The love every parent fears: YOUTH IN REVOLT (2009), ENDLESS LOVE (1980)

Being blown away by SCOTT PILGRIM I had to check out YOUTH IN REVOLT which promised to fully answer the question: can Michael Cera play anything other than his squirmy ectomorphic sexually-frustrated pansexual 'self'? PILGRIM seemed to indicate yes, but REVOLT answers uh... non.

Cera's essentially playing a dual character: his Nick Twisp (the usual shy Cera) and his 'dangerous' alterego--Francois Dillinger--who is clearly borne of obsessive desire for a sweet neighbor girl whose sexual boldness blows the normal Twisp clear into oblivion. Wearing a pencil-thin mustache with white slacks and an ever-present cigarette (does he ever inhale?), Francois is Cera's chance to cowboy up but he's still talking barely above a whisper. Dillinger never really materializes as a separate 'ballsy' character, just basically a pyromaniac with a dirty mouth and extra confidence, and proves, PILGRIM aside, Cera is still the Stu Erwin of his generation, the Eddie Bracken with less small-town corn and more art film savvy.

Why Cera? The Cera-phenom didn't start with JUNO or SUPERBAD --it began with ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, but in that series he was a confused hormonal kid trying get out from under the avalanche of contradictory instruction from his micro-managing father. JUNO and SUPERBAD made it A-OK for Cera's brand of high-voiced stream of consciousness to enter the realm of the horny nerd, and emboldened the horny nerd in the process to have interests beyond peering at dirty magazines. Now in between all the dick jokes  they can discuss Welles, Bresson, Fellini, Argento, Wood -- they even know that Ozu directed TOKYO STORY, not Mizoguchi. Tres intellique!

While REVOLT's pranks are less dorky and more property-damaging than the typical virginity-losing teen sex comedy's, touching that vein of troubled boarding school loss as it does, the film's source template emerges (as TAXI DRIVER was the template for Jody Hill's underappreciated OBSERVE AND REPORT) as nothing other than Bertolucci's ENDLESS LOVE (1981), a drama of tortured love and torched property. It was similarly about a lovestruck arsonist-pursuing his forbidden underage rich debutante, in his case the world's obsession of the moment, Brooke Shields.

In the late 1970s, Shields launched the popularity of skin-tight 'designer' jeans with a campaign for Calvin Klein ("Nothing comes between me and my Calivns").  And she was 14, which is hard to believe in this day and age when Hannah Montana can be blasted to hell for showing her shoulder on a magazine cover. Shields won even more moral outrage playing a child prostitute in PRETTY BABY (1978, age 13) and going topless at age 15 in THE BLUE LAGOON (she had to testify a body double was used due to child pornography accusations), then in ENDLESS LOVE at 16, playing a sexually budding debutante in Franco Zeffirelli's worst film and biggest box office success.

I never really understood Shields' flash of appeal, being just 14 myself and more into older women like Cheryl Tiegs, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Farrah Fawcett, but I remember the film's avalanche of hype: sexual movie posters and commercials and playground word-of-mouth, and so-- apparently--does REVOLT's director Miguel Arteta (THE GOOD GIRL, CHUCK AND BUCK) who was Brooke's age when ENDLESS LOVE came out and thus wouldn't have been allowed to see it without legal guardian. Bad as Zeffirelli's film may be, at least it has the courage of its sickly softcore convictions. As much about Shields' nymphet stardom as Zeffirelli's desire to recreate the box office success of his 1968 counterculture-approved ROMEO AND JULIET, it was what it wasn't. Something talked about endlessly so seen to be part of the conversation. Straddling the difference between the new wave heralding outlaw romance  BREATHLESS's insouciance, the indie quirk-studded suburban character ensemble comedies of the era, and ENDLESS LOVE's Franco Zeffirelli mania (there's some good scenes with Justin Long as a Zen-shroomer older brother), YOUTH IN REVOLT ends up being drawn and quartered in its saddle.

