Top Ten of the Decade!

I had a good time this decade! Sin and sensation abounded and alternated with austere sanctimoniousness. My old boss escaped from prison in Brazil, I got divorced, had scandalous affairs, became enlightened, disillusioned, dizzy, co-starred in AA THE MUSICAL, found true love and the glory of chemical psychiatry, watched a crane fall onto my friend's bar, flaming death from the sky, a dog is born, job I worked, ocean I slept and then took a nap in between, and seen pictures.

The films here mesh beauty and ugly, truth and illusion, and generally have actors I like or love or sometimes generally can't stand! Most of these entries come with a quote from an older blog, unless I never wrote about it before, and a lot of times if I really, really dig a film, I don't write about it, as if afraid I'd dim the magic of it for myself or perhaps just realized I was or am simply not up to the task. Truly great movies make commentary seem almost superfluous, don't they, Paul Bettany?

1. DOGVILLE (2003)
"A condemnation of the hypocrisy of the New Testament by way of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. One needs a certain amount of pop culture history to understand this chthonic purging, as if no cinema after D.W. Griffith exists. Lillian Gish turned out to be Jesus in disguise, and after all her frenzied prayers didn't save her virgin honor, she decided to burn the world down. It's Frances Farmer having her revenge on Seattle, as Kurt Cobain once prayed for. Nicole Kidman here represents all the vengeful icons ever idolized to the point where their unwashed fans ripped their clothes. I left the theater feeling like a century's worth of crud had been laser-surgically removed from my eyes." (Popmatters, 03)

2. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2005)

"When the shattering of the mirrors comes, at first it feels glorious and freeing. Later we come home damaged by defeat, or torn by obsessive fall-out from petty triumphs. What is this ego shattering moment for you? What is it that splinters your sense of self and time so that for the rest of your life you long to gaze into those shattered shards just one more time? Maybe it’s the moment you finally got a chance to tell the one you truly love how you feel and she wasn’t into you. Or maybe you realize that the girl you thought you were in love with years ago, you really weren’t. It was just that she was so gorgeous, and so damaged, and looked like she would fade so fast. " (Acidemic, 2006)

 3. MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)
If it's too weird, just remember, it's all the same soul, ever-dividing and re-aligning itself. If the cowboy looks at you twice, you're done and whatever contract you take out on someone is really always on you. Lynch actually illustrates the impossible-to-illustrate process of multiple life/death Buddhist reincarnation. We eventually become the recipient of all our kindness or cruelty, the way the Moebius strip connects two sides into one endless road, and that whatever we do, it's already happened for just as we can see the future, the future can see us. Somewhere far ahead on the timeline, we're watching it all happen as ghost shadows on the wall.

4. THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2008)
 "Men who have grown soft with unearned privilege will probably not like Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and are probably the reason Brolin's not even nominated. The return of the true king is never welcomed by the pretender to the throne. The haters thought this sort of moustached hombre long vanished. Now he's back, covered in the dirt used to bury him, but his eyes are burning through the dust with the fire of a thousand Bronsons!" (BLAD, 2/08)

5. SCIENCE OF SLEEP (2006)
"Mark my words, this film will one day be regarded as highly as CITIZEN KANE and LA DOLCE VITA and PERSONA as a benchmark in art cinema, that is to say, art cinema that is accessible to the layperson and trenchant regarding genuine issues of its days and it elevates one's perceptions even as it captures the way we really think, the way we see, etc., in short Gondry has re-created and perfected "instantaneous cinema" in a manner that takes the dreams of the 1960s New Wave and art house movements and fully realizes them. One day SLEEP, along with the tremendous ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, will be regarded as one of the true masterpieces of the new century." (BLAD, 10/2007)

6. BLACK SNAKE MOAN (2006)
To understand the genius of this movie is to understand what it isn't, which is cliche'd. It takes a steamy backwoods premise and proceeds to create a marvelous story about the unification of old and young, black and white, man and woman, and the true way an old black man playing Robert Johnson licks on slide electric guitar is the coolest humanity has yet to come, and we bask in Sam Jackson's noble embodiment of this force, and it warms us like the devil's most sweet and uncut fire. The blues doesn't cause the blues, they just alchemically turn pain into a balm for an even deeper wound.

