Hail Hail Heather Graham

I just go back from Heather Graham's 41st birthday bash (1) and what better time to celebrate her unnerving sexuality? 41!? You'd never guess it.

I remember well Graham's big crash into A-list films in the late 1990's: first as the sweet girl who saves future IRON MAN-director Jon Favreau from chickless despair in SWINGERS (1996)--her presence a reminder that even the most self-defeating hep cats were occasionally rewarded with a nice, no BS kind of gal--second as shockingly uninhibited porn star Rollergirl in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997), and third as the lass who beats out Natasha Gregson Wagner for the dubious prize of Robert Downey Jr. in TWO GIRLS AND A GUY (1997). By the time she staggered into AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME (1999), as a spy who shags Mike Meyers' disgusting over-latex fat-suited Scotsman badguy, 'Fat Bastard.', it was like doesn't this poor nymphomaniac persona ever get to, like, shag someone other than doofuses? (Doofi?)

 I saw the SHAGGED in the theater during the hot summer of 1999, when my AC was out, and my gratitude for the coolness of the 86th and 3rd Loews was offset by the disturbing sight of Graham's gorgeous body in bed with Meyers' Bastard, his fat fingers and bloated hair prosthetic chest greasy from chowing on a whole roast chicken. Some things you never forget, and the sight of sweet doe-eyed hottie Graham going to such lengths for her job made me shudder in sympathy for young actresses everywhere.

From there Graham did other things like hosting SNL, where she played a babysitter who becomes the straw dog in a bitter post-menage a trois argument with the parents. The Heather impact by then was undeniable: those wide eyes, that horrifically voluptuous body, that golden hair; she was almost too sexy in her ability to be unconscious of being too sexy. It was if the lost little girl guilelessness of Marilyn Monroe was wedded to a smart, concerned, awake, lonesome therapist.

Hers is the kind of allure that perfectly embodies Lacan's objet petit a: men fantasize about her kind of 'availability' only to run from it when it suddenly makes itself so immediately, alarmingly tangible. I can imagine her (meaning her screen 'persona') coming onto me at a party, my dream girl, and me stammering some lame excuse and running away... watching in shame as she goes home with some other guy more foul-mouthed and aggressive. That, alone, makes her awesome. She proves 95% of men are all talk. She wins the dare.

Pornography is probably the most clear example of the kind of image-based delusion her sexiness destroys - all the enjoyment is enacted onscreen for the viewer, who presumably fantasizes themselves into the action, and Heather Graham reminds us that the reason is more than our shyness, laziness, ugliness, reticence; our whole identity is split between the imaginary and the real -- we fantasize via the screen and when our fantasy comes true, sans screen, we run back to the shelter of the image. With Heather Graham, we better run fast, as she moves like a serpent zipper.

Lacan writes about the impossibility of desire, and Heather Graham is its fullest expression. She makes us weep with longing and trepidation, with worry and resentment. Her career needs to flourish now that she's in her 40s! Take that sexuality and finesse it, Heather Graham! You are the sunshine '69. Free love still blazes in your saucer eyes. More's the pity for the world, not you, if all they can do is run from the golden blessings you bestow.

(more cool photos and celebration at Neil Fulwood's Agitation of the Mind here)


(1: I never said she was there... or even knew about it :))

TWILIGHT's Cinematic Ancestors: THE WIND, DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, MOROCCO, TITANIC, LITTLE WOMEN

I'll always stick up for TWILIGHT (the films at any rate) because I love the death drive, and what other series is the lead girl allowed to have an unrepentant disdain for life? That's so ninja! What other teen series is it not only sanctioned but wholly recommended to die for love? That's pre-code woman's picture Hollywood, as old and venerated as Lilian Gish and D.W. Griffith. In refusing to be embraced by the positive life energies of the social order that pines for her, Bella becomes an Antigone-by-way-of-Camille tragi-diva. She may be a virgin, but she's not afraid to give it all up for the idea of love.

It's important for hand-wringing moralists to remember that most everyone in the world knows the difference between fiction and reality, so these kinds of death drives are meant for films -- films are their outlet, like death on a stick, 50 cents a seat -- in a dream, does it really matter if you live beyond the credits? Doesn't Oscar prefer a long, gloriously overwrought death scene over a happily-ever-after fade to nothing?  Don't we love to pretend to die as children? To achieve true immortality, the ideal lover is only a memory, a twinkle in Gloria Stuart's eye, rather than one who ages into her sofa, spanning decades of squinting at the crosswords. Let's take a look back:

TITANIC (1997)

What could be more 'functionally Goth' than the frozen Arctic ending of this film? I was deeply surprised the frosty hair, pale skin, chattering teeth and purple lip look didn't sweep the world as a fashion trend after this film came out. Sometimes in cultural hypothermia a lag effect doth dwell. A decade or so later, TWILIGHT speeds the lag to a close.