No offense to true romance, but as I've said before, John Cusak standing outside your window in the dead of night blasting Peter Gabriel from a boombox over his head is called stalking. Every time a girl says that scene (from SAY ANYTHING) is romantic, another girl pays the price as some obsessive maniac takes her rejection as a challenge to keep pursuing, burning down buildings, lacing drinks, blinding horses, breaking into dorms, killing rivals, and even taking telescopic pictures while listening to that "la-la-la-la" Ennio Morricone soundtrack (L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo).  Stand skeeved by their methodology if you're me, but "In Your Eyes" has become the song every parent fears. And then of course there's the rich history of society helping abused women get clear of their abuser men, only to watch in horror as the women wind up going back to them anyway.

Stop encouraging him

In movies, at least, the stalker attitude is a sign of a romantic ideal where a million true loves await your ceaseless internet trawling, and you can't quite pick one, so you go for the one you can't have. Better to have stalked and lost than won and so become forever barred from the comforting safety of her neighbor's bushes.

REVOLT's reptilian adhesion to formality and mammalian desire for characters and change is akin to yesterday's Roger Corman films, studded with interesting characters but robbed of Corman's streak of true, genuine revolution. Random violence in the service of love is not true love, but obsession. Roger knows that. Arrereta doesn't. It's like that itch on your back and your lover scratches it and it feels good for less than a fraction of a second before the itch moves on. It was never about the itch; the itch was where your incompleteness. The itch was meant to keep you scratching, shopping, drinking, hungering, writing lots of tortured poetry and sighing over LA BOUT DE SOUFFLE, CRAZY LOVE, TRUE ROMANCE, and the song: "My.... endless... love."

The girl of REVOLT, Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) understands this and 'creates' the drama version of the 'angry bed' to test her wannabe Lancelot, but she's never deluded into believing the tests are anything more than mere amusement. The tragedy is that in the end the film itself believes the delusions created by her need for drama--as evinced in the final thought of our unreliable narrator: "After all that, Nick Twisp was enough." One is tempted to shout back at the screen: "No, he wasn't!" Neither character is even 'present' --how can any girl be expected to love a vertical plane of self-conscious neediness and ectomorphic myopia so deluded into thinking it's a 'person'?

And the same goes for Cera's Francois Dillinger, who turns out to be little more than a gimmick, though Cera's dirty talk and French accent has its moments, such as "I want to wrap your legs around my head and wear you like the crown that you are." Nice work. There is after all a difference between the well-laid bluntness of Serge Gainsbourg and the bitter smuttiness of the perennial virgin. For all the bravado, Francois can only skim the edges of the former.

The oxymoronic impression YOUTH gives off, of 'trying' to be effortless, manifests right off the bat in the dopey claymation credits sequence, which seems to beg the audience to see this as JUNO II.  But at least Diablo Cody had the courage to get out there and do the things she writes about, to get the grody details right. Here, aside from a later shroom-lucination or two, the animation is too sophomoric and obvious, too on-the-nose. Effort could have been put into subtle changes like making the walls breathe, ala THE BLACK SWAN, but the YOUTH's too busy making dumb sex comedy jokes.  It's why all the best artists are fearless self-examiners, exorcising their demons in public, screaming and howling and trashing hotel rooms, all to keep the crap of self-delusion and obsessive denial of death from fogging up their windshield and making it impossible to see their road from any kind of genuinely artistic vantage point.  If you look at two other 'portrait of an evil doppelganger as a young artist' films, THE BLACK SWAN and FIGHT CLUB, the pedestrian safehood of REVOLT--even with shrooms and arson--becomes a timid, sad second, the kid who rather than jumped off the cliff into the lake with everyone else, stayed up there, alone, and has been making films rationalizing his cowardice as macho road-not-taken chutzpah ever since.

Twisp's epiphany that it was "him" all along misses the whole point: magic bullet clinginess is not true love. Doing crazy things for love is fine if you bear in mind that love earned that way isn't going to last more than a night. Concentrate and you can feel an undying soul connection to anything -- a cat or a teddy bear even-- and then it's *Poof!* c'est finis. The moment ends, your attention focuses back on the TV, the cat skulks off into the other room, Cera gets out of jail and finds none of the expected sparks and crashing trains when he finally shacks up uncontested with Sheeni. Rather than realize the error of his unrealistic expectations, Twisp will undoubtedly suspect Sheeni's sleeping with someone else and that's why he's not "happily ever after." If there was one lesson he could have gleaned from reading Cahiers du Cinema or listening to Serge, that was it. Twisp gleaned it not! Coupez spot publicitaire!