7. THE HURT LOCKER (2008)
Bigelow's unflinching feminine eye for what war is shows how much damage the male psyche--man's need to prove himself against real physical danger--has suffered over the years trying to be "nice" in the long twisted, never-ending, ever-more draconian and litigious wake of early 80s PC thuggery and "bare life" fearmongering. No pain, no gain, goes the slogan --but while women are born into a cycle of menstruation and the agony of birth,  what do men get to do? No wonder they've grown anti-dirt. But our James here has passed this by; he's materialized from a breed of men that seem unfazed by the dubious comforts of peacetime (as brilliantly portrayed in a simple shot of James powerless in the face of a gigantic supermarket cereal aisle). (3/7/10 - more here)

8. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2006)
Ang Lee turns the wild wilderness and two gifted actors into a heavenly light, the Bergmanian Virgin Spring. Gay or straight, all our lives have been damaged by the closet. And not only does this movie heal us, it moves us like all the other 'forbidden romance' craftsmanship tales can only aspire to.

9. THE HOLY GIRL (2004)
Another one I never wrote about. I know a film's good when I can't even begin to write about it. Ahead of its time and ably capturing a sense of intimacy and texture that is totally Argentine in a way America needs to learn for itself, or become Catholic in mind as well as deed. Imagine Altman-style seamless ensemble overlap and a Bressonian feel of gloriously unglorious martyrdom.

10. PUNCH DRUNK LOVE (2002)
"The pinks and blues and whites and deep black silhouettes are all the sort of stuff many directors use to hide the flimsy material within, but in PUNCH-DRUNK's case, it is the material, the style shapes and frames and focuses and blurs until we recognize that pure art is the way to shift attention from the banal blinders-on crawl of drab social reality into the liquid present, where life is a continually moving, breathing changing force expressing itself constantly through the air, the stars and the sea and every random song select or spin of the roulette wheel. So when you see PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE even stone cold sober you can follow Anderson's breadcrumb trail right into that same candy colored universe of egoless nonjudgmental acceptance of all life as it is right here right now. In short, watching this movie gets you totally "TOASTED" on art, love, and a dizzying array of overlapping dialogue by the seven sisters, who make the witches of MACBETH seem like Girls Gone Wild." (9/09)
-------------------------------------------

If I could I would add more from Argentina's Lucretia Martel, and Noah Baumbach's amazing SQUID AND THE WHALE and MARGOT AT THE WEDDING.  And what about Wes Anderson's underrated DARJEELING LIMITED? Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION and Jody Hill's OBSERVE AND REPORT? And of course, Quentin and of course, BIRTH, maybe even THE WRESTLER.

But my best-of decade films had to reflect not just a freedom from bourgeois morality and unconscious status quo obedience, not just a sense of love and spiritual awakening, but deep and perfect artistry and a sublime mix of style and substance. What films leave you shaking with awakened sense of love and purpose, or of healing -- without being dull or didactic, or 'family ensemble'-driven? Of having some long unresolved inner issue suddenly solved and healed over by the power of cinema? These films showed us things we needed to see, and they rock, AND they're well-made and beautiful. They've made the '10s a safer place to be unsafe in. Let's not ever rock like it's 1999 again!

For the best of the year rant (this is the best of the decade rant): go here and hap...."

Acid Sight/Sound Symphonies: FANTASIA (1940 - rereleased in 1969), 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968)

Walt Disney was determined to not just blow minds and thrill art lovers with his 1940 epic animated classical music film FANTASIA, but to bring what critic James Agee referred to as "middlebrow highbrow" culture to an America on the edge of war. It didn't but yet, when re-released in 1969, it caught on with a new kind of American at the edge of war, the stoned draft dodger. As Wikipedia notes:

Fantasia did not make a profit until its 1969 re-release. By then, Fantasia had become immensely popular among teenagers and college students, some of whom would reportedly take drugs such as marijuana and LSD to "better experience" the film.[4] Disney promoted the film using a psychedelic-styled poster. The re-release was a major success, especially with the psychedelic young adult crowd, many of whom would come lie down in the front row of the theater and experience the film from there.

You know how Disney used to do with their best titles... and still does with their DVDs: letting them go in and out circulation, then re-releasing them (with "timeless" hype of the "now more than ever" variety). Acid similarly comes and goes from the American popular imagination, and in 1969 it was still "cool" the way cocaine was in the late 1970's, or ecstasy in the early 1990s, something even "normal" people want to try (they read about in Newsweek or heard about it at their bridge game). Naturally Disney and acid came together; seeing a good Disney film with "mind expanded" was to truly appreciate its abstract beauty. The idea of acid cinema had reached a nice peak with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and YELLOW SUBMARINE the year before. Whether any of these films were intended for drug use or not, all three were ideal for a cinematic trip.

