Acidemic - Film

No Sex! It's a Gentleman's Agreement...

2012-01-26T11:13:00.004-05:00

Design for Living (1933) centers around a "gentleman's agreement" that there will be no sex between sketch artist Miriam Hopkins and best friends Frederic March and Gary Cooper. There's a very good reason for this: they like each other so much, they don't want to fuck it up. American ex-pats in 1930s Paris, they meet on a train, so neither March nor Cooper can claim to have seen her first and have any 'finder's rights' and Hopkins refuses to choose one over the other. She is 'very fond' of both, so the agreement is she will be a 'mother of the arts' and spur their work--March's plays and Cooper's paintings--to success, which she does, and friction will be sidestepped by their gentleman's agreement, its offshoot artistic sublimation in part responsible for their triumphs. But once March is off to London to shepherd his play's West End opening, Hopkins takes Cooper into her boudoir, to console him over their mutual loss, and beds him for she is "no gentleman."

Meanwhile her boss, advertising mogul Everett Edward Horton, patiently waits his chance to woo Hopkins. He hasn't even 'gotten to first base' with her and as is the case so often with such lame duck lovers who are never quite all the way spurned or accepted, feels it's his duty to attempt to shoo the other boys away but of course he's little more than a fly at a picnic thinking it's the other way around. That is until he eventually 'wins' by default, even though he's too beholden to Eaglebauer to give her a, well, long story.

But what price no sex with guys as gorgeous as Cooper and March? And in this film they are tall, well-dressed and full of callow insecurity coupled with 'they don't know how hot they are" extra hotness -- and the result my favorite performance from either of them. I don't think I've ever seen March more relaxed, less like his usual coiled spring thespian self, or Cooper more beautiful, almost feminine with his eye liner and creaseless face. Look at his visage in the top picture; not a furrow on either's brow. Or look into Cooper's haunting eyes, has he ever seemed more alive or intelligent or sensual? Together they display the kind of rapport you seldom see in men outside of a rock band, the military, or Howard Hawks movies (Hawks collaborator Ben Hecht wrote the script loosely patterned off of Noel Coward, for whom the boy-boy romance was surely more complicated).

Paris, 1933 (March - right)

^{Now that Criterion's awesome blu-ray is out we can forget about trying to find it elsewhere and savor the lush image and Kim Morgan's awesome essay, "It Takes Three." which is included in the liner notes:}

What’s so touching about this threesome is how much they genuinely like each other. When you see them giggling on a bed (feet off the floor), they could just as easily be braiding each other’s hair or challenging one another to a wrestling match. Sex gets in the way, of course, but equal intelligence is an asset here. And since Gilda is essentially a good woman and not a mere indecisive tease, she can’t tear these two best friends apart. Rather than torture them with bedroom flip-flops, she sacrifices her own happiness for . . . Edward Everett Horton.

Morgan's tight journalistic prose and willingness to gaze without flinching into the murky abyss of feminine desire is an inspiration for my own writing and I appreciate her approach to the film is a lot more about the desire while mine is about the 'agreement.' I found out early on that if you love beautiful, intelligent women, but don't sleep with them, or even hit on them, ever, just love them and let them inspire you, then your art will bump up several notches and you will keep the beautiful inspirational women as friends for life (as lovers you'd lose them after a few months or years and never be inspired by them again). God forbid you hit on them and get rejected! you'll never write again, but if you can do the trickster thing and resist temptation you just might have a shot at getting actually good at your craft.

One of my own personal gentleman's agreement-style bonds is captured in the picture below, circa 1991. It wasn't quite the gentleman's agreement of Cooper and March and Hopkins because she was his girlfriend but the effect was the same as in Design for Living, a three way love affair for alcoholic ages: he and I were in a band together and housemates; her and I played a lot of gin and drank a lot of gin. The three of us went everywhere together. We were like Design for Living times Performance! In some ways, my relationship with the both of them was 'purer' then theirs as a couple. They fought and sulked and needled and I rose above it all like a third wheel spinning in the sky; my own girlfriend snug and quiet in her genie bottle of Old Grandad (green label).

N. Myrtle Beach, 1991 (me - left)

Losing her in the mid-90s to a conventionally successful and 'grounded' E.E. Horton / Ralph Bellamy type helped make me the critic of marriage I am today. No offense to him personally, he's a right enough chap, but he's not... us. I've lost so many great friends to marriage, it's like small pox, or Logan's Run (below). Right around the age of 30 they float up to the altar at the 'carousel' and are zapped off to the suburbs. Suddenly they can't stay out late because they need to catch the last train home and or relieve the babysitter. I'm happy for them if they're following their bliss, but if they're following the herd I say halt, herd!

"I do."

But! I am for group marriages. Maybe a three-way marriage could have allowed sex to flourish within the tri-bond of of Design for Living. I wished I could have married all my friends in a big collective group back then, bound to each other body and soul (well, soul anyway). Instead we live with the daily injustice that we may be best buds with someone for 20 years and then can't visit them in the hospital or share their inheritance, while some chick they drunkenly married a week ago in Vegas suddenly owns half of everything we watched them earn and shuts us out of the visiting room on detox day. I know at least two beautiful, smart girls who never see or hear from their dad anymore because of his jealous second wife. And that's your 'noble institution' in action? No wonder wits like Hecht and Coward and Lubitsch were so suspicious of it. Much better to cherish those friends you love via the gentleman's agreement, so that the mystery and sublimation need never cease its sparkle.

^{And of course, breaking that agreement then becomes doubly exciting.}

PS -- if you're happily married and getting pissed off reading this, forgive me, I was married once myself, so no offense. I'm really only talking about the media's sickly unconscious Horton-esque sanctification of the suburban status quo (i.e. new baby sitcoms like Up All Night) and overall avidya-style short-sightedness compared to the witty out-of-the-box genius of Design for Living. I do know many fine marriages where I revere and love both members and even their children or lack thereof. It's only because no one else is even trying that I would widen the shrinking aperture of what the media shows as success and happiness in this most dying and overpopulated of all possible worlds.

^{See also other films that recognize the gentleman's agreement: My Best Friend's Wedding and The Good Thief.}

Quilty Makes This World: 12 Tricksters (Archetype Series #1)

2012-01-23T16:18:00.000-05:00

This post commences a series on Jungian archetypes in film and media, wherein we gather an assortment of characters, icons, and public figures who all fit the same archetypal mold, the better to unravel our iconographical lexicon. The first archetype celebrated here is, naturally, 'The Trickster' for he is the most psychedelic, just ask Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary, if they weren't dead....Trickster makes this world!

For sake of polarization of type we've limited this to males, but of course the trickster is by nature beyond gender. Beyond personal gain as well, for he lives in a state of identity flux, bound to no one persona (though perhaps a cause, like 'the paper') and is seldom on the level as far as sincerity and yet this allows him perhaps greater leeway in his altruistic ambitions, for he need gratify no urge if there is no fixed identity to 'want' anything. If a trickster helps you on your way be grateful but not indebted, and beware -- for ever two or three favors he gives, one wry screw-over is guaranteed, but which one is which you may never guess til it's too late. He'll confuse the simple and clarify the incoherent, and never justify anything, let alone means or ends. Take Elliot Gould's doctor in MASH for example, he seamlessly incorporates an operation on the child of a prostitute into his Tokyo boondoggle, and just as effortlessly employs blackmail of the resident officer to make it happen. He expects no reward or condemnation, he doesn't think ahead or crave validation - he's just a dancer in the Shiva flame. That's a trickster.

1. Peter Sellers

"The woman always goes for the trickster, because he cannot be shamed; he is too transparent, "clear" enough to be invisible except as a serious of roles each easily discarded for the next. The James Mason type inevitably resorts to violence, for they presume their warped idea of dignity and ownership is an essential right, worth killing over; each feels justified in the use of firearms against the trickster who mocks him — and in the 1960s it was because the repressed guy was closeted, or abused, or a mélange of the two like in Bertolucci's The Conformist. The trickster's game involves exposing these straightedge characters for the damaged bullies they are, and thus their bedevilment is meant to expose their true nature --as they can't help but leap across the mess hall table and start strangling Donald Sutherland (Burns in MASH) or shooting Quilty we realize the whole time they've been festering in their self-made prison of masochistic desire. But even here the trickster's power is healing and transforming — his opponent's straightedges have been rounded off against their will. Maybe now Burns will learn to smoke pot and lift weights in his garage, like American Beauty . . . or get a motorcycle like in Wild Hogs!" (All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives)

2. Stephen Colbert

"...Conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. " - H. Lamare (The Irony of Satire)

3. Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008)

The meta-textual similarity of Joker's burning money scene to the wasteful expenditure of the film's vast budget and its justification via huge box-office profit -- all for what amounts to a big loud explosion of nothing -- is eerily prescient. For Dark Knight is really a big, loud, leftist version of Dirty Harry with our sympathies reversed. We can imagine Batman rushing in to save that burning money, cradling it in his arms and screaming to the sky: "Damn you, fire! This money had just one more day 'til retirement!" Meanwhile we look on in horror, not at the burning money, but because we realize the Joker is the only sane man in Gotham, the only "true" soul in this dark mess, the only one with inner Zen stillness and joi de vivre; the only one not hypnotized by their "life story." No matter how harshly he's screamed at (Batman growls and shouts until he's hoarse), the Joker never loses his mellow-gold cool; he's already at peace with himself and his mania. He's in the flow like one of those old drunken masters in the Shaw Brothers films. (see: "Burn your money!")

4. Groucho Marx

"Let me know when you want to be attacked and I'll be there five minutes later to defend you."

5. Bugs Bunny

Bugs Bunny gets a charge out of driving people crazy. And that may be why he lasts. He doesn't seem like a character of the '40s, but rather a character of today. His wisecracking, gender-bending, anti-authority antics broke ground long before punk rock, or David Bowie, or Jerry Seinfeld. He's impossible to pin down in any specific sense. --J.J. Sutherland, Trickster, American Style

6. Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow

"Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It’s the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly, stupid."

7.Eli Wallach as Vacaro - Baby Doll (1956)

When Vacaro and Baby Doll have been alone in the house all afternoon neither Archie Lee nor we in the audience know if they did or didn't have sex. Rather than confront them directly, Archie Lee hems and haws around the issue, and Baby Doll and Vacaro play up their flirtations... for Archie's benefit! The play the same game Dietrich and her young bucks were working on Von Sternberg's masochistic stand-ins back before the code. What makes this scene so “dirty” is not the seductive play between Vacaro and Baby Doll, but its performative aspect towards Archie Lee. They exaggerate their seductive fire for each other in order to enflame the jealousy of Malden. Their kisses are passionate in direct relation to Malden’s proximity; the harder Malden tries to control things, the steamier their interaction gets.

8.Robert De Niro as Conrad Brean - Wag the Dog (1997)

Conrad:

And it's most certainly NOT about the B-3 bomber.
Aide:
There is no B-3 bomber.
Conrad:

I just said that! There is no B-3 bomber.

I don't know how these rumors get started!

9. Elliot Gould as Trapper John - MASH (1970)

Peterson:

You can't even go near a patient until Col. Merrill says its ok and he's still out to lunch.
Trapper John:

Look, mother, I want to go to work in one hour. We are the Pros from Dover

and we figure to crack this kid's chest and get out to golf course before it gets dark.

10. Cary Grant as Walter Burns - His Girl Friday (1944)

Walter Burns:

Look, Hildy, I only acted like any husband that didn't want to see his home broken up.

Hildy Johnson:

What home?

Walter Burns:

"What home"? Don't you remember the home I promised you?

11. Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway - Naked Lunch (1991)

"You'll see how elegantly this works. The black will disappear completely. There'll be no smell, no discoloration. It's like an agent, an agent who's come to believe his own cover story. But who's in there, hiding, in a larval state. Just waiting for a time to hatch out."

12. Max Von Sydow - The Magician (1958)

Bergman's film itself refuses to guess whether Sydow's character is a poor beardless blonde actor begging alms for his attempt to entertain and terrify, or the actual mystical creature he appears to be in the beginning and by the end. Even the embittered empiricist for whom most of it all is being performed can't tell, and he's at least wise enough to see that the denuded magician / beggar is just another persona for this mysterious faux-magus.

Vampire Morality Blues: Underworld: Awakening, We are the Night

2012-01-19T12:03:00.003-05:00

We all love vampires, but what's the deal with all the 'good' ones in films like We are the Night (2nd down from top, below), Interview with a Vampire, Near Dark, and others I'm sure I can't remember, wherein people become vampires only to also become pious, refusing to slaughter innocent humans, feeling guilty about it when they do, and giving the vampires who kill and drink humans a rough time, worse than preachy vegans. Give them a goblet of blood they'll drink it and never ask where it came from, but killing humans is, like, wrong, just like the 'good' Terminator can only shoot humans in the legs, and Batman even risks collateral lives to not run over the Joker on his gay little scooter (The Dark Knight).

We are the Night

Even in Germany's We are the Night the newborn soft butch femme develops a conscience and refuses to kill and refuses the advances of the hot Teutonic blonde leader so she can get all boringly hetero with some handsome copper. So rather than perch in the rarefied aerie of Vampyres, The Black Swan, Xena, Daughters of Darkness and Bound, this (Sex and the City materialist-brand) edgy horror-action drama trudges down to the the last-minute heterosexual imperative dungeon, already crammed with films like Kissing Jessica Stein, So Close, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and others too boring to remember.

Interview with a Vampire

And not even to harp on that issue, but We are the Night is made by Germans! Why not take a risk and dare us to identify with a genuine human-killing vampire, i.e. one who truly is the night and isn't just kibbitizng? Do you think humanity itself will cease to exist if we get to see a happy lesbian vampire couple for a change? You parachute this glum boy cop in there like the film needs him. We don't need anymore hunk c***blockers --sent in like heterosexuality's overcrowded real estate agent to dull the works.

That's why this new Underworld: Awakening (released next Friday-ish) looks good to me. After Melancholia and Rise of the Planet of the Apes it may be the first movie to wise up and root for the other side, to trust we're smart enough not to start biting people because we saw the protagonist instead of the villain do it in the movies, or that we'll hate humanity like we don't all ready.

Its plot from what I can garner is that Kate Beckinsale and company are going after humanity this time instead of werewolves (The werewolves are to apes and vamps are to humans in the Underworld - Planet of the Apes continuum). I find this news especially refreshing as humanity has become a dreary bore lately, what with the old white devil sea / Republican debates. I'm not alone either: in his review of We are the Night on Spellbound Cinema, Daniel Orion Davis brings up the existentialist concept of 'bad faith:'

Inevitably, comes the turn, however. We are socialized to reject "vampirism" in all its metaphoric capacity. Taught, for very socially beneficial reasons, that might can not make right. And so we must deceive ourselves, practice "bad faith" and call the fantasy a nightmare. If it is wrong to dominate others, then it must be wrong to fantasize about dominating others. And so the figure of the brooding vampire, the repentant sinner, the...sigh..."vegetarian."

I say a humanity that can cheer its own demise is a saved humanity, for it is our own objective perspective about ourselves that saves us -- what laboratory chimp among us will feel vindicated by Rise of the Planet of the Apes? None, but we made it anyway. That's good. What outraged vampire action group will howl in outrage if the good vampires don't stick to their 'animal blood' diet? None, but they make them anyway, and when a more ambivalent approach would add all sorts of modern resonance, that's just cowardice.

Why is killing a human more offensive than killing a chimp, or a deer? If you had a choice between one human test subject dying and ten thousand test chimps which would you pick? What if it was between three dolphins or a pedophile? A thousand kittens vs. a foul smelling old vagrant who never had an altruistic thought in his life? Dude, that smelly old vagrant... was me.

Bill Paxton at his carnivore best, too bad the 'hero' is someone else: Near Dark

Animals are always innocent. Humans almost never, and no more so when we presume to treat them unkindly and PS-we should learn to eat insects, as nature intended, and I will only accept your decision that it's gross after you've killed and skinned at least one of the mammals you've eaten, if ye be eating them, and told me it's less gross than frying up some crunchy buttered grasshoppers. That our vampires are too squeamish to do what thousands of brave slaughterhouse workers or micro-livestock enthusiasts do everyday is just embarrassing, a sad offshoot of our see-no-evil carnivore guilt; even our vampires are of cowardly conscience made when all the time it is they who are supposed to voice the unconscious drives that struggle to be heard behind all our mortal veiling.

The Underworld series isn't great, but it employs a lot of classy Brit thespians like Michael Sheen and Bill Nighy and Beckinsale, who is a good actress, foxy, and damned hot without being tacky or sleazy in her skintight leather outfit. And they all play it dead straight. Sometimes something can be great just by being better than Resident Evil or Bloodrayne, and that's always been true if the greatness includes daring to return to moral ambivalence, like we had in the 1970s! So go get us, Kate! Believe me we deserve it, and man can we can take it - bad faith begone.

Kiss Me Del Rey

2012-01-17T14:07:00.000-05:00

LtoR: Lana Del Rey, Gaby Rogers, Candace Hilligoss

Lana Del Rey's panned performance on SNL this past weekend wasn't all her fault -- the mixing was dreadful. I instantly imagined the sound tech guy had hit on her during rehearsal and decided to 'punish' her, as douche bags are wont to do, after she rebuffed his seedy offers. See how protective I am regarding Lana? I feel like she's someone I once loved but couldn't protect as douche bags circled her every step like Kenneth Cole-clad vultures. I cringed and hid behind my book as she stood paralyzed against a white spider web of lights on stage, her legs locked together in an unflattering, weird white dress; her lyrics stuck on the endless repeat of a melody that fades on close audience scrutiny, that only works with clips of something else to break her up or as in her "Video Games" video, wherein she was only there for scattered moments, falling over or singing alone-ish, half America's Next Top Model-audition tape, selling the brand, "haunted."

Once I heard how far down in the mix she sounded I was hoping for a moment like the one in Road House (above) when Ida Lupino sings her first song at the lodge, the whole cast of regulars and staff eyeing her with concern as her frail voice, barely above a whisper and without a mic, clings like Grant on Lincoln's nose at the end of North by Northwest to the melody, a ghostly after-effect of pure will and brass nail courage. Nope.

As I wrote earlier, I like Del Rey for her hand-crafted post-noir persona and its relation to American Horror Story, but that persona hinges on intimacy, which SNL lacks. Rey's a post-digital artist meant for late night headphones and tear-stained iphone screens, not stages and fancy lighting rigs and an audience keyed up by comedy. Thus we're presented with the same conundrum that sinks Manhattan nightspots I visited in the 1990s, or real estate 'hot location,' the mainstream snapping at the lonesome artist gentrifier's heels and punking out small good things into oversize crap. Some stuff can't just automatically make the jump. I've seen the best bands of my generation destroyed by bottom line AOR guys who brought them up too fast, from Nightingales to the Meadowlands with no stops in between, and dropped them from the Humpty Dumpty wall when their 15 minute egg timer clicked crack time.

In the end the mainstream wants all the things it takes from us to be good, never considering whether or not we invited them to even taste a sample. Thus we make ourselves deliberately bad to scare away success, for success means having to be surrounded at all times by douche bag entourages and clingy fans and thus be unable to hone our craft in the isolated anguish cocoons which our culture has all but enforced upon all artists who are not mainstream. So our sophomore album is bloated, and the AOR guys throw us to the cut-out bins and now not even Nightingales wants us back.

Then there's the movies: I finally bought and saw Criterion's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) blu-ray. which lived beyond expectations. It's a whole different movie on blu-ray, like 3-D without the glasses and now Mike Hammer's jazzy bi-level apartment seems to stretch deep inside the screen at odd, skewed angles, and the many shots of menacing feet and/or sexy girl bare feet seem bigger than life, the treacherous west coast hills down which flimsy stairs carry tumbling thugs. The two blonde girls who bookend the film are now extra insane so that you can see the thin layer of sweat over their faces. When Gaby Rogers gets all glazed-eyed lunatic at the climax you can practically smell the laudanum and vodka coming out of her pores and you can smell the sexual heat pouring off Cloris Leachman in the beginning, or the toe tingling scent of Marian Karr as the gambling kingpin's nympho sister.

Spreading its influence out to post-nuclear Japan and films like Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967), and into Altman and the Coens, from its backwards credits to its doomsday ending, Deadly enfolds rather than unfolds, in that sacred timeless backwards space occupied by Jimmy Stewart's Vertigo fingernails and the electric chair-bound flashbacks of Edward G. Robinson in Two Seconds, or Lee Marvin's mysterious resurrection in Point Blank or Naomi Watts remembering her own parallel reality motherhood of Samara in The Ring, or those suddenly interminable songs Lana Del Rey sang on SNL Saturday. Nothing is by chance when death is in the rear view mirror and time no longer works as it should.

In the beginning/end of Kiss Me Deadly, Hammer is drugged, beaten and driven off a cliff with his first lost blonde (Leachman), and maybe he's still dead at the bottom of a sandy ravine and the girls around him the delusional Candace Hilligoss Carnival of Souls gender equivalent of the weird white skinned zombie guy with the crazy hair. And maybe the big whatzit in the box is an atomic Skynet variation of the Hitchcockian mcguffin, suddenly aware of its abstract unimportance to the mise en scene and so deciding to change the game, to swallow the universe whole and run it backwards only in dreams.

Now, in 2012, the film 2012 is coming to TNT (my take on it here). The snake, having swallowed its own tail first continues unkowingly along, its radius tightening, and only as it speeds up to the infinite point does it begin to digest itself, does memory finally catch up to its 'this is where we came in' finite point. Death is more a dawning awareness than a traumatizing finale, and a parting word to those who will be forced to watch the black hole close around us seems prudent, as Christina Rosetti's (left) poem "Remember:"

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

If we feel the darkness closing around us, is it at all possible that we who die in the coming floods do not our deaths remember but rather still live in a landlocked world where no further burgees unfurl but for the brief cocktail steward span that bridges sleep and death--that fluttering spasm of alertness, the forgotten hand suddenly recalled --that clutches once and having clutched drops its eternal bong --and watches as the blackened water's through the carpet soaked and gone? Soaked...

... and gone? As Mike Hammer says when giving up the key to the whatszit, "I didn't know... I didn't know..."

He didn't know he's been dead all along and the same girl twice has died him in a drag race (left). As J.J. put it in Sweet Smell of Success, "You're dead son, get yourself buried." Mike Hammer didn't know he really was pulling a Lazarus. Right. Thing is, no one ever does.

So remember to "forget and smile" when the waters are rising higher than any hit count and our apocalypse year begins endlessly over with one January after the other, never reaching the dreaded December 21; all time slowing down like a black hole's infinite approach. And remember what the fortune teller said when Lisa Simpson asked if there was any way to avoid her grim future, "No. Just try to look surprised." All else is... Silencio...

Silencio. Ladies and gentlemen, corpses and conqueror worms, give it up... for Lana Del Rey!

In praise of Red Queens

2012-01-12T12:59:00.001-05:00

It's not until a really vital and vibrant myth envelopes you in its wings that you see just how wingless so many other myths are, and after some close examination I now know why...there's not enough red queens.

Myths and fairy tales are all rich with archetypes -- the shadow, the anima /animus, the wise old man, the wild man, the dark father, the evil queen, etc. but if you look at the most popular mythic franchises in Hollywood- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Marvel-verse you find woefully no evil queens. There's Mordor, the Emperor, Lord Voldemort, and...?

Only the Narnia and Twilight series have evil queens, and the latter especially is given raspberries by the fanboys who proclaim the Rings-Potter-Star Wars trifecta as the best sci fi-fantasy in Hollywood and Twilight a bunch of girly crap. Man, that's sexist. 99% of the characters in those three franchises you like are male, and the bitches be all secondary, objectified and immaterial, and certainly not morally ambivalent, beyond good and evil.

We need more queens beyond good and evil, for it is there, beyond good and evil, where lurketh all archetypal forces: And the fantasy industry shows its nerdy, unlaid, apron-strung girlophobia by ignoring this archetype. Things get stale until a great evil queen shows up she's like a breath of fresh, beyond good and evil air. Below is a list of red queens divided by archetypal role:

The (Primary) Red Queen:
Queen of Hearts - Alice in Wonderland
Victoria - Twilight
The White Witch -Chronicles of Narnia
Mrs. Iselin - The Manchurian Candidate

Imperious in her whims, she represents the unfulfilled potential of adulthood, when wealth and rank allows spoiled girls to sidestep full maturity and humility. They are generally childless, preferring animal familiar lackeys--doting subservient cats, trolls, maidens in waiting, mice, owls, hawks, boys... they are vengeful and reserve special loathing for prettier, younger, naive, innocent girls.