LITTLE WOMEN (1994)

I saw this in the theater the same weekend as INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, and was hungover and repentant both times and cried at each; but for the purposes of this post, WOMEN trumps VAMPIRE. Why? Here's why: a) Brad Pitt's ethical guilt tripping over biting folks in VAMPIRE gets soooo tiresome, and b) Tom Cruise as Lestat? Who cares if he was actually good at it? It's just wrong, no matter how sexy Antonio Banderas is.

LITTLE WOMEN, meanwhile, has super young Christian Bale, Kristen Dunst (not quite as good as she was in VAMPIRE, where she stole the show), Clare Danes (I cried a thousand drunken times over My So-Called Life reruns on MTV) and Winona Ryder! And even today, the film has a weird charm, like you're staying over at the spooky-cozy mansion house of a group of very, very cool girls in long nightshirts and candles, and that sense of 'belonging' to a cool group of beautiful people is really what TWILIGHT hinges on. Also, Winona Ryder establishes brainy, brunette and no bullshit-taking as a combination too sexy for this world; her steampunk version of Jo provides a clear forerunner of the whole Kristen Stewart-Bella Goth thing, which Ryder basically invented anyway, six years earlier in BEETLEJUICE.

LOVE STORY (1976)

I've never seen this, but I've heard my dad bash both Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw constantly in our house, and so I both dread and secretly pine for this movie. It was a hit which producer Robert Evans talk about lovingly in THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE.  In case you don't know, Ali has a disease and slowly dies, or is it Ryan? At any rate it was a huge hit and the TITANIC or TWILIGHT of its day. Might be worth looking up for the tru-ballin' Twilighters.

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (1933)

Death is played by Frederic March, who poses as a living count and meets a far-away-eyed debutante (Evelyn Venable, who is awesome). She's death-obsessed enough to make Bella seem like Mary Poppins; and her Edward ain't some deer-blood drinking Puritan, but Death with a capital S for Scythe. Love + Death = Modernism, a cry-in-your-whiskey highball tradition. This isn't available on DVD, except as an extra on the two-disc Meet Joe Black (Ultimate Edition), which since you can pick it up for under nine dollars, is worth getting just for that (avoid JOE BLACK itself, and I say this as a man who deeply adores Pitt's co-star Claire Forlani).

MOROCCO (1931)

Marlene Dietrich's cabaret chanteuse courts androgyny and shuns rich Adolphe Menjou (the Jacob), knowing he'll eat it up as he's a masochist. She's defined more by what she's not than what she is, and that's why she falls for a young and Edwardian Gary Cooper; he's a 'tall drink of water' in the Foreign Legion who, like her, is bored with the opposite sex throwing themselves in front of his feet. They're each surprised by their deep yen for one another, but both are so used to being pursued they barely remember how to actually do the pursuing. Not to worry, since neither one gives a damn about life or death, only love, and Dietrich's final renouncement is as valiant and Goth as anything in the back of Bella's death drivin' mind. Inspiring!

THE WIND (1929)

Silent (or sound) films have seldom spun along with such crazy spirit as in THE WIND: Lillian Gish is the poor virginal girl who gets way less than she bargained for when she moves in with her far-off mail order husband. His homestead is in a land so windy she spends the bulk of the day sweeping sand out of the shack, and repelling her husband's would-be rapist friends. The whole thing works well as a metaphor for virginity and the loss thereof; the terrible price paid when one moves into adulthood, the endless sacrifice and loss in exchange for nothing but maybe love. In a way, it's the most sexually and emotionally 'mature' film of the lot. It's the REPULSION of the silent era! Don't miss it, and don't front if you have to read intertitles, or you may never understand DOGVILLE. You been warned! Stay away from them, Bella!

A Moon, Cat Women, and Thou

One of the 'golden turkey' classics (Medved wrote of it in awe), CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953) begs little but indulgence. It doesn't ask for respect, forgiveness or love, that's why you forgive, respect and love it, like a play put on by your children. Shot in 3-D in the middle of the night on cheap sets by the most depth-perceptionally challenged director in history (Arthur Hilton) it features cat dancing, Earthman spacesuit donning and doffing; a giant spider, mystic trances and lots of sleeping. Ah to sleep, long time, for there is no 'late' sleeping on the dark side of the moon; there is no sun for your mom to complain you're wasting. There are just stars, and those who once were even less than that. See how they doze on lounge chairs in their aluminum siding-walled space ship. See how they doze amidst the columns and splendor of the secret cat lair. Shhhh! They waken and overhear a conversation. The two alpha human males fight over Helen... if you can call it fighting.