Imagine that you're used to seeing television on a small black and white TV in a room crowded with cigarette smoke-- you've been watching TV like that for 20 years nonstop--and now you're in a New York multiplex with 3-D surround digital sound. Everything about the experience of viewing is now a complete sensory overload; your inner blinders, your blocks, your chocolate fingertip smudges all over the glass door of perception, all quickly scurry to adjust their levels, leaving you momentarily like a kid on a very weird rollercoaster. The sheer miracle of a moving picture and sound in and of itself, of the people around you, is enough to delight you beyond all endurance. You  gush with gratitude at being able to process all this information in a setting where you feel safe without feeling lonely, where it's dark enough to be free and don't have to talk to people or make eye contact while you endeavor to catalog your newfound wealth of sensory information.

Your natural tendency to be hypnotized by a glowing screen keeps your loosened mind from wandering (usually) into bad trip panic attack territory, which is important, since your mind is so open and unguarded, one nasty image can get right inside your head and warp your soul forever. Of course, it's good in that sense to avoid films with lots of guns and violence and negativity or a heavy emotional plot that your unprovoked laughter will disrupt. So what you needed in the acid heyday of 1967-70 were long, slow panoramas filled with soothing, positive music and flowery images, expressions of love or else total blankness. Living is easy with eyes closed! But when your eyes are suddenly open, you need a break from all the lonely people.

Fitting the bill perfectly for supplying the positives without the negatives, right at the start of the acid spike in 1966 was a surfer movie called THE ENDLESS SUMMER. As Laker34 notes on the IMDB user comments "See this film because it is not violent." Rather than a drama it was a meditation, a music picture show in the best sense... waves, man, it was about the waves.

Then came YELLOW SUBMARINE and 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY in 1968. With these films, the cinema was now safe for heads (as they were known at the time). The posters for 2001 even came right out and labeled it as "the ultimate trip." While YELLOW SUBMARINE said it all, a psychedelic journey with Beatles and the safety of a little hideaway beneath the waves. It even had a total selfless love ending, when John asks the defeated Blue Meanies to join the celebration. Was this not the lesson we as people most needed and could most easily grasp when high out of our gourds? That to reject or fail to love even one person, no matter how bad they smelled or how hard they cracked our skull with their baton, was to render the whole thing worthless? That's the lesson we didn't learn though, only Lennon and Gandhi and King learned it, and look what it got them! That kind of selfless love is a bullet magnet, speeding you up to God before the rest of us wake up to its power, like they speed a candle out of a gas-filled kitchen. We the gas learned to reign in our smell, to hide in pockets behind the stove and wait for our chance. In short, though we still wanted to love everybody we shut up about it.

Kubrick's formalist dehumanizing motifs reflect that "shutting up about it" and once that's taken into account it's all suddenly revealed to be just the cynical armor of an existential humanist, one unafraid to stand in the bathroom mirror and watch the stranger through the glass age into newborn baby. While 2001 sent many a conventional sci fi narrative lover out the door in boredom. Many of them had read about the drugs and they knew it was their fault if they didn't get it; they probably just weren't high enough. These drug people fell into the movie like it was a black pool and the sober people would see them float up out of their chairs and vanish into the screen. Okay, maybe not that sober.  Here was a movie man's killer instincts were depicted as entwined with alien genetic manipulation, and the concept of outer and inner space were colliding, and withered old age was turning naturally again to embryonic, and these straight edges were dozing in the aisles just because absolutely nothing was happening for whole minutes at a time. Both things happening at once, in the same universal mind. Truth or illusion!

It was all stuff only the heads could totally grasp and the idea of classical music piping through space kept the whole thing at enough of a measured pace that no dosed human watching it was likely to get a panic attack, until the whole heavy breathing out in space rescuing Dr. Poole part at least, and even there it seemed Kubrick had slowed down the action deliberately so the heads could sneak out for a smoke. Heads may have been distracted, but they knew that it all meant something, had something to do with birthdays. And circles. It wasn't a story of dudes in space but the story of human evolution carried from start to finish - not a circle but a straight line up from the caves and into the eighth dimension. And the obsidian obelisk is like a great big tab, man!

Kubrick's use of classical music connects the abstract imagery to the equally sleep-inducing FANTASIA, re-released the following year. Here too, those straight folk trapped by expectations of conventional narrative were flummoxed into submission while the enlightened presumably blossomed out their crown chakras.