The guys in the above video exemplify here that you can be scrawny and white and nebbishy and still kick every ass in the room. Francois, if you're going to wear mirror shades and a so-silly mustache, take a lesson from "The Chief!"

Great Dads of the 1970s #1: Jon Voight as Luke in COMING HOME

"Ah, the smugness, I can't stand it." -Jane

"I dont belive it will change, but you're beautiful when you're excited." - Jon

I was just a kid when COMING HOME came out but I remember its impact. Along with THE DEER HUNTER, released the same year, there was a whirlwind of controversy and outpourings of support, anger and raw feeling over a war that hadn't been over more than a few years. The media was aflame and Oscars fell like rain and now, thirty years later all we have left are the DVDs, while another war rages and the best we can get are polemics like LIONS FOR LAMBS. But what of 1978? In hindsight, The DEER HUNTER seems to have almost nothing to do with Vietnam, being instead an American Reifenstahl Alpenfilme, but it's still good and gets repackaged and made glossy and classic, but why not COMING HOME?

The red state stigmatization of Fonda and her strong character may have something to do with HOME's lack of corporate support as far as DVD re-marketing, but I would guess the answer really lies in the fact that its genuinely subversive, in a positive almost painfully human way. Leonard Maltin's guide gives it a mere three and a half stars to the DEER's four, citing the film's "lapses into melodrama" as the reason. Of course THE DEER HUNTER (like APOCALYPSE NOW which came out the following year) is really a "guy" movie. (Maltin says it "packs an emotional wallop"), COMING HOME is neither a man's nor a woman's picture. If I wasn't all obsessive and insane at the moment I would probably never use these sorts of words, but: it's a human picture. It's a picture for the non gender-specific lover archetype which we embody only when we are at our best. A lot of us can't stomach that sort of intimacy for long; we'd rather reach for the easy comfort of our threadbare genre straitjackets. I'm as guilty of that as anyone. I can barely watch COMING HOME even now. I'm watching the DVD as I write this and I have to pause every few minutes, for breaks that stretch into hours. I have to write like mad to deal with the pain.

And no, Voight's character, Luke, is not an actual parent--nor shall he ever be one, apparently, thanks to his waist-down paralysis--so his being considered a 1970's dad might seem a bit odd. But hey, man, there are people all over the world needing parenting, not the bossy, browbeating kind but the unconditional nurturing and sense of strong support kind. One need only grace, gravitas and guts, genuine non-gender specific love, and maybe a mustache and fine foxy beard to be the best of 70s dads; kids will come from all over, from all ages and groups.

Luke has those things and as he goes from soul-ruptured angry young paraplegic to nurturing activist/lover, you get to see deep into his wide-open soul--both the actor and his character--and his innate majesty shines out at you; he's the wounded fisher king accepting the fact no Parsifal is coming. As a knight you need to serve a king, and Voight fits my bill in COMING HOME. I watch and I want to help him do whatever it is he needs to do, because you know it's right and just, whatever it is. He becomes the sort of man that James Dean's character was on the road to becoming in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. He becomes a leader that inspires what is best in men.

Contrasting Voight in the film is Bruce Dern's character, a smarmy officer and Jane's husband. He embodies the Beatles' lyric heard in the film: "Living is easy with eyes closed..." and Bruce Dern is so good at portraying this type you fear for his soul. In short, he's odious. His character eventually loses out and goes for "the long swim" (if only he'd hung around awhile of course, he wouldn't have to worry--the Voights of the world lost to the banal conformity of the Derns after all). Too bad, because the pain he was feeling might have made him a better person if he just faced it rather than running. The Derns of the world don't ever face the mirror, they don't need to and so they don't, and then when they need to suddenly they can't - they'd rather off themselves than see how their unexamined life has left a shitty legacy.