Diggers of Brecht, Godard, Wood, Ulmer and Franco should know that this is it: the pure stuff, the 'stank, bra. Irresistible in its grade-Z charm, missing--thankfully--any sense of self-awareness or wit, MOON manages to forget more about male-female relationships than the entire rom-com genre will ever remember.  It is, in short, the graveyard shift of AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL: MOON EDITION, and-- whether convulsing in alcohol withdrawal, or fuzzily fading in and out of stoned consciousness--'tis like some strange oxygen-enriched air magically adhering to the dark side of the moon for only you and your asleep, annoyed lover to breathe.

It's a movie so cheap that half its action scenes occur off-camera, described secondhand by actors who've just run back down the cavern between the spaceship (interiors only) and underground cat woman lair. The presence of a giant spider on strings pops up to wake you with Helen's screams if you were about to fall asleep. You could laugh at the spider's strings, but why? The humor in the film comes from something far deeper: the mythic dissonance between the sides of the moon and sides of the brain--the moon/women/Eros cats vs. earth/sun/Apollonian astronauts, and it all goes down with a quiet Zen like emptiness, thanks to film composer Elmer Bernstein's inexplicable presence on the soundtrack. He delivers a low-key snake charmer flute score that puts it at a whole other level. You end up not laughing, even falling into a mythopoetic dream trance, when that flute starts working.

Bernstein's touch saves the film from utter disintegration into abstract off-off-off Broadway theater, but even then, disintegration is imminent. And wait, there's a few more touches: Look for example at the poverty of the dark side of the moon cat cavern lair below:

 

Simple, poverty-stricken, beautiful, a psychic palm reading in some terrible alternate reality where no one washes their hair and the future is unwritten, just improvised off the back of the screenwriter's cocktail napkins. And UFO enthusiasts should dig that thing on the wall in the upper left. It looks just like a primitive sculpture of the face of a reptilian grey! 

An accident? Intentional? Just some weird trinket rummaged from the discarded prop bin in the alley behind the sound stage?  There are no accidents in bad 1950s science fiction. I can imagine that face being added in the dead of the night by covert military disinformation specialists to throw paranoid fans off the scent... or not.

On the intellectual side, if I understand Antonioni, Godard, and Bergman today, it's only because of movies like CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON, which taught me to love the seams of the simulacrum, the glue on the aluminum siding spaceship with the lounge chair beds right by the instrument panels. Watching it I get the feeling as if space is a giant slumber party where someone is awake all the time and someone is always asleep, keeping the crew rooted in a place neither unconscious nor conscious. Cinema and viewing, especially late night semi-conscious viewing, is just like that! And in watching the characters throwing themselves into the path of the spider, you feel unmoored from the limits of narrative and into the 4th wall freedom of post-modern awareness.

 

Above is another cool shot of some people sleeping. Doesn't it just make you want to sack out on a cold night like this? And of course, Helen:

Marie (NARROW MARGIN) Windsor plays her! (everyone in the cast has to shout her name for some reason: "Helen!") As woman and such, she's susceptible to the mind control of the cat women. She's the navigator and guides the men to the dark side, and then plays the humorless Victor Jory against the incompetent leader, Sonny Tufts, so she can learn all their secrets and telepath the data back to Alpha (Carol Brewster), the lead cat lady. Only Victor has the power to free her of cat women domination, just by twisting her arm (she likes it rough, like an Eartha Kitt- Catwoman). And she likes to sleep... around!

I like that too, and I like that there's no exterior footage in CAT WOMEN, no daytime shots, mismatched day-for-night driving scenes that go on for two reels. No sense of grass or earthy values. It's soothing to my Swedish blood to imagine a world where the sun never comes up and the planet is populated only by cat girls who, for all their guile, are so much more sympathetic than the clods of earth like gullible, brain-dead Tufts or the suspicious, reptilian Victor Jory, who never doubts his own moral rightness as he punches out women right and left (he'd be a great candidate for Summers' Isle)--or the nakedly greedy and self-serving Walt (Douglas Fowley), and the blank-as-candy Doug (William Phillips), who somehow earns the love of Lambda, ah sweet Lambda (Susan Morrow).