The Secondary Variation: The Little Sadistic Princess
Fah Lo Suee - Mask of Fu Manchu
Princess Aura - Flash Gordon
Scarlett O'Hara - Gone with the Wind
Cleopatra- Caesar and Cleopatra
Carmen Sternwood - The Big Sleep
Drucilla - Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Tollea / Naja - Cobra Woman

As her father notes to Marlow, Carmen is "still a little girl who likes to pull the wings off flies." These are girls grown up in wealth and power, untamed by empathic development, given too much free time and parental indulgence and are now egocentric hedonistic sadists who are obsessed by the few things they can't have -- usually that means naive men who are in love with someone else. So Scarlett pursues Ashley for decades, obsessed, until she gets him, realizes he sucks, and throws him away. Aura loves Flash, but largely no doubt because he loves Dale. If he were to turn around and confess his love back to Aura, she'd lose all interest; thus he does her a favor. Fah Lo Suee is the most unrepentant and therefore the hottest.

That's the thing, these girls may be hot messes but they're super sexy -- the hero is always a little tempted but he rises above it, which always pisses us off a little watching the film, but if he did give in and fool around with her, he'd be doomed, damned and destroyed. That doesn't mean we can't love her from afar, even obsess from beyond the screen, knowing we'll never have to risk actually running into them at a party.

The Tertiary Variation: Trickster
Julie Newmar as Catwoman - Batman (TV)
Rita Hayworth as Gilda
The Derevko Sisters (Alias),
Mystique - X-Men
Catherine Trammel - Basic Instinct
All Marlene Dietrich roles for Josef Von Sternberg

She promises sex and delivers debt, she's whisked away on the day of your marriage ceremony and the next time you see her she says she's her evil twin. She takes your money and somehow you can't get mad at her because you know she doesn't really care about it. She is the embodiment of the trickster, intelligent, beyond good and evil, using her sex appeal as a lure but more for fun or, as in Irena Derevko, a deeply embedded plan to save the earth, or keep herself amused. Catwoman for example is evil, but Batman loves her and self-sabotage their efforts to kill or catch each other. The chase is the thing. Stop her if you can.

The Quarternary Variation: The Ancient-Young Woman
Ursula - Little Mermaid
The Evil Queen - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
She - She
The Three Sisters - Suspiria, Inferno
Elizabeth Bathory - The Countess, I Vampiri, Countess Dracula, etc.
Jessica Lange and Maid - American Horror Story

She can be both young and old: The evil queen with her apple basket; Ursula with Ariel's voice on land; She before she steps into the fountain the last time. hey illustrate the 'swindle' behind youth and beauty. You see it, you fall in love, you marry it, and then it's gone, it withers away to age and ugliness and death in but a few decades, and then you look in the mirror and see you too are old and dying and somehow it's all her fault. Or if you're a woman, the queen is your mother, desperate to sabotage your maturity and somehow drain off your youthful bloom for herself.Or it can even be you, in the mirror mirror, realizing that even your beauty isn't yours, but fades with time as inescapably as the grinding of the clock.

So wise up punk-ass mainstream Hollywood! Don't be scared of the red queens! Help revive true myth, and breathe the salty air of your own mortal huskiness.

I dunno man, I took the Blue Sunshine and I feel fine

2012-01-10T14:08:00.008-05:00

It doesn't really have all its marbles together, but Blue Sunshine (1978) is an interesting composite of low-rent 70s filmmaking that's roughly comparable to De Palma's Sisters, Romero's The Crazies (both 1973), and Cronenberg's Rabid (1977). It melds approximated Hitchcockian romantic comedy momentum to terminal capitalist 70s politically-tinged horror, shoe-strung in a manner that promises gore and lysergically intense thrills, and like the best carny pitchman, delivers the bare minimum to keep you from hitting stop and going back to Sarah Silverman reruns. The plot involves people randomly going bald and homicidal in a swath of Stanford alums, but why? And why does Zalman King have to run around stopping it all single-handed?

Like its leading character, Sunshine can never figure out where it wants to go. It lacks the nerve to take two tabs like everyone else in the room, and so it 'misses the party' that splitscreen crazy Hitchcockophilic obsessiveness like De Palma, and druggy clinicians like Cronenberg, and blue collar Swifts like Romero all took three tabs at, and flew into immortality. Director Jeff Lieberman doesn't follow through on the film's promise. Has he even dropped? The only person you know for sure is lit up is Leon the replicant (below) and the guy in the poster at top. And alas, Zalman King is a bit of a Sean Penn-ish scowler. He likes to barge in on people and then not explain what's going on, just stand there and almost formulate sentences while refusing to explain himself or volunteer one iota of information to anyone who might use it to some universal benefit.

"wake up, time to fly!"

Meth, I hear you callin'

The plot sets in motion when at a druggy party a crazy guy kills three women, and King takes it on himself to run like an outlaw from said party, not trusting the cops to realize he's innocent, and not bothering to clarify why it's so important he finds out who the political candidate about to be elected sold blue sunshine (acid) to ten years ago at Stanford. Apparently the guy was a kind of local Tim Leary, but he's now a Mitt Romney, as unlikely a transformation as you're liable to find with a budget this low. The murderous freak-outs are pretty hilarious, with the victims apparently all right until someone rips off their wig and exposes them as bald and they go apeshit with superhuman strength. Also hilarious is the way old Zalman King has to race around and reach these crazy baldheads before they go on their rampages, as if it's exactly ten years after they took the stuff, so all the alumni dosers are popping over a period of a week or so. Seriously, no human central nervous system has that kind of Swiss watch accuracy.

Deborah Winters is cute and alert as the girlfriend who King uses for odd jobs and leaves in the dust of parking lots. She seems ready to be beamed up into a marginally better De Palma film, and deserves a much cooler lading man. She's sassy, sweet, and able to shine big dudes who took acid ten years ago at Stanford. Adriana Shaw (above and below) however, is not so lucky, but she does look like my old college flame and gets the scariest scene when in her blazing red bathrobe she finally snaps from the noise some kids she's babysitting are making. The blocking is a little clumsy but it's great to see a director other than Spielberg dare to 'go there' - and to paraphrase William Carlos Williams, so much depends on a bald lady in a red robe / with a butcher knife / chasing small children.

My doctor added Abilify

While I expected more from a film named after a brand of blotter acid there are various points where it almost all comes together, like not a 39 Steps but maybe 20? It never if you'll forgive the expression, gels. Still, I'm glad it's around, in the freezer, waiting for just the right time to blow the world's mind. Just don't invite old King to the party, at least not until he gets his Red Shoes laced.


May also induce Jason Patric scowlingitis

Slaves to Unconvention: Another Earth, Tiny Furniture, the Sarah Silverman Show

2012-01-07T17:29:00.005-05:00

A great scene comes through Another Earth like a cyclone: A female TV journalist in the radio control room is the first person to make contact with the recently arrived Earth 2, and finds another version of herself at the other end of the microphone. We see it through an old TV, with a roomful of people watching it. So that means there are now two of everyone. "Maybe the other me didn't make the same mistakes," notes Brit Marling. Yes, but maybe her hair is lifeless and dull and not stunning like yours!

She's beautiful, is Brit, with golden hair which she hides under janitorial hood and garb, ala some kind of repentant nun, moping she killed the wife and kids of some dorky composer, as DUI minor -- and now she's grown up an is talking him and doesn't have the guts to tell him who she is, so she pretends to be from a cleaning service, and she continues to serve and worship him and it's all rather creepy, like the fantasy of any mid-life crisis slacker --some beautiful young girl gets rid of your wife and kid/s (or in my case, dog) for you, then comes and cleans your house for free and eventually falls in love with your sorry ass. Like all film school screenplays, it smacks of misogyny --you know this guy would never get a hottie like Marling unless just this twisted scenario happened.

Rembrandt-ish darkness and sunlight impress more than the characters as they clean and sulk in the guy's artfully deconstructed farmhouse. The cliche'd two-character framing undermines the good stuff, like the radio and TV broadcasts about the second earth, which have the weird post-modern immediacy of the best parts of the first two Romero dead movies, where we're just watching TV news come apart at the seams. Too bad it's mostly the crisis of conscience like the Sundance screenwriting instructors teach must be present for a solid 'story' when they should be asking why -- why bother visiting this alternate earth if it's exactly the same? Are y'all that narcissistic? Y'all that afraid to go somewhere new for a change? Y'all really want to go Paris just to visit their Starbucks?

Poetry journal conceits aside, the moral here is that actors love roles that require lots of emoting and screen time but less memorization of dialog and if you let your cellist boyfriend design your score for you don't be surprised if he drowns you in tired chamber music and wants to make a big production of letting you see him play the saw in an empty auditorium so you can visualize old Sputnik photos to something vaguely Yuma Sumac/theremin/space-ish. You're Brit Marling, damnit, you look gorgeous in front of a big blue earth, and you're hip and this is your Darling, so now what? She has one really good monologue about learning to love the things that annoy you if there's no way to change them and there's a Tarkovsky-esque moment playing Nintendo boxing and a great final shot, but why you should care about a guy so selfish he tries to talk a girl out of going to space after she wins the essay contest and gets approval from a Branson stand-in? Imagine if Charlie's uncle tried to talk him into giving up his golden ticket! A guy that self-absorbed deserves to lose his Marling.
**

So I've been watching the old Sarah Silverman show a lot on Netflix. I love her. There's a great animal cunning that comes over her face when she's stalking her prey or marching purposefully around her apartment. She can be insufferably coy but I've grown fond of her since I've seen more and more of the gleefully amoral, post-apathetic sprite she plays on the show. I could do without the two hairy nerd slothful, poop-obsessed gay dude neighbors and the ham cop boyfriend, but Sarah's real life sister plays her sister and she really seems like someone I could talk to.

In order to grasp the Silverman revolutionary aesthetic, first see The Big Sleep (1946), Meet Me in Saint Louis (1939), and Animal Crackers (1930), and then think of Silverman as a cross between Carmen, Tootie and Harpo.

---
Tiny Furniture (2011) explores life as an intelligent but negative body image-stricken recent graduate... in film theory, though she never seems to make any trenchant Antonioni references. Instead she throws herself at self-absorbed moochers and druggie restaurant kitchen chefs (a notoriously slutty lot), and while the whole "I learned the truth at 17" motif is subtextualized it looms and Lena Dunham refuses to even smile or hold up her chin, and eventually it drags us down, especially in high-def.

Dunham, second from right.

Lena's the real-life daughter of a famous artist, so its understandable she'd try to counterbalance her mom's extroversion and acclaim via a rejection of all aesthetic and social criteria, but why then punish the viewer? Her youtube video of her doing exercises in a skimpy bathing suit seems a misguided bid to belittle her artist mother, to essentially out-maneuver 'Art' itself via a primitive return to Willendorfery, to return the shock value and uncanny horror to nudity and strip the bride bare for her gay bachelors, as it were; it's a good start, but it won't get you laid. This isn't Willendorf or a Dubuffet 1950"corps de dame" mixed media on canvas.

Jean Dubuffet, 1950

There's nothing to be ashamed of in being frumpy if you embrace it but don't expect us to do it before you do it yourself! That just shows a contempt for the public that's probably founded in her deep ambivalence about what makes successful art, an understandable attempt at differentiation from the mom, but then again probably made with mom's money. And there's a reason flawless skin and beautiful cheekbones rule, especially in hi-def. With her frumpy demeanor, Fieldsian nose, and dead eyes and you feel, after only an hour or so, like you can't wait to get home, take a hot shower and close your online dating account. Is that shallow? No, it's just how it is.

However, Lena's real life sister plays her sister and she really seems like someone I could talk to, and Jemima Kirke (below) as posh Brit accented party girl Charlotte is cute, daft and completely mad. I kept wanting to whisk her away to another party, do ecstasy with her and live in her bedroom forever! Am I shallow? Why should I be expected to be less shallow than Dunham? She should cultivate an interest other than exposing herself to gross boys! Boys are gross. She should have hung out with Charlotte more and done lots of drugs. She would feel better and look good in no time.

Oh well, maybe she'll put that film theory degree to use yet and I have a feeling we'll see Kirke again. I hope so. She and Silverman are at least their own monsters. With gorgeous Marlin bound to dour indie convention and unattractive Dunham bound to dour rich kid myopia, we're left only with questions, and the realization that film school is misleading our confused sensitive young artists, teaching them rules of story development and conflict resolution, insuring that every new filmmaker makes the same dour movie. Escape the Sundance conventional box, girls, go ahead and tell rules of narrative and sacrifice to go the fuck themselves, and shiver in Silverman blue light of... Another Melancholia!

Call for Papers: Acidemic #8: Brecht, Godard, Wood (and other Acidemic news)

2012-01-05T12:39:00.005-05:00

Calling all Quakers! Pundits, Philosophers, Brechtians, Woodies, Match Kings and Red Queens, here's an early announcement on the subject for the next issue of Acidemic Journal of Film and Media, the eighth issue.(of which this blog is a proud offshoot).

Brecht - Godard - Wood, an unheimliche trio (their muses--Lenya, Karina, Vampira, above); from the fourth wall shattering, narrative immersion-disrupting carny barker Marxism of the Weimar Era's own Bertolt Brecht to the 'unconscious' post-modern transvestite sci fi of Edward D. Wood, Jr. to... Godard, wherein we can perhaps locate the creamy middle of what cinema, metatextuality, artifice and the 'pleasure' of suspension of suspension of belief is all about

With his shots of spinning tape recorders and pop singers sulking around pinball machines and reading philosophy aloud from the bookstore, Godard compares well to Wood's indifferent sense of (dis)continuity. Is Brecht their spiritual father and where does fleabag economy and drunken incompetence blur into post-modern genius and intellectual rigor? And he asks you where What is. It all comes unglued just by talking about it, and there's plenty of room between these melted titans to explore other serious or accidental post-modernists: Ulmer, Lewton, Warhol, Ormond, Ray, Ray, Beaudine, Cassavettes, Anger, Zulawski, Suzuki..Cunha.

Deadline is May 29, 2012 - It's earlier than usual because of the apocalypse.

Send submissions pasted into email or via word to: Erichk9@aol.com.

And may God protect us all... in the future...

PS: I got a Kindle for Xmas so am working on getting Acidemic avail. via Amazon. If you have a kindle, check it out here.

Also working on my first essay collection, Sisters of the Blue Ray: Post-Cinema's New Sirens or E-book only! Why kill a tree... when I can kill somezing elze?

..and Happy New Year! Resolution 1: Starting in 2012 I'm going to desist from using block caps for movie titles. Ed Howard doesn't use them, why should I? It's just an old habit from working for Scarlet Street and Muze Inc. But in 2012 it's no longer really necessary thanks to a more understazzzzzzzzzzz

If I was a TCM guest programmer / and you were a lady: FREUD, COBRA WOMAN, DISHONORED, CEILING ZERO

2012-01-03T12:17:00.010-05:00

Don't you hate when TCM guest programmers pick titles from the same old classic safety list TCM shows constantly? Here's their big chance and they pick Maltese Falcon, Dr. Strangelove, Casablanca and, um, Citizen Kane! Yeah, right. I love them too, but we need guest programmers like me, who are keenly aware of all the films TCM hasn't shown in at least 100 years, if ever. These four are classics that should be ubiquitous but instead are never aired... why? Why, Nat?

FREUD (aka "The Secret Passion")
1962, dir. John Huston
Why don't they screen Freud to tie in with Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method? Are Freud's theories of infantile sexuality still too shocking? Any John Huston film starring Montgomery Clift and filmed in expressionist-Victorian hothouse black-and-white should be a mainstay! Damnit, I want to see Klaus Kinski making love to a mannequin while the visibly uncomfortable, drug-addicted, partially paralyzed, perfectly cast Freud/Clift looks on, agape, theories coagulating to Frankenstein life in his mind. Imagine a prequel to Suddenly Last Summer, with Clift's shrink dreaming his way back to being the world's first psychoanalyst, and clinging to what shreds of Tuinal-induced hallucinatory calm he can while while he treats his Venable patients --that's truth, that's Freud!

COBRA WOMAN
1944 - dir. Robert Siodmak
Technicolor is king and shapely Maria Montez is queen here on the Island of the Cobra. Bold crazy greens pulse all through the inspired costumes and there's tarot card-level archetypal juice combed into a plot that's strictly serial: See! The evil Montez ordering virgins into the volcano by the hundo at the height of her ecstatic and sexy snake dance! See! Her letting a man she doesn't even know kiss her under the water. Realize! That 1944 was the height of the war, and censorship made sure all the skin had to be in pools (would a genre like Esther Williams pool musicals ever work today?) or on ice (or Sonia Henie?), i.e. folded into the story naturally via displays of athletic prowess. Luckily we're liberated! Not just from the Axis (who also loved displays of athletic prowess) but from the Catholic legion of 'Decency.'

Montez is good/bad and awesome. Sabu is annoying, Huntz Hall forgettable, Chaney silent, the score awesome with timpani, the language pidgined. The king cobra Montez dances for is pretty floppy (though it does have a good tongue). The evil queen also has a good twin, engaged to Ramu (Hall) who swims to her rescue after she's kidnapped right before the marriage ceremony

It's no accident that right before I popped this in something also from the WW2 era was on TCM, about an officer who had to ship out before his marriage could be consummated, the sexual tension ran cold and coded, as was the style of the time, the censors claimed. The interrupted wedding at the start of Cobra Woman plays on, maybe even satirizes that idea. Religion and its ability to make people act against their own best interest is satirized mercilessly in the witty script. When Ramu asks why the people of the island willingly go to their deaths in the volcano, the queen notes that "the ceremony appeals to their emotions... fear has made them religious fanatics!"

Luckily when the boys finally came home from the war, they were too used to fighting to let some pious control freaks tell them what do do, and censorship began to collapse into the shadows of film noir.

Shot with fairy tale picture book gone wild flair by the great Robert Siodmak, Cobra Woman is more about the shot and the image than the story, which is strictly from Flash Gordon-ville, but the presence of an evil princess (ala Aura in Flash) is really refreshing and cool. Such a figure is archetypal but sorely lacking in the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars franchises, both of which are ubiquitous while Cobra is available only from the Universal Vault Collection, though their DV-R is pretty badass.
And you can find it here!

DISHONORED
1931 - dir. Josef von Sternberg
Dietrich and Joe made seven lovely films together - most are on DVD--Blue Angel, Morocco, Blonde Venus, Scarlet Empress, Devil is a Woman, but two--Shanghai Express and Dishonored--are not. Thanks to savvy guest programmers, Scarlet's become a mainstay on TCM lately, but Dishonored remains MIA and it's a damned shame. The (true-ish) story's been better told by Fraulein Doktor but this is better than Garbo's Mata Hari. Here Dietrich plays a Prussian spy who seduces men and steals their military secrets. But she weakens and aids the enemy, though why she should choose a creepy, leering Victor McLagen to give up her life for is beyond me. What a waste! But it's Sternberg so we never get the sense she loves him so much as she set him free because it twists the masochistic knife in us, and says fuck you to the world. Anyway, she is victorious in an earlier maneuver against Warner Oland, and a New Years masquerade shows off Sternberg's penchant for crowd scene bacchanals and there's a great final firing squad scene that should be embraced by self-destructive hipsters everywhere.

CEILING ZERO
1936 - dir. Howard Hawks
I might have missed this over the years because of the bland title and I dislike Pat O'Brien, but it's by Howard Hawks and also stars Jimmy Cagney, and say what you want about Pat and I will but he talks fast and Hawks needs rapid patter overlapping dialogue men and I'll tell you something else there's nothing like Hawks when he has two good actors who can talk like machine guns and aren't afraid to display motormouths we usually associate only with speed freaks which isn't to say Dexedrine is bad at least not in Hollywood where 18 hour workdays are normal and a man like Hawks wants you looking wired and ready, so where the hell is it? The film I mean?

The Public Domain Undead : George Romero and the Halperin Brothers vs. ze World

2011-12-29T14:46:00.001-05:00

With the apocalypse year 2012 only a handful of days away I thought I'd prepare you with this post about zombies and creative copyright - you'll need to know about both to survive what congress and cosmic radioactivity have in store!

The post-apocalyptic undead 'shoot 'em in the head' cannibal zombie film/TV show is now so ubiquitous that anyone with a camera feels entitled to make one --yet the way the bandwagon jumpers carry on you'd think these walking dead 'zombies' were as old and license-free as medieval folklore. Do the makers of stuff like AMC's THE WALKING DEAD and/or zom-coms like ZOMBIELAND and SHAUN OF THE DEAD even remember what life was like before 1968? Do they understand their huge debt to one man, the Bram Stoker of zombie-hood?

In the 1930s, 'every desire' was extra dirty.

Before this man, all zombies were tools of sugar plantation owners and voodoo chiefs, via films like 1932's WHITE ZOMBIE and REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES (both by the Halperin Brothers). When the Halperin Brothers tried to release REVOLT as a WHITE sequel they wound up in trouble with their old distributor, according to Wikipedia:

In May 1936, however, the Halperins encountered legal troubles in the form of a suit from Amusement Securities Corporation, a company that had helped finance White Zombie. Amusement Securities alleged that its contract for the earlier film gave it the exclusive right to use the world "zombie" in motion picture titles. Amusement Securities sent letters to theaters who planned to showcase Revolt of the Zombies, warning them not to show the film. As the film's premiere approached, Judge Waservogel of the New York State Supreme court ruled that screenings of the film could take place until a judgment in the suit was reached, and appointed attorney Henry Hoffman to referee the case. On June 27, 1936, Hoffman issued an opinion in favor of the plaintiffs, awarding Amusement Securities $11,500 in damages and legal fees and prohibiting the Halperins from promoting Revolt of the Zombies as a sequel to White Zombie.^[3]

Wow! All that over that one word --it's bound to make you mad when you consider what's going on now, how everyone and anyone makes zombie films as they like while the one man who invented zombies as we know them today collects not a farthing and rarely any public recognition. He brought us all the modern zombie features and there's not even a plaque (cough) or a statue of him, in that town, and meanwhile everyone with a camera is out making zombie movies, rewriting classic literature to include zombies, making faux History channel documentaries on zombies and using the ideas he invented as a 'given' of folklore. Michael, he could have been bigger than US Steel, which instead all but owns his hometown of Pittsburgh.

His name? George Romero.

Thanks to George Romero, zombies have never have been the same. The Romero brand zombie has become 'the' zombie. Your zombie is a Romero-inspired zombie if:

1. It can only be stopped if it takes a bullet to or strong blow to the head
2. It eats the flesh of the living
3. Those who are killed rise up as zombies anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours after death.
4. They can somehow smell out who is dead vs. who is alive (they're not really cannibals since they don't eat other zombies.)

That's the issue for me I never understood. At what point does a dead person being eaten alive wake up a zombie and say, excuse me brother, get your damn teeth out my arm or I shall start eating thine? And why is it, even with tons of meat at their disposal, they'd rather waste an evening bashing at a front door than chow down on the corpses available and/or wrap something up for later?

Of course there's a long history of borrowing and co-opting in horror, stemming from legal issues over the use of DRACULA as a narrative in the 1920s, filed by Dracula author Bram Stoker's widow against Murnau's film, NOSFERATU in '22. That's just an example of the muddy battle by which Dracula eventually became public domain. The big disaster for Romero was that the licensing rights to NIGHT fell into the public domain due to someone letting the copyright lapse.

Now anyone can make a movie called Dracula or Romero-brand zombies, and adhere to its rules (vamps die in sunlight, need a wooden stake in the heart, zombies in the head.) it's a true myth for the ages. Maybe that's the definition of myth - public domain - once it's public domain, anyone can tell the story in their own way. And of course that's why the story gets told over and over... so letting your title lapse may lose you cash, but in insures your myth endures.

Disputes over the rights and directions, led to a branching of minds between Romero and his effects man / screenwriter John Russo who did RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1985, which references NIGHT directly, wile Romero did DAY OF THE DEAD the same year. I remember seeing both in different NJ cinemas the same week! Adding to the confusion, Tom Savini remade the original film with Romero producing (?) and there was also a colorized version.

Interestingly, I'm pretty sure the word zombie never even comes into the original 1968 film. The newscasters do refer to them as 'ghouls' and 'individuals rising up and committing mass murder and cannibalism' but never as straight up zombies.

And at least, as with Dracula, the imagery of hungry hordes ripping the living to shred finds a perfect meta analogy for the feeding frenzy of zombie cannibal bandwagon jumpers.

So...if you're going to make a movie about zombies, just remember, unless you're doing it in a voodoo context, you're using Romero's ideas. It's an homage to film made in 1968. Respect the George! Or better yet, go back to 1932 and respect the brothers Halperin, who brought us the amazing WHITE ZOMBIE!! This film is also in the public domain -- the Roan disc is pretty good quality-wise so again, if Troma is still putting those out, so... go for the reliable brand! Bela Lugosi won't get a cent but.... Bela Lugosi's dead! Long live...'choke'.. Bella Swan.

2011 Round-Up - Erich's Best

2011-12-23T17:41:00.008-05:00

Dads of Great Adventure: A Guide to Cinema's Post-Apocalyptic Hyper-Parent
Bright Lights Film Journal #71 - February
Whether or not 2012 will really be the end of life as we know it, the myth of the post-apocalyptic dad is emerging in today's cinema, and man, he's a bad father. Forced by cataclysmic events to cowboy up while his kids roll their eyes and talk shit about him, whether in bleak existential treatises like The Road or big-scale popcorn fodder like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, "the dad" has been center stage, his responsibility to keep his kid/s safe grown to astronomically tight-assed proportions in the wake of global meltdown. While millions die, he's forced to create his own hypocritical blueprint for survival, one that runs counter to his basic urge to just let it all hang out, save his own skin, and luxuriate in a quick, painless, CGI death along with everyone else. The almost unbearable responsibility to protect his children trumping his own humanity, the post-apocalyptic father uses global meltdown as an excuse to become a "my-family-first" neo-conservative, shoving other families out of the way to be the last on the lifeboat, or risking the lives of many to save his precious few. Is Hollywood using this dad to passive-aggressively condemn the recent trend in micro-managerial parenting? Or is it all just an easy way to ratchet up key demographic interest? Is parental anxiety the new black? Or is fighting to survive in a world with no TV or internet just not meaningful enough, and one has to do it "for the kids'?

One Pill Makes You Corporate: Limitless
August 21st
In the end, this drug just kind of turns you into Tom Cruise, and for the Los Angeles power worshippers, that's everything: assertive narcissism and total fearless confidence. We love that trait like we love gangster movies, or mad scientists, or Hannibal Lecter, but you can't have your face and eat it too, you can't expect that Bradley alone is rising the ranks, what of all the other super-brains struggling for their angry fix? Cooper's character seemed pretty stupid to begin with, but he loves his drugs and we're supposed to be in awe of him irregardless of Abbie Cornish's disappointment. In the end we come away angry at our own trapped potential, but there's a reason we shuttered up the upper rooms of our brain mansion: there be monsters locked away up thar. Tread lightly, and bring a good therapist, and a sword, or suffer the consequences, unless you're Bradley Cooper, for not even the darkest demon can compete with the gravitic drag of such black hole vanity.

Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock
June 1st
"My mom rented THE WARRIORS for us on Halloween when I was around 15 or so and living in Central NJ suburbs... and hard to believe now, but my friends and I were scared to watch it! Can you dig? Being 15 and scared to watch a film like THE WARRIORS? But that's what life in the pre-cable 1980s did to you - it was hard to see stuff with gore and nudity so you grew up kind of intimidated by it, which is good! That adrenaline-apprehension served us well - the film had tons of action but little blood or trauma, which was a relief, the best of both worlds. We saw THE WARRIORS again and again after that, but if you told me I'd ever move to NYC or Brooklyn I would have laughed in disbelief while quietly pissing my pants in fear."

The Last American Ruffalo: Lisa Cholodenko's Lesbian "Homespun" Family Values
Bright Lights Film Journal #71 - February
For a supposedly hip feminist director, Cholodenko seems lost when it comes to seeing through the facile posturing of the insecure male psyche, in the process granting it both more and less power than it has. Ian is allowed to come off as a great all-around guy who remains super cool throughout and is in awe of this older woman in his life, McDormand, in a way that's reminiscent of Ruffalo's character with Julianne Moore. These men are both near-caricatures of confident "approachable" masculinity, while Bale's wounded son stands with the jilted boyfriend in High Art and Ruffalo at the end — also abandoned — of Kids, as the other side of the coin, the cast-offs.

5. Vandal in the Wind: Over the Edge
October 3rd
When a peer group is captured correctly on film, as in Howard Hawks, or Richard Linklater, you get a feeling of the power and joy of belonging, a power and joy most adults hiding behind the evening paper at home have no recollection of. They condemn it in their children as dangerous, but without that kind of peer group power there wouldn't be a civil rights movement, a free India or America, or women voters, or even the current Wall Street occupation. And I can't help but wonder if EDGE wasn't shelved just for that reason -- because of the terror producers must have felt when seeing a movie where the kids were genuinely dangerous, instead of just screwing in cars and kidnapping the school mascot and being 'edgy' in that edgeless rote misogynist PORKY'S way.

6. Abilene Point is Anywhere: How Texas Conquered Death in Southland Tales
August 8
"DARKO was about the apocalypse of self-immolation, the sacrifice of the individual, while SOUTHLAND presumes there is no individual. It becomes the world's sacrifice, so that media itself may live. I'd contend here that boys--so disenfranchised and glum---may be more pro-apocalypse than girls. The nonstop parade of documentaries about 2012, Nostradamus, and the Ice Age on Discovery and the History Channel proves what Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES hints at: some of us, self included, are excited for the apocalypse. It's a chance to stop receiving paper bank statements in a whole new way. I'd even argue our whole culture is apocalypse-dependent. Without the fantasy of a global reset button, we'd be stuck with the guilt, hangover, and debt of seven generations. Aren't you always tempted to just blow up the house rather than have to clean up your messes?"

Tree of Life (We Will Fall)
July 5th
"Jessica Chastain as the mother certainly helps redress this Iron John blood poisoning. She reminds me of a girl I wronged, adding all sorts of psilocybic resonance to her wounded dove close-ups, which are so well shot that you can see the 'signature' stamps of alien DNA in her Celtic pale skin, that fair-haired mossy coastline fairness that if you look closely reveals blue webs of capillaries just below the translucent skin, flushing with blood when hot emotions come across her face."

7. Bride of Bogartstein: In a Lonely Place
August 24
When something doesn't go his way, the anger begins, and then every attempt to quiet him is regarded through progressively more paranoid eyes. This man should clearly be medicated, but he's allowed to roam free. In the end the murder mystery is solved and yet Dix has almost started a whole new one. Dix's ego is such that he shouldn't be allowed to be in a movie. Thank God Nicholas Ray gave him one anyway. Ray never gives up on any character, even when they're so foul we recoil in shock that we're seeing them at all, let alone played by leading men, as protagonists..His love for dangerous maniacs is contagious; their lives are his downfall, and our redemption.

LSD Godfather: Don Fanucci in the Vestibule
September 13
There's the Black Hand cultivating wives' tales with their propensity for violence and then there's that old wives' tale of the LSD user eating a live cat for the 'experience,' a fable I'm not sure I believe so much as remember from my halcyon days. Not that I did, but while you're peaking even a stalk of celery can seem like you're eating a live cat. You can hear the screaming in the crunch, feel the claws in the severed tendrils of the inner stalk. The piece in your hand is like Rhode Island being unmoored from the North American continent, like Jupiter adrift in space; every gesture leaving trails that make it seem like you're wielding a dozen arms, like Vishnu on a bender. In the amber dimness of the apartment doorway where Fanucci is gunned down, a similar collapse of time and space occurs, making my many views of it under the influence in past decades no mere accident. What collapses is not just a man, but the distance between the busy throngs of Manhattan and the Catholic ceremony going on outside in the street; the old world theater with its constant shuffling of crowds in and out during performances collapsing into one of the best and darkest, quietest mob films ever made; all collapsed into itself like a dwarf star, shrunk away into nothing but a few red holes in a white suit. Every time Fanuccie dies I feel the bullets; I burst out laughing from my chest at his grotesque expression, at the bewilderment and anger pulsing out of his face and mine, the realization in the second before he dies that he'll never get to make his last macho boast, his last beak-whet, his last salut.

The Selected Writings of Pauline Kael: Book Review
Bright Lights Film Journal #74
"The fact is, the lions of literary fustiness may have adopted her as their own, but just read one of her pieces and you realize our irreverent saint of cinema was edgy and brave above all else, and she regularly, daringly scolds and condemns her highbrow friends for doing the very thing with cinema that they have since done of late with her writing, namely validated and lionized and sanctified, and therefore eroded the very meaning of it."

You can't be coughing on a moving train: CONTAGION
Sept. 19th
A couple billion people could die on this planet and--if you didn't know them--would you miss them? Would you weep with frustration at the big statistics in the paper--those numbers all had families, damnit!--or would you breathe a sigh of relief that real estate prices are going down? And what about the pigs, chickens, goats, cows, and fish who die by the billions daily to feed or varied appetites? I know there are innocent turkeys and pigs that have more on the ball than the slack-jawed yokel who assumes all this meat just comes magically from the back of the supermarket, and who gets indignant when he or she accidentally sees clips from the abattoir. If these humans weren't 'entitled' to a lifetime of free meals they are way too stupid to ever catch for themselves, natural selection might have a fighting chance. To use the TEXAS CHAINSAW analogy, we're a nation of comatose grandpas, too weak to even lift the hammer but still guaranteed a piece of Marilyn Burns. CONTAGION brought those emotions up, because the animals seen in the film are the only humans worth rooting for, and their welfare is in the hands of sadistic liberals who would kill an entire population of monkeys if it might extend the life of one terminally ill human pedophile for just a day.

Shining Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror
October 10
In any 'trippy' film, the bathroom is ground zero when it comes to realizing the drugs are kickin in, since you can check your dilated pupils in the mirror, freak out when you close the medicine cabinet (checking for mom's Librium, no big deal) and see a figure standing behind you or a different background; the toilet looms serpentine and alien, the gaping maw of porcelain where we are mystified in childhood by the sudden presence and absence of feces as an extension of our body that vanishes in a swirling vortex never to be seen again. It is the place of hair combing and judgment and bereavement. It is the place where coke moves from the tip of some dude's car key into your nose, or you sneak cigarettes from the head mother, or find the gun taped to the back of the old-fashioned toilet. We all surely know the 'boost' we may get when navigating precarious social situations by looking into the mirror of the bathroom. Here we are able to reconstitute our ego, a little mini-resurrection. It is where we go to delude, and denude ourselves. We are allowed 'privacy' there. Time and language drift away in the solace of the fixtures. It corresponds perfectly with our visualizations of the the portal between our own unconscious and that of the universal collective.

Unironic Ventriloquist Radio: You Can't Cheat an Honest Man
October 5th
Call me strange but I've always been a little bothered by concert 'films' i.e. filmed music or comedy performances. Maybe I've been to too many Grateful Dead shows while hallucinating but I find the sight of people playing instruments on stage to be fairly obscene. It's dirty! All those phallic necks and jerking strum movements. And the music should speak for itself - like you shouldn't judge a book by its dirty cover. Sometimes seeing the musician is off-putting to your musical enjoyment. What is the correlation, for example, between watching a hunched-over jet-black demon blowing through a shiny brass cornucopia and the the primordial jazz of Miles Davis? Or a bunch of balding white guys in tuxedos with horsehair saws to the music of Mozart? Or a big fat dude with crazy gray hair jerking off a long dorky hunk of shiny purple wood and the music of the Dead?

Bob Hope Vs. The Swedish Svengalis: I'll Take Sweden, They Call Her One-Eye
Acidemic #7, August 2011
And so a queasy compromise with virginity is made - American couples are allowed to depart from convention as long as they suffer in guilt over what their fathers will think, and vice versa. Swedes must then respect our gentle decency as their casual sex lifestyle devolves into debauched ennui (Erik turns out to be a date-rapist). In other words, Hope will take "Sweden" but can't allow his daughter to do the same even though one look at Erik and you know he'd be awesome breeding stock for Jo-Jo. Hope's choosing mutt Frankie to come in and save the day is typical of America's preference for socially instilled mores vs. natural selection. He finally respects Frankie because Frankie, too, is terrified of sex - and would never dream of mating with Jo-Jo unless there were rings and certificates and demands from in-laws for grandchildren involved. In short, Frankie is American as defined by Hollywood in the half-Nelson of the production code. It was the style of the time, the early 1960s, marriage enforced under the states' stern censors; hotel detectives looking under beds for evidence of 'mixed parties' and women's dorm room 'matrons. So people back then would marry each other after only a few dates, go racing for their new room in married couples housing like their pants were on fire. Only later do they find out they are not so compatible... wasn't it unfortunate they never had those Swedish two weeks at the youth festival in Goombatten?

Best Films of 2011 (and 5 Worst)

2011-12-20T20:38:00.015-05:00

Was 2011 the year 'movies' broke... in half? And hydra-like those halves doubled back to wormy life? More and more media downloading and portable small screens means more variety and reasons to 'wait for the video' and with their bedbugs, and twelve dollar ticket prices, contagion-level coughing, popcorn that leaves you nauseous for days, uneven heating and cooling systems, out of focus projection, flashing peripheral blue texting lights, and uncouth nostril breathing, theater experiences are becoming iffy ventures. American Horror Story is the best thing out there but does it really count on a movie blog? I've been covering the show the last few weeks because, simply put, it makes me tremble with excitement the way few other movies did this year. Where was the 2011 BLACK SWAN, ENTER THE VOID or THERE WILL BE BLOOD?

I am nonplussed by the sight of bourgeois darlings like THE ARTIST and HUGO, which might be well made and 'adorable' but are appear from a distance to be this year's LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL or CHICAGO - i.e. movies meant for retired ladies of the academy to recommend to their friends at bridge. Personally when I see an image of some kid in a theater, the light from the projector reflecting on his or her rapt face as he or she beams up a the screen, I wince for to me it's the phoniest most self-congratulatory kind of self-reflexivity to see 'us' through a filmmaker's eye watching movies --unless we're crying like Anna Karina or about to be killed like MESSIAH OF EVIL. A true movie fan doesn't even exist at the movies. He just vanishes into the screen, leaving only a popcorn bag and a scarf behind.

Now that 2012 is on us our cinema's great depressives turn to issues of endurance and deliverance, the approach of Planet X and alien invasions, and/or presenting clear examples of why humanity deserves what's coming, with not one but four films dealing with an apocalypse of memory - CONTAGION, ANOTHER EARTH, MELANCHOLIA, TREE OF LIFE and cathartic uprisings of SUPER 8, X-MEN FIRST CLASS, BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, and RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Andy Serkis establishes himself in the latter as the Lon Chaney of the CGI era, the Spartacus of our beat down age. In 2011 Angela Davis rises from the basements of Swedish TV studio's to show how no amount of brutal miscarriage of justice and imprisonment can keep a noble spirit down while MELANCHOLIA's Justine (Kirsten Dunst) showed how even an expensive wedding can be the most brutalizing of incarcerations.

Many films I've written about or seen in 2011 deal with a new idea of the father. The sheriff single dads in TWILIGHT and SUPER 8, the scientist single dads in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and X-MEN FIRST CLASS, Odin, Nick Fury, Nick Ray, the fathers of modern psychology Jung and Freud, 2011 was the year we said goodbye to all of them, and I said good-bye to mine as well. RIP, James Kuersten --you were some kind of great 70s dad...

BEST

1. RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES dir. Rupert Wyatt
He moved us as Gollum, carried us as Kong, and now, as the super-intelligent ape survivor of inhuman experiments and concentration camp conditions, the CGI-enhanced Andy Serkis blows our minds right out of the movies. He's the true Peter Lorre of his time, maybe even the James Dean, certainly with that level of sensitivity. Moving from the loving care of scientist Franco to the harsh ape penitentiary run by Brian Cox, he expresses all the silent screams, the terror and abandonment of the first day of school. RISE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES is the best movie about man's horrific inhumanity to the creatures in his care since OVER THE EDGE! It's a film I feel will resonate one day as the turning point not just for ape evolution but for CGI 'humanity.'

Also, from a fringe science standpoint, this movie explains human evolution and its little alien-enhanced 'spark' of language/intellect better than any bible or textbook. It's no accident 2011 was the year ISLAND OF LOST SOULS finally came out on DVD. We're meant to cheer our own demise in RISE, the way we cheered the demise of Moreau is SOULA, and I say that's fine. Let it go, man, let it go like Justine lets it go in MELANCHOLIA. The apes know what their doin'. We'll get it right next time! Some day, yeah, when the world is much brighter.

2. MELANCHOLIA - dir. Lars Von Trier
"Von Trier dives into the abyss that Terence Malick only wades in to his knees in, drops a dress and calls it art in the other 'big' film of 2011, TREE OF LIFE. Both link 2001-style classical music-scored space visions with inter-personal relationships and the forthcoming apocalypse but MELANCHOLIA's tale of a woman's depression coming to life in the form of first a wedding and then a world-destroying planet is the suicide note to TREE OF LIFE's faded funeral notice. TREE mourns my dead father but MELANCHOLIA comes for me, and the son of my unborn son, and the ground beneath our unborn feet..." (more)

3. TREE OF LIFE - dir. Terence Malick
(see also Worst of 2011) My friend Max tried watching this and turned it off after 45 minutes, telling me later, "life's too short." Indeed, that kind of sums up the film's message, appeal and problems. How you react will depend a lot on your mindset and maybe the size of your TV. I saw it in the theater having just heard about my father, and so I cried a lot throughout and took comfort in its sense of eternity and fleeting memories and great 50s dad style patchwork stream of consciousness (though my childhood occurred in the 70s, it's close enough). But when I wasn't crying, I was also smirking at the pretentious classical music score, the birth of the earth visuals, and the typically Malick use of poetic, whispered inner voiceovers... (more)

4. THE BLACK POWER MIX-TAPE (1967-1975) Music by Questlove
In the basement of a Swedish TV station it waited, until now... when America has enough distance to perhaps confront it all objectively. The black leaders interviewed tell a rational, sane story and it's all scored Questlove of the Roots. Effortlessly evoking the soul and funk of the era along with the alienation of crack and the urban drum and bass o the 90s. There's a lot of time spent with titans like Angela Davis, whose towering intellect and 'fro beg the question - when? When will they do an Angela Davis biopic? (And if they do it better star Angela Bassett or Pam Grier and not frickin' Halle Berry). More than anything MIX-TAPE makes a fine addition to many of the other films on this list in showing how America's tendency to boast of its freedom while at heart act as a very callous oppressor of animals, trees, drugs, sex, dancing, non-white races, oceans, women, scientific facts, and the romantic yearnings of sixteen year-olds.

5. SUPER 8 dir. J.J. Abrams
I was expecting a STAND BY ME meets IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE style swamp of triteness and overbearing John Williams strings but the Spielberg-produced/JJ Abrams-directed SUPER 8 turns out to be a surprisingly effective and--if like me you were a kid making Aurora monster models, HO scale B-17s, and super 8mm science fiction films in 1979--very personal love story. Abrams keeps Spielberg edgy and Spielberg keeps Abrams human and the fat kid (Riley Griffiths) doesn't have chocolate all over his mouth and is Denham enough to quickly incorporate all the disasters going on around them into their scripted zombie mise-en-scene. The lead (an impressive youngster named Joel Lamb) doesn't stutter around the hot girl or let his dad bully him and his vacancy makes his having lost his mom believable instead of convenient.

The alien is a pleasing if unoriginal composite of all the aliens ever created by either director bit it's the first love' story aspect that sends SUPER 8 this over the top into greatness: Dakota Fanning's sister Elle, with her ironed flat long blonde hair and too much make-up has the lost-n-lovely vibe of Veronica Lake in THIS GUN FOR HIRE. Dragged semi-unwillingly into the super 8 zombie production as the hero's concerned bride; her rehearsal of a tearful farewell at the train station is so moving and strange it marks her like the audition scene in MULHOLLAND DR. marked Naomi Watts. With her Trans-Am driving, possibly abusive shithead father guarding her like a certain kind of a hawk, she reminds me of all the doomed poetic girls I loved as a youth, to the point I began to feel quite haunted (see: a Girl Must Have her Ghost). The score gets a little too John Williams-ish for the big climax, all but doing your agape jaw wonderment for you, but it's by Michael Giacchino, not Williams, and that in itself is some kind of trans-dimensional miracle.

6. THOR - dir. Kenneth Branagh
The older brother in cinema is a lost art as our boys are stuck at what Joe Campbell would call the hero's journey - the process of moving from boys to men, seeking the wild man at the bottom of the soggy lake, etc.. Being stuck in that initial journey, never arriving at their goal, our heroes never reach the next phase, the next mythic journey--the older brother journey, the third age of man - the lover, sighing like furnace, the bridge between the age of Parsifal and the age of Merlin, the sage, Gandalf, Obi Wan, Jimmy Page, lies the journey, the pain of losing your father and the humility of the 12 steps. In short, THOR's process is unique compared to the heroes journey as reflected in other Marvel comics in that he's a man - with a burly physique and regal walk and self confidence, many yards removed from the nervous nellie Peter Parker or the gearhead narcissism of Tony Stark. Chris Helmsworth is a real discovery in the lead, looking both like he fixes motorcycles listening to Metallica and is a true king of noble Viking birth. And for that alone, the film is awesome. Kenneth Branagh you are redeemed! Add Natlie Portman and Kat Dennings as two hot scientists (below) guarded only by the flimsiest of Wilkinsons, and lo! My heart is hammered!

7. SUBMARINE - dir. Richard Ayoade
On one hand it's a little too self-aware and beholden to the 60s new wave as evinced in endless 'quote' shots referencing everything from Bergman's PERSONA to Truffaut, Rohmer, Godard, Mike Nichols, and modern classics like RUSHMORE --so much so that if you start checking the references you quickly begin to wonder if any moment in the film is it's own. On the other hand, that's kind of what the film is about, innit? That era when we're losing our virginity and gaining ennui, where we try on personae one after the other, feeling our way into our adult identity via compiling tics from all the tics that have come before, looting through the hand-me down shots and textures of or older brother films, taking a smirk and a shot here and a soundtrack cue there. It's like Warhol or SUPER 8 in that it becomes original through it's sheer unoriginality. And if the stuff being looted is your stuff, like spending the first half of high school trying to disappear in plain sight within layers of science fiction and cinema and longing for a girlfriend and the second half enduring the skeevy terror of actually getting a girlfriend, and watching her let her guard down and turn weak and emotional, which in turn becomes more terrifying than a dozen consecutive prison sentences, so the only thing to do is leave her... and then pine for her... like a dumbass.

8. IN THE CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS - dir. Werner Herzog
I don't know why I put this on here. To seem artsy? Or is it because Werner Herzog has become his own genre to such an extent that every film takes him a little farther into his corner of the recesses where nature, man's unconscious, and the devil meet. Mixing fourth wall breaking documentary analyses with his usual tired monologues about dreams, he may be in danger of becoming his own cliche, but the key word is 'own.' If you didn't catch this in 3-D you can get the picture from the wide angle lenses that comb through the surrounding French countryside like it's the opening sequence of THE SHINING. The 30,000 year old cave art itself is mind-blowing: the animals are drawn so that they overlap and merge perfectly with the fissures and cracks of the cave walls and Herzog brings home the idea they were drawn to seem like the first movies, limbs and horns waving in the flickering shadows of primitive man's campfires --and the result is a spookily contemporary --the first 3-D movies now recaptured in 3-D after a 30,000 year hiatus, this be the serious HUGO.