As we've seen in our film thus far, the idea of the theater as a place of reflection and spectacle (rather than narrative absorption) was big in the late 1960s as a result of the newfound "midnight movie" crowd, those going in with altered consciousness or just looking to see if they could catch a contact high. It was in the papers, so even if you'd never done a single drug, for example, you knew that 2001's big ending was "trippy" and you consoled yourself that maybe if you were high you'd get it. If you weren't high, and didn't get it, both FANTASIA and 2001 could be as intense and moving as a trip through a crowded art museum with relatives who have to spend several minutes before every picture, and your feet hurt. "Yeah yeah, pretty, but can we go?" Andrew Sarris famously issued two reviews of 2001: The first review--sober and full of high expectations--is grouchy and disbelieving. Sarris' second viewing came after he'd "ingested a substance" resulting in a complete conversion. At least he was critic enough to admit it and write the second one. And both together really illuminate the power of set and setting.

Now, later, on DVD, it's easy to forward through the draggy stretches of Kubrick's film, or pluck the good segments of FANTASIA (Night on Bald Mountain, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Rite of Spring) out and fold them in with pre-code Betty Boop and wartime Bugs for a night of weird but blissfully centaur-free animation.

So why is FANTASIA so dull to the sober? We must inevitably look at the Disney juggernaut itself. Was Walt a humanist or propaganda merchant? Nazi collaborator or Hero of California? Either way that Wonderful World of Walt Disney TV show--that ran all through the 70s on Sunday nights on ABC--was excruciating. It was boring and brown with faded outdoor photography color, but it was all that was on and we kids slogged through it just to make the night before going back to school last longer. Sometimes Walt would show some nature documentaries (ala Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom), but mostly it was apple-cheeked youngsters learning drab conformist lessons from folksy trackers. Occasionally the youngster would run from a bear, snake or wolf, and sometimes I'd stay up just to see if he got eaten--the attack played up in the commercials and kept to the last minute just to keep us antsy JAWS fans in front of the endless commercial. That ultra-square sense of what constitutes entertainment suffuses FANTASIA. However, in the right mood it can be as brilliant and riveting as watching a snail... crawl along the edge... of a straight... razor... and surviving... to the stern Teutonic strings of a little fellow named Richard Wagner... We start with a soft timpani roll, Mr. Stawkowski... if you please...

Great Acid Movies #11: NAKED LUNCH (1991)

The year of 1991 was a scary one to be a recently graduated, unemployed alcoholic writer: recession, turmoil, George Bush senior, CAMP (California Against Marijuana Production), fascist action movies, beat canon staple Naked Lunch being adapted into a movie... what? LUNCH was property of the freaks, man. How in the hell could that be anything but an embarrassment, even with David Cronenberg as the director?  But then we learned in the trades that even Burroughs approved of the final script. And as Nirvana prepared to descend from Seattle and lovingly fog our once clear windows with layers of heavenly grunge, LUNCH was served, with genuinely disturbing  hallucinatory creatures; a sublimely deadpan comic edge, and a Burrowhgs-biographical tone ala JUNKY or EXTERMINATOR--not in the LUNCH itself--replete with creepy, slightly "wrong" (probably intentionally so) renditions of Kerouac and Ginsberg--without being gushy period piece hero worship like so many druggy cult figure bios/memoirs (THE DOORS, FACTORY GIRL, any movie about John Lennon or Brian Jones).

In short, Canadian Cronenberg quietly does the impossible, makes a good adaptation of a very weird and purposely disturbing book, one originally (apparently) aimed at the ever-dwindling demographic of gay autoerotic asphyxiation devotees.  But clearing out all the hangings and orgasms, there's still enough in LUNCH to blow your mind and have you bent over with laughter, jotting down future band names (So that's what a Steely Dan is!") And Cronenberg clearly found his own way in, making it all more Burroughs than you thought possible while being uniquely Cronenbergian.

While all the loud Americans and Brits shout and overdo it in things like FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, Candian Cronenberg delivers the raw black meat the right way: on the sly, a bare whisper out of the corner of your mouth. You pass him the money in a handshake and follow him through the Moroccan marketplace to a quiet tent, paranoid eyes seeing all the roasting meat squirming and hissing like a basilisk as you pass the turning spits.