I first got into this movie while drunk in Seattle living with a girlfriend who was beautiful and already fed up with my sloth and debauchery after three months of unemployed cohabitation. Lambda could have been her sister, same kind of deer-in-the-headlights sweet clueless brunette cool and aquiline profile. Man oh man. I was so in love and all I could do was treat her mean and contemptuous until she left me. Then for years after, I watched CAT WOMEN to remind me of her, and to escape the pain of her all at the same time. "Lambda...." Seattle may as well have been the moon, now that I was an east-coaster forever. The perfect Pacific Northwestern pre-Twilight fantasia was born... it was my moon-northwest coast oasis, with an element of run-down shabby furniture-adorned coffee house...

Like Seattle, CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON has no sunshine, mismatched garage sale decor, a beatnki coffee house aesthetic gone wrong, a sense of smug sanctimony clouding its once-beautiful blankness, and once you leave you can never go back and the comforts of Sonny Tufts are small condolence.

It's been a long time since I was in Seattle, and New York has no room for CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. In my personal constellation, Lambda's archetypal resonance has dimmed over the decades, and thanks to David Icke I recently learned  the truth about the moon (the moon is not your friend), but I took this film to PA earlier this month and it got me through. It's the kind of film that can get you through almost anything, except... maybe... itself. But isn't life a lot like that... in PA? Or anywhere... but stupid earth? 

The First Liebowski: CUTTER'S WAY (1981)

Every once in awhile a man has to pause. Every once in awhile a man has peer into the decades behind him, take a cursory flip through Leonard Maltin and wonder... is John Heard really a good actor? I mean, is he awesome? Or is he too much too late?

The question is answered the same time as you ask: do all 1970s movies involve grizzled vet loners going after corrupt power father figures like they're lone wolves growling valiantly but for naught against the machine?

As Robert Evans would say, you bet all 1970's movies involved grizzled loners growling for naught against the machine. And they all must have a big crowd scene parade, or a wedding, or a political rally, or some place where they can see some figure in a white dress representing old world innocence now reduced to a symbolic lamb sacrifice against the coming storm of dread and draconian soul-eating.

Perhaps a bit shaggy, CUTTER'S WAY can't make up its mind about itself: is it called CUTTER'S WAY or CUTTER AND BONE? Is it a Elmore Leonard-ish beach bum crime drama, a Vietnam vet character study; a buddy-buddy California corruption tale, or an elegy to the American dream in a small California town where everybody knows your name and you can drink right out in the open and not be arrested? ("Hey man! I have a beverage here!") Is it Elmore Leonard meets TAXI DRIVER meets MIDNIGHT COWBOY? BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA meets NIGHT MOVES? CHINATOWN divided by THE DEER HUNTER? It's got a little of a lot and it's brilliant but by 181 these tropes read like quirk by the numbers. Why shoehorn the whole evil murder plot in there at all? And Heard overplays so much, is so drunk, that a murder case seems way too much for him to handle. He should be using some of that voracious animal intellect to not piss his pants, like the rest of us!

Those pants really tied the room together.

In short, this movie could have been a prequel to THE BIG LIEBOWSKI, wherein the very same Jeff Bridges deals with a massive conspiracy by the much saner approach of going bowling, and this time his Vietnam vet wreck of a buddy isn't a little scrawny fucker with only one leg and an eye patch. He's John Fucking Goodman! Goodman would have shaken the shit up in CUTTER'S WAY, but Heard can't do much more than ride a horse. As Sam Eliot once said: "Take her easy, dude...I know you will, too."

CUTTER took a long time to be released and completed due to studio regime changes as well as trend shifts. It started as a project back in 1971 and if it had been released in 1972 instead of 1981 it would probably have been a hit and a modern classic like your DEER HUNTER and your CHINATOWN, but by 1981 people had grown a little weary of the traumatized vet loner solving a rich man's crime thing. I remember reading some good reviews in the local newspaper when CUTTER finally did come out, but I knew even then, at 14, that the 1970s were over. We'd all had a good laugh at the HEAVEN'S GATE debacle, and grown tired of the undignified posturing--chronicled in PEOPLE magazine--between the stars of DEER HUNTER and COMING HOME over the 1978 Oscars, and Jane Fonda bashing the former over its 'demonic' portrayal of the Viet Cong. One more film about a Vietnam vet disillusioned and seeking to overturn the immobile turtle of American politics wasn't going to make us care. We craved fantasy, escape, ET!! And lo, ET he was on his way, to trade us our innocence for some magic candy--like a safety class stranger--just one year after this last gasp of 1970s corruption-venting. 

