again I believed in unicorns with all of my heart.

#1, Found this on eBay, and although I’m not gonna bid on it (what for, really?), it was yet another nostalgia trip to renew my memory of this tin lunchbox.

Specially of the matching thermos, which never sealed completely and would always let some of the juice out onto my napkins, utensils, other thermos or even worse, onto my sandwich.

#2, I just learned that Guillermo del Toro is producing a film adaptation of one of my favorite comics: Death: The High Cost of Living, and he wants creator Neil Gaiman to direct! Awesome move! And I’m SO looking forward to it, it’s scary. They could also fuck it up so many ways

All hail the Endless!

Well, it’s almost Day Zero (in which my closest friends and I lift off to the Pacific zone), and I just had a pretty interesting weekend.

Eze and Pepe twisted the planned schedule for Saturday upside down, and we ended up handing in a pre-recorded program of Frecuencias Alternas in exchange for the freedom to spend the rest of the evening at Rebeca’s and Tatiana’s birthday. It was one of those huge, folkloric affairs, with two birthday cakes (more than enough to pass around twice and then serve in doggy bags for family and friends), confetti strewn all over the floor and a random mix of merengue, reggaetón and (gulp!) Gunther. We (Eze, Pepe, Maricarmen and I) spent most of the time sitting on a huge metal box perilously perched on the parking curb (and identified by graffiti as the “Skate Box”). We talked a lot, planned some more details of our upcoming trip, and had the kind of easy-going fun you only get to have with tried-and-true friends. We’re the Clerks (see: Kevin Smith) generation, and we love it!

Sunday kicked off with rain and thunder, but we carried on with our plan anyway: to spend the afternoon with my Mom and brother. We picked them up and went to lunch at El Hipopótamo (a small, old Spanish-style restaurant, or tasca, as we like to call it ‘cuz then we feel a bit more cosmopolitan when we go there). After a nice, thorough lunch (serrano ham was to be had, as well as milhojas, and that makes me very happy), we went to JC Penney in Plaza Carolina (so as to avoid Plaza las Américas, which gets hellishly crowded on weekends). I had spotted a few covetable items in the JC Penney shopper, and for the first time in a long while, I acted on the whim. Most of said covetable items were not so pretty up close, or were not available, but I got away from it all with a new pair of (gasp!) Mary Janes. How odd of me ¬_¬ …

Later on we had dinner with Pepe at Dennys, and after another brief visit to Mom’s (to help move a futon outside, where it will probably be carried off by someone desperate and very strong), we capped off the evening by watching Bridge to Terabithia. It was much better than I thought it would be and affected me more than I predicted. It’s fully recommendable, but be prepared for the unexpected.

Oh! Eze also bought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for me, and I just started reading it. NO FUCKING SPOILERS, you read me!?

So, it’s nearly 5PM, a bit over an hour to go before quitting time, and tomorrow we depart at 4:52PM. In 24 hours I’ll most likely be strapped to a plane seat, looking out of the nearest window and bracing myself for the emotional orgasm liftoff always brings. I’ll keep posting as much as our daily activities let me, and I’ll definitely take as many pictures as I can.

I’m giddy! I can hardly wait!

A month or so ago Eze introduced me to the Dr. Who series, starting with the 9th doctor (Christopher Eccleston). This introduction coincided with the season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica (another obsession Eze introduced me to), so I was thirsty for yet more sci-fi. Little by little, I realize I’m becoming a bigger geek than I thought myself capable of. However, the sheer and full realization of this came last night as I watched The Last Mimzy.

Think not so much in terms of storyline, but more in terms of reference. This is like putting together an old love of mine (Alice in Wonderland) and a newfound love (time traveling) linked together by an element I was called to awareness of by my brother (the Jabberwocky). The film becomes for me, then, a beautiful work of art and an enthralling sci-fi story.

So, suffice it to say (since I have no intention of spoiling the plot for anyone), I’d be incredibly happy to have an adventure traveling through time in the TARDIS along with Doctor Who #9 and Mimzy… I’d be incredibly happy and tickled pink …