Casting is everything and Cronenberg's great deadpan roster would still add up to nothing if not for the amazing Judy Davis as Sally Bowles. She has such incredibly dry, cool hipster rapport with Peter Weller's bug-eyed Bill that Hollywood matched them up again in a film called THE NEW AGE shortly thereafter. Davis blazed along in many great films of that period: nurse/succubus/enabler to a Faulkneresque drunk in BARTON FINK ('91); a droll and saucy George Sand chasing Chopin around in IMPROMPTU (1991); and the jaundiced object of Liam Neeson's unwanted affection in HUSBANDS AND WIVES ('92). She was the older, more gravitas-engorged Parker Posey of her day. For a brief while she shone in enough nervy, sexy, intelligent roles to cause many a prematurely disillusioned young writing student to fall in love; she nailed the ideal antithetical mix of sexuality and brains, insanity and maternity, canny courage and vulnerable confusion, and--best of all--she was nonjudgmental. You could drink, shoot up, shoot her, it didn't matter. In one of those weird coincidences of cinema, there's a lot of similarity in her two roles of 1999, BARTON FINK and NAKED LUNCH. In each she's a writer connected to an older male writer and desired by a younger rival writer. Both films are rife with hallucinatory imagery in and around a typewriter and a room wherein protagonist is alone and tortured by writer's block. Each has interesting use of beaches, weirdos, surreal expressionism, Kafka-esque elipses, etc.

Top: Lunch, Bottom: Fink

 Back to Peter Weller: before LUNCH he was the lead in BUCKAROO BANZAI and his ADVENTURES ACROSS THE EIGHT DIMENSION (1984). There's only one scene from that film everyone remembers: Buckaroo is in a club, jamming with his band and Ellen Barkin is crying at a table, and Weller stops the music because someone out there is sad, and he says his famous line: "You know, no matter where you go... there you are." The quote stuck in all our brains, though a lot of us felt it was a little too sure of its future cult status. But that wasn't Weller's fault. He played it perfectly. You could barely tell he was even acting, and that was why the phrase registered. If that ambigious "there you are" was a butterfly wing, NAKED LUNCH would be the tsunami that roared ashore seven years later via the infamous "butterfly effect."

To eat of the black meat, to sample strange hallucinogens on a regular basis, one needs the thousand yard stare of the war vet, one needs to be level-headed and whistling a mellow happy tune even as the people around you on the street seem so laughably obscene you can hardly stop from pissing your pants with deranged laughter. Cool must be maintained, as panic amplifies like feedback. That's the whole idea behind the title, taken from something Kerouac said to Burroughs about how when you're dosed on mescalin and trying to eat and your food is squirming on the fork as if alive, and you can't freak out because you're at the dinner table with family or a public restaurant. What do you do? You be cool. You smile and say nothing and eat as if all is well, trusting that your shoes are not actually on fire the way a zealot trusts in his god. Although some say the title was supposed to be NAKED LUST and Ginsberg typed it wrong from Bill's illegible notes, it's nonetheless an idea people could relate to. For the true hallucination is not that people are monstrous, but that they aren't. Stripped instantly though temporarily of all the social indoctrination and laziness by which we filter our sensory input down to the bare minimum, we see the world as it really is, and it makes no sense.

And the weirder things get, the cooler one plays it, for one doesn't want to be shipped off to the bughouse or to make a public spectacle or otherwise end up pinned to the ground and frisked by hastily summoned law enforcement before waking up in a straitjacket. Weller plays it cool just like this in NAKED LUNCH and we're allowed to ride shotgun through his hashish and mescalin musings.

Depicting hallucinations has always been a tricky issue in cinema. It's not that typewriters turn into insects on drugs, it's just that they do look insect-like when you're on acid and trying to type brilliant poetry, the letters squiggling and dripping on the page as soon as you type them, and the loosening of your perceptions makes you notice; everything--even the floor--is alive and breathing. Fictionalization naturally ensues. One is allowed to see all the nuts and bolts of vision and how we're still hard-wired to identify insects camouflaged in trees that might sting our hands or perhaps provide food. I could go on and on about how if we learned to eat insects all our problems would be solved, that it's a jive corporate mind fuck that makes eating slaughtered mammals acceptable but bugs disgusting when clearly we were meant to eat both, and each other's pineal glands as well. That's why when people have the DTs, or are twitching on cheap meth, they see bugs everywhere. We're hardwired to be seeing bugs everywhere because we're hardwired for outdoor, forest living. Bugs are meant to be everywhere. Our brains see typewriters and if our blinders are off, our cortex makes them bug-like, because we're born with basic programming, a rudimentary set of shapes and symbols--bugs, animals, breast, nipple, food--and these can warp and change and re-affix with ease, the way strangers look like our mom when lost, or the way the guy stranded on a desert island sees his friend start to look like a hot dog in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