For some of us, John Heard was just too... Kevin Bacon-ish? No denying he's ferocious and gives it 111%, but seeing the film now, long past any due date, I honestly don't know how I feel about him, or the film. All the ingredients are there and maybe that's the problem. It's like the film was given an unlimited shopping spree at the seventies' paranoia cliche' store and just had to clean the place out.

But hey, it's worth seeing for sure, some time when you're high on 1970s 'Nam-gate cinema, and what a double bill it would make with LIEBOWSKI! May I recommend an angle on which to view them, for political meta-purposes? Just have Bridges = Blue States / right brain (blue for Bridges, peace, man!) and the vets (Goodman and Heard) = Red states / left brain (guns break class barriers!) The corrupt power elite figure equals the 'real' corporate shadow puppet (Halliburton) figures that capitalize on the dissonance between the colors/hemispheres to steal everyone's IRA and soul. Keep this in mind and let the bowling balls and cocktails fall where they may.

The fine and trenchant blog OUT 1 reviews CUTTER here, and draws a similar Liebowski conclusion while dealing more with the plot and production of the film itself. It makes a fine double bill with this post! Tell them the Dude sentchye.

Best Erich Kuersten Film Writing of 2010

Whether in Bright Lights Film Journal or this very blog, Erich Kuersten's been busy trying to fracture reality through bizarro psychoanalysidelic film analysis. This year he found himself hung up on the ambiguous sexual crosscurrents of feminine desire (in #6 of the Acidemic Film Journal proper) was cited as one of the best film criticism sites by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, and had his mind blown by seeing ENTER THE VOID and BLACK SWAN in a single 24 hour time period, all while sick, and strung out on Robitussin DM!

1. Sex is a Hen Decapitated: BLUEBEARD and Eroticism of Catherine Breillat

Do we not, in associating white for virginity and purity, forget that red means the alchemical opening up of that purity into the raw violence of procreation? So what does that third color of the French flag--blue--represent? Naturally, the cooling rescue of death--or rather as symbolized in the 'bloody chamber' where all the previous brides are stored, a suspended animation -- a sleeping beauty status wherein the enslaving agonies of childbirth and old age are forever kept at bay. In short, the blue represents frozen death and timeless decadence, pleasure and a disruption of the natural enslavement process of patriarchy. Bluebeard postpones sexual relations--and life itself-- in order to keep romance forever young... (more)

2. Misogynist! Genius! (Dario Argento)

No great art actually solves problems or answers question, but instead brings confirmation to doubt, a sense the answer to that question you were obsessed with as a child is still relevant and waiting for you to pick up its breadcrumb trail. To firmly believe in two simultaneously contradictory opinions is to free to be in on the joke of your own enslavement, which is all true freedom is... (more)

 

3. Great Acid Movies: THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

A good myth functions as a natural psychedelic, but OZ also functions, like 2001, as a metaphor for acid itself, and remains a common way to describe the effects to people who've never tried it (...) No matter how many times we've seen (the film), even knowing it's coming after dozens of viewings since childhood, that transition from black and white Kansas to technicolor OZ is a bit of a shock. And the shock just intensifies with the arrival of 'The Lollipop Guild'...  The great Terence McKenna wrote of 'machine elves' as common mushroom hallucinations, positing that fairies, aliens, mythic creatures, all might be tied up into particular, small, elvin beings that exist in alternate dimensions but are nonetheless real... (more).

4. Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, S/M, and the Daemonic in TWILIGHT

... I say this not to belittle Edward or lay down some pseudo-psychological trip. I think this pre-sexual object of desire is very important and incredibly erotic. It's the whole virginity/purity thing that fascinates me about this series and its popularity. The idea of chastity being hot is not just some Mormon conspiracy — it dates back to the age of King Arthur and courtly love. It's not just a mask for fear of sharing bodily fluids; it's a spiritual act, a renouncement... (more)

5. Lindsay Lohan will Have her Revenge on Seattle

I've downward spiraled many times and I can tell you this: she'll either die or she won't, but unless you're a traffic cop and she's swerving down the road; or you're a relative planning an intervention with her crazy family; or a producer who's already paid her an advance on an upcoming role, it's really none of your frickin' business if she wants to drink herself into an early grave, sneak off to Cannes and promote a film barely in the preliminary stages of casting instead of going to out-patient; orblow holes in her car with a shotgun, or set herself on fire like Richard Pryor... (more)

6. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call Summer's Isle

Isn't it sad to realize the patriarchy has to repress and belittle the feminine, for the very simple reason that otherwise women will realize it's much better to kill men off once they've served their reproductive purpose, or send them off to work in the fields as castrated slave labor than to have to launder their clothes and do their dishes until death? Hasn't anyone seen CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)? What's the matter with you people? You think this is a joke? A child is missing! Her name is Rowan! (more)