Luke certainly has his work cut out for him in facing that mirror, learning to use the wheelchair, etc. all while being utterly reliant on others. There's a feeling of futility and angst surrounding his situation, and it reaches a head when he first crashes into Jane on her first day volunteering at the VA, sending his colostomy bag flying and humiliating him to the breaking point so that he goes on a furious tirade that would not be topped for sheer greatness until he himself topped it seven years later in RUNAWAY TRAIN. It's a rage that is so fierce it reaches alchemical-level heat and from its raging molten crucible comes a humility akin to divine grace.

Luke's humility in this film represents a path for men that was never overtly spelled out and so was lost in the shuffle when we went from subtle to sledgehammer in our cultural cum corporate aesthetic. If you look at old films--like Howard Hawks' in particular--they all depict an unspoken code of "good" behavior that men measure one another by; it's a code that operates free of gender and physical strength and asks only what was asked of Laertes in Hamlet: "To thine own self be true, and thus it follows as night follows day, thou cannot be false to any man." The path up to this heavenly ethical plateau is through things like therapy,  the 12 steps, meditation, volunteer work, helping others --all the shit we'd often rather die than deal with directly. But if we don't deal with it, it deals with us and we're back in the jungle or the desert faster than we can run. 

There's a great moment when Luke first gets asked to dinner by Jane and as she heads off-screen he slowly pulls himself up the hospital's wheelchair ramp, his newly muscled arms rippling as he pulls his wheelchair and bulk. Those muscles represent not just Voight's devotion to getting the details of his part right--and by association doing right by the paraplegics he studied for the role--they represent the triumph of love against the sort of rage and shame that he expressed earlier. Luke begins to grow like a flower in the sun of Jane Fonda; he will become a dad figure to Billy, the shell-shocked neurotic guitarist played by Robert Carradine; and he will become an inspiration even to a whole high school assembly at the film's climax.

What makes the final speech so moving and profound is not just his tears, but his acceptance of responsibility; he doesn't condemn Vietnam with the self-righteousness of a screaming protestor; he doesn't bemoan his loss. Instead he admits he "doesn't feel very good" about having killed people for "not enough reason, man." He doesn't blame the U.S., or the recruitment officer who spoke before him. He admits defeat and admits he made choices that he believes were wrong. In doing so, he begins the possibility for genuine social change. It's such a scary thought I believe the powers that be would just as soon this movie never existed, was forgotten, and overshadowed by the grim fatalism of The Deer Hunter.

Everyone celebrates and remembers Voight in that big final high school speech, so rather than discuss it further I'm going to delve a bit into their first date at Fonda's apartment: She's nervous and he orders her to sit down. He asks if this is "Bring a gimp over to dinner night," and rather than get indignant (a reaction which you see cross her face) she instead looks him directly in the eye and  slowly shakes her head no; the result is nothing short of a true human connection, and he connects back and admits, "I know you didn't."

In today's edit-happy world this scene would probably be cut down to a few seconds. Instead we're allowed to see each of them overcoming fears and prejudices, connecting as real people, and Ashby makes it possible for us to see this in a magnificent natural light that illuminates their eyes. He gives Voight and Fonda all the room they need to make these characters real. Even though we might squirm in embarrassment while it's happening, in the end we're in love with them as much as they are with each other; the kind of love that transcends sex and gender (literally since Luke is effectively sexless) the kind of love that spreads outwards to all who come in contact with it... except for the Bruce Derns, of course, living easy with their eyes closed.

Later in that same first date, Voight says to Fonda: "When people look at me they see something else, they don't see ... who I really am."  In real life, people still don't see Voight or Fonda as who they really are (I'm sure I'm not seeing Dern as he really is either). They see publicity and Angelina and Hanoi Jane and ANACONDA and whatever else. In 1978's COMING HOME we can feel the aperture of spirit close around us, feel our willingness to embrace the gossip rags rather than the unwritten riches, but first we get this wide open view of the human spirit at its most noble and compassionate... and yes, it can be painful to watch, especially for men. We're not comfortable seeing a man so dependent upon a woman (two words: wheelchair accessible) and COMING HOME lingers right on that sensitive spot, like a lover trying to tickle some embarrassing secret out of us while we're tied to the bed.