A fever dream of weirdness, NAKED LUNCH scores extra eerie frisson if you're a sexually frustrated male in 1991, a time when queerness was allowed to carry a creepy closeted charge, even to the extent of casting the uncanny Mr. Julian Sands. You remember when he was Elisabeth Shue's deranged Russian pimp in LEAVING LAS VEGAS? Wait, did she win an Oscar for that? What the fuck? In 1991 being gay was still much more controversial than it is now, and the brave thing about LUNCH is how it gradually "outs" its protagonist, from flinching at Ginsberg's suggestion that he and Bill "join" Jack and Bill's wife in an orgy (like he's ashamed he's in the same sexual set as this Rick Moranis-ish poet) to conveying disgust at the advances of Julian Sands, to waking up quietly contented and happy next to Kiki, a pretty Moroccan boy hustler who's taken a shine to our Bill. Without trumpets and a big fuss, LUNCH brings queerness into the acid cinema canon without raising a single hackle. The way it does this is first by shocking the audience--with the gay come-ons which are creepy and rejected--then retreating back to heterosexuality (with Judy Davis). Once you're completely confused, Bill wakes up with Kiki and gives him a tender kiss on the forehead. By that point in the film you're too dislocated to be able to muster any knee-jerk homophobic horror, you're just glad Bill's finally found a friend. 

Lastly, there's the late, great Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway. When near the end he rips off his disguise and shouts "Benway!" with a roar of delight, you know you're seeing a fuckin' great movie, it may have taken the whole film to get there, but there's no denying. In structure, NAKED LUNCH bears similarity to the sacred ritual myths of initiation and creative evolution. In that sense, here Scheider is like Prospero in THE TEMPEST or Sarastro THE MAGIC FLUTE, or even the little girl hologram in RESIDENT EVIL, letting you know you're ready for the next level, the higher initiation; and every time the serpent takes another swallow of its own tail, the circle gets just that much smaller, i.e. wider.

At first, for example, our ideas of Bill's sexuality are pretty vague, reflecting a kind of immature albeit pupae-like readiness. His very nature reflects the duality of life and death as he works as an exterminator, but gets high on his own bug powder. Both Cronenberg and  Burroughs are unafraid to look death in the eye and see it as merely temporary (like life), the tunnel portion of an endlessly looped carnival ride. The topography is changed just a little after each journey into the Stygian darkness, just enough so that everything is revealed as in flux, and memories of past events warp to accommodate new information. Benway appears with a new prescription like Glenda the Good Witch, arriving with a new pair of more powerful, more addictive, rubier slippers, once the latest Oz challenge has been met. Maturity and the winning of the princess in the corresponding myths are here just steps into an even darker vortex of self, for drugs take as much as they give and for every bridge deeper into the interzone, another universe of possibility dies behind you. What Buckaroo Banzai didn't realize about the eighth dimension is that you don't need a fast car driving into a rock to get there, you just need a taste of Dr. Benway's patented black centipede syrup, and a deadpan facade. Wherever you go, there you are, but then, also there you aren't... one sniff at a time.

MAD MEN Substitute: THE CARPETBAGGERS (1964, d. Edward Dmytryk)

While Mad Men is out of season, get your hot angry period piece businessman fix with Edward Dmytryk's adaptation of the Harold Robbins' bodice-ripper, THE CARPETBAGGERS (1964). Age has been kind to this loose adaptation of the Howard Hughes mythos. It keeps all the juicy bedroom camp alive in long, well-structured scenes that should have been studied by Scorsese and DiCaprio before they made the far less virile AVIATOR. While Scorsese's film made Hughes into a saint too fine, broken and dreamy for this world, the fictionalized Jonas Cord (George Peppard) is a misogynistic chick magnet. His marriage to the Winthrop heiress is scrapped when he finds out she's a clingy conventional hausfrau. His true love is his hot stepmom (Caroll Baker) who was his lover before his richer dad stole her away and married her. Amoral and manipulative a pair of hot-to-trot relatives as you're likely to find this side of the 80s, they're like Tony and Cesca in the last reel of SCARFACE ("I can't tell whether I love you or hate you"/ "Both"). Meanwhile, Alan Ladd hangs onto his hat as western hero Nevada Smith (the cowboy outlaw turned millionaire kid's bodyguard/pal, ala William Demarest in THE LADY EVE or Rock Hudson in WRITTEN ON THE WIND, or Viggo in EASTERN PROMISES), and Leif Erikson rants nicely as Joanas Sr., who yells at his tomcat progeny: "A man's judged by what's in his head, not in his bed!"