7. Thanks / for the Lucky Strikes (Bob Hope)

Their push-pull dynamic is only heightened by the words and melody, making this one of my all-time favorite musical moments. Particularly I love the sudden breaks from singing to speaking: "That's life I guess (sung) / I love... / (spoken) your dress," he sings, the 'love' causing her to look up expectantly. Then he says 'your dress' and she looks down at it, her tears temporarily subsided. "Do you?" (more)

8. BIGGER THAN LIFE: Nicholas Ray in the Heart of the Gray Flannel Darkness

However, the tricky part of a Jekyll/Hyde role like Ed Avery is in first winning audience sympathy as a good, "normal" kind of guy. Remember when Stephen King got all mad at Kubrick for putting Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in The Shining? Dude!...

But the thing is, though Jack Nicholson made for a creepy dad, he was the creepy dad that we all know: the kind who laugh at their own jokes, presuming no one else will get his brilliant wit. He's smarmy, but a sexy, earthy, real smarmy that comes from having lived a full and addled life, i.e., a mix of love and hatred for his rich plethora of vices. He lets it all hang out with a sense of a college-educated snob who surrounds himself with unintelligent people and takes jobs lower than his abilities just so he knows he'll always be the smartest guy in the room. By contrast, James Mason comes off more like the child of a very harsh British prep school, all the mischief long since beaten out of him, employing a dry Ronald Colman-ishness as a carpet to cover the wormy floorboards of his megalomania...(more)

9. South Park Terrorism and the Nicole Kidman Experience

...she slithers between the moral poles of silent film virgins like Lillian Gish and unapologetic, homicidal sirens like Fu Manchu's daughter, Fah Lo Suee. For a prime example, please see BIRTH and play close attention to the sex scene early on, and the long take of her face at the concert...(more)

10. Enhancement of Anguish: Godard's VIVRE SA VIE on Blu-Ray

Coutard's camera leers over Karina's shoulder, sympathizing with her sadness even as it causes it, never sure what's an act and what isn't Is she just drawing us in to ask if she can borrow 2,000 francs? In a meta way, it's even true that her character's dreams of being a film star are realized, right there in the act of being in the movie you are now witnessing, and yet even that is not enough. Godard is forcing us to realize how we destroy the characters we love by looking at them. Our eye is the real monster here. But whereas the similarly distant Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion reacts to the encroachment of our gaze with delusional homicidal madness, Karina's prostitute just watches, almost bemused, as her freedom and life are crushed up in the jaws of the other's tepid desire...(more)

11. I got a Home in that 'Raq

Bigelow's unflinching feminine eye 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, but while women are born into a cycle of menstruation and the agony of birth,  what do men get to do as far as "taking the pain?" No wonder we men have grown so squeamish, like women we should be forced to take a punch in the stomach at the end of every lunar cycle... (more)

12. Great Films of the 80s: CONAN THE BARBARIAN

Valeria's fierce devotion and her beautiful monologue about passing other people in couples in tents in the night breaks our hearts and when Conan leaves her to pursue his quest for vengeance, we understand her sorrow and still understand his quest, because in this case Valeria's reasons not to ride against Doom aren't based on fear of death, but fear of losing this love so soon. Laugh all you want, but this was our Romeo and Juliet, our Titanic! Our Twilight...(more)

 

13. All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS

When their plane's about to land in Japan, the pair quickly wolf down their coke and pills in the airplane bathroom to avoid trouble with customs and suddenly the film speeds up for the butterfly stomach sweaty-palmed high of being cranked up onstage, twirling under the hot lights, and the slow-downs of first kisses in the dark of post-show euphoria. The big seduction lesbian moment between Joan and Cherie is scored to a slowed, drug-drenched "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that makes you ache in rock and roll remembrance of the first trip on acid, the first trip on ecstasy, while on stage, the blazing red lights in your face as you sing and the flames form a holy funnel around the microphone and your mouth becomes the size of a black hole in outer space, spewing flaming lyrics into the clenched alien insect fangs of the microphone, and outwards in waves of flaming energy that washes over the melting-faced fans...(more)

14. From Russia with Hell

The amazing performance by Olga Mironova as a Madonna/whore split personality is alone enough to catapult COME AND SEE into the pantheon of all-time greats. And there's nary a drop of easy sentimentality or preaching, just a savvy truly artistic appreciation for how war turns existence into a literal living nightmare, with all splits between awake and dreaming, interior and exterior, home and abroad, life and death, good and evil, mended into one twirling mad carnival of chaos, starvation and violence... enough to make Von Trier's ANTICHRIST look like a summer picnic..(more)

15. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! (Gold Diggers of 1933)

From: Film Experience 1/28/2010

Blondell goes from trying to stand up for her beaten-down beau against an unfeeling cop to addressing the audience, and the world, directly, her hands outstretched in a massive, Broadway belt of a plea. Watching Obama last night I was reminded not of Jimmy Stewart's hoarse fillibuster in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, but Blondell, opening her human heart a mile wide to engulf the nation in a surge of compassion as the music marches inexorably onwards. (more)


RUNNER UPS:
Some of these are heavy, some too light, some too just right, some caught me flak from angry feminists:
1. Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (#67 - Bright Lights Film Journal)
2. X is for Xanax (Acidemic 11/18/10)
3. Katherine Hegl: Infantilization's Poster Girl (Bright Lights After Dark 10/5/10)
4. Book Review: Hammer's Lethal Ladies & Femme Fatale (#67 Bright Lights Film Journal)
5. The Drowned Phoenician Sailor and his Mermaid Muse: HE RAN ALL THE WAY (Acidemic  11/24/10)
6. Let the Right One KILL BABY KILL (Acidemic 10/5/10)
7. Remote in Reach: THE WALL (Acidemic 7/27/10)

American Grievers, Part Two: THE FOUNTAIN

"Death is the road to awe."

Was it an accident I watched THE FOUNTAIN (2006) the very next night after INCEPTION? There are no accidents in cinema when your cinematic reality is more high-def than your foggy day-to-day free-floating grind! There's a handful of differences twixt the two: DiCaprio's brooding dreamweaver in INCEPTION becomes FOUNTAIN's Hugh 'Wolverine' Jackman as a concerned neurochemist trying to cure his terminal wife (Rachel Weisz) via ancient tree of life scrapings. She just wants to find peace and die but he's too busy being ridden with angst and posturing grief to give a shit what she wants. We flash forward and back through time (via her calligraphy hand-written journal) like we're skimming a glossy-paged graphic novel, with a shadowed inquisitor flagellating and plotting against a golden-hued queen and a seething conquistador who sets off to South America in search of the same mystic tree.

What makes this such a classic American Griever saga is Jackman's blindness to Weisz herself. He sees only her dying. She's seen the light and Jackman only sees the shade. He thinks if he buries himself in sunless jungles he can create an eternal light, when the deathlessness of light already is eternal! Right? And besides, if you've been forced to perform as long as our sweating sun, you'd be ready to die too. Jesus, heal these children! You can float like a Buddha all you want, Hugh. It's as phony as a tree dolla bill. The parts in the beginning where he seems to die and be reborn into another aspect of self are very cool, but turn out to be kind of misrepresentin'. When and if he dies, he demands the whole earth shake and dissolve in admiration. He may meditate and look as self-righteously enlightened as Richard Gere, but the ego is a cunning focus puller.

Personally, if I ever lost a parent as a child or vice versa my attitude might be more conventionally 'oh death, I'm mad at you! Instead I  have a great grandmother who lived to 107, and her daughter, my granny, alive and bored at 95 and put on suicide watch at her home if she even jokes about going out in a bang not a whimper. So I'm a represent, for her sake, that under-represented, pro-death voice: If your eyes are truly open, and life appears as it really is, infinite, then you know death is life--living in the moment is useless without it--and so when you hear all this life at all costs even if that life is less than lovely jazz, you understand why our medical system is so fucked up. We'd outlaw death if we could, jamming a crowbar into the wheel of life and wondering where that grinding sound is coming from, and why the lines at Epcot are so long, and why so many people are being born with such knock-off souls.

I know it's a touchy issue and I don't mean to sound all-knowing or callous, but in not even daring to touch on it, we're killing quality at the expense of quantity. I bring it up just because no one else will, and I've known people who've pissed away their life savings keeping a vegetable relative hooked to a machine. And I've waited in lines. At Epcot. And I've seen the limitless expanses of trash dumps, and mass production, and stockyards, and phone books... and suburban sprawl. Know who benefits from our fearful overpopulation? China.

What makes THE FOUNTAIN all the more troubling are actually its most interesting aspects, i.e. the way death is handled as a kind of transport, i.e. if you surrender to death in the right spirit, you never really die - and the idea of this tree of life as related to mind altering South American plant concoctions like ayahuasca. But these elements aren't explored so much as passed in the CGI artsy night on the way to another tearful tantrum. A good 70% of THE FOUNTAIN seems to be these Jackman tantrums. I stood up a few times and yelled at the screen: Hugh. we may already be immortal, soul-wise, so why cling to one body forever rather than find out? It may well be that radiation treatments, for example, may prolong your life if your body has cancer, but at the cost of warping the weave of your immortal soul, which is an electromagnetic field that can become permanently damaged by radiation, hence William S. Burroughs' description of the atomic bomb as a soul killer:

Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.