Is it any wonder then, that cinema fans in media-saturated 21st century prefer the cool macho alienation of THE DEER HUNTER? COMING HOME challenges us to be more open and loving with one another and it does so by practicing what it preaches; it gets all sticky and gooey, it "lapses into melodrama." It asks us to feel deeply. Conversely, THE DEER HUNTER asks us only to pop open another cold one and turn up the game; to drown out that subtle, soft voice that would point us towards the love we'd prefer to think irretrievable. If things get too intimate, just drown that sensitivity in another game of Russian roulette, like a real man.

And so Jon Voight in COMING HOME gets first place in the 1970s dad pantheon, without his character even having any kids... or even any legs...or the ability to ever walk or inseminate again. All he has are the guts to ask for help, and to love without limit, and to administer a cool beard... and he's beautiful. And I almost forgot: he's got such cunnilingual skills he gives Jane her first orgasm. As far as hostility towards this picture by mainstream society, that explains a hell of a lot.

With a love that will echo through the Ages: Reincarnation, the Lost Lenore, SHE, Kate WINSLET, the Mummy, etc.

(Note: This blog was written a month or so ago, but I wanted to wait on it until sufficient time had passed that it no longer makes sense. When you read it, I think this will become clear.)
(Note 2: 70,000 years later I've added some minor details and corrections)
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Rushing to write down my thoughts about ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, which I just watched again on DVD, alone, nursing heartbreak and nicotine withdrawal.
The moving part of that film lies in the concept of lovers through time, it works as a metaphor for reincarnation and the loves that echo through the ages, such those in SHE, PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, and the MUMMY.

To commemorate the release of a “special version” of the 1935 epic SHE, I wanted to blog a bit on the nature of love via reincarnation. I just finished watching ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. The last time I saw this amazing movie was with my Swiss-French mistress who is now gone from me (for the third time). The third time that she left me, plus the second time I saw the movie equals where I am now… in the race through time of love. But is it love? Is it love like the love Boris Karloff has for his princess in 1932’s THE MUMMY? This cat Im-Ho-Tep (Karloff) went all out for lovely Zita Johann, even stealing the secret scroll of Thoth to impress her. For his troubles he gets mummified alive in a flashback that spans the ages, and a huge chunk of the center of the film. It’s a stately affair, brilliantly filmed by ace cinematographer Karl Freund. On a big DVD screen you can count the pores on HER face, not just on Karloff’s very shriveled and dead-eyed silken Ardath Bey (his nom de plume once he’s unwrapped thanks to an expedition some years before.)

Before what? Before he meets…her (Joann), his lost princess from the days of ancient Egypt, now reincarnated as a jumpy, cat-eyed English girl of high social position (her dad the British governer of the Sudan, her mom a royal Egyptian), Helen Grosvenor. Johann is an interesting screen presence: she actually seems to be a reincarnated something or other, a cat maybe, and she exhibits the same bland spookiness that her character requires, although it seems an accident. (She was only in a few other films, but what pips they were, including THE SINS OF NORA MORAN). Her acting style seems to reflect a spiritualist's vague contempt for all mortal striving, such as David Mannes' earnest lovemaking and when she remarks how grateful she is to be away from that beastly hot Sudan, a world weary flush passes like a fast cloud over her desert sand visage.

Naturally, Ardath Bey alias Im-Ho-Tep has no problem seeing right through the veils of time to spot his beloved princess reincarnated into this woman, who--alas is stuck on David Manners. Plus, she’s with her father… and they recognize Ardath Bey from the old expedition, some years before, and it begins to dawn on them they're outgunned as he uses his long range hypnosis to get Helen over to his love shack.


Reverse the formula and you have SHE, which makes its DVD debut this month. Did I tell you that already? A very stoic, humorless and therefore (to me) strangely sexy woman named Helen Gaghan is the titular She, who is immortal because she bathes in the art-deco fountain of youth. To get there you have to climb over various rocky architectural leftovers from producer Ernest B. Schodeshack’s previous film, KING KONG (1933).

Doing this is Randolph Scott as a rugged explorer who discovers She (Who cannot be Named) and her art deco fountain and hordes of slaves and nubile servants high in the Arctic. Perhaps she is related somehow to Im-Ho-Tep because she rules her subjects with this broad statement, “I am past, present, and future; I am sorrow and longing and hope unfulfilled. I am Hash-a-Mo-Tep-She who must be obeyed.” Okay, Hashamo. The "longing" in this statement is for her lover, dead these many aeons. But who does she find reincarnated in Randolph Scott? He’s got a David Manners of his own to cling to and prefer to a love that will transcend time itself--chipper little trapper's daughter Helen Mack.

All this can either seem like some mid-life crisis fantasy (“my true love is no longer in my 45 year old wife, but has left her mortal husk and flown into the pleasing shape of this 19-year old homewrecker”) or it can seem like hope for a love beyond romantic expectation waiting for us across the veil of time. We see this later with PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951) and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)... both of which are deeply romantic in the way films can only be when they step outside the confines of linear time. In the latter film, near everyone in the cast is discovering their lost loves through the veils of time, but in this case, time is only a few weeks at most. Does it really matter? As we get older doesn't childhood memory at times feel more 'recent' than things that happened the previous week?

Another either/or lies in the issue of reincarnation. Presuming there is such a thing, and it’s as easy to believe as anything else, do we in fact keep coming back in the same patterns, meeting the same people, passing into intra-dimensional portals to near realities? Don’t let your fearful super-ego convince you to laugh it all off as “hooey.” There’s a lot you don’t understand even about how your own understanding works, understand? I thought not. I’m talking to myself here, but it’s good company just the same. Actually you are reading my voice with your brain, and probably not even “hearing” me at all. It’s all good… though…

Did I mention the new SHE DVD is colorized? Now before you get all bent out of shape, let it be known that producer Mirian C. Cooper envisioned the film originally in color. The problem was RKO ran out of money and had to fall back on good old black and white. So many moons later, Harryhausen lends his name to the project to make sure the color’s done right from the bottom of stop-motion animation’s crazy beating heart. I already have the 1998 Kino DVD which is nice and all, but not as remastered as I was hoping. I imagined from my shitty VHS dupe of yore that it wasn’t the movie’s fault it was so boring; it needs to be seen on a big screen in beautifully restored detail. Colorization? If Ray Harryhausen says it’s okay, I say it’s okay --in a way is it not a meta reincarnation commentary on the eternal youth of film?

I am going on like this because my heart is broken and, like all bloggers deep down, I hope one day my beautiful soul mate will read these words and something will click in her head and she’ll remember me. I get that way looking at Naomi Watts sometimes, and Helen Gahagan too, while we’re at it. I don’t get that way looking at Zita Johann, though. Not my type. But ultimately is this how our types are chosen? Is my memory of comforting Miss Gahagan after her career sank (due to SHE bombing at the box office) real or false? IMDB tells me that she entered politics after this and eventually lost a seat in a congress bid against old Dick Nixon. You can see archive footage of her in action against old Nixon in Oliver Stone’s film, NIXON. That seems like a scary prospect, though. To imagine SHE who is eternally young getting old…and being in NIXON!


Now you know why I am so down, don’t you? That and I’ve noticed my hair-line receded again. One never actually sees it recede, you know. It comes following a period of “unstable euphoria” when one sees only the “ego ideal” when one looks in the mirror. But then, invariably, something happens that shatters your little teepee of ego-mirrors and leaves you seeing the "real" you in the mirror, time beating relentlessly upon you with a big stick of wind and weather. When the shattering of the mirrors comes, at first it feels glorious and freeing... we fall in love with the person who triggered it, like we were an imprinting newborn baby chick. Later we come home damaged by defeat, or torn by obsessive fall-out from petty triumphs...What is this ego shattering moment for you? What is it that splinters your sense of self and time so that for the rest of your life you long to gaze into those shattered shards just one more time? Maybe it’s the the moment you finally got a chance to tell the girl you truly love how you feel and she wasn’t into you. Or maybe you realize that the girl you thought you were in love with years ago, you really weren’t. It was just that she was so gorgeous, and so damaged, and looked like she would fade so fast.