As I mentioned in an old post, THE CARPETBAGGERS makes a great unofficial sequel to GIANT, with Jet Rink changing into Jonas Cord, and Caroll Baker growing up and over to Hollywood to pursue her dream in pictures, and Dmytryk knows Baker's method hotness is the film's best asset, and so gives her room to breathe and lounge. Meanwhile, Monica, the clingy Winthrop heiress (Elizabeth Ashley) sounds exactly like Kate Jackson, and through it all George Peppard is a real pleasant surprise as a taciturn, ruthless hedonist businessman workaholic with daddy issues. Such a role might warrant over-playing in less capable hands, but Dmytryk and Peppard are smart enough to never let Jonas smile or betray a hint of emotion other than simmering hatred.  His voice is marvelously tinged with nasal reverb, like he's always either freshly buzzed or really hungover, or has a cold, or all three, like I used to have when seeing him in Breakfast at Tiffany's screenings Sunday afternoons in Tribecca circa 1997. 


I was too much of a boy to watch Dallas and Dynasty and all that back in the 1970s-80s, but  now I love the CARPETBAGGERS, and to me, the nymphomaniac stepmom is clearly the good guy. Actually sex itself is the good guy. Those who wield sex wantonly gain the world and lose the soul they never even had, a more than reasonable exchange when your life doesn't extend past the credits.

And yeah, it has that 60s Mad Men panache as well. What was once misogynistic becomes quaint and inspiring in our post-modern age for it reminds us we are not like that now. Even the most sordid sexual expression can become socially acceptable through the prophylactic rose-tinted windshield screen of time. As CARPETBAGGERS is itself set thirty years before it was made (in the swingin' 30s), our windshield here is double-tinted. Baker's boozy harridan becomes less a sex object through all this filtration and more of a third-wave martyr. Oh the things she could have done with a guest spot on the O.C.!

Of course it all ends happily, and I shan't reveal any more. But know that the DVD is in splendidly refurbished colors and it all glows with nice dark red wallpaper and tastefully dusky furniture and none of the usual suffocating bouquets and endless white marble that chokes so many other rich folk films. So when you have that yen for martinis, suits, gowns and a complete absence of political correctness, pick up CARPETBAGGERS the way you'd pick up a Kantian dissertation on 60s soap operas for the beach. Raunchier than Sirk, not neutered like Tashlin, not smothered in chintz and expensive perfume. It's about ballsy men, and deep oak and mahogany surfaces, and women who are allowed to make the kind of prolonged, sexually aggressive eye contact that would send a 21st century boy or 19th century girl blushing from the coffee bar. Edward Cullen would probably explode into CGI dust if Baker so much as batted an eyelash his way. Here's wishing there were a dozen more as good... or as bad... as Baker.

Idiot's Delight (1939)

Who are the idiots?
There must be some word.
I want them all.
I want all the idiots."
--Riffs' leader if "idiots" was substituted for "warriors" (THE WARRIORS, 1979)

And that's just what MGM does here. "Warrior's Delight" would be a much better title, because all the local soldiers at this Alpine border want to do is bomb some stuff, and stranded traveler Burgess Meredith gets all self-righteous about it: "Ten thousand tons of flaming death and none of you want to stop dancing!" Why doesn't someone shut that pacifist up, you ask, mootly, at the screen? Gable and Shearer are trying to play screwball and the soldiers are trying to dance with Gable's devoted dancing blondes, and the pacifist wants to rain on the parade.

The best thing about this play/movie is how transparently it reveals anti-war modernist tracts to be self-defeating. Now that an annoying sanctimonious tub-thumper like Burgess' pacifist has expressed all these humanist sentiments, humanist sentiments are suddenly very uncool. Once you hate the haters, you just switched sides.

Two big MGM stars were Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. Both having been MGM top talent since the silent age, Garbo was basically retired by 1939 (though she came back the same year in NINOTCHKA), but Shearer was only slightly the less for wear, a little paunchy maybe, but bravely, brazenly--for endless pages of campy but gleefully nihilistic dialogue--willing to alternately satirize, celebrate and lovingly impersonate Garbo, at times coming off like a drag queen, other times like a legit and loving sociopath who "vonts to be alone." And then, when you're just about ready to press stop, Clark Gable busts loose in his big number, mocking both Fred Astaire and the whole concept of song and dance men in his hilarious "Puttin' on the Ritz." It's worth watching just for his facial expressions, which are pure Groucho Marx impersonating Maurice Chevalier in MONKEY BUSINESS.

Edward Arnold is pretty ballsy as the ruthless arms magnate (Shearer's his arm candy). He explodes in a big burst of anger when she's cynical about his genius at sewing death. "If someone's going to be so petty as to take up arms they deserve to die! I help humanity by getting rid of them!" Or something like that. No argument from me, brother! Probably not from MGM either, with scrappy little Burgess Meredith's hysterical outbursts. The self-appointed "prophet" spreading brotherly love and peace, he's the lynch pin by which to measure and hang the rest of the cast. Gable and Shearer's doomed couple ultimately transcend it all since they're not too terribly afraid of death. That's what true love is, after all, a kind of painful form of living death, in and of itself, like enlightenment, and death is just another station on the endless spinning dial.