9. BRIDESMAIDS - dir. Paul Feig
"This earns huge props in its skewering of the rampant materialism and bourgeois oppression that's encouraged and indulged in the name of a 'magical wedding.' Props also come via the peerless improv naturalistic dialogue especially between SNL goddesses Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph. It would make a great double bill with MELANCHOLIA! Even if her motives are self-centered and/or lifted from MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, it's damn heroic to see Wiig trash the bridal shower that way Anne Hathaway never could in RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. "(more here)

10. RANGO - dir. Gore Verbinksi
Leonard Maltin gives this animated lizard tale a ** rating, citing the visuals as too dark and ugly. That's like bashing BLADERUNNER for being too rainy! (I think he did, actually, and gave it ** also). Apparently Lenny is prejudiced against reptiles like he is against women (BLACK SWAN gets ** vs. WRESTLER's ***1/2) and moral ambiguity tied to shocking violence (TAXI DRIVER - **, the 1983 SCARFACE - *1/2), all of which is my way of saying RANGO is the s***t! Like Gore Verbinksi's RING remake or his PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN films it's worth watching just for the art direction alone (the barroom with its deep black shadows and dusty card sharps particularly), and Depp's lead characterization is so daft it exposes the neurotic narcissist at his inner mumbling monologue core, and that takes guts, as does the CHINATOWN framework. If this movie had a Pixar stamp on it, the critics like Lenny would all be gushing.

WORST:

1. Worst example of doing too much with too little and simultaneously vice versa:
SUCKER PUNCH - the only redeeming feature of this film is that it makes the equally understaffed John Carpenter film of the same themes, THE WARD, look awesome by comparison.

2. Worst film to see in a theater during flu season:
CONTAGION - As pleased as the film is with its all-star casualty list and clever 'the virus is the star' framing, it's still much ado about nothing - never bothering to answer the big question - is it really such a loss to lose 90 million people? Shouldn't our reckless population growth be allowed its own herd thinning almost as a built-in protector for humanity's ultimate survival on this over-crowded planet? Since the disease is the star, we really don't 'feel' these deaths, so there's a strange moral neutrality at work here; all Soderbergh is doing here besides showing off how clever he frames disparate threads is making you never want to spend two hours breathing the same air of a sniffling multiplex audience ever again. (more)

3. Most glaringly artsy mix of pretentiousness and naïveté:
TREE OF LIFE - Sure, it's also one of the best films of the year, but one a basic level it's still self-important pseudo-religious wankery and Terence Malick is still just a great cinematographer desperate to convince us that's enough to justify his godlike reputation. Then again, he'll always have BADLANDS.

4. Most glaring example that Kevin Smith is not the Terry Southern of our time:
RED STATE.

5. The film that killed my love for the 'Cute globe-hopping super assassin goes off grid' genre.
HANNAH
After SALT and all the other poptop Bournes of late, one would expect the fairy tale symbol-drenched HANNAH to bring something new to the table to warrant its existence, and aside from some odd casting choices - Cate Blanchett with an unconvincing southern twang, Erik Bana channeling Jason Patric--some good wintry atmosphere early on, and a winning performance by Soairse Ronan--there's nothing but ultra cliche'd chases and battles, cross-Europe flight or fight to keep your 'riveted.' Some really lame plotting and strange rationale makes the whole film seem to evaporate only a few paces behind itself, so by the time you reach the end, there's nothing but the white snow of the opening credits to remember, and the distinct feeling someone just sold you an empty box. And there's more of them to come! What's the name of that new Soderbergh film, HAYWIRE?

That's it for now, though of course this year could change at any time. Long live the Kings of Catchphrase! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeef Jelly.

Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Candice DeLong

2011-12-15T13:26:00.108-05:00

Any similarities to a vampire are surely coincidental.

The real life Clarice Starling, Candice DeLong (above) was a high profile FBI profiler for 20 years. Seeing her on Investigative Discovery's Deadly Women and Facing Evil (Friday nights!) is to see a still button-cute but steely-eyed brunette who's brittle but compassionate demeanor is tried and tested in the forge of evil, poring over testimony and evidence and motives of specifically (for the shows) homicidal women. Interviewing them on Facing Evil in a style as intimate as a Barbara Walters, Delong guides their story from childhood to the moment the trigger is pulled or knife inserted, the moment sanity is left behind. Before that moment they were just normal people losing their minds; once the first shot is fired or cut is made, their whole world--and that of their victim--has now forever changed; so here they are, in for life. And it's all because they let a man blur their own private line between good and evil.

Facing Evil

Their stories follow a general similarity of a vulnerable woman and a predatory, usually older schemer. On the surface, this undeniable facet of our modern mediated life validates some of the feminist concerns about the Twilight series --that it glamorizes abusive relationships, encourages dependence on older men and encourages leaving conventional reality behind for the fascist bubble that love and submission create.

In this fourth in the series, Breaking Dawn, Edward tells a story of his days hunting and drinking the blood of 'molestors.' A flashback to a screening of Bride of Frankenstein (1933) cements him to a lineage that dates back to the first Universal horror films, the dawn of dread in cinema, implying that his kind are in a sense, truly evil in that they are predatory. Whether they curb their habits, only drink bad guys (like Dexter), or only hunt deer, they're still evil -- maybe that's the true difference between staying out of jail in civilization and survival in the wilderness. Predatory instincts ensure the latter, but the sharper they are the harder it must be not to kill everyone around you, sooner or later, just because you do it so well. As they say in AA, "if you hang out all day in a barber shop, sooner or later you're going to get a haircut."

Small wonder, then, that the character of a romantic fantasy demon lover like Edward in the Twilight series and a real life murderer are often indistinguishable. Remember all. the girls who sent love letters to Ted Bundy and the Night Stalker? Bundy even married one of them during his trial. I'm sure the physical absence of the killer helped boost that along. The saga of Bella and Edward is similarly based on denial - there's no nagging wife to dispose of first, but there are... other things... that make their story conflate with the prison nurse who shot a guard to help her bad boy escape, over which comes DeLong's memorable words (approx.) about the nurse's love for hot prison guys: "You liked the bad boys. But these bad boys mean business."

I mention all that in relation to blood and Twilight: Breaking Dawn for a very good reason: the blood, as Dracula once said, "is the life." In 1931, the 'other' Bela, Lugosi, at his most masterful and deathless, played him - his movement... corpse-like, his speech... slowed... as if each... word.. took effort through a dust-caked, bloodless mouth (a Hungarian, he had to learn his lines phonetically). You could believe Bella had turned into a bat when the bat appeared. He seemed more dead than death.

You don't get that level of 'death'-like behavior in any subsequent vamp movie. Certainly not the nonetheless blood-enriched Dawn. If Bella has to drink blood, the ever mollycoddling Edward puts it in an empty Big Gulp cup with a straw and plastic lid so she doesn't have to see it. To add to the freakiness, it's her blood type, which they keep around just for her - which doesn't seem to make sense - since when does one have to drink their own blood type? That's incest!

I love the first three Twilight films (well, let's just say, 'fascinated by') but Breaking Dawn sure takes its time getting going, and the fundamental problems that set it apart from earlier entries are herewith summed up in the three M's: Maturity, Martyrdom, and Music, and the one saving grace D, Disillusionment:

1. Music: Instead of the nearly nonstop flow of emotional sadcore songs that ran like a nightmare chorus through the first three we're burdened with a rather dull, listless minor key piano score that occasionally breaks for tired croons from Christina Perri and Bruno Mars. Blechh. Part of what drew me to the first three films was, in fact, the sad music which actually seemed to be what Bella Swan the character would actually listen to while moping around in her bedroom dreaming of her shadow self vamp protector. When the pop songs finally sneak into this fourth installment they're apparently all sound the same and lack any kind of legitimate sadness, except in the most perfunctory of Brooklyn hipster harmony sort of ways.

2. Maturity: Whenever a teen series moves into marriage or out of high school you know you're headed for trouble and that's why I maybe forgive Dawn a little bit more than I forgave, say, season IV of Buffy. The theater I saw Dawn in was freezing cold (broken heater) and that made the extended, strange marriage ceremony both better and unbearably slow -- time slowed, half the ceiling exposed presumably from a flood, the cherry blossoms onscreen seemed made of ice, and the dream of the 'death-size' wedding cake froze my blood thanks to the help from the winter. For a second I had a sense of overwhelming fear hat Bella was already dead and marrying Edward would mean literal death -- it reminded me of the climax of Psychomania!

The intervening year/s since the last film have been kind to Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner: posture and definition and a sense of gravitas are theirs. Kristen gets Julia Roberts-length stretches of time to do bits of post-marital daydreaming while unwrapping food or combing her hair. Pattinson seems extra bleached--his face a white paste glowing blur-- vamps don't age. In general they have all avoided the pasty hungover look that dogged the aging Harry Potter gang, and I loved the awesome selection of fully sketched-out 'relatives' of the Cullen clan, all gorgeous and interesting and probably worthy of spin-off films. Checking out those glowing eyes and Goth but not too Goth dresses made me desperately want to be at that wedding, and made me think I already had in weird teenage dreams I still remember. PS - My favorite Cullen is the nurturing but still badass 'older sister/advisor' psychic vampire, Alice, played by Ashley Greene.

Break: If you're still unclear why/how this series is so popular, let's examine the still below:

Note the purple and violet color coordination that's been the key luscious art design since the first film, and the way these two cute vampires fuss, with their centuries of beauty tip expertise, over this 18 year-old slacker with her hunched over posture and vaguely mannish profile. As a viewer you're identification locus moves in three directions if you study the picture, mirroring the three components of consciousness:

   1) Bella: cute but frail and human, easily led (ego)
   2) Vampire helpers: examining our human weakness from their superior position (super ego)
   3) The Gaze: the unborn child's free-floating ghost, eying Bela's womb like a tired wanderer eyes a warm, toasty Motel 6, coupled to the 'male gaze' - where death, sex, and reincarnation all tangle up in the unconscious webs of fear and desire\ 'female gaze' - the unseen third vamp in the room, reacting to Bella with a mix of jealousy and adoration (id).

In a sense, it's perfect just as it is, this preparations for the wedding. There's nowhere to go but down - the deeper and harder Edward pushes to make the honeymoon just perfect, the more it will begin to crack at the seams. After a certain point no amount of stalling and pretty baubles and nice scenery will help when it's down to you, in your nakedness, facing the end point of desire's long trip down the river Niagara, when the three aspects of consciousness are forced to face the three unconscious aspects, the sides of self you never even knew were there, the ones hiding at the bottom of the lake, the unconscious!

3. Disillusionment: That said, Jacob (Taylor Lautner) shows up and steals the film halfway through the wedding reception, bursting with lycanthropic life, sweeping Bella off her feet and right away from the only mildly more animated than the plastic wedding cake groom, Edward. Jacob's derisive scoffing that their honeymoon will be a sad sick joke, and his incredulity that Edward 'hasn't told her yet' implies some massive sterile impotence on the part of all vampires that makes the 'waiting' til they're married to have sex aspect suddenly seem like a sad con job. Once that ring is on her finger, the fact that this Ken doll has only a plastic absence in his pants will no longer be something she can protest about.

Sure enough, after this long beautiful wedding scene and lengthy travelogue to this exotic secret honeymoon location we in the audience are as as jet-lagged as Bella. We'd been expecting some serious fireworks, and instead Edward drags her down to the middle of nowhere, just to be by the beach, and feebly tries to humiliate her because she's not mad enough at him for leaving her bruised up from the roughness of his, how you say? lovemaking? Ah yes. In the film's best scene she looks down at him while he sits on the smashed up marital bed, defeated and wormy, for the first time he's not a gentlemen of vamping anymore but a self-sabotaging undead toad, a loser with weird teeth who's spent three films postponing this inevitable de-pantsing. A fraud, like all men!

Thus we come to the realization that those people who wait to get married before fucking are perhaps either terrified of sex or terrible at it - and Edward, one supposes, is a little of both, or else completely oblivious to the tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis and/or Buddhism. Having sex before marriage is like getting your head out of the clouds and acknowledging that yes, there will be arguments over whose turn it is to do the dishes, but the longer you stay in the virgin white clouds, the more you're sink fills up with crap, until by the time you're all married and finally disillusioned, the dishes are so dirty and so numerous that you can't even find the sink, or the soap... and you run!

So while Bella and Edward's flatline honeymoon is not what we want to see it's what needs to be seen. It's closer to being genuine rather than giving us the trite softcore display of conspicuous enjoyment we only think we want to see and which would be just not 'true' and would, in the Lacanian sense, collapse both Bella's and our own identification construct. If they really enjoyed their honeymoon the whole grand mythic aspect of their love would be lost. But as long as she's miserable we can still safely identify with Bella and enjoy her squirming from our hidden masochistic perspective. Once she's 'well laid' as it were, she becomes no longer our commiserator but a threat.

A key moment is at the Rio airport where Edward makes arrangements with a Brazilian pilot for a private jet home because she's pregnant... with a demon baby! The impression Edward creates as such a hip, rich, happenin' dude in his cargo shorts (he can speak fluent Portuguese!) is denuded by the nonplussed way Bella regards the whole thing from her passenger window in the nearby cab. By now, Edward's brand of 'I'll take care of everything' is seen by her, finally, for the mollycoddling it is; there's no demarcation line between his old-fashioned chivalry, his Victorian/compulsive need to keep her co-dependent and his own insecurity. So, like the women interviewed by Candice DeLong in Facing Evil, Bella is getting a brainwash by a bad boy but unlike them she's finally seeing through his Jedi mind tricks.

The thing is, the women by and large interviewed by Candice are 'made' into killers through this technique. And Bella technically will let Edward make her into a killer (a vampire) but she has chosen it in advance of his proposal. She deliberately seeks it out, is drawn to the darkness, and on a certain level and at first her bad boy tries to keep her out of it. And without death, what do you have? Sans petite mort? Vous n'avez rien!

4) Martyrdom - Bela she indirectly uses martyrdom--the oppressed feminine's ultimate trump card-- to force Edward into finally letting her become the undead wraith she's always longed to be, Bella regains control, and steers the film into waters where feminism foams up around patriarchy's boat like an unstoppable surf. The only way to get Edward to finally punk her into vampness is via the pretext of pro-life sacrifice. Of course it's annoying that this all has to be in service of a pro-life subtext, but, if you follow the 3rd wave feminism all the way down to the twisted roots you'll see it drinking heavily from the forbidden waters of pregnancy and rough sex--the twin magnets of darkness no amount of feminist rationale can brighten.

So let me ask you this: If a woman starts out independent and chooses to be overwhelmed by the male other and chthonic nature, is she betraying her gender, even if its by her own choice? Is she allowed to examine the paradox of being free through surrender? Is she allowed to choose a deeper darkness than even death or prison can contain?

Won't get fooled again.

Accusations of Twilight being pro-life as a whole are evaded by Edward being so pro-abortion, hating his own semi-dead child (as opposed to the doofus husband in Steel Magnolias, above). Bela's refusal to give up her half-vamp infant even as it's killing her is seen as foolhardy by everyone but herself... and part of it is her unconscious wish to die and be reborn as a vampire, which Edward postpones indefinitely (of course he does, as he will lose his power over her). So in the end, feminists and pro-choice types alike go snarling back to the Exit out of the woods, both ill-served by the myth they cautiously hoped to adopt. That may not be the perfect answer, but there's no real way out of this dank, chthonic forest. They ain't goin' anywhere

It is, after all, only a myth, except that's not quite correct: something can be 'only' life, but never 'only' a myth. The danger of ignoring the true nature of the mythic archetypal unconscious--of presuming the mythic dimension has no power other than cheap entertainment--is that you leave your unconscious with no avenue of conscious expression, so it festers in your pressure cooker subconscious... then creeps up and bites you in the dimension of 'real life' when you're most vulnerable. This is a sad, Freudian truth seen all too well through the steel blue eyes of Candice DeLong on Facing Evil. Without an archetypal context by which to recognize the big bad wolf when it comes pawing up at her basket, these Red Riding Hoods are easy prey for any passing wolf. Haters can sneer at it, feminists can rear back at it, but girls currently immersed in the Twilight world will all grow up knowing how to recognize wolves when they see them. Those who don't have a myth can't grow out of it, because they leave themselves nothing to grow out of. They stay frozen in the amber light until suddenly the wolf is right up in there, and instead of knowing one when they see one they are instead themselves are only seen, and sucked... through Candice DeLong's steely blue vampire eyes.

PS - Free Brenda Wiley!

A Girl must have her Ghost: AMERICAN HORROR STORY: "Smoldering Children" & Lana Del Rey: "Video Games"

2011-12-09T18:01:00.012-05:00

"Me...love dead. Hate...living." -- Monster (Bride of Frankenstein, 1933)

If the rest of the media universe is playing it safe and cuddly there's at least two chunks of media that strike a deep unnerving chord of the 'real' in the last few weeks of 2011 -- Fx's American Horor Story and that found-Americana video for Lana Del Rey's one song, "Video Games."

Passing the 10 million hit mark, inspiring the usual countless remixes, the song+video+singer taps into a nerve of sadness and loss that has the authentic feel of a drunk night crying to your best friend long distance while you thumb through old photo albums. Watch the video ten times in a row and you can get that feel even at work, sober, on the phone to no one. Still, a lot of people seem to think she has no right to be sad. There's a huge internet bloglash both pro and con (read Awl's "Who's Afraid of Lana Del Rey" to catch up and choose a side). Lana Del Rey's hot lost little girl from 1965 look -- the thick hair, Julia Roberts lips, black eyeshadow, vintage dresses and paisley headbands-- make her come off like Evan Rachel Wood in THIRTEEN now grown up in reverse and her own grandmother at 21, dating a hot young rockabilly guitarist alcoholic who's always on tour, leaving her alone but 'safe' in our care, we being the ghost of a lover long dead (she'll only see us smoldering, never old or charred). She makes me excited to see YOUNG ADULT. Like Charlize Theron in that role, we don't have to worry about Lana's deep sadness overwhelming us via a real relationship. She's just a friend, and she doesn't even exist... she's a ghost in the machine, like Samara in THE RING. She even looks like Hayden, Ben's 19 year-old ghost ex-mistress!

So what does this broad have to do with American Horror Story, specifically this week's episode, "Smoldering Children," where (Spoiler Alert!) we find out Violet, the lost little daughter who turns out to have been dead since a few episodes ago when she overdosed on pills?

Everything. It has everything to do with it.

Look at Lana's photo above, with the cigarette and white dress. She could step right into any David Lynch film--she's a ghost ready to haunt you. The photo above is the kind of thing you find when cleaning out your deceased grandparent's room. Who is that beauty? And before you find out you swoon, just a little bit, for your own mother. Lana Del Rey may just be playing dress-up, but she nonetheless radiates a sadness that's not fixed in any one generation. It creeps through decades like vintage clothing and DNA, and the flag. America strong!

For comparison, let's look at another pretty, lost, augmented little girl who is talented, driven, and also trying to be re-born, in this case as a sitcom star, Whitney Cummings. Her self-titled show comes on after The Office (read Meghan Wright's solid recap here), the key time slot for any current sitcom, which is how it's drawn my indignant attention. Am I the only one who is suspicious? No. In "Understanding Screenwriting," Tom Stempel writes:

In Whitney, Cummings plays the title character. She is living with her boyfriend of three years, Alex. They make jokes. They are afraid of marriage. They go to a wedding and make jokes with their friends. Whitney dresses up as a nurse to seduce Alex and he ends up in the hospital. They make jokes. Most of the jokes are variations on material from Cummings' stand-up act, and so the show falls into the trap of a lot of sitcoms based on a comedian's act: all jokes, no story, no characters. Half an hour of this just gets tiresome.

Part of why this show is doomed can be summed up right in the above paragraph, particularly one sentence "She is living with her boyfriend of three years, Alex." - what kind of dumb idea is that? Has anyone ever done such a thing? Be wary of Whitney and her conspicuous displays of enjoyment. She misunderstands the fundamental basics of romantic comedy. "Tiresome," indeed!

The most fundamental comedy truth is this: a couple is only cute and watchable when they are not quite together - either always about to hook up--the will they or won't they of Sam and Diane (Cheers) or Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd (Moonlighting) or Fox and Scully (X-Files), or Ross and Rachel (Friends)-- or maybe they already have from before the show began and are now just friends (Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld). All but Seinfeld gave in to audience's demands of seeing the leads hook up and get married or live happily in congress, and viewers dropped off like flies once they did. Smart shows know in advance this is doomed to happen. (Pam and Jim on The Office are beyond terminal in their Whitney-ishness - but luckily it's an ensemble show).

As I've written before, the original 1970s Charlie's Angels was ingenious in this regard. Aaron Spelling wrote the book, which we now open to examine the reverse case of guys like Ashton Kucher and Howard Stern. As long as he was married to Demi, Ashton had some gravitas --his flirty douche bag qualities were tolerable, even amusing. He's in the process of now of realizing the extent Demi's presence kept him from getting Sheen-level skeevy. As long as Howard Stern was married and unable to 'do anything' with his strippers--fighting against the current of his own tastelessness and desire --he was funny. Once the chains were off, that edge was lost. As long as Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned, he was terrifying; escaped and free and he's suddenly just another dude trying to get a piece of the action. Thus 'infantile' male personae have power only in relation to their constraints (like that dog that barks and growls and strains at the leash but take the leash off and he's terrified).

Similarly onscreen couples without constraints--misunderstandings, break-ups, deaths, fights, infidelities, abuse, divorce--are suddenly cloying. The tortured misery of Ben and his crazy wife in AHS, for example, made all his temptations exciting. Once the wife was gone, however, giving into those temptations would just be softcore boredom, hence his heroic resistance, as I wrote about last week. This week he got his reward: he even got to vent his rage on the tormentor of his wife, the evil Tate!

Tate is an ideal representation of the 'absent lover'--the animus, the incubus -- in that he is actually dead - and his grisly past makes him a 'bad boy' in ways we never want to compete with - he's like Lana Del Rey's lost rockabilly guitarist come back from the dead to demand beer and fidelity. If you listen to the lyrics of Rey's songs they're like the dream girl words bound to catch any video game playing bad-girl loving boy blushing at the thought they just might be able to hook up with this doomed, sweetly tragic, DSM-IV type of lost little girl:

"Open up a beer /
and say get over here /
and play a video game."

Dude, she likes beer and video games and guys in fast cars! She's not singing "Come meet my family / earn a six figure sal'ry / tar the roof." In short --Lana del Rey is the type of girl Whitney is trying to be, but as Yoda says, there is no try.

And as for' bad' boys who encourage you to skip school, drink beer and play video games, they don't come any badder than mass murdering ghost teen Tate, and so in a way we can respect him because he is evil and yet he still loves Violet and protects her and that's what makes him cool. It's because he is truly evil that he can be sympathetic. We identify with Tate as viewers because like us, he is dead - like Edward in Twilight is dead, or Spike on Buffy. Our perspective as viewers (we can move through walls and time and infiltrate up close even the most intimate moments of characters) mirrors that of the watching dead, for who else but the dead have such omniscience?

Lance Kerwin, 1977

Are we not all in love with ghosts one way or the other? I remember my lucid dreams of holding hands and walking around my old Lansdale PA neighborhood with Kate Jackson, all my friends seeing us and being super jealous. She appeared on this show James at 15, as a woman who befriends runaway James (The Tate-ish Lance Kerwin, left) thus enabling huge fantasies for boys my age, 12, of running away to live on the street with this cool older woman once we graduate elementary school... to escape, as it were, from the terrible onslaught of adult responsibility and social castration that only the city, or death, can bring.

Violet will never have to go back to school now that she's dead, but at the same time she's not entirely sure a life playing cards with Tate is the answer to all death's prayers, or so it seems by her only mildly bemused response towards his displays of devotion. In a way she's already 'cooler' than Tate. Perhaps what is happening to Violet is the same thing that happens to us watching Whitney -- without obstacles and uncertainty the ultimate emptiness of our coveted prize comes into focus. The only reward for our struggles was the distraction our struggles brought us. Knowing school and her father were always threatening to separate her from Tate, Violet's love was wild and Bronte-esque. Now that she can't escape him, her love is feeling fenced-in. Jessica Lang's character understands this and her final bit of cruel torment to the man who burning man shows her Dietrich-like insight into his masochistic condition. She's giving him what he needs, knowing anything less than torment and heartbreak would be unbearable.

Frances Farmer, 1891

What does matter is--unlike so many other TV girls her age--Violet has chosen darkness and now she dwells within it, nevermore to return to school or write a resume. After the initial shock she finds put death is not the end of the world, so to speak. We can hope the same thing won't happen to Del Rey in 'real life' but the other options are grim as well. Based on the hot young musical prodigies that have come before her--Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Bjork, and Alanis M.- there's a very real danger she will get 'quirky' or slick or obtuse, and eventually even become a surgery addicted gargoyle or a seducer of hot young boys half her age, like Jessica Lange's eternally sexy Constance.