Imagine if in doing chemo we are prolonging our current life at the expense of mutating our immortal soul, like the Bridey Murphy medieval witch in Roger Corman's THE UNDEAD?

My point in dissing the American Griever thing in film isn't meant to just draw controversy, but to illuminate a gap between romantic male characters in today's cinema and those of old Hollywood, when men relating to their female partners in a direct and tender manner while remaining tough (not falling into romcom territory) was not a forgotten art. Think of the rapport between William Powell and Myrna Loy in THE THIN MAN or William Powell and Kay Francis in ONE WAY PASSAGE and JEWEL ROBBERY. Think of Bogie and Bacall, Newman and Woodward, Taylor and Burton, Gable and Lombard, Gable and Scarlett, all instances of actors able to be both masculine and tender, deep and badass but also sexually healthy, compared to the anguished loners of post-70s American dramatic cinema! Aside from Russell Crowe--an Australian--who can still do this?

I must be preaching to the choir in the case of Aronofsky, for his last two films, THE BLACK SWAN and THE WRESTLER death is seen as just the coolest of two grim options and endorsements of the better to burn out than fade away adage of Neil Young. I would hope we're meant to side with Rachel Weisz's right to die vs. Jackman's tiresome "you're not gonna die!" tirades. THE FOUNTAIN's American Griever, Jackman, claims to love his wife but all her attempts to show him the wonders of the stars and the beauty of the moment are dismissed and ignored by him as imbecilic prattle. We're meant to notice this in the film of course, the keen and subtle critique of America's blase' closed-mindedness towards death with dignity is a subtextual touchstone for Aronofsky's last two films. In discussing THE FOUNTAIN we discuss the roots of THE WRESTLER and BLACK SWAN, with Jackman's buzzkill character an early reflection of SWAN's Barbara Hershey as a micro-managing stage mom and Marisa Tomei as a single stripper mom wary of ex-client Mickey's headlock in THE WRESTLER.  The trouble is, Jackman's the main character in THE FOUNTAIN. He's supposed to be the good guy.Would you want to see THE BLACK SWAN if Hershey's character was the lead, and Portman just an ungrateful daughter?

In the end Jackman may or may not get wise to the joys of nonexistence, but either way his life as a lotus-posin' baldhood fool taking care of a space tree doesn't seem real, doesn't seem "earned" based on all his glum tantrums. Meditation is where one goes to find the truth of what lies beyond our current mortality, what survives when the rest is burned away, what is eternal and true vs. what is ephemeral. What makes Aronofsky's later films so much more 'earned' is the introduction of art to that equation, to mean art = a very cool death, regardless of your clocked meditation tree time. As a doctor, Jackman's whole Hippocratic Oath thing stops him from being true to this ideal of deathless fierceness --but truly good doctors know when to stop torturing the patient with painful, temporary stave-off measures and endless spinal taps and start encouraging them to enjoy their last remaining moments. Don't they?

That said, the visuals of THE FOUTNATIN are quite impressive, but again you can have acres of trippy hallucination and it's no more than eye candy for something that never seems to really happen, i.e. the transcendence of the duality of life and death into one eternal deathless state. In the words, psychedelic. If you're going to be that deep, it's cool to not show self-righteous American grievers getting rewarded by the cosmic good fairy as if spiritual points are given just for self-importance. There's more to Zen than baldness and Jason Patric-style sanctimony! There's also nothing romantic about Jackman's jackass hero. Look at Jack and Rose on THE TITANIC! They loved a lifetime worth in a few hours, but ole Hugh doesn't care about a few hours, and that's the very definition of unconsciousness. Imagine for example, Leo spending his last moments with Rose just lecturing her about how stupid it was she jumped out of the lifeboat to be with him... that's THE FOUNTAIN.

Fortunately, Aronofsky learned the lesson from its failure at the box office and with critics.  THE WRESTLER and THE BLACK SWAN would keep the best elements of THE FOUNTAIN--the even-keeled examination of the way immortal art can make you transcend death even as you die, and ditch the douchebag. Aronofsky learned in THE FOUNTAIN that the best way to make a point about art and the death drive is by portraying artists in physically masochistic fields like pro wrestling or ballet, more than just showing the art of CGI illustrators shellacked over greenscreened actors as lost in the winds as Jar Jar off his meds.