In short, there's far worse examples of that Barton Fink feeling than this adapted pacifist play! Simmering with cross purposes, it fairly begs to get a post-modern de-adaptation by the Wooster Group. I can see Kate Valk acing the Garbo by way of Shearer MGM elocution accent, and Willem Da Foe a psychotically chipper Gable, acting out love scenes in front of a screening of some confiscated Third Reich Alpine nature documentary footage and psychedelic bomber shadow explosion lightshows. And the conscience represented by Burgess Meredith in the film could be one of Godard's deadpan commie sermons playing on an old reel-to-reel, before it's finally replaced by the smooth no worries shine of Compakt Disk.

Acid's Greatest #66: THE DAWN PATROL (1938)

Say a prayer for the dead already / and salute those next to die!" -- Lucy Westerna, reciting an old airman's drinking song for Count Dracula's bemusement (DRACULA, 1931)

A bad trip can leave you traumatized for weeks, cut off from a general populace who cannot see beyond their collective fog of assured continuity to understand why you're so pallid. The blinders that obscure the constant threat of death are, for you, if not outright removed, perforated to let in the rays of the black void. For those around you it's business as usual, the glazed-eyed consumers on their endless rotation from cubicle to couch to bed, while you sit outside it all, clawing softly at the fleshy disguise you call a face. A feeling of lost futility overwhelms your every thought and gesture, but lo! THE DAWN PATROL is waiting; the doomed airmen waiting their time to die up in the air over the trenches between France and Germany in what they thought was the war to end all wars, they understand your existential anguish! Are they not, in their way, the living dead? Look at the way the pilot up top resembles a corpse right out of a Joe Kubert WEIRD WAR TALES cover. You can feel both the beating of post-war modernism's horrified, hideous heart and smell the dread of the next war, already in progress, which America was eyeing with the remorse of a redacted father who just got home from the front and now has to turn around and find his gun again...

Though directed by "ladies' choice" Edmund Goulding (GRAND HOTEL, DARK VICTORY), DAWN PATROL is a remake of an early sound Howard Hawks film, largely unseen and allegedly stilted. I've no qualm with this version as Goulding is just fine at capturing his own version of the Hawks' camaraderie. Like Hawks he keeps shots at a medium level to allow us to feel part of the action, part of the brotherhood of airmen, who treat their captured German pilots with respect, giving them drinks and food before the MPs take them away for questioning and internment. And of course our airmen agonize over all the fresh young recruits, most of whom are shot down during their first few soirees. What's most important in a film like this, since it's almost all male actors in a room talking, is that the actors be first rate and nothing beats seeing Basil Rathbone as the C.O., bravely taking the heat from righteous pilot Errol Flynn and drunken wingman David Niven. Not to spoil it, but there's a whole great middle segment with.... well, i can't spoil it.

But drinking, man is there a lot of well-deserved drinking, and after a bad trip, honey, if you don't have a drink or something to put your lights out, you're going to be hallucinating ghost anima fingers ripping your soul apart all night. But you do have drinks, and they're apparently free, since the bar is your HQ. Goulding's DAWN PATROL puts you in that same pleasant zone, that land where you too belong to something cooler than yourself and the bartender is a personal friend, that Hawks puts you into via ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, AIR FORCE, RIO BRAVO, etc., and maybe even outdoes them as far as sheer existential chutzpah and melancholy.

The big existential question isn't ultimately how or why, but when? Eckhart Tolle (or was it Ram Dass?) writes of working with death row inmates and how they would have big breakthroughs, with the convicts turning to the glory of the eternal now. But then, if, say, the convict got off the short list and were put back on non-your-time-is-nigh status, they'd get cocky and forget the now, become hungry-mouthed ghosts again. Hawks and Hemingway understood it: they knew they had to be cozied up to death to write worth a damn. Like it or not, having survived the horrors of a bad acip trip, you're now in that same league as Hemingway and Hawks. And knocking back a few with THE DAWN PATROL can be like stowing away on a boat only to learn you've got a pre-paid royal suite with a fully-stocked bar. Every Icarus needs his wings melted before he can be of any mythic use, you just don't get to find that out until your wings burn, and you know Marlene's not to blame. THE DAWN PATROL is your welcome to brotherhood of the melted wings! Now get up in those deadly skies! Von Richtofen's gonna make you squeal like a pig.