At least we'll always have that first album, song, or movie. We'll always be able to marvel at JL's youthful sizzle in 1981's POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, frozen in celluloid immortality. We don't want to lose our Violets or Lanas, or let them grow up or let them die or even keep them just how they are for that matter, but we have no choice. We can only watch and listen to them from our Lazyboy graves, aging and decaying while they stay eternally young, even if it's just for one haunted song.

Pre-Code Capsules 10: DAMES, BEAUTY AND THE BOSS, THE DARK HORSE, SVENGALI, THE MIND READER

2011-12-08T12:52:00.010-05:00

DAMES
1934 - ***
Unlike breezier selections from the Gold Diggers series, Busby's DAMES suffers from a stale opening that's third rife with cornball humor. As the repressed and allegedly fuddy and assuredly duddy Uncle Ezra, Hugh Herbert's schtick--his giddy titter and little hand claps--has not gone quite gold with age. One of those sexophobic millionaires who likes to form abstinence societies, Ezra promises to award his cousin-in-law Guy Kibee ten million dollars as long Guy refrains from tobacco and alcohol and behaves like a kiss-ass toady during Herbert's stay in New York. Kibee's wife, Ezra's cousin, Zasu Pitts seems uptight enough with her spindly walk and wavery voice, but Herbert is way too hiccup-ridden to convince as a reformer.

WC Fields might call this "a double bargain..."

Ezra's also a hypocrite who cries for Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir whenever he gets the hiccups, apparently oblivious to the fact that it's 77% alcohol. And thus vice, as it so often must, takes the long way around and cuts through the pharmacy to strike in the guarded souls of the morally uptight.

Small wonder - DAMES came out in 1934, the year real-life versions of Uncle Ezra killed the spirit of louche cinematic insouciance in its cradle. While Busby undoubtedly detests Ezra, it's no fun watching him suffer; we came for breezy laffs and psychedelic dance numbers not Tea Party-style hysterics. It's too close to home, man. Too relevant.

Meanwhile the fact that Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell take a ferry to Staten Island to sing while they're supposed to be bringing Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir to Uncle Ezra who is hiccuping nonstop and driving Zazu and Horace into a frenzy of anxiety leaves an odd aftertaste in the minds of we sensitive viewers, as does watching as Powell gets ripped off by a sleazy producer. Joan Blondell is the much wiser chorus girl who gets her hooks into Horace for the show's budget while on a train to the city from upstate.

It all comes down to Herbert hiring some goons to trash the show, and though it all ends happily enough Herbert's attitude lingers in the mind. Thank god he gets arrested, takes a shine to Blondell and announces he has officially given his old fashioned moral code the raspberry.

The songs include "Dames" and "I Only Have Eyes for You," which gets real post-modern meta with the opening of the number taking place in the crowd outside the theater and wining up on the subway -- it takes on the feel of an SNL opening sketch with the host running backstage or out onto the Rockefeller Plaza as the cameras follow him out of the studio. It can be very confusing until you remember Busby bows to no one when it comes to inversing the fourth wall distance, so that the show within the film is a hundred times more like a movie than the stagy off-stage action. Once Ruby Keeler is shooting up through a hole in an eye, and psychedelic flower leg shows, and the fogeys are having a blast guzzling 79% alcohol by volume elixir (that's 158 proof!), profits, publicity, and credits ensue.

BEAUTY AND THE BOSS
1933 - ***1/2
Warren William is in his lascivious wolf prime as an Austrian business tycoon who avoids the temptation of his secretaries by firing them if they catch his eye... then inviting them to stay for drinks and arranging them as mistresses. In his own way he's a Prince Charming forced by expediency to be his future bride's fairy godmother, doling out pink slip glass slippers and six month salary stipends.

Enter a Cinderella to make George Bernard Shaw light up, the button-cute Marian Marsh (Trilby to Barrymore's SVENGALI the same year). She's super efficient and methed-out on starvation fumes and moxy. Showing the same ease and playfulness here that she had with all those long bearded old painters in SVENGALI, Mars gets taken to Paris on business and transforms into a wide eyed jubilant sprite in a sexy evening dress. David Manners as the brother tries the earnest pretty boy approach to win her, Frederick Kerr ("Here's to the house of Frankenstein!") tries the lovable duffer approach, but only Warren has the louche captain of industry approach she craves. She even gleans tips on being sexy from one of Warren's own mistresses.

You can tell by the breathless dialogue pace, continuity and its relatively few sets that it was once a play - so think Lubitsch in froth and Hecht in pace as well as Shaw in the terms of capitalist philosophy and Brecht in its unflinching narrations of life as a starving poor person who gladly becomes an office machine automaton if it means eating regularly. As in that film, the great Anton Grot did the sets.

Marion Marsh and wolves (Top: Beauty and the Boss / b: Svengali)

SVENGALI
1933 - ***1/2
There's three reasons to see this: John Barrymore's florid hamming as Svengali, Marian Marsh's sweet face and alabaster beauty as Trilby (cute in an oversize Parisian officer's topcoat) and the crazy Anton Grot sets--including a nicely dilapidated Moroccan night club and Parisian rooftop miniatures seen in an extended crane shot from Barrymore's eyes to Trilby's apartment. This movie has an uneven tone that I like: Svengali clowns around with his Leperillo-ish companion one minute, sends a foolish housewife to her death in the next and heads over to do some mooching off Paddy and the Laird, stealing Trilby and proclaiming Trilby's mouth has a roof like the parthenon! Billee (Bramwell Fletcher) is a sympathetic character as the young lover until he sees Trilby posing in the nude and runs away in horror --did he think she was a tranny? As Oscar Jaffee would say, "That eliminates the lover!"

Tsk tsk, it matters little for is old Svengali not there to steal her away? Barrymore does lots of that schtick where he clutches his heart with one hand and extends the other out before him like he's trying to find the light switch in the dark, crying "Ack! Ack!" One wonders what Warren William would have done with such a part! Directed by the one and only Archie Mayo.

THE DARK HORSE
1932 - **
Allegedly a comedy about a moron chosen by some shady power elites to run against the incumbent New York State governor, DARK HORSE is really more a polemic against impulse marriage. Warren William is the ingenious PR guy who sways the rubes but he's dogged by a vicious ex-wife who hounds him for astronomical alimony and later tries to seduce Kibbee in a frame-up to expose the boob in "love nest... with singer" Except she ain't no singer. At Warren's right hand is Frank McHugh who notes Kibbee's ready for the KKK when he peeps him in his long johns.

A lengthy scene at campaign headquarters with the ex-wife having a tantrum and threatening to call the cops and have Warren arrested if he doesn't cough up four hundred smackers for alimony is kind of not what pre-codes are all about. In real life we have to deal with coughing up dough to people we hate, we don't want to see it in our movies. And Kibbee's not as endearing as one would expect. He's playing the stupid hick a bit too broadly, flashing his terrible teeth and awesome belly. Bette Davis has a pretty thankless role as Williams' girlfriend and right-hand woman, but she's good and spritely... but really --WW scrounging for money to pay a gold digger? It's not right we should have to see that.

THE MIND READER
1933 - ***
Williams starts out this NIGHTMARE ALLEY-esque fable as a sideshow dentist, but he and his pal Allen Jenkins get a load of a fortune teller on easy street...and Chandra the Magnificent is born! Jenkins is right to be aggrieved when "Chandra" falls for a gorgeous local girl (Constance Cummings) who's mother 'loses' her handbag to Jenkins' nimble picket pocking. Williams marries the daughter --the sap--even though she's clearly not too bright since she falls under the spell of a cheap carny hack so easily.

With the subject matter and Williams as a star THE MIND READER should be better than this. Silly bits of plot waste time when the real story is in the dialogue which runs counter to the grain of the approaching code. Jenkins makes good cases for why it's better to rule in hell than slowly starve to death selling fuller brushes in a desperate bid for moral character, but Williams is trying to reform, or convince the girl he is, anyway. Jenkins meanwhile gets a posh chauffeur job and pays the other drivers for addresses of where the husbands are cheating on their wives. Thus the chauffeurs sell info to the wives of their male passangers via Williams as the middle man, predicting it all from his ball, and everyone cleans up but the husbands, who are soon coming in to see Chandra themselves, with murder on their minds.

In the end Williams turns to drink and reveals his tricks onstage, disillusioning the masses and it's all because of this girl "I've broken my home!" he shouts, drunkenly, to the annoyed rubes. Williams playing drunk is like James Dean playing drunk in GIANT--in other words, doubly slurred to the point of true incoherence. And the crowd roars!

Still, tasty insights into the lurid lengths men went to get laid in the 1930s are coded in chocolate and sprinkled all over the salty dialogue: When Williams originally says he's going to marry the girl, Jenkins asks, "Legally?" If you wonder what that means in pre-code parlance, it's where--as seen in WAY DOWN EAST (1921)--you dress a friend up as a preacher so your girl thinks you're legally wed, so you can fuck and run before she gets wise or in a family way. Just more grisly evidence of the fall-out from archaic concepts of 'virginity' in brides being so important. There's also prohibition repeal references: Jenkins gets the best last word as his pal heads off to Sing Sing: "Sure is tough to be going away just when beer's coming back."

Bellamy the Deflowerer: THE WEDDING NIGHT (1935)

2011-12-07T13:16:00.013-05:00

If you want to see the cruel extreme barbarism of the sudden implementation of the Catholic Legion of Decency's enforced production code (which overtook Hollywood in 1934), look no further than 1935's THE WEDDING NIGHT, starring Gary Cooper, Ralph Bellamy, and Anna Sten (the 'other' Garbo). It helps when considering the Christian backlash hooplah about the morning after pill to see a film like this, and realize the extent of female subjugation in pre-industrial European culture, and the way it survives today in xtreme Catholicism, fundamentalist Islam and some Mormons.

Ralph Bellamy with his wild hair, expertly applied peasant-stock eye-liner, and traditional Polish farmer garb actually gives Cooper a run for the money here in the god-like looks department. He's way too good looking to be so dumb, and what's this brood of crafty tobacco farmers doing up in Connecticut in 1935 in a place bordering open marriage-minded drunk writer Cooper's get-away lodge?

While Cooper's wife stays in New York City, he moves up there for inspiration, and decides on Anna Sten and her family's provincial Polish culture as the subject of his next book. The film thus sees the code mandate of 1934 as a property dividing line, between the home-grown social 'dissolution' of the post-WW1 Depression era of women's equality and hurrah for the next who dies, and a very fundamentalist old world patriarchy proletariat. A dissolute neighbor next door is demonized as brutally as the Nazis would later do the Jews--the property-greedy tobacco-farming Poles and their outmoded values then can be read as the very reason for the barbarism inflicted upon them. As The farmer says to his daughter when she refuses to harness the Bellamy plow, "stop making me hit you!"

Cooper's never been too convincing as a writer, but here he at least is convincing as a self-hating intellectual for whom literary 'research' has been the rationale for seducing women for so long he can't remember whether the book is in service of the affair or vice versa. Sten is damn... good... actress and Sig Rumann is properly terrifying in an unusual role (for him).The code shock is of course that Sten must die, because her father pledged her to Bellamy, and was paid the dowry, and she refused to run away from the ceremony before saying "I do," which is the only proper thing for a bride standing on the lip of the 20th century. That she loves Cooper instead but still goes through with the Bellamy wedding spells her death under the draconian rubrics of the code. But if she'd just run out to the car and driven off and grabbed Cooper and fled to the city, well you could roll the credits right then. But the post-34 censor had his eye on adulterers.

In the post-34 world of Hollywood, women starting dropping like flies. At least they had time to take long Garbo-esque death scenes, but there's a thin line between good death scenes and the bitter aftertaste of being forced. Religious censorship bleeds into the nature of the post-code era's stories -- where women marry even knowing it means their death, because marriage is the ultimate validation of woman, and then she may breed and create more Christians who can carry forth this fine, wretched, evil tradition of yoking the women to the Bellamies. Imagine the tale of Little Red Riding Hood if the Catholic Legion of Decency decided to update the story so that Red gets a chaperone through the woods, and the woodsman--her husband--regularly belittles her in a smirky way when she's caught talking to wolves. That wolf would be played by Cary Grant... the woodsman? That's right! It's no accident Bellamy in THE WOLFMAN.

To drive the point slamming home, the titular night of the film is a long wedding party for Sten and Bellamy at Rumann's house, with the Sten being 'prepared' for deflowering by the glum matrons of the clan upstairs while downstairs Bellamy gets drunker and his cronies (and even Sten's father) encourage him to get up there and lay some pipe like they're the sloppy seconds-craving would-be-rapist brothers of the groom in Peckinpah's RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. The message is clear: the boys get to drink and goad each other one in lusty eggings-on below while the women, depressed and apathetic as if dressing a deer, prepare the next virgin for her code-sanctioned marital assault. Again, the message is that not only does marriage legitimize sex so you can have it right under your parents' roof, it frees you from the uncertainty of 'taking possession' of your spouse in copulation. In other words, she doesn't get to say no --only the dad does. Even screaming for help they'll just laugh and roar below.

Fundamentalist Christian adages against a woman's right to choose her own mate seem barbaric to most free thinking people these days but after the WEDDING NIGHT you may understand its origins better. It's not really the fault of the Bellamy - he's not a bad guy. He's been led to expect he will get a wife handed to him via her father, and his confusion when it's otherwise is not his fault --empathy takes brightness. Though many conservatives are desperate to pass bills that would revert woman's rights back to the patriarchs, nowadays at least, they can't get very far. The best they can do is bomb an abortion clinic now and again as they lament the loss of their old property, the Fertile Womb, so squandered in the hands of its wasted young women owners.

So yeah, drooling sexual relatives are written into the rocks of Plymouth but when a sensitive poet soul like Sten's comes along, that kind of violent burlesque of socially controlled reproduction is shocking and un-American. It's one thing if the girl is plain and not very bright and maybe can't get a date on her own. But then comes along a smart, poetic beauty and the Bellamy will crush her like an orchid under the plow. When choosing between the Bellamy for life (in Albany too!) vs. Gary Cooper for a just one weekend in Manhattan, is there any choice?

The worst that can happen is that they'll wind up destitute and abandoned on the streets of the East Village, and that is nothing in comparison to being kept down on the farm under the yoke of Bellamy's unconscious, never-been-outside-of-the-box sense of entitlement. Just ask One-Eye: (see: Bob Hope Vs. The Canadian Svengalis).

Thus the Coopers and Grants are like missionaries of pre-code enlightenment, bringing hope to the dark areas of the New England tobacco belt. Now more than ever, we need to ridicule our Bellamies and ban the incoming burkas of our immigrants and rescue Mormon girls before they're married at 14 to lecherous cult leaders. I don't blame the Bellamies, or even the Rumanns --this is what they know. But the chain's gotta break somewhere. For too long our tall beautiful men and fast-thinking wabbits and Daffy Ducks have held back, given the Bellamies and the Elmer Fudds the benefit of the doubt, presuming their old ways must have some merit. Our reward has been a trail of broken Stens. I say they shall break no more!

Gimme Cockaigne: MELANCHOLIA (2011)

2011-12-05T11:33:00.013-05:00

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be." –Don Quixote

When true doomsday comes perhaps the manic depressives and bi-polars amongst us will at last have an opportunity to shine in calm perfection while walking through slow motion rain --that seems the text under Lars Von Trier's MELANCHOLIA (2011). Until then of course the ordinary madness of our civilization and all its unconscious munching, adherence to unexamined cultural mores, and slow death momentum--will have to be endured.

MELANCHOLIA makes me nervous because I don't want to lose one of the best auteurs of our post-art house age and the film has the earmarks of a message from someone planning to be dead by the time you read it. LVT's whole post-Dogme 95 life is flashing before our eyes and on some level he's out of new things to say, at least at this juncture. He's reached the frontier from which no traveler returns. The film ceases to be about a frontier, or returning, but about endurance - the inability for some to handle normalcy vs. others to handle apocalypses. And Kirsten Dunst has never seemed more Nordic, as if she's spent her life scowling through meaningless sex and meals rich in animal fat, all to get to this vanishing point.

For in MELANCHOLIA, Von Trier dives headfirst into the same abyss that Terence Malick only wades up to his knees for THE TREE OF LIFE. There is no real comparison between the two other than their ponderous linking of 2001-style classical music-scored space visions with close family relationships but it's fun to compare them anyway: a tale of a woman's depression coming to life in the form of a wedding and world-destroying Planet X named Melancholia (my collage/press photo deconstruct above) is the suicide note to TREE OF LIFE's faded funeral notice for my/our/Malick's father; TREE mourns my dead father but MELANCHOLIA comes for me, and son of my unborn son, and the ground beneath our unborn feet.

We saw the film this past Saturday night at the charmingly dilapidated Brooklyn Heights Cinema with its blaring, distorted sound (to drown out the film next door?) blasting Wagner's aria to Tristan und Isolde, rumbling the floors as Kristen Dunst and company writhe in Bill Viola-style (see above) slowness as the planet Melancholia swallows up the earth and there's just nowhere to run, so may as well pose. I figured I'd just accept it... rather than be the one to complain to the ticket taker.

The 1st chapter is a long wedding for our melancholy heroine Justine (Dunst) over the course of which the bride flits with ecstasy then dissolves in a deep depression, eventually telling off her boss (Stellan Skarsgard), losing her groom (Alexander Skarsgard), pissing off her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her sister's rich husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), infuriating Udo Kier's anal retentive wedding planner, and drawing gasps from everyone else except her loving drunken father (John Hurt) and psychotic mother (Charlotte Rampling) who makes the toast "I think marriage is a crock of shit." In the hand-held improvisational verite it recalls Demme's RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, Vinterberg's THE CELEBRATION, and Baumbach's MARGOT AT THE WEDDING in its picture of a cold planet bathed in warmth but unable to feel warm, and if you can survive the nausea of LVT's whiplash handheld camera in these scenes, you can move on to the next course. The bride, however, won't be there as she's upstairs, catatonic in the bath.

After some portions of the reception are over, Justine ducks into the library and changes the art books pages on display from abstract geometrical shapes (put there no doubt by John as they reflect his dull patriarchal-modern tastes) to archaic pictures of female suffering, death and peasant post-wedding debauchery: ""Land of Cockaine" and "Hunters in the Snow" and by Bruegel, "Ophelia" by J.W. Waterhouse, After the Hunt" by Bogarde." As in DOGVILLE and ANTICHRIST, my two favorite Von Triers so far, this book swap seems a full rejection of the flat, dull left-brained scientific rationalism championed by Sutherland's materialist know-it-all in favor of a return to the mythic unconscious where every day is your last so you better get connected back to your Jungian roots, post haste. John rejects this even as he falls apart, unable to to deal with the loss of his empirical toe-hold, deluding and denuding-- as DaFoe did in ANTICHRIST-- by smug dismissal of 'feminine hysteria,' and the neglect of those poor horses. Dunst's depression, then, stems at least partly from these circumstances--the rich razzle dazzle of her wedding being the 'best that patriarchal wealth can do' as far as keeping 'the myth' alive. In going for high class in a materialist bourgeois competitive manner ("Do you know how much this wedding cost?" is a continuing refrain), it becomes a Bruegel land of plenty fairy tale combination control freak's dream and overload nightmare, a Land of Cockaine!

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Luilekkerland" ("The Land of Cockaigne"), 1567. Oil on panel.

Cockaigne is a medieval mythical land of plenty, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, Cockaigne is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful... Writing about Cockaigne was a commonplace of Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth (Wiki)

Justine prefers dearth

So a ceremony that should be mythically enriched with archetypal energy is stifled by the trivialities which the wedding planner (a marvelous Udo Kier) and the host couple cling to. Insisting on guesses from everyone as to how many pebbles are in the vase, for example; John's outrage over Justine not coming down to cut the cake, relate to Justine's boss's slimy demands for a tag line, his weird head games to get one out of her resonate meta as the producers of MELANCHOLIA were no doubt hoping in a similar way for a tag line to his film (the image the boss shows being like a Vogue cover premonition of mythic poses Justine herself will assume later in the film).

While we struggle to not get nauseous from whiplash shaky-cam, the heavy breathing Dogme sound keeps the wedding unbearably intimate: we hear every cut of the meat and every clang of cutlery on the china plates, every breath and wheeze from the gathered throng, amplified through like we're tripping our faces off and boiling over in claustrophobic anxiety, trapped in this crowded dining room with all these actors. At first we don't know why Justine is losing it, but we feel it's something to do with the oppressive worry of her sister ("Don't ruin this!") her brother-in-law ("this cost a fortune") and the insane ravings of her mom. Justine is Von Trier. The wedding is a public de-pantsing ala the climactic press conference in 8 1/2, when the best riches and opulence millions can be is thrown up as buffer against the onslaught of depression, and crumbles like fairy dust.

It is only in Justine's subsequent sad melt-down and later ecstasy over the approaching doomsday planet that she blossoms, for the planet is her true groom. I was reminded of my own strange exaltation on the day of 9/11 as I went racing up deserted 2nd Avenue at midnight, brain thrilling that it might all finally be over (the world, I mean, not the danger). New York City was a ghost town - I managed to find one cab, and me and the the cab driver were like the post-apocalypse, like Cabbie and Snake in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. I knew my exaltation was not 'proper' but also, later, learned I was not alone in feeling it. At uptown AA meeting in the weeks that followed, those who weren't grief stricken cops or firemen were often strangely calm. Our daily anxiety was suddenly gone. In this apocalyptic moment, we were at peace because our existential dread, so useless in normall life, was suddenly the norm. Now that the world was blind, our one eye made us royalty.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

–Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”

John however, will have no such apocalyptic acceptance, and in the period after the wedding, he belittles and dominates Claire in a vain effort to allay her anxiety about the approaching planet. In his bland pretense he resembles past Von Trier male characters, authority figure wannabes who do their best to dominate the women in the room but come off sad and impotent.

In TREE OF LIFE we saw the dawn of the earth, and the first vague gestures of compassion, leading up to some beach-side dream jazz heaven cast party. That's the kind of soiree Claire wants to have as the planet looms, a Cockaigne-style aversion of the end through drink and song and togetherness. But Justine finds that as contemptible as she finds everything else--from her new husband's picture of an apple orchard he's bought for her, to 'rest' in, to the pebbles in the jar--everything but the strange request to 'build caves' from the son, to return to Werner Herzog's CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, perhaps, and to the mythic inner reality of Jungian archetypes of which we are the shadows on the Platonic walls.

Von Trier shows that all the money in the bourgeois world of wealth and rationalism won't allay or abet this impending cloud, only Justine's resolutely transcendental delusion is some kind of salvation. Hers is the peace of the twisted who have writhed back through time due to years of practice being unmoved by the hollow pleasures of Cockaigne. Like Jack in the 1920s New Years eve picture at the end of THE SHINING, Justine moves backwards into the representations of the past, until she's as indestructible as the planet Melancholia itself. I hope Lars doesn't mean to follow her quite yet, though at this point he's running out of language, image, and time. Every new film shows a little less sand in the hourglass and MELANCHOLIA shows the hourglass itself breaking into slow motion splinters. Soon he will have nothing left but ash, unless... May I suggest an Effexor + Wellbutrin + Neurontin cocktail? It works wonders! Cockaigne is for suckers, as Bruegel well knew. When life gives you not just lemons but orchards of citrus, no amount of lemonade-making can allay the soul-curling sourness. One must burn and run, even if there's nowhere to go but deeper into the ash crevasse.

POST-SCRIPT (12/7/12): As Justine gets out of the limo to head into the reception, she spots the incoming planet--still just a dot in the sky but she recognizes it--and five days after seeing the film it dawned on me that even so far away she recognizes it as our onrushing doom and her deliverance. So fuck it, she tells off her boss and dumps her groom. But isn't that what depression is all about? She doesn't bother to share her realization though, knowing perhaps it's useless to bring such stuff up in the house of a coddling imperialist like John. Considering this, the film suddenly comes into sharper focus for me, so thought I'd add it!

Special Thanks to Jennifer Boyer,

American Horror Hotel California Story

2011-12-01T11:52:00.007-05:00

Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice
And she said 'we are all just prisoners here, of our own device'
And in the master's chambers, They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast - Eagles ("Hotel California")

The Eagles' 1976 song "Hotel California" and the awesome new FX show, American Horror Story are two peas in a grisly pod--along with Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon--that circumscribe the broken longing of Los Angeles. Hearing it as a kid (I was nine when it debuted on the radio) the dark eroticism of the song carried a queasy black magick power. Whatever those L.A. people were doing, it was evil, dark, and underscored by a sexual longing I felt deep within my polymorphously perverse childhood soul.

The song's lyrics painted a grim portrait of what might be called the Land of Hungry Ghosts, the Buddhist hell where everyone is ravenous with hunger and cursed tiny mouths at the end of long, painfully thin tube-like necks. "Stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" might very well be an illusion to cocaine, with the knives being used for the flat ends to distribute coke bumps, but no amount of coke able to kill the beast; the jones for more that ever threatens to turn success and fame and endless groupies and booze and drugs into a living hell. Worse than an average Christian hell where one at least is allowed to suffer loudly and unabashedly, in the California hell one must act as if they are always having the time of their lives, for if they fail the whole scene could implode on them, the veil pulled away to see that the glitterati at your back porch Laurel Canyon party are all grungy sycophants who bought their way in with mountains of coke and are already telling everyone you're their best friend, and it's too late! You already got rid of your wife and kid so you could party 24/7 - it's too late to admit the mistake, the blindness, so you just snort and shoot and drink more and hope to blot out the grisly alien demon look of your joneser entourage which has gradually, without you knowing when or how, become all strangers. As Lili Taylor said in Abel Ferrara's THE ADDICTION, "We drink to forget we're alcoholics. We seek relief from the addiciton, but the addiction is the only relief we can find." Or as Taiyu describes it in "Buddhism and Recovery:"

"In Buddhism there is a myth about a hell-realm populated by beings whose appetites exceed their capacity for satisfaction. Their stomachs are huge but their throats are tiny. No matter how much they try to eat, their hunger remains. In ancient India, they are called hungry ghosts. We call them alcoholics and drug addicts... We eat and drink and smoke and use and gamble and love and lust and shop and exercise and obsess about anything that resolves the sense of incompletion, imperfection, or suffering we find inside."

The Hungry Ghost blueprint fits perfectly over the great new TV series on F/X, American Horror Story, which indulges in the '10 PM sex-and-violence trends of later-time slots to create a horror series about a large haunted house in the heart of Los Angeles that's acted as a focal point for a whole history of Hollywood murders--from the Richard Speck nurse murders to various crimes of passion, madness, and in this week's episode with the haunted-looking Mena Suvari playing the Black Dahlia. This real life 1947 murder victim became an emblem of the evils of 'Hotel California,' the sun-baked sin city where slimy predators take advantage of pretty, starstruck youngsters as a matter of course. For most of America, the kind of druggy, sex-saturated, fame-whoring lifestyle L.A. indulges in is merely a fantasy. Middle America has families to worry about, they don't have to worry about the despair that comes when such fantasies are realized. L.A. rock stars like the Eagles however get enough drugs and sex with their rock and roll that it it's a fantasy no longer, and so it no longer keeps the lonely terror at bay, and they realize that while they checked in any time they liked, they can never leave. Guitar solo!

There's a meta charge to the casting since Suvari in past years appeared to be under the spell of some kind of eating disorder in the wake of her sudden surge to fame via AMERICAN BEAUTY (1997). On a subsequent SNL appearance her wild eyes, bird-like mannerisms and darkened teeth, all indicated something just not right (it may be my hunger artist experts were wrong) at any rate, she's come out of it super strong in recent years and has been active in pro-women's esteem-style causes. Luckily for us she was still able to capture the sense of needy desperation in her portrayal of the forlorn ghost of Janice Short last night, bringing a ghostly sexuality that is so needy it simultaneously arouses and spooks us.

The hungry ghost / sexual sacrifice on the tortuous wheel of insatiable lust motif permeates American Horror Story. It is so L.A., and the actors playing desperate Hollywood fortune seekers broken on the rocks of skeevy casting couches clearly tap into their own experiences. The house maid Moira (Frances Conroy) is a ghost who appears as a young hottie incarnation (Alexandra Breckenridge) of herself to desiring men - clouding their perceptions, exposing them to judgment from their daughters when they're seen fooling around with a woman old enough to be their grandmother. We in the audience are forced into a very creepy realization - all hot young women become old and unsexy eventually so our desire for their young flesh and revulsion toward the old is suddenly revealed as a kind of fever dream grab at immortality. And most of all, we're faced with the question what is more important - that our friends think the girl we're shagging is hot, but we find her hideous - or vice versa? We can't overestimate the idea that the value of beauty in women lies largely in our status amongst our peers for 'having' them. Even rolling in the hay with a goddess we may be doomed to not fully pay attention to the sensations of the moment, imagining instead the high fives and admiration to come the next day amidst our inner circle. In other words, even in the moment of our ultimate desire's realization, we instinctively pull away -- already reflecting on what it will be like to have had our desire realized, as if we can't wait to get away from it, and Lacan smiles knowingly at your disillusion. He shouts, "Now! Now take a look around you and see things as they really are!" But you are already staring at a hot chick across the street. This time, it's forever.

Last night's episode showed that this clouding can be broken through via a man who is able to refuse his desires for a purpose other than fear or guilt. In this case Dr. Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott) is able to refuse not one but two seduction attempts that are created straight out of the Penthouse forum pages, and Ben--who we know from earlier episodes is pretty weak-willed and considers his sexual needs a priority over all else-- has good reason to act on his fantasies: his wife and daughter out of the house (we never see the daughter in the entire episode), and learning of his wife's infidelity as the perfect excuse.

That he does not, even with no strict moral impetus hanging over his neck, is what breaks the spell. Buddhists call this 'moksha' or the ability to transcend ego via the abandoning of the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, tedium, etc. The realization whatever we run from chases us and whatever we chase runs, therefore we find pain always hot on our heels and pleasure always just out of reach. Or as the Eagles song goes: "Some dance to remember, some dance to forget." And it's the same dance either way. The pain of remembrance exists only in relation to our resistance, just as pleasure exists largely in terms of its delay. Ben's big breakthrough this episode was a refusal of the hungry ghost appetite even though fear of being caught became no longer a factor. In other words, even with no witnesses and no possible reward for his asceticism, he chooses it anyway, and this is the only time it's ever worth a damn, for morality under the gun is only obsequiousness, itself a kind of sin. To thine own self be true, but is lust true?

That said, a lack of appetite for illusion has no place in haunted Los Angeles. The ghosts in his house, such as his ex-mistress student Hayden (Kate Mara), long and pine and remain trapped in perpetual hungry ghost longing. But on the other hand, they don't have to pay rent! They don't have to sleep, or eat, or go to work, or face rejection by the outside world. As the song goes "this may be heaven or this may be hell" and in Hotel California the difference is erased, just as the dance is both to remember and to forget. Either way we play it we can still hear the voices calling from far away, waking us up in the middle of the night, just to hear them say "thanks for coming in but I'm afraid we're looking for someone just a little bit younger."

THE BIG CUBE (1969) - Lana Turner and the Unscrupulous Doser

2011-11-28T11:33:00.002-05:00

Acid has long been considered a safe, healthy, happy, spiritually freeing drug, at least by me in the late 1980s, but even then I was a conscientious individual ever aware of the mind-bending, never-ending roller coaster of terror that results from taking too much --not to mention the left-out feeling of boredom and missed opportunity that results from taking too little, and by extension the danger of trying to then take more, before the first hits have given their all. A very, very powerful substance is our friend LSD. One drop can set your soul free to be alive on inter-dimensional levels beyond time and space. Five drops and you better get sloppy drunk... fast. Or, if no one can spare a Valium, you can always chug some Nyquil before the demons get you.

Chakris advises his ant customers

If you're malicious and unscrupulous and have a a vial of liquid you can do a great deal of damage to someone's conception of reality by emptying said vial into someone one's drink. The CIA did some notorious experiments in that regard, and much clawing out of eyes and off of faces ensued. Even if you know what you're getting into you're liable to claw your way through this disguise before you make it to the ER and its waiting drip of sweet Thorazine. The equivalent of cutting or anorexia at the time, in my crowd, was, I remember, taking like half a sheet of blotter in a last ditch effort to break through the veil before the depression makes you do something even more desperate (this being long before Prozac went mainstream). Those who dared always wound up hospitalized.

Pamela Rogers (left) almost saves Lisa from being a stone drag

A similar thing occurs with the maligned Ropey, i.e. Rohipynol. Today it's stigmatized as 'the date rape drug,' which means, yes, it removes inhibitions and zonks you out and eliminates memory and motor coordination and spiking anyone's drink without their consent should be a crime in and of itself. However, in small doses, taken intentionally, with a consensual partner, it can be rather liberating. A half a pill makes for a dynamite Halloween party; a whole pill makes it suddenly Sunday.

All of which is a preface to the candy-colored opus of bargain basement glitz and now generational posing known as THE BIG CUBE. An underrated camp classic from 1969, year of the Manson, and starring Lana Turner as a former Broadway star who's retired (in a Mexico-L.A. hybrid) with her new wealthy industrialist husband (Dan O'Herlihy) and his sheltered 'pure' stepdaughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg), who dresses like she's still 12 and at her first church social.

Lisa reacts not well to the new step-mom, and in a passive-aggressive moment of naivete, takes up with a smooth-talking med student played by George 'Shark' Chakris and his gang of former and future lovers and hipster pallies, including the cat-like blast and cool soul of the film, Bibi (Pamela Rogers). Captive Wild Woman (from whom I cribbed many of these screenshots) loves Pamela Rogers in this film, and I totally dig it:

Saving it all from becoming a big snore-fest is Pamela Rodgers as Bibi, who appears to have landed from the planet DumbSlut1969. She is the BEST! I was going to include some of her dialogue but then I found a YouTube clip (see below) that does her much more justice. I could never convey the fantastic bubble-brained delivery she strives to deliver so expertly. I LOVE all scenes featuring Bibi and only wish the entire movie revolved around her. (more)

Alas, Bibi is only on the periphery, as the story has places to go, and drive crazy. Chakris' med student status means he has unlimited access to commercial grade LSD and since he uses it for evil he's a dangerous mix of Manson and a SHAMPOO-style gigolo. LSD wasn't even officially illegal until around '68 and was used all over for psychiatric treatments (with great effect, making its banning the true crime). And when the dad conveniently dies in an off-camera yachting accident, the stage is set for the unscrupulous doser and Lisa to drive the already shaken Lana over the edge via massive LSD spiking of her Valium supply.

An interesting comparison can be made between this film and the AIP title ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO! (1968), which also concerns an heiress getting involved with the now generation and letting a charismatic young cult leader type convince her to arrange the deaths of her rich parents (Jennifer Jones fills the Lana Turner glamorous mom role) and let the gang move into the mansion. ANGEL kind of loses momentum by the time it decides to critique materialism, while CUBE ends up being a self-reflexive epiphany ala Freud (the only way to 'cure' Lana of her strange affliction is to write a play about her boating accident so she can make peace with her drowned husband). The subtext bespeaks a very conservative prurience about this new craziness amongst the youth. It's like once you go into the world of LSD the only way out is to go post-modern Brechtian and re-imagine your life as a play which you can then act out with a different ending. And of course, that's how it happens in real life!

The moments with Lana on acid are freaky, but the really scary moment is when Chakris spikes the drink of a guy at the club... just for being a douche. The guy freaks out, starts tearing up the joint and is thrown out on the street raving like a foam-mouthed, face-clawing lunatic. As someone whose been there, I had a lot of sympathetic frisson for this clown. Taking the right dosage can be like being lifted up the ladder of your own evolution. Too much is like having the ladder shoved down your throat while Hell's full roster of demons peel your skin off and every kid who ever hurt you in grade school materializes like accusatory, sneering ghosts to laugh at your extreme skinless nakedness.

Acid is shown in the film almost purely as a weapon in THE BIG CUBE, and it shows how it's too dangerous to be left to criminals. Legal, it could be diluted to the point where overdose was a difficult task, in the twilight world of schedule one substances, it's a risk in the best of times. So... know your dealer, stay away from sleazy gigolo med students, and err on the side of prudence til your batch's strength is tested. Or you could just say no, but don't you want to see what heaven and hell look like before you die?

Speaking of movies, Michael Frost at Helsinki Productions as used footage from the CUBE as jumping off points into deep strangeness. They are awesome and truly weird. If for no other reason, THE BIG CUBE is a classic.

Here's the second in what we can only hope is a million part series, LANA TURNER AND THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (I'm hoping the next one is LANA TURNER'S PERSONA). Stick around for the climax, where Turner is revealed as the Goddess worshipped by the cats of the blue and pink inter-dimensional plane of cats!

Men Who Are Frozen

2011-11-25T15:37:00.013-05:00

Top to Bottom: Forever Young; Captain America; Matter of Life and Death

Is FOREVER YOUNG (1992, top) in its blessed ignorance of the 9/11 to come, a sequel out-of-time to CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (2011)? Taken together they form a Moebius strip: AMERICA ends 70 years after it begins, with a psychedelic steampunk abstract version of WW2--replete with octopus swastika that's a cross between the dragon swastika of the Thule-esque fringe group in HELLBOY and the 'later' insignia for S.P.E.C.T.R.E... FOREVER YOUNG begins in 1939 and ends 53 years later, in the then current moment of 1992. Both film's stars death defy (Mel Gibson in YOUNG is a test pilot) and both are deeply frozen in their (and our nation's) prime--one is motivated grief, one by sacrifice.

In this way there's also some echoes throughout all this with Powell and Pressburger's classic STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, AKA A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946). David Niven isn't deep-frozen in that one, but he does hang suspended between life and death after he has to jump from his burning bomber without a parachute, and like Hellboy, Captain America, and Mel Gibson in FOREVER YOUNG, he has a hard time talking to the girl he loves, June (Kim Hunter). Oh, he can talk to her when he thinks he's going to die, and she's safely on the other end of a radio receiver, trying to guide him in through the fog from bomber command. Their chemistry in their scene is terrific, but then again they aren't really in the same scene at all, or even the same altitude. But they fall in love just the same. In wartime there is no room for waffling and being coy. When love strikes, the victims act, in great spasms of each-breath-may-be-your-last intensity. The thought of having to die and not be with June is too much for Niven to bear, though his angelic summons bearer consoles him he may get to meet her again... when she's 97.

So the age thing comes up again. Men are immortal but the women age. The man snoozes through the decades in ice or clouds without suffering the long-term wear and tear that erases the youthful bloom from the woman. And what happened to the lady Captain America (Chris Evans) left behind in the 1940s, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell)? Atwell is aces and I appreciate they made her way tougher than any Lois Lane-type, but still she seems to have traveled back in time from our more liberated decade. Unless I missed something in the credits, by the time 2011 rolls around, she's presumably wicked old or dead.

What in 1992 with Mel Gibson became a geriatric-romantic fantasia as he races to find his old bitty becomes in 2011 not even worth asking about; a mere regret. Captain A. notes to Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D (though Fury too, presumably was frozen since he fought WW2 as Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos and looks relatively young... and suddenly black), "I had a date." According to the Comicvine, Peggy Carter is "residing at the Larkmoore Clinic due to old age and possibly Alzheimer's disease."

You think Mel would have let that stop him?

Luckily for Mel's lovelorn pilot he starts to rapidly age soon after he's thawed from his (co-invented with George Wendt) cryogenic prototype. Thawing him, by accident, is a plucky young boy (Elijah Wood) and his pal who help Mel reach his eighties right as he reunites with his lost love, who just happens to have a landing strip-sized front lawn. For Captain A., however, there can be no such strip and no such Wood. Seventy years is just too damned long to pick up the pieces. And so it is on this past Thanksgiving I celebrated via and through CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, a country built on the urge to escape... from religious oppression, from time, from the ice, from girls your own age.

But Americans don't stop there. Even in our new safe haven we knew that to be free and safe and cozy we must go deeper still, into the tinsel-and-celluloid palm trees, into the pulp novel and comics, into 3-D and Cinemascope, ever searching for a new and novel way to chill ourselves out, to get away from our parents, or our screeching spouses, or our needy, nagging children. Freezing ourselves, as Americans, becomes the new sky-diving, the new crack, the new coke, better than a quart of bourbon and a W.C. Fields tape. You go to bed, and when you wake up technology and changing tastes and inflation have altered the landscape so fast that in a mere half a century you may as well be on Mars.... and you skip the hangover.

The bad guy, the Red Skull, is seen in alternating set-ups, Hugo Weaving doing a Christophe Waltz accent in the key of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK meets JONAH HEX-style world domination. He's real only in the need of the creators to outdo the Nazis, to take evil one better, in insignia and in style. Captain America was always a throw-back to the dawn of comic books, when nearly every superhero tangled regularly with the Axis, including Captain Marvel, Captain Midnight, Captain Blackhawk, and so forth, and the colors of their uniforms needed to be bright and distinct from the backgrounds for the crude 4-color newsprint process. These early comics were cozily satisfying, but their idiotic use of sidekicks (Bucky Dent is here at least an adult) and easy victories has made them easily outgrow-able. Sidekicks were abandoned once the fans of comics grew up and took over the writing jobs.

But seriously, does anyone really love Captain America? No. He seems like he was created by some drab civics committee to deflect flak about juvenile delinquency. Comic book fans in the 1980s loved, as I did, the Fantastic Four when drawn by Kirby or John Byrne. We loved the X-Men as written by Chris Clarendon. We loved Frank Miller's stint with Daredevil, but Captain America (I presume since I never read the CA comics) could never get too dark, he stood for something, and thus seemed wooden, like a support rod for a tomato plant --and here the baroque steampunk version of WW2 is, in retrospect, vaguely disrespectful. In the 1940s comics it was okay to give Nazis superpowers and gigantic death rays, but it seems now to diminish the true heroics of the men and women who fought in that war. And when I see villains wasting time staring at glowing green or blue power sources I begin to think of RED SONJA (1985). Man, I really wanted that movie to be good. But it wasn't. Each bad scene and haircut stretched time to tedium where freezing oneself to get to the credits, seemed to be already happening. Red Skull fares only moderately better in that regard. Red does not mean hot in these cases. Like Captain America, Red Sonja even as a comic character seemed exist soley to indulge some base instinct (patriotism is the last refuge of the sexually frustrated).

As a comic reading middle schooler, is it worth it to escape the dread of having to make a move on a pretty girl with your whole rep hanging in the balance as buddies egg you on from across the playground, without blushing like a moron, or feeling your knees were going to collapse beneath you? All the self-sabotage made retreat into comic book-reading on my bedroom beanbag chair all but the only option, the great American escape story.

In the summer, in the early 80s, I'd put my feet up on both sides of the central air vent, letting my crotch cool from the blasts of arctic frost. What I mean is, I never had time to have a child thanks to permafrost sterility, over-population, and varicoceles. And all my loves now since aged into dreadful moms and withered forty year-olds. It's enough to make me wear a beard, and a mask of a younger man to cover my too-late completely blushless mummy skin. If I freeze myself until their grandchildren are over 18, does that make me skeevy to hit on them when I am woken? These are no longer just the concerns of 100 year-old hunk vampires, but of cryogenic America, a country built on the freedom to defy authority, natural aging processes, time, space, and the lessons of history.

Freeze me, then, Big Red Sonja Skull, so I can miss Christmas and airport anxiety and just magically get to the time when that AVENGERS movie is finally released... as an eye drop of digitally encoded biotechnology that lets me dream it in 4-D. Freeze me, December, and let me remember a time when I, too, felt human... and 22.

When I was 22, I had a very good year.

Prepare the ray and let's pull this spinning planet to a stop. Lois Lane crawls through the bushes looking for her Indiana Jones blue pills but there is no blue pill. That's what no one told Neo - the blue pill was a sugar placebo. There never was a choice of not burning in blushing idiot reject hell. Every decade spent hiding in the cold just postponed our initiation until the girl we wanted to ask to the prom went and married someone else, and is now dust, or worse, a mom.

Thanksgiving with the Matriarchy: THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME (TVM-1978)

2011-11-24T12:55:00.002-05:00

This rare and delightfully strange TV movie, based on the Thomas Tyron novel, makes fine post-autumnal equinox-style viewing. It's all in the name: harvest, home, and it's about family, and agrarian matriarchal cults that bring back the old ways but.... I've said too much already. They may be listening, the cornucopia held up to the door to hear my whispered clacking.

Anyway, iis a strange feminist-phobic film starring a young Rosanna Arquette, a Bette Davis-eyed matron, and TV vets like Linda Marsh and Michael O'Keefe. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, and I never saw the end. Parents made me go to bed. I missed the ends of countless movies in those hard years. But I heard the end from the kids at school, and I never forgot THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME.

The story involves the typical suburban family settling in a strange New England town. A blind man listens to books-on-tape there. How did he get blinded? What does he know too much about? Why do women run everything like some Neil LaBute nightmare come to life?

Would Camille Paglia dig this movie? She would. Is it the perfect family film to see on youtube in 13 chapters while your dad watches football, or your grandparents aw gee over the family fare that chokes TCM on holidays? It would. Long live the sisterhood of the scythe!

Part 1 of 13

Twilo When I was Young

2011-11-22T13:53:00.005-05:00

"Sexuality is a murky realm of contradiction and ambivalence. It cannot always be understood by social models, which feminism, as an heir of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, insists on imposing on it... It cannot be "fixed" by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society." - Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

"I can't help it if you might think I am odd / If I say I'm not loving you for what you are
but for what you're not." -- Bob Dylan, "I'll Keep it with Mine"

Haters love to dismiss the Twilight films sight unseen, but they do so at their own peril. The New Sincerity, you can't escape, any more than our collective rattletrap beachfront condo can escape the wrath of 2012's rising tides. Will you be drowned in the pool of tweenage tears, or stand up and be counted, neck seared by the puncturing flames of angst along the water's edge?

I'm excited about the EMERGING DAWN or whatever it's called. When I flew down to visit my mom and grieve my late father this weekend, pictures of Kristen Stewart rubbing her flat white pregnant with half-vampire baby belly were all over the USA Todays and NY Times papers floating around the airport lounges and airplane seats. In the rush of pressurized cabins and the endless boarding calls, these pictures took on an unheimliche aura that I found irresistible. Then, watching ECLIPSE and NEW MOON on my mom's huge flat screen I could appreciate the films' sublime mix of gorgeous scenery, operatic brooding (the kind WB Aaron Spelling himbos only dream of) and mythic family dynamics. The latter in particular is so strong --the sense of belonging or wanting to be belong, or about to be initiated into a pack of cool older kids--and so central to any alienated youth fantasy's success you'd think it would be a regular feature of teen movies, but you'd be wrong, and that in itself shows what idiots most filmmakers are. Like overpaid hack Joe Ezterhaz's Catherine Trammel, who is given Lecter-like powers of manipulation thanks to her 'Bachelor's in Psychology', Mormon author Stephanie Meyers wins by default, because her fantasy world is genuinely Jungian, not Freudian, not smarmian, not dickheadian. It never snickers or leers, and even when confronted with a bunch of muscled Native American males, there's never a wolf call. Just as the douche bags and dillweeds never make it past the chicken wire fence of our psyches, so too is the Pacific Northwest of Meyers' imagination a perfect mirror of a genuine dreamworld. That it's a 15 year old girl's dreamworld and not mine matters not. In dreams we are all ageless, and gender is as flexible as set and setting, we all dream Tiresias. All that matters for true myth to function is that the chivalry of Camelot meet the wild woods of Hans Christen Andersen; that the nightmare projections of lonely girls making out with their tear-stained pillows in the dead of night sometimes come to life in white-as-a-sheet complexioned animae; that cool music by Bon Iver and Mazzy Star-stained chanteuses find its ultimate visual in the misty mountain hops of the Pacific NW.

As an older viewer I identify neither with the Edwards nor the Jacobs, but with the moldy old growth forest bearing witness to their duels. I view it all as the Merlin-Green Man or Tiresias, bearing fathomlessly patient witness to the unfurling events from the vantage point of the fern camera. And since most straight guys in their 40s like me wouldn't give the Twilight films a viewing even if they were forced to on a plane, I take it as a duty to flaunt my championing, even as I question the 'rightness' of it. I'm not sure I'll ever actually pay to go see Breaking Dawn in the theater, but I salute its existence eventually on DVD rental. And when I'm old and enfeebled like T.S. Eliot I'll probably buy the complete set on blu-ray to watch all alone in long sittings when I'm emotionally disturbed and afraid to leave the house. But until then, come with me into my past writings on this great series. First, ECLIPSE:

"...the realization of modern myth requires teenagers to resonate, as all fairy tales involve the very young. Never forget that in the days of King Arthur, the oldest person–Merlin–was probably in his early 30s... Considering the sexist neoconservative consumerism-product placed orgasm-oriented flicks that predominate so-called ‘women’s pictures’ or rom-coms, TWILIGHT alone understands the supernatural power that can be had in rejecting bland hand-me-down values. The pro-virginity aspect is the 21st century Antigone move, the way not being a virgin was in the 1920s. I know very well the way a woman you haven’t had sex with can inspire like no other muse, and the way a 100-year old lecher in a teen idol’s body can wreak merry havoc on pouty-lipped teenager brain stems, and I know these things to be true, and that as an artist or writer, that kind of inspiration should always trump the pitiful and misleading call of the proprietary orgasm. Edward knows it too…. sigh (Bright Lights, 1/11)

Then, on the first two films and the general 'concerned mom' backlash over the second film I wrote the feature length (for Bright Lights Film Journal)

"Eternal virginity via sacrifice in the Twilight-verse thus equals the preservation of youth, of sparing a beautiful creature the passage into the world of cruel, devouring nature. This is essentially what Edward works towards in refusing to punk Bella out to the vampire way of life, to prevent her from having any traumatic or otherwise significant experiences, to keep her isolated from "the real." Yet the imaginary level he exists in hinges on promises of danger, sex, and being turned into a vampire for it to hold any interest at all. For Edward to, in a sense, "exist" in Bella's life, she must stay virginal; the blood he drinks is supposedly from animals or something, but it's clear his spiritual power is derived from keeping Bella sustained in perpetual adolescence." - "Someone to Fight Over Me." (Bright Lights #68, May 2010)

I bring in this Neil Diamond song as 'Shilo' is an excellent anima example, Shilo as the Edward to Neil Diamond's Bella: "When no one else would come / Shilo, you always came."And of course, Twilo (left) was a once very popular, now closed, mostly gay but extremely hetero friendly all-night dance club - the place to go when the rest of New York was finally closed, the sun was coming up, and dawn was breaking, and you were still too high on ecstasy and/or cocaine and/or acid and/or shrooms to consider going to sleep.

That breaking dawn vibe of your heart beating like mad at the thought of bedding one of the three girls still up with you and how to sneak away from the others, and where the hell your keys are but you're so high you don't care, that's what the Twilight films conjure up for me, that and the aching soul vibe that my mom's LP of Neil Diamond's 12 Greatest Hits gave me as a six year old in the 1970s, where Kate Jackson was my Shiloh, and she always came, but I had to go bed before Charlie's Angels came on (damn you, ABC!)

And, from 1/7/08 (The Beautiful and the Darned) after the first film came out:

"TWILIGHT it must be remembered, has nothing to do with "real" high school or "real" horror films - it's a fantasia of maturity deferment; a snapshot of how pregnant with dangerous, giddy possibility the world seems before one gets their first "bite." It's permanently frozen at the moment of rapture/rupture, right before the disillusionment of the first sexual experience (see also: THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) with a guy who promises you the world, then splits. The idea of an ageless vampire here becomes an excuse for the eternal virgin prepubescence; an eternity dwelling at the edge of the cliff that all your friends are now beginning to dive off of (and looking kind of busted when they resurface, if they ever do).

"Aren't movies primarily vehicles for escape? In the case of TWILIGHT, what the girl demographic is escaping from is their own wooden stake penetration, the pink dawn of the mighty crowing cock. Who can blame them? I remember my revulsion at seeing hairy 1970s nudist magazines being circulated in elementary school. Could people really be doing these things with their... ? It seemed unsanitary, violent and most of all, painfully humiliating. The giddy night of the prom starts out flowers and anticipation, it ends up pig's blood and Trip Fontaine splitting before you wake up in the wet grass of the football field.

"What eased the fear of this sullied maturation when I was of TWILIGHT age? Pamela Sue Martin as TV's NANCY DREW, Kate Jackson in CHARLIE'S ANGELS...much of TV at the time fostered a dependable sexlessness, the promise of an eternity of hand-holding and chaste confessions of love and adoration, as opposed to a humiliating orifice merger."

Finally, from 1/20/09, Tortured Longing is the New Coke:

"TWILIGHT fuels the fire of sadomasochistic alchemy wherein torture becomes pleasure, denial becomes acceptance, submission becomes freedom. Through recognition and release of the associated fear, not having becomes having it all. The girls of TWILIGHT ween themselves off desire through recognition of its impossibility. They’ve been set free, like Jonathan Pryce at the end of BRAZIL, looking out at the clouds while one of his torturers (Michael Palin) sadly realizes, “he’s gotten away from us, Jack!” These TWILIGHT girls have gotten away from us, Jack. They’ve found a streak of neo-Victorian repression that leads them clear away from Big Brother and his sublimation dream wheel."

The dream wheel, damn right. So this Thanksgiving, if you see a weird looking dude alone in the Twilight Twilo Shilo sea, getting his ticket with shaky hands, the 90s ecstasy abuse still leaving nervous tremors long after the last club's closed, have a little sympathy and don't judge him as some perv... maybe he just finds in the quiet passions and purple scenery and lush music and pouts and paleness something 'real' for his psyche that no other avenue can provide. We Tiresiae and Merlins and vampires all transcend our age, gender, and desire. And PS - there's nothing gay about... THE IMMORTALS!

Pre-Code Capsules 9: BEHIND THE MASK, DR. X, TROUBLE IN PARADISE, BLESSED EVENT, THE BLUE ANGEL

2011-11-16T09:40:00.004-05:00

BEHIND THE MASK
1932 - ***
The great forgotten Jack Holt stars as a fed with a yen for weird undercover work in this pulpy thriller. He poses as a convict so he can win the trust of nervous con Boris Karloff, so he can hit him up later for a job and expose a racket that hides dope in caskets and is masterminded by a shadowy Mabuse-type. Edward Everett-Sloan is either a sinister doctor or a good one and there's a vast spy network full of dark-eyed bit players. Holt has to be the worst federal agent in the world, endangering his witnesses and letting himself be snowed over by any old disguise or pretense, but he seems like Carl Denham's pilot brother, so dig. Meanwhile his girl, Constance Cummings, tries to save her dad, a doctor in 'a lot of trouble' and a little romance bloometh. And she's even remarkably capable, which is a switch for these things.

It all climaxes in a scene where the masked evil doctor refuses to give Holt anesthetic for his planned operation, because he wants him to experience the magic moment when excruciating pain becomes ecstasy. Batailles and dimestore pulp come together with the Universal horror stock company so you need to see it, one way or another, but the best it does really is approach in its last five minutes the cock-eyed madness of any five minutes of DR. X (this guy even has the same name), but as the guy who wrote for the NY Times used to say, "you won't doze."

BLESSED EVENT
1932 - ***1/2
If you've been always a bit cold on Lee Tracy this is the film that will make you warm up. He's like Jimmy Cagney crossed with the adenoidal scarecrow as the quintessential fast-talking gossip columnist, ushering in a new low in journalism via the ratting out of 'blessed events' - i.e. children born less than nine months after the couple's been married, or outside of wedlock, or etc. Remember when that was a scandal? Me neither. But the big redemption moment is when Tracy bluffs Allen Jenkins' mob hitman via monologue about an electric chair execution of a woman, which Tracy covered, that brings Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY-worthy manic pantomime to some balls-out ghastly places. (The infamous electric chair picture chronicled in the Cagney film PICTURE SNATCHER is seen). As he talks and goes on in his demonstration of the execution he gets more and more hysterical, voice cracking, movements getting sharp and jerky as he describes the anguish of waiting in hopes of a reprieve, the shaky steps of the last mile, puking up the last meal, the rigor mortis and hair burning. It's the sort of thing that only the pre-codes could delve into, and this delves so deep you're quaking along with Jenkins by the end, and all traces of your dislike of Tracy have been obliterated in the electricity-rich air.

Roy Del Ruth directed and the rapid patter pace is awesome except when Dick Powell's lame songs slow things down but with regulars like Edwin Maxwell, Ned Sparks, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly, Jack La Rue, and Rita Cunningham this would give HIS GIRL FRIDAY a run for its money and make a fine double bill. Add references to Jews. ("Do you know many Jews there are in New York?" "Oh, dozens!"), Amos and Andy, and a wild-eyed girl at 'in trouble' played with deranged ferocity and desperation by a ragged-looking creature named Isabell Jewell (left), and you have a whipsmack pre-code that makes your scalp stand on end, You will also come out of this film learning what 'nadir' means.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE
1932 - ****
It took awhile for the greatness of this film to resonate with me. I had to see it enough times that the languid differences materialize: The excited way the Italian hotelier translates EE Horton's story of how he got robbed in his room, just the way the film doesn't 'Americanize' the dialogue like so many lazier Hollywood films, but bothers to fill it with Italian, and then French. The elaborate tale of how fast gossip travels, so that Miriam Hopkins is getting verification requests from duchesses mere minutes after being spotted in the lobby by a nosy count. (and it's all rot, of course), so though Herbert Marshall isn't Cary Grant, or Melvyn Douglas, or even Ronald Coleman, he swoons well and convinces you, through two layers of subterfuge, he's genuinely, as a man confident in his sexuality, in love with the moon (he wants to see it reflected in champagne) and the women around him.

Who wouldn't be? Miriam displays her wide, loose midsections proudly in some tight-clinging dresses, giving you the vibe that, as Dave's mom used to say, "She moves from her cunt, cunt-first." She's from the 1960s in South Africa, so it's okay for her to observe this, the way their first kiss on the couch seems to make them slowly dissolve until the couch is empty.

As always, Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles are Francis's weak-armed suitors. And Gustav Von Seffeyritz humbugs with gusto as the chairman of the board who suspects Marshall is a crook, just as he is himself, the blighter. But who would be able to resist robbing Kay Francis?

"I'm a sad panda..."

THE BLUE ANGEL
1930 - ***
To really appreciate THE BLUE ANGEL let go of your preconceptions as far as Dietrich's other films with Von Sternberg and think of this more as the bridge between their Hollywood collaborations and the 'tortured clown' silent films starring Lon Chaney and usually directed by Todd Browning, that were once super popular and which Acidemic contributor Budd Wilkins has termed the "masochistic melodrama" genre (See his Chaney reviews here) wherein a circus magician or something like that, often deformed, falls madly in love with, say, the acrobat at the circus, who throws him over the handsome strongman, and so--after copious scenes of masochistic humiliation, usually before a jeering crowd of spectators-- he runs berserk, torturing the bad guys, or killing himself in spectacular fashion. BLUE ANGEL might best be understood as the chrysalis between the caterpillar of silent masochistic melodrama (similar chrysalises would later show up in the art house, like Bergman's SAWDUST AND TINSEL, and, if you stretch it, LA STRADA) and the sound era pre-code butterfly.

But Emil Jannings is a damn unsightly kind of creepy crawler. Rather than stir our sympathy Jannings' ever more out-maneuvered Herr Professor inspires nothing but ennui so there's little masochistic payoff. He's asking for a take-down via his asexual smug judgment of Lola and her postcards which he finds in his student's schoolbooks. And as he makes his downward slide, his slow motion expressionist pantomime reaches for grand tragedy in a way that makes you think Chaney is down to his last few faces, and is searching vainly in the mud for one more piece of sawdust and/or tinsel. With his bug-eyed outraged head facing the camera from the same angle, round glasses and Satanic facial hair swirling, Jannings works very hard at keeping his head always in the center of the frame while his body twists and turns like a big old bug caught in a spider web. But to what effect? Nevah vanted doo.

Shot in Weimar Germany before Dietrich's studio-ordered nose job, molar removal and diet. If not for the cynical smile and flashing, darting eyes, she might pass for her own sister, the one who stayed in Berlin mit die schwarzwaldkuchen und bier. But Von Sternberg is in fine form; he lights the Blue Angel club like a crazy expressionist side show and if you just act like the light and dark are the real stars of the film, it definitely is the masterpiece so many claim.

Still, more than in any subsequent films, Sternberg's masochism is a downer. Always portraying the suitors of his lovely star Dietrich as buffoons, bug-eyed blowhards, shameless masochists, or authoritarian bullies (or else they rarely speak at all and operate as sex objects themselves, like Gary Cooper in MOROCCO), Von Sternberg's obsessions can sometimes seem the cinematic equivalent of a jealous, angry lover defacing pictures of his romantic rivals. One would normally ask of a pre-code, yes, it's fun and sleazy, but is it art? But in DER BLAU ENGEL one knows its art, and its sleazy, but is it any fun? As Herman Cain would say, Nein Nein Nein!

DR. X
1933 - ***1/2
Time and digital re-colorization has been kind to DR. X, which uses the 3-strip early color process that, on VHS back in the day, aged and ended up making the film look blurry and muddy and depressing. Now there are lots of emeralds and murky pinks and deep, bloody reds. Fay Wray is the daughter of Lionel Atwill, who gets lots of ham time as the titular Dr. Xavier, out to trap the "full moon killer" amongst his creepily-lit collection of scientific colleagues, each of whom grows more indignant and suspicious the longer we see them: Dr. Welles, for example, has made a study of cannibalism and has been keeping a heart alive in an 'electrolysis solution' for the last three years, but his missing arm preempts further suspicion; Dr. Haines was shipwrecked for years and his tasty, plump colleague was never found; the one-eyed Dr. Rowen studies lunar rays effects on criminal minds but notes that "the lunar rays will never effect you and me, sir, because we are normal people."

There's lots of subtextual resonance throughout but the post-modern self-reflexive commentary of the doctors chained to their chairs with their pulses linked to vials of blood that overflow like a buzzer at the top of a Coney Island strength tester is very reminiscent of the audience for a horror movie, just like the one you're watching, as the murders are reenacted on stage before them in grisly tableaux. And notions of the duality inherent in language gets a lot of subliminal attention too: Xavier's outrage over each of the new accusations of his colleague belies its opposite: "Dr. Rowen could never never be the guilty one," means he thinks he is, while Lee Tracy regularly promises not to do something while then turning around and doing it. Meanwhile, Xavier's grave pronouncements of things like "There can be no doubt about it, gentlemen - this is cannibalism!" are allowed no argument since they carry his medical weight. And now that you're not annoyed by Lee Tracy anymore maybe you wont want to tear his picture apart with your bare hands when you learn he gets Fay Wray in the end. Chained, for your own amusement, indeed.

Screams within Screens within SCREAM 4

2011-11-13T17:55:00.007-05:00

O Courtney Cox, you were my favorite Friend; now with lip all ducky and face glowing like a luminous nerve toxin mask and your character foolishly yoked to David Arquette's ever-wincing and criminally incompetent sheriff yours is truly a SCREAM 4 for the Munch. Just as the ghostface mask is frozen in a 'Scream' so is your once gorgeous face frozen in a world you never made, and which you haunt in a shadow state like that other memorable Munch painting, Madonna.

The rest of the cast is also back, with changes reflecting the longer stretch since the last carve-up. Now Sidney's a chastened author of survival memoirs, Courtney's a stay at home fiction writer wife to Dewey, who's incompetence has devolved into something akin to mild retardation. His bewildered, pleading look lets your know he can't find his cell phone when the killer calls, let alone a hole in the ground, though he's determined to do all the decision-making. He's the sheriff! Meanwhile, he's given a cute but bonkers deputy with DSM-IV-darkened teeth, upping the ante of hot mess women in his life. This poor debuty doesn't even think to take her gun out of the holster even though she knows there's a mass murderer in the next room!

"Take me to ze towns with incompetent sheriffs!"

The last time a sheriff and deputy were this outmaneuvered was in Monogram's 1944 classic, VOODOO MAN (above). As happened there and in SCREAM 4, the characters eventually learn to not even bother calling the cops, who would likely just shoot them by mistake. But Dudley Manlove, or Wally or Dewey or whatever his name is over in Screamville is worse, for in his refusal to receive any help from his far more competent wife he directly endangers the lives of his entire town.

The tragedy that marks SCREAM 4 as the logical extension of the first three lies in media evolution, which is the best thing about it, that post-modern edge, the accidental jackpot of realizing that self reflexivity heightens scariness. The first one was just itself in relation to other horror films, specifically from the 1970s-80s. SCREAM 2 added a film called Stab, based on the 'true events' from the first film. The third brought the cast to the making of the sequel. The fourth finds the Stab sequels up to number seven, and everyone watching them on youtube, even while they're being stalked and stabbed in 'real' life.

The 'ghostface' voice that calls everyone on their cells to taunt them and ask them horror trivia (PS- I knew every answer!) is aactually available as an iPhone app so even getting the call is no guarantee it's the 'real' killer. And the real killer sounds less scary and more just old--a Stuntman Mike from beyond the film's ageist cast list--and slick from over-familiarity. More could have been made of him sounding old as if Hamlet's father's ghost or Charlie on Charlie's Angels. We never see old people in the film, so he becomes--even though we know the voice isn't 'his' but some phone app--a representation of age and decay more sad than scary, less scary by far than the creepy old couple in MULHOLLAND DR.

Focus, please.... focus

It's all meta only in the way that the characters say the word meta and pretend to be empowered even as they tastelessly prank call each other mere hours after learning their friends have been murdered, like eloi in The Time Machine. No one thinks about arming themselves, or staying indoors at night, or not answering the door, or yelling for help, or calling the cops, or looking in closets in advance of letting their guard down and feeling 'safe' in a room. The film would have benefited from someone who doesn't wait before she is the final girl before they finally pull one of the ever-present butcher knives from the tasteful wooden counter top knife block, or gouge the eyes and poke the sweet spot when being strangled.

But there is that subtextual fear of aging working strange magic: the smearing the lens with Vaseline and deep color washing makes all the girl's faces til they glow in an airbrushed blur that lights them up in the dark. It can only be some stipulation in the Cox contract, but the message is clear - no one knows the difference between movie and real life anymore, even inside the movie itself, and the high color style gloss underwrites a miraculous disconnect that helps people hide from their own aging or sense of self-preservation. They even cheer bloody movies based on their own future deaths; like a man cheerfully devouring his own foot and working his way along the digestive ouroboros centipede until all that's left is a desert snifter of credits and theme crunk.

The only one who sees past it all is the mighty Sidney (Neve Campbell who stars even without plastic surgery addiction) who, like all chastened lovers in films, comes home on a book tour for her self-help memoir. Sidney's self-serious pout and moistened eyes show she's secretly well-aware that the only one who survives these events takes them super seriously, but even she doesn't bother to employ standard dirty fighting tricks until all of her friends are dead. The rest of the cast lives only for their death scenes and have all the survival instincts of Yvette Mimieux and company when the horn goes off and morlocks come calling or one of them almost drowns (above). It's mildly scary when the SCREAM kids encounter the killer but once they're stabbed and bubbling blood out their mouths, there's no longer pain or tragedy --they become merely actors game for a throe, even tossing off bon mots right before their death rattles.

The sad thing about survival is this: If you're lucky you get old. If you're lucky! In Hollywood is it perhaps better for your legend to not get lucky? Marlene Dietrich and Garbo both retreated into exile to spare their fans the shocking Baby Jane-in-the-mirror moment (Dietrich performed into her 70s before retiring, however). Marilyn Monroe perhaps knew that if she took her life at least her fans would have what they always wanted--an immortal Aphrodite for the icon-stellation--and she could finally get some real sleep.

The alternative is not always good: Hollywood is cruel to those over 30, like that game of 'carousel' in LOGAN'S RUN! Man, is SCREAM 4 really science fiction? Imagining a future where screens and streaming have so overtaken us that we don't even have to worry about a Japanese ghost girl getting us through the screen like THE RING. We're already in the screen, and barely outside it, and only hoping just to get as much face time with the camera as we can before we get stabbed, and to have the bloodiest, best death scene. For them life is measured not in heartbeats but in hit counts (I'm paraphrasing the killer here, though shan't reveal its name).

In the end, that ducky overbite on Ms. Cox and the Streisand-ish Vaseline fog spell out that just maybe, mummification on the altar of the image is the answer. It's pretty squirmy when she makes wry references to her hit sitcom COUGAR TOWN by coming on to nerdy film geeks, but it's nothing new in Hollywood. The nerds were never meant to have this much power, or get hit on by this kind of weird, desperate Mrs. Robinson-meets-the onabotulinumtoxin A type of sitcom icon. They don't know how to handle it, but it's there nonetheless; because their youtube views run in the millions they suddenly run the world, right through the screen, with a ripping sound.

Pauline Kael, Wonder Woman, Bright Lights #74

2011-11-11T00:03:00.001-05:00

The latest issue of the awesome BL is up, and in it I salute Pauline Kael, the voice of madness in an age of damned dull sanity. And there's William Leung's How to Play a Superhero: Lynda Carter, Popular Culture Feminism, and the Search for Wonder Woman

"As long as popular culture has a place for a woman hero, Wonder Woman is relevant; as long as Wonder Woman is relevant, Lynda Carter is relevant." -

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

Reviewed by Erich Kuersten

"We miss her and need her today — someone with enough literary clout that her praise can define and refine the response to a movie the way she helped define and refine the responses to Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and Carrie. There are recent movies that have gone panned and forgotten but would surely have been embraced by Kael, like Observe and Report (she would have saved it from getting lumped with Paul Blart, Mall Cop), Enter the Void, and the Twilight series (panned by adults who haven't seen it or are ashamed to admit they have — she would no doubt recognize that they fill a too-long-ignored, underserved demographic). She was confident enough to get wise to Fellini's and Woody Allen's essential shallowness... she was wary of film critics who prized themselves for elitist judgments. "I don't trust critics who care only for the highest and the best, it's an inhuman position, and I don't believe them. I think it's simply their method of exalting themselves" (265)

We need her! Luckily there are some great critical voices still out there, in the Village Voice, in fact, and on websites like Bright Lights Film Journal!

Americanus Ignoramus: RED STATE, BRIDESMAIDS

2011-11-08T13:15:00.005-05:00

No one's ever accused Kevin Smith of being a closed-mouth man. He likes writing characters that like to talk, and talk, and talk in language so unlike actual human speech it wears out the actors unless they pace themselves. Either they go all red-faced and sleepy by the end, or we fall asleep halfway through. Smith doesn't care - camera still rolling away. RED STATE (2011)--his first venture into 'straight' action thriller--is marred by at least two lengthy monologues that stop the film so cold you may forget all about it and start playing cards, forgetting the TV is even on. The first is a long, unfocused ramble by Tarantino stock company regular Michael Parks as a crazed bible-thumping arms hoarder and leader of a 30-strong family that's a little bit Waco, a little bit Westboro Baptist. Parks is great but he's not much of a preacher, barely talking above a mutter when he should be shaking the rafters with righteous hellfire. The second big monologue is far, far worse --John Goodman-- unfocused, haggard, and a hundred pounds too thin--rambling out a lengthy, half-asleep metaphor and a lengthy, drop-dead dull explanation of a plot device spoiler alert decency excuses me from revealing. Goodman's usually energetic and fun, but here he takes the idea of a lumpen proletariat ATF man to a tedious extreme. You want to feed him some twinkies and raise his blood sugar.

The plot has a the crazy Christians using the devil's tool (Craigslist) to lure a trio of fledgling douche bags way out into bumfuck country by promising them a menage a quatre with a local divorcee. From there we get a little torture porn, a little Mexican stand-off, some tense 'won't someone think of the children' drama, and a small arsenal that most of the captured menage-hungry douchebags are too stupid to take advantage of. We get the feeling Kevin Smith had just seen the entire output of both QT and RR in one long weekend before writing the script but QT's dialogue always works in brilliant ways that Smith can't seem to grasp. At the film's end, as Goodman, long- winded and exhausted, attempts to tie up the loose ends a proper movie wouldn't have left dangling, what we learn is that Kevin Smith hates the bible belt lunatics and thinks shotgunning Jesus fish in their holy water barrel is some kind of righteous apocalyptic satire, but as I wrote awhile back in my take on TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL --a real auteur, a Nick Ray or Godard, harbors compassion for the damned even as he skewers them.

BRIDESMAIDS (2011) on the other hand, feels real and lived in and we can thank SNL and Groundlings for the breezy, lived-in rapport Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig share in little termite scenes at coffee shops and mundane errands. When they talk to each other in low-key natural speaking voices it's suddenly apparent just how fake and trite most rom-com friendships are. If you haven't taken time to rehearse and improv and live in your characters, it suddenly shows now that they have set the bar so high.

But they drift apart when Maya marries into a cabal of rich, bland, whitey lawyers. Adept comic actress Jessica St. Clair is Whitney, the materialist wife of Maya's future husband's boss who tries to jostle Wiig out of alpha BFF position. And since Maya's real-life dad is the legendary Quincy Jones, it's a nice touch that her onscreen dad looks like Quincy, and can afford the super rich wedding Whitney dreams of... for Lillian (Rudolph).

However, this movie has douche chill moments galore. Annie (Wiig) starts out the film in free fall after her small business dream of a quirky bakery has gone bankrupt and her hot guy lover (Jon Hamm) only wants her as a second tier booty call. Along the way she throws over the Canadian cop who really loves her because her esteem is low, and that's all quite believable and well-done but still douche chill cliche.

That said, BRIDESMAIDS earns huge props in its skewering of the rampant materialism and bourgeois oppression that's encouraged and indulged in the name of a 'magical wedding.' Snob consumer Whitney flaunts her knowledge of expensive couture and personal relationships with haughty bridal boutiques and snobby country estates, and as we all know this type of girl we relish when Annie just attacks her head on. Even if her motives are self-centered and/or lifted from MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, it's damn heroic.

But in the end the film basically undoes the anti-petit bourgeois take-downs that have preceded it. After Wiig tells it like it is we're supposed to champion her ability to not wince at the mega-rich tackiness of the wedding at the climax - replete with lasers and fireworks and waterfalls and a surprise performance by Wilson Phillips.

The best scene prior to is when Whitney brings all the bridesmaids to pick out a dress at this ritzy all-white boutique and the fawning silken strong arm suffocation is so well done that the vomiting that snues seems natural and deserved, a performance art reaction ala Penny Arcade to the peer pressure-driven bridal business. Don't deny it deserves it. The way the bridal biz plays on female insecurity and competitiveness to choke what should be a special day near to death with table flower whimsy and lovely little ribboned bits of business is a friggin crime, so shit on, sista!

More could have been done with Jill Clayburgh's AA mom, and how much Wiig's meltdown 'hitting bottom' and rescue resembles an AA intervention. But at least it's in there. The 'normal guy' cute Canadian cop who just happens to have been a fan of Wiig's old bakery is actually not as douche chilly as I said earlier, but why are all the men in rom-coms either adorably scruffy blank slates or smug douches? Still, for all it's concessions to the rom-com world, this is easily the best chick comedy I've seen since MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING. Of course BRIDESMAIDS could use a man like George Downes, the Rupert Everett gay BFF in MBFW who transcends all stereotypical gay cliches the way Jesus transcends carpentry.

Carpentry... ah yeah, RED STATE could use a man like George Downes, too, and Kevin Smith could really use a dialogue editor and an understanding of how narrative works in film. If Smith had made DR. STRANGELOVE he probably would have re-written the ending to have a long-drawn out tribunal about how Major Kong's A-bomb was a dud, and Kong had a parachute, and the Russians questioned him for three days. As it is, only BRIDESMAIDS dares to snap at the hand that feeds it. Ostensibly another materialist fantasy like MAMA MIA or EAT, PRAY, LOVE, BRIDESMAIDS turns around and trashes the empty headed over-done prettiness of so many bourgeois weddings with great finesse.

Too bad in the end, waterfalls, moonbeams, Wilson Phillips, and fairy tales of composting hippies and two dogs fighting are all America has left. BRIDESMAIDS fights that truth for awhile, then surrenders to it. RED STATE just jeers both sides. Time to grow up, Kevin! It's that kind of attitude that lost us Vietnam!

Miss J. EDGAR Regrets...

2011-11-07T19:22:00.015-05:00

Postscript 11/9/11- The Village Voice review today was pretty positive, including hints Leo didn't balk at the queer closet aspects... so maybe this wild prediction of mine is way off? I hope so.

--
Was it true that J. Edgar Hoover liked to wear women's clothes or was that a communist plot to discredit him? By all accounts he was a hopeless voyeur who got his kicks listening to bugged tapes of JFK having sex with numerous shakedown starlets and the gay stuff with sheep-dipped plant Sal Mineo even more so. He had a lifelong best friend (ala Robin to Hoover's Batman?) in Clyde Tolson, who inherited Hoover's estate, and they took all their vacations together, but were just pals as far as anyone knew. Biographers theorize Hoover was too paranoid from his own copious blackmailing to ever risk doing anything sexual, gay or straight, and got his rocks off as a voyeur as a result... but that thing with Tolson...

If Leo dons a fez, I'll know I'm wrong.

I worry that in Eastwood's upcoming film the voyeurism angle will be 'neutered' and his sexuality will be conveniently arrested by his duty to a strong but ailing mother figure. I've been reading James Ellroy's awesome Underworld trilogy, wherein Hoover gives his implicit but unspoken okay to the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK and is a paragon of sleazy power plays and slow burning vengeance who leaves the mob alone and asks only occasional favors in reward, including eliminating threats to his tenure (such as JFK) while he waxes roth at the safe, powerless straw dog danger of communism, i.e. an enemy that can't fight back like a 'real' one would.

Also, Hoover was allegedly also good buddies with Howard Hughes, who DiCaprio played with similar sweaty reverence in THE AVIATOR. Just as that film dismissed the tissue box shoes and long nails of his later years via a single, long scene of piss jars and a round the clock screening of WINGS, so J. EDGAR will dismiss Hoover's plots against, say, Martin Luther King, through some arbitrary dialogue. I can see Leo's personal cadre of writers noting that DiCaprio doesn't care for racism, or gaybashing, but may allow a topless shot to show off his jailhouse abs.

I predict also that any actual J. Edgar mom issues will be elevated to a kind of saintly exchange as befits Leo's characters past holy Norma Bates/Spielberg sunset sanctification of his characters' (dead) mothers and since Hoover's use of sex tapes and shakedowns made him too paranoid to either approach starlets (there were rumors of him having a thing with Dorothy Lamour) or, probably, to get funky with his longtime companion Colson. Leo's penchant for ghostly dead wives haunting him in guilt-wracked moments of boozy self-reflection are likely to provide the alternative 'out'.

Bottom line: the current persona of the Leo DiCaprio hero as a confused, damaged tough guy reflects his use of his own box office clout to avoid genuine emotional risks in his choices of roles. That's why he would make a good J. Edgar Hoover, but I doubt it's the reason DiCaprio thought would make him a good J. Edgar Hoover. It's like his unconscious is trying to tell him hey, Leo, you need to stop trying to look tough in manly suits and raincoats and shoulder holsters standing tall on courthouse steps in high contrast blacks and start cackling like the neurotic gunsel / Richard Widmark psychos or grinning and laughing like the romantic fools you were born to play.

Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hope Eastwood's film will dare question Hoover's intentions, manhood, and moral compass in a way that's real and honest and not mere craftsmanship window dressing on a white-washed sainthood canon shot / shoe-in Leo Oscar nod. We know from the promo Leo 'ages' into a crazy old Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman would be the ideal choice to play Hoover, and wouldn't flinch from covering the darker areas Leo will doubtlessly sidestep).

Leonardo needs to throw that momma of his down the stairs and get in a real fight, Mickey Rourke-style, that would solve the babyface aspect of his persona he so clearly works to transcend, and if he wants to return to this era in his historical biopics, he should consider James Earle Ray. Now that would be a stone cold brave role for old Leo. But he won't go there, and maybe one day he'll understand why that in itself makes him perfect for the part... of the real J. Edgar!

Odin's Last Stand: WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

2011-11-04T23:45:00.004-05:00

A great experimental film premiered on TCM last week from Nicholas Ray, which he shot in the late 1960s-early 70s with his film class while teaching at an upstate NY school. Along the way Nick created a communal spirit, basically pulled his class out of their other courses and into his orbit. He drank in excess and was alternately a benevolent instructor and a manipulative tyrant. His younger wife sums it up eloquently in her accompanying documentary, Nick had the passion and obsessive focus on a film that never wavers even when the project is not working, when it sucks, when it's a train wreck, and that's the difference between an artist and a non-artist. Most of us just walk away from lost causes.

As time goes on, WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (1973-ish) becomes a self-reflexive right place / right time black hole. An old Hollywood outsider inspires and infuriates and exhausts an upstate New York crew of campus semi-radicals - and films same, and this film is the film of filming the film it's filmed. There's smatterings of Ahab, Manson, Colonel Kurz, and Long John Silver in Nicholas Ray's inexorable creative drive. He's the teacher you both hope for and fear, since if you fail to follow him over the lip of madness, leaving even your Dietrich shoes behind in the sand, then you know deep in your hidden heart then you must not really want to be filmmaker. Whether pretending to hang himself or coaxing tears and anguish from his actors in the documentary he's also a little bit Norman Maine from A STAR IS BORN, ever a stone's throw from the long swim as he grooms the next generation with a love born of mortal desperation. He could be editing and re-editing this film forever, it's a maze he created just to get lost in, and like therapy, you know you've graduated when you've worked up the nerve to leave him.

Maybe that's all art is, in the end, a maze because houses don't have a 'finish' line and the insane need to always have an ending, a way out, open to them, at least in their imagination. I'm reminded also of the Buddhist monks brushing their elaborate sand mandalas back to muddy sand and Welles' tinkering with the edits and sound on each and every film post-KANE until it's snatched from his hands by impatient producers and hacked back into some semblance of order by a sane, orderly hack; drunken De Kooning, painting over and over on a single canvas with the same paint simply because he has neither the money nor sobriety required to replace it with a blank one. This kind of compulsive behavior when harnessed to genuine art is unstoppable --it succeeds because it already has succeeded. It fills the void no amount of sex and possessions ever could. Nicholas Ray's film is a success because he worked on it long enough that he could distract his mania and so could catch some winks. It's a success because he wasn't dead before he could finish principle photography.

Does the finished product of WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAN amount to anything? Compared to what? The only ideal way to see it would be at four in the morning in an otherwise empty university editing suite with the people who made it, enshrouded in pot and tobacco smoke, and co-eds in thick beards and glasses, and jugs of wine, with Nick Ray sitting behind you, yelling at the projector or the screen, entering and exiting the room to compliment his entrances and exits in the film. But on TCM in your living room, on your modern day utopian sofa, the film's relevance will depend on where your own head is at: are you a filmmaker yourself, one who perhaps chooses self-reflexivity and post-modern metatextuality as your mise-en-scene, since it ensures the sets are always free, the actors always present?

I wish I had Ray's mania and am glad I don't. Something inside me keeps me from ever letting go of the rope as I descend into the abyss that Ray jumps into, always, headfirst and without a rope except to hang himself with. WE CAN'T GO HOME practically dares the audience to dive in after him, right through the screen. He even left us a wide open hole, surrounded by a patchwork ring of images of fire and nooses. Just stick your head through, and trust him to tighten til the end snaps you through the flames.

"Law no more!" - Kindergarten Consciousness in ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1933)

2011-10-30T14:27:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Criterion's fancy restoration the ships and shipping have extra foggy resonance (director Earle C. Kenton eschewed mere stock footage rear screen projections, and the enormity of the ships and their lines and cables strung in the fog really hits you - you can practically smell the salt-sprayed animals). Also restored to high glory: the endless shots of bright spot light and pitch deep black coming through chiaroscuro latticework, pond reflections reflecting potential lovers dissolving back into DNA sequences ripe for halving; the subtle changes of distressed expression on Leila Hyam's face as she tries to keep civilized ("oh, nothing") as the windows facing her teem withe lewd, grinning, probably jacking-off Calibans; the character of Oran ("Him.. tell me... spill blood!") now standing out more from the foliage as every feature of his black on black face is now restored with the Criterion glow; every obscene pus-filled swell on Moreau's hopelessly phalli post-historic plants. Naked Lunch indeed! Moreau's compound now glows with depth and spaciousness, the rooms surrounding a giant central pond/foyer like a giant reptile house in the zoo-- seeing the blu-ray, you can feel just where the alligators would be.

One would feel better about it all if the old man had some opiates or Ketamine on hand to knock out his animals before all the painful glandular surgery, but that would undo the grisly satisfaction of the ending.

Under Laughton's portly sadistic toad like elan, Moreau becomes something like the younger brother of his other two main early 30s sadists: Cap'n Bligh in MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935) and 'bullyin' Barrett in THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET (1934). We learn from my old Scarlet Street buddy David J. Skal in the extras that HG Welles meant the original version to be a kind of Swiftian meta-satire on the Victorian fad for social evolution, but my reading of the film this time before seeing his extra harkened back farther, as far back as ye can goethe - to the Annunaki in the old tablets of the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia.

Him tell me... spill blood!

If you don't know your ancient alien theory, Lord Enki came here and made humans from a mixture of Annunaki and resident ape /animal DNA so that they could mine for gold which was then shipped off-world. Enki got soft on his critters and gave them some tips on the use of fire and language against strict orders. He even taught them to eat.. meat.

Maybe the end of LOST SOULS and of most mad scientist movies when the monsters run amok and kill their maker, then, are really a kind of very long-belated revenge against lord Enki for fucking us up - making us part god, part beats - this hideous still-beating THING! We've been simmering all these eons in our ancestral memory, resentful of ever being dragged from our Edenic animal sleep too soon, thrown into the cold logical light of reason, pain, spelling, kindergarten, walking on two legs instead of crawling, and all that other serpentine-mammalian hybrid consciousness --all just to satisfy the morbid curiosity of a well-heeled reptilian alien madman who's angry at the world cuz he's too deep in the closet to have a sex life of his own. Moreau could also be in that sense an early accidental ringer for J. Edgar Hoover (more on that to come)!

The big highlight in ISLAND of course is the climactic showdown between the two biggest hams of horror prior at that time: Bela Lugosi as the keeper of the law going against the whip-snapping Charles Laughton. Beard vs. goatee. Lugosi's ranting--after being beaten down, forced to endure untold hours of daily make-up application, brought to heel by bad deals from Universal and morphine addiction -- vs. Laughton's hamming--no need for studio beat-downs when his homosexuality is beaten into the closet by the intolerant age itself, potent evidence of bucking it staring him in the face via the trial of Oscar Wilde

One can't imagine Karloff playing either Moreau or Lugosi's beast man very well though. Karloff was never much of an ego-mad tantrum-raving screamer--his is more the creepy mellifluousness of his Satanist in THE BLACK CAT--and in the end this showdown is all about tantrums - the bratty older child wreaking havoc on the younger ones, who finally band together and wreak their vengeance. When we see the 'faithful dog' die to save his master, we're suddenly ashamed we've been dressing our pets up in little butler outfits all these years.

Another cool aspect is its ahead-of-it's time approach to liberal empathy - perhaps the fall from Eden wasn't the serpent's DNA-diddling after all, but the sneering condemnation of a moral crusader like Richard Arlen. The outrage of his Mr. Parker towards the vivisections of these creatures makes him a kind of early representative for PETA. On learning Lota was once a panther, note Parker's choice of language - "These others I can maybe overlook, Moreau," he says, "but to make a woman, with a woman's suffering! That I can't forgive."

In other words, his empathic response is manageable with the grunting, tough manly beasts, but a woman is as Carol Clover noted, man's sensitive springboard, his mental frame for absorbing a more acute form of projected punishment via the masochistic gaze. You can serve a bunch of pork, steak, and chicken at the craft services table during a film shoot, but if you kill a pig, chicken or cow onscreen you are 'cruel' and in violation of "the law" - clearly that law is to protect the stomach of squeamish empaths and not the animals themselves -- there's no way you can possibly kill a creature 'more' cruelly than at a freakin' stockyard or under a doctor's scalpel, so it's not the animal's suffering the laws protect; we want to be assured no suffering we see onscreen is real, because it might upset us. If only Moreau had given vocal chords to the meat on the craft services table! Their ghostly yowls might haunt the entire world into veganism! And what argument could Mr. Parker have then, that wouldn't make him sound like a hypocrite as he reaches for another plate of veal?

Of course on the island--Moreau insists on it in his laws--everyone is a vegetarian, just like Hitler!
---

Final note: I generally don't groove on DVD menus, but the Criterion one sets a new awesome standard, expanding on the cover art, with overlaid medical drawings spliced together and music from the film playing over cool and menacing. Dig. I love it. DVD of the year.

Old Dark Capsules: THE GHOUL, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE BLACK RAVEN

2011-10-28T13:48:00.017-05:00

Secret panels, stormy nights, dying heirs, hairy hands, Karloff, candles, lawyers; priceless mcguffins stolen from a dead man's watch pocket; maybe a coroner, woken up at this ungodly hour of the night; guys in ape suits for the medium shots, stock footage of a monkey for the close-ups; Bela Lugosi stuck playing a butler with barely any lines because the producers are worried about his morphine addiction; shrieking maids; bats; black cats; skulls on desks; conniving trophy wives everyone wants dead. What could be more Halloween-ish? It's the Old Dark House genre, basically forgotten today because there are no more old dark houses. Now they're either 'haunted' or long-since converted to apartments.

But if you've ever spent a weekend at a rich friend's mansion then you know how weird it can get: a late night trip to the bathroom after everyone else has gone to bed can be a terrifying, surreal nocturnal journey ala THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER river trip. The walls are so thick that if someone were screaming for help downstairs in the study you'd never even hear them, or be able to find them.

And no longer can eccentric millionaire uncles just caper down to Egypt and help themselves to whatever cursed, ancient artifacts they care to dig for. The colonialist yard sale is closed! But the films, thank Ra, remain open! Here's five I know like the back of m'hand:

THE GHOUL
1933 - ***
British studio Gaumont's attempt to make a 1930s Universal horror reveals just how great Universal horrors were by contrast. At any rate, GHOUL's foggy and cozy as a cup of Earl Grey at a midnight graveyard picnic. Karloff is an eccentric Egyptologist who spends 75,000 pounds on an emerald he thinks will bring him back from the dead. He dies soon after and is entombed to the strains of Wagner's immortal "Sigfried's Funeral March" but apparently without the gem. Soon thereafter a cast of skulking emerald seekers materialize out of the fog including Ernest Thesiger (Dr. Pretorious!) and a grumpy Dickensian lawyer who employs rather elaborate strings of words like "I intend to grant myself the pleasure of calling on her this evening." They're all either looking for the emerald, stealing it from someone else, having sadomasochistic fantasies (how very British!), writing notes, making peace with angry cousins, or being strangled by a Karloff now back from the dead!

The grand guignol moment is when Boris carves a bloody ankh symbol on his bony chest, cut from many prints. Overall THE GHOUL would make a fine, weird double bill with the original MUMMY (1932), and possibly even stole its props, but alas, like so many British-Egyptian Museum horrors of the era all the supernatural elements must be conveniently explained away by film's end. One mustn't leave the queen's subjects thinking such things are true, you know... a gullible lot they are, I'm afraid, sir. That's not to say this jewel still isn't a little loose in its setting, if you know what I mean, guv. Say no more...

THE CAT AND THE CANARY
1939 - ****
My favorite Bob Hope movie! I've seen it 1,000 times! Dragging my canoe behind me! I taped it off 'Spotlight' in 1980 and, in some ways, I'm still watching it. Bob Hope is the perfect mix of romantic hero and scared goofball quipper as Wally Campbell. Paulette Godard turns out to be the sole heiress to her eccentric Uncle Cyrus Norman's estate, which is an old house way out on le bayou, where an escape maniac who calls himself 'The Cat' is prowling for victims. Guest must take canoes to get to the mansion, and Hope's stoic creole paddler has already heard Hope's jokes "last year... Jack Benny Program."

Zucco reads the will and is the first to get murdered. The other relatives all play up the notion Paulette is insane (she keeps seeing hands come out of walls) but it's mainly so they can lay claim to the fortune, thanks to the sanity clause, and don't tell me there ain't no Sanity Clause because if there's one movie I've seen even more times than CAT it's NIGHT AT THE OPERA (I taped it off Prism).

You lucky stiffs, Uncle Cyrus' ghost must be holding bank night because CAT AND THE CANARY has been restored on DVD and glows like never before so you don't have to put up with my olde dupe which I once would have been happy to dupe for you in exchange for REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? Now it's available in that Thanks for the Memories - Bob Hope DVD set, which if is a must even if you already have ROAD TO MOROCCO and GHOST BREAKERS (which everyone says is better than CAT, but I disagree. CAT is the shit!).

THE MONSTER WALKS
1932 - *1/2
An old creep in a wheelchair with a big old dark house? Check. Ape in a cage in the basement? Affirmative. Mischa Auer as the illegitimate son of the old creep in the wheelchair and his maid, angry he's denied cent one of the family fortune after all the hours he's slaved for that old man? Check but ick, now it's depressing in its offhand illumination of social injustice. Willie Best as the shuffling, uber-cowardly stereotype chauffer to the bland honky hero? Check and double-ick. Ape man hands coming out of the wall to strangle blonde poseur to the fortune? Ick-mate.

I know the Leonard Maltin review by heart: "Willie bests Mischa for laughs, but it's a close race." Lenny, you're my racist wheelchair-bound true father who taught me to write like a subliminal weisenheimer. Still, the stormy night-rattling-sheet metal makes it nice to fall asleep to as the sun comes up on another frosty November 1st, your blood levels of alcohol, ecstasy, nicotine, and candy now dwindled to a shudder no amount of coffee can allay.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE
1932 - ****
I had such high hopes for this film, the 'lost' Universal horror of 1932. For decades it was a holy grail for Universal horror nuts like me. Old VHS copies were nth generation dupes, horrifically murky. Then Kino came to the rescue via a restored, lone surviving print, and its star Gloria Stuart even did an audio commentary for the laserdisc! I never had a laserdisc player, but James Cameron did, loved the commentary and hat's how she came to narrate TITANIC! It's awesome to hear this no-nonsense 1932 starlet tell you about shooting in the rain with James Whale and Boris Karloff and putting up with a cast of intellectual thespian Brit eccentrics and their clique-ish tea rituals, as meanwhile the shots all go down smooth as a Knobb Creek skinny dip... death where is thy sting?

The stranded travelers include: Charles Laughton as a blustery captain of industry; Lillian Bond as his chorus girl traveling 'ahem' companion; Melvyn Douglas the ubiquitous forgotten man; Stuart and her taciturn husband Raymond Massey as Mel's sophisticated, supportive friends. The old dark residents include: Ernest Thesiger ("Dr. Pretorious again, sir!") as the brother of the bitchy no-nonsense, no-teeth old pious Christian woman Rebecca Fem (Eva Moore), who shouts "No beds! They can't have beds!" Decent old Thesiger lets them park it by the fire anyway, and even busts out his secret stash of gin - much to his pious sister's disapproval. And man, wait until you meet Saul! Karloff is a bit underused as the violent, scarred, mute, horny, and exceedingly drunken butler ("a night like this could set him off!"), he'd have been great as Saul... not that... oops, four o-clock! Break for tea, everyone! Sorry Gloria, intellectual thespian Brit eccentrics only... there's a dear.

THE BLACK RAVEN
1943 - ***
When I'm having a travel-induced panic attack this is my go-to PRC for nonstop black-and-white storms, muffled dialogue, and George Zucco's silken voice all serving to make things extra cozy, and it all takes place--as do all the best old dark house films--over one wild-ass crazy 'dark and stormy' night, ending as the sun comes up. Zucco plays a kind of posh Moriarty-ish version of the Dude from Big Liebowski, moving around the waterlogged cardboard sets in his robe and slippers. He's the titular Raven, a retired criminal par excellence who now runs a small inn which he uses as a front for an operation that ferries criminals over the Canadian border. No actual ravens appear in this film, but Glenn Strange is the idiot manservant and Charles "Ming" Middleton is the suspicious sheriff. An assortment of would-be border-jumpers check in because the bridge is washed out; a suitcase of embezzled cash changes hands; corpses accrue. And if you're me, a dark part of you really responds to the killer's climactic rant against smelly garlic-eating working class bus commuters! Make sure to get the best available edition as there's lots of crappy public domain copies out there where everything is too dark and and half the dialogue is hopelessly muffled. Though if you get a little dark and muffled yourself tonight, you just may not notice... hmmm?
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Special shout-out to Verdoux! - it seems to contain the same eerie alchemical magick as celluloid itself!