The Gummo Marx Way: INHERENT VICE (2014)

With glazed eyes and a suspicious tan, Shasta (Katherine Waterston) began languidly gyrating atop our semi-supine and stoned hero (Joaquin Phoenix); her slow deep rhythmic breathing began sending twisty second chakra waves out from the screen into my own shattered nervous system like a hot shower in the reverse direction, kicking the little dusty stem I'd eaten during the previews into slow un/coiling kundalini life at last. The barnyard pungency of the leather coat on the hulk in the seat to my left became--through this Shasta-breathing kundalini awakening--no longer overbearing but reassuring, earthy. A few more deep Shasta breaths and the whole theater of imperfect Brooklyn specimens glowed and merged as one--ever-more rhythmically frenzied-- grinding energy vortex. Each shadowy spiderweb sketch line filament of Inherent's cinematographic glow was now a haunted hazy amnesia-curing brushstroke, framing two lovers against the darkening afternoon of a "Gordita Beach" apartment in the early evening. Shasta's Tropic of Capricorn-style twisted sexual power trip extended single take monologue slowly drove us all into a sympathetic breathing response, and our hero into a ferocious rutting frenzy. 

"You're moaning again," my girl next to me whispered. Apparently this was a thing I did in such moments, quietly I hope, at any rate unbeknownst to me.

I've felt the glowing anguish that results when a a tripping male is suddenly placed in close quarters with some random hottie wearing intoxicating perfume with low cut blouses and short skirts. The intensity can buckle you to your knees. Not being able to just attack her like you're some cameo-making midlife crisis male in CANDY is like having to explain to your children why you're getting divorced, only instead of kids it's a seething sacral chakra. I've felt it a dozen times, but seen it captured in a film only once: Terry Gilliam's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, when just being in an elevator with a laughing Cameron Diaz is enough to send Benicio del Toro's acidhead lawyer into a slow-building howl of pain that infects his mind and body for the rest of the film and results in him even pulling a knife on her friend. I'd never felt it over a movie scene before though, until this moment in VICE, on that one dusty stem... 

Benicio is a very attentive lawyer for both Hunter and Doc (from top: FEAR, VICE)

Everything else, every other trip I'd take later in college and after, never equalled that one perfect moment, it was all just more of the same, but less effective, like 99% of horror movie sequels. Well, that Katherine Waterston scene in director Paul Thomas Anderson's crowded canvas VICE does deliver something new, something PTA's sorely needed, a damned good femme fatale anima for all his damaged fathers and sons.  There's even a holy ghost this time, via a moving and very weird scene with the great Eric Roberts, and a spirit operating a drug dealership via Ouija board.

And most of all, VICE is set in 1970, California, via the literary tripper's choice, based on the book by Thomas Pynchon.  I wanted to hang onto everything--being such a PTA fan--but most of it is a blur of names and faces and places. What resonated for me: a stray streak of sunshine on Doc's face during a drive to the beach, a sunrise reunion of a reformed junky family (the glow of the doorway and the horizon line behind matching in perfect transcendentally lucid pink), and that Waterston 2nd chakra-activation monologue --that's what I remember most. Just a stem and a cap to heighten the gorgeous golden magic hour moments, just a little Gordita Beach Turkey Ranch, that's all I got. Just a couple of acres. Groucho looking out from the ANIMAL proscenium CRACKERS arch, talking to Doc like a most gnarly cross-mediated platform surfer? Stuff was on TVs back when everything was thrice the magic for being so ephemeral. The only screenshot you could make was to take a photo of the TV screen. Always is that magic of the untaped TV-chronicity in a Pynchon; he'd be a great film critic if he wasn't so regular falutin'. Knows his pop culture  but spikes it with post-modern glug glug glug, like a drowning submariner crying Lot 49. And if those strange figgers, mysterious figgers (Anaconda 148) don't add up, neither does life, it's just time lapping into seahorses, and for my sins, they gave me some. And neither does BIG LEBOWSKI. Make sense, I mean. But that's okay, it's not from a book, and so it doesn't fall into that over-reverent, 'trust the meaning is there in the lit' white elephant manicuring that, for example, pulls a bit of the stream-of-madness energy from John Huston's UNDER THE VOLCANO and flattens it out into detailed 'giving the cinematographer and art director way too much money and time' sumptuous over-thinking. There's no extended dream sequences or surreal "it had no bottom" odysseys for Doc Sportello. He's nailed to the events occurring in ways more significant to a detective yarn where it all makes sense and the paranoid 'maybe connections' are meant to add up. No scene can go off into its own little termite dream realm because there's the 'book' to honor and it is a work of literature not a lean mean skeleton on which to hang an array of detours. Yet neither Pynchon nor Lowry are very 'exterior' writers, and to nail their florid dense text to a single narrative film and expect it--due to its literature pedigree--to make 'narrative sense' is rather silly, like expecting Holly Martins will be able to pontificate on Joyce's Ulysses just because he's an American and an author. 

But Shasta adds up. Those legs sprawled naked and soaking in a storefront alcove, Phoenix's scroungy Marxist professor from the 70s look, from back when professors bedded co-eds with sanctioned impunity, and Nazi bikers worked as Aquarius Age bodyguards, and nymphomanic maids screwed everything that wasn't nailed down in her madame's boudoir. Or is that just priapic fantasy?

Mystified mainstream critics have reasoned English major Generation X stoners like myself who remember the 70s from a wide-eyed childhood perspective, aren't seeing the 'real' thing. Our parents are disillusioned with that decade, just as we are with ours (the 80s). I still get weirded out when I hear the Y generation venerate the 80s like it had some mystic power, when for my generation that power faded in the anguished morass of puberty and puerile sex comedies and misogynist slasher movies. For my generation we feel connected to the mystical 'truth' of 70s-style Fleetwood Mac/Sonny and Cher California consciousness raising. We see the Aquarius high water mark with a glowing rose tint. We remember an orgy we saw from afar but never experienced, and that orgy--our expectation of attending it later--being what formed our psyches. But we let the distance between that peace sign-sticker flanked scene and our own embarrassed shyness widen until the distance until our longing soured into bitter frigidity of the slasher movie, feeling our last shred of innocence die at the hands of David Mark Chapman, moaning in pain as the AIDS 80s slammed the door shut right on all future orgies right as we were approaching the 'right' age.

We, these mainstream critics have noted, will probably dig INHERENT VICE more than the bourgeois top critics on our more mainstream newspapers, the "Top Editors" who keep us second stringers reviewing Tyler Perry and Veggie Tales movies. They grab the Paul Thomas Anderson film for themselves, alpha dogs grabbing for the chew toy just because they sense we want it. For these top dogs, the decade's Aquarian tommyrot is just an embarrassing reminder of the month they tried to wife-swap with their bridge club. Paul Thomas Anderson, as far as they're concerned, hasn't made a decent movie since HARD EIGHT. La dee dah.

The Gen X-ed of us love everything but HARD EIGHT, and now, or yet, THE MASTER had thrown us for a loop. Speaking for myself, I dutifully saw THE MASTER twice thinking it would cohere into genius a second time, but no, it was still just gorgeously photographed acting of no more lasting effect than being made to chop wood at my buddy Al's grandparents' house, and liking it despite grousing before during and after. Seeing it again, I can smell the wood burning. But it doesn't get me high anymore

I'm not sure I like INHERENT VICE, at least after one cinema viewing -- high expectations? The only moment of THERE WILL BE BLOOD-level badass Babe and Bunyan truth in either of his last films is when Hoffman shouts "Pig Fuck" with a coiled unresolved adolescent fury any frustrated enlightened charlatan knows all too well. The more spiritual drivel you speak, the surlier your squirming toad cortex seethes below, til that wicked tongue snaps forth and puts someone's eye out. But it was hard to buy the idea that Seymour Hoffman, for all his towering talent, could ever be a cult leader--his fingers were too stubby. Neither he nor Phoenix is the sort, for example, you'd want a bedroom poster of, or to pray to on an altar, the way say we would James Dean, or Daniel Plainview, or "Bob" Dobbs. Phoenix also seems all wrong for a detective, or cop or skip-tracer. He's way to tiny. He seems the type you could just brush away with a strong broom like sweeping motion.

Luckily, in VICE we have the sexual power of Sam Waterson's daughter. She seems legit --the real thing. Her vaguely cat-like face and ease with her body, that sweet sad wistful 'already gone'-ness cracking in her voice, the sort of real no amount of acting workshopping can fake. Her Shasta isn't hung up on Mother Jones sermonizing or slumming Edie-ism. She's complex, and you can believe she doesn't show anyone her full self, and those who come close to getting the big picture are just as likely to lose her with their first inauthentic breath.

Keep your eye on the red bullseye - Lucky Strikes means fine tobacco (LSMFT)

But this is INHERENT VICE: Ultimately, as the narrating Joanna Newsom notes, a nameless eternal evil has seeped like a vapor out from the ancient opium Pacific and co-opted the Age of Aquarius. But just where has the vapor condensed? It's a hard thing to trace in a 1970 California where hippie-dom is apparently so very near becoming the dominant culture that cops don't even bat an eye when you spark up a joint in their presence. They do beat you up for having long hair though - even if they're  your friends. Ain't no gettin' around that. So just assume the passive stance of protecting head and fingers and groin and let the billy clubs fall where they may.

Milk

Thus the strange ancient frenemies relationship with Josh Brolin's cop Bigfoot. And Brolin's character invoking hazy memories of the 'Twinky Defense'-copping assassin Dan White in MILK (2008), connecting with Newsom's debut album (The MILK-eyed Mender). Coincidence?

PTA's always been first and foremost a filmmaker for de facto cool older brother relationships, and part of what BLOOD's power emerged from was the relative lack of a feminine element. Certainly, to my memory, no female character has a line of dialogue in the film, aside from maybe Mrs. Sunday. Instead there was this boy scout-cum-capitalist narrative nursing on the crude oil teat of the Paul Bunyan masculine John Henry Steel Driving consciousness, drawing from it as if a deep well from which to dredge up the dark oil-slicked father of modern oil-based economy. THE MASTER tried to do the same, but Amy Adams' as Hoffman's wife snaked forward with more power perhaps than even Hoffman (as his Clinton-esque hand job indicates). Now, in VICE, it's even narrated by a woman, and not a Spacek in BADLANDS blank slate woman but a savvy all-knowing Cali free spirit shamaness of no small wit, harp expertise and mystic acumen. Her albums are rich with great existential lines that would stagger Whitman and leave my iPod devastated--"and though our bodies recoil / from the grip of the soil / why the long face?" She and Waterson are not stealth buzzkills like Amy Adams, but wild untamed goddesses of strange alliance, orbiting men in motion like moons or cats but belonging to no single planet or territory or direction.

Then there's Joaquin as old Doc, the hippie detective. His office lurks deep in a medical suite, Anderson's ex-girlfriend Maya Rudolph as his doctor office receptionist; Doc in his gynecology chair, a xone for smoking weed and staring at the window, huffing laughing gas when the myriad threads get too much for a single viewing. Seeing double somehow allows the plot to come into focus for old Doc. Not me. I do know that it's Maya Rudolph's mother, Minnie Ripperton, singing the song that rises triumphantly from the soundtrack during Doc's mosey back to his office:

Ring all the bells /sing and tell 

the people everywhere that the flower has come
Light up the sky with your prayers of gladness 

and rejoice for the darkness is gone... 

Of course 1970 it was still possible to be idealistic enough to believe that darkness would one day be gone, or even had gone once and come back. And it's Anderson's genius that he can recreate not only our Gen-X collective memory of that era, wherein he and I were children of similar age, but to make it a source of lasting mythic resonance. For me, every strand of long blonde straight hair I see reflects the gossamer shimmer of Anita Louise's as Titania, queen of the fairies--my anima! If it's over a denim jacket, I'm agog. Why? My mom volunteered part time at a runaway shelter, which was basically a typical suburban house with a big porch. I remember one Xmas my dad's company bought them a coffee percolator. They were part of the Jaycees, my parents, so fell into stuff like that. My mom brought this girl named Toots home for Xmas -- a gorgeous 16 year-old thing in a jean jacket and perfectly pressed long blonde hair. My mom gave her two packs of Marlboros as an Xmas present, maybe some other stuff - I only remember the cigarettes. It left me forever a-swoon for her type, and dying to be a smoker. That was the 70s, you'd take in runaways and give them cigarettes and it wasn't considered a felony or 'suspect' or 'corrupting the morals of a minor." Don't get me started!

For Xmas, my rapture over her every movement paralyzed me so I still remember how hard it was to croak, "Hey Toots, want to do Doodle Art?" Those words etched into my brain with some small shame, the way my voice broke on the word "Doodle" and made it seem somehow scatalogical.

It was the 'Mythology' one (left -but w/different colors)- and ten years later it hung in my college friend's drug den living room -- it's the circle of life. Mythology. Coincidence.

But it was mainly that fate had deposited her there, on my orange shag rug, like an Xmas gift from the karmic wheel. In the safety of my family, she let it all hang out. And it's a family affair of adopted and actual sibling cinema in camp PTA too: Sam Waterston's sexy daughter Katherine is the femme fatale; Martin Donovan is the angry dad of a runaway, the stand-in for Col. "I enjoyed that drink as much as you did" Rutledge in THE BIG SLEEP; Elaine May's daughter Jeannie Berlin is Doc's savvy New Yorker Aunt Reet; James Brolin's son Josh is the cop; Eric Roberts is Julia's brother; Serena Scott Thomas is Kristen's sister; Jena Malone is a reformed heroine user looking for her man.

And some of us remember Joaquin didn't come up the ladder to fame so much as be revealed standing there after brother River died (sister Summer's also in movies); Joanna Newsom is married to Andy Samberg who later that same night (that we saw VICE) showed up on ERIC ANDRE SHOW uncredited as Eric's double and their schtick together evoked the mirror scene 1933's DUCK SOUP, starring the Marx Brothers, and the street name Gummo Marx Way--Gummo famously the only Marx Brother never to appear on film--is on one of the files looked over by Doc at the Hall of Top Secret Records in VICE.

And what about GUMMO? It's by Harmony Korine, who also made SPRING BREAKERS, set also on a beach involving pretty people doing crimes while engaging in deep druggy binaural second chakra breathing. Of course that film was set in Florida, where Elmore Leonard set so much of his oeuvre, and that oeuvre a clear inspiration for Pynchon's source novel, along with Hunter S. Thompson (Doc and Duke sharing Benicio del Toro as an eccentric lawyer) and The Firesign Theater's How Can you be Two Places at Once when You're not anywhere at all? And back around again. Gummo Marx's film oeuvre, a study through which someone in some Allen film obtained some film doctorate... which brings me back to VICE yet again, and Martin Short's obscene corrupting uncut Cockaine dentist love... with Shasta an underage girl ("But it did happen."), a wild child ala Camen Sternwood, falling onto Sam's lap while she's standing up.

And back to that wow of a super sexy girlfriend free spirit played by Katherine Waterston (Sam's daughter) named Shasta Fay Hepworth. She basically owns the movie, no mean feat considering the heavy hitters in all directions. She's the mystery, and by the end we can understand why this stoner detective is so crazy about her, and why he's ultimately so frustrated being unable to find any clues as to her whereabouts when she decides to be gone. Like Lebowski is about that rug, or Gould's Marlowe about that vanished wrong guy friend, or Hackman for poor Melanie in Night Moves, it's the obsession that guides him, the film, us. Woke last night to the sound of thunder / how far off I sat and wondered / started gummin' a song from 1970... was it Minnie Ripperton's "Les Fleurs?" Yo, Minnie's daughter Maya Rudolph was that fleur? She was born two years after that song came out. So no. She wasn't even a gleam in her father's eye. But in Hindustani texts Maya means illusion and is eternally beguiling. No coating of black enamel could hide her value from his eyes. Maya is the woods we must hack our way clear of towards the clear-cut riverside of Nirvana, with no Excalibur machete or golden ankh to wave. And let's just take a look at this fabulous Yucatan Blue! Price: only what the traffic will allow, delivered to me, Ralph Icebag, by a brown-shoed square in the dead of night. Now of course PTA and I are too old for such things - to fantasize about young hotties in the 20s is to feel slightly skeevy, the line of parental concern sneaking in to kabosh lewd longings, that coupled to desire's gradual dimming. We've been fantasizing about and desiring girls in Shasta's age group since we were seven. Are we supposed to magically stop just because we're now enlightened? Can we really put the social awareness genie back up the bottle? Now in middle age, men are only desirable if they do not desire. It's in accepting this awful compromise that an ex-swinger earns his only chance at long-term respect. Sportello in his quest for justice or whatever he's after winds up with no magic credit card full of money for his labors, that goes to Coy Harlin - who also gets his family back. What does Doc get as this agent of Borgesian karma? I can't tell you but it's also the name of a short-lived 70s soda brand. Give up? Even then, there's bound to be hurt feelings with a certain assistant-DA (below, right). This is the ever-evolving world Doc navigates. Riding one paranoid clue to the other. The final reward being a great bit of acting tough during the Martin Donovan talk where he momentarily seems somewhat scary, before sinking into his stoner fog once more.

I had no control over it, but I watched, and then I read about it, so I know that by the mid-80s, when I became a hippie and besties with Toots-like hippie blondes, America had already given up on the utopian ideal for a united and very hip America - only in certain pockets of California, Colorado, Connecticut and upstate NY maybe did it all still thrive. The alternate reality of Pynchon's LA can't decide if the counterculture infiltrated the mainstream and tools of government to any degree. I was too naive at the time to realize how much the 'free love' grubbers from the raincoat 'burbs had trashed the Hashbury Ideal until it hit me personally: Maybe you experienced it: townie and/or frat cokehead troglodytes dropping by your intimate ego-dissolving LSD party at four AM and you realizing you need your ego after all because you need to get aggressive enough to kick them out. All you can do instead is try, vainly, to formulate a coherent sentence without contradicting the love vibes you've vouchsafed. So it was wherever clement outdoor park service did thrive. Hordes of long haired peaceful but filthy barefoot hippies clogging ever last public bathroom, everyone being too cool to work or pay money, just presuming they'll be taken care of by the very social order they spit on.  The center cannot hold. Communes go unglued as psychedelic unity and the blazing tribal consciousness that had emerged from the primitive inner rolodex for the first time in 1,000 years gives way to petty squabbles, malnourished infants of uncertain parentage, filthy sinks (the water turned off for no one paid the bill) and squalor enough to reduce even the most enlightened of near-Buddhacatholichrists back down to grouchy adolescent Earth, craving the comfort of mom's clean sheets and the now-weakened capitalist behemoth's car keys.

But they had brought all the trappings of the counterculture with us back to our home suburbs, and 1970 signaled the beginning of that smooth Laurel Canyon sound on the FM dial. The radio lit up with songs that managed to be sexy and vaguely dangerous to us kids without seeming to offend or challenge in any way. Parents and children in unison swooned from the emotional connection of "American Pie" or "Go Your Own Way" or "You Light Up My Life." Vietnam still sulked around but there were bridge games, wife swapping, martinis, and above all we kids. Our parents gave up total freedom but we were unleashed, freed by Jaycees' many parenting lectures all hip on Buscaglia, Spock, and EST - all attended and talked about and the methods "tried out" on us to great success.

I took advantage of that 70s freedom. I stole every cent I could. We kids ran loose like dogs. It was okay with us that we could still get spanked or slapped in public by people not our parents and no one would bat an eye. One whack for every year on our birthday in front of the whole class by the teacher. At home, indoors, we towered like Godzilla over wood block towers we'd smash again and again before sloughing back into the depths. No mom objected to us playing with realistic looking cap guns unchaperoned wild in the woods and streets for days at a time. Vertical wood paneling was our rec room horizon; orange shag carpet our jungle canopy; couch cushions laid in a line on the floor our Bridge of Toome in County Antrim, Ireland. We'd march up and down it in time and pretend to be hung like Roddy McCorley. PTA was there, I was there. Were were you? Where were you? Which war? Which side or drug were you on?

I don't know how many times I've seen BIG LEBOWSKI. A dozen?  I don't even like it but it's endlessly re-watchable; some part is always just right for the moment I stumble onto it during, and its always on some channel or other.. Sooner or later though, it grates on my nerves. But it's never the same film twice, until now. Jackie Treehorn's shoe prints are all over the Pynchon PTA's lovingly detailed semi-sordidness. VICE even uses the same Les Baxter-Yma Sumac Tropicalia vibe that was Treehorn's leitmotif to conjure the same crossroads between the Jack Horner nurturing free love spirit and the Treehorn mobbed-up porno-decadence. But that's just one of a thousand twuggy-druggy twiggy-wiggy branches. You can dig it. I can dig it. Cyrus, the one and only.... But most of all, Paul Thomas Anderson has exhumed himself from beneath THE MASTER's weighty muck to re-dig it.

Who knows what would have been the result if Welles made a 70s stoner detective film. Would it have been INHERENT VICE? Or is there just no character titanic enough within the story to hold his interest? There's no core or center to VICE, no 'hurrah' moment like the pool party in BOOGIE NIGHTS or the bowling alley climax of BLOOD. Phoenix is a great actor, but he's a scrawny shell of a thing, a short wiry little weirdo. We don't gravitate to him like we do to Warren William or Bogart in similar roles, or even Dick Powell or big Jeff Bridges (or his father, Lloyd Bridges, for that matter). As for VICE's detective narrative, it's more coherent than some, but trying to explain the plot to my underwhelmed partner last night, all I could do is relate the anecdote about Hawks calling Raymond Chandler from the BIG SLEEP set to ask who actually killed Owen Taylor and Chandler not knowing the answer either. It doesn't matter.

She thought it should.

I've seen BIG SLEEP a dozen times at least, and I'm almost ready to blame Joe Brody, but Joe's saying he just sapped him for the incriminating picture from the back of the head of Krishna, So don't even draw the connections, baby. Just soak in Eric Roberts' brilliant monologue that rips the guts out of capitalism with an LSD trowel and reveals nothing but jewelry-coated vultures beneath the black enamel topsoil, the breathing aurae of cinematographer Robert Elswit, the spiderweb lines of light and shadow haloing around every actor; the great clothes and cars like some old analog album came to life, Phoenix a little monkey wiggling free of his angel dust entrapment cuffs and every drug you have ever done shivering to your DNA surfaces.

You're home, if you're like me, comfortable, almost amniotically sound, in this murky mythic din of countercurrent flashbacks. Every time you smoked angel dust it was because some dirtbag laced his joint and didn't tell you til it was too late. You were only three but you well remember the morning when every TV channel showed only the streaky continuous feed of astronauts bouncing around the moon in molasses air, like they were underwater, the audio just transmitted astronaut chatter and space interference, hour after hour, the usual old science fiction movies of the morning pre-empted, their futuristic fiction now outmoded into ancient fact.

"Ain't been high since '69"

In some strange way that was true love, that one stretch of continuous time --no commercials, no political dissent or grandstanding or fear-mongering, no sponsor, no agenda. Just community, finally. Harper Valley, we didn't know how much you meant to us until we thought we'd lost you.

But a new time has come: your cosmic Maya has given birth to a new generation of Rippertons. We're free to love movies like those mythic moon moments again, free to see you and me in the same slow motion bouncing astronaut ground zero persona-dissolving mythic glow. A new go-to comfort food bible is born, if you care to blast for it. It's the Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective, brought to you by Wild Root Cream Oil Hair tonic. Yeah, it tastes electric... crimson... almost like fire. Almost. But were real 70s cars ever this collector clean? Or ever a humor in this Woman One? Take this lozenge from my tongue, this quill from out my heart, this pink and blue Tab (languette) of / Purple Barrel Plums / Untie from me the TruCoat, Ralph Spoilsport. Though our bodies may break and our souls separate, why the long face? We don't need no sealant, not anymore. No salt coheres along an ever-moving shoreline. Arise for the darkness has come / back! Remember Les Fleurs, Walter! Ils brillent dans le noir. And most of all... Rejoice, sisters and brothers and siblings transgendered: there's finally a movie where being a stoner isn't the same thing as being an idiot. I never in a million addled years thought we'd overcome that dopey stigma, let alone Washington and Colorado, let alone, baby.  Let alone.

Dirty up that car, Paul. This ain't no expo

Al Shean Presents: Vice Grip of the PYNCHON

RIFF INDEX: 1. Jackie Treehorn -(Big Lebowski) Pornographer played by Ben Gazzara (a riff on Eddie Mars in Arthur Gwyn Geiger + Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep) - "I'll Say She Is" - title of the last (unfilmed) Marx Bros. Broadway revue / Jack Horner - Pornographer played by Burt Reynolds (Boogie Nights) 3. "when the drugs began to hold..." - opening lines from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing... Vegas  4. "Turkey Ranch... that's all I got" - Hank Quinlan - Touch of Evil (1959) / "lapping into seahorses" - Patti Smith, "Horses" / "Steel Anaconda," etc. - Animal Crackers, Pynchon - Crying of Lot 49 5. "Spoilsport Motors," "Where were you, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Smith" - Firesign Theater (How Can you be Two Places at Once...) / IV. "Communiss" - Confederacy of Dunces / 7. "Roddy McCorley" - Irish drinking traditional (via Clancy Brothers album we had as a child) 6. "like the Andalusion girls used..." -"crimson... almost life fire" -  James Joyce, Ulysses  7. Trucoat - protective coating / sealant - scam extra Lundergaard tries to sell - Fargo (Coen Bro.s) 12. Wildroot Cream Oil Hair Tonic - "Again and again the choice for men who put good grooming first" Squaresville, in short. (Sponsor for old radio show "The Adventures of Sam Spade"  / Walter - (John Goodman in Big Lebowski; also Dick Miller in Bucket of Blood) 9. "Take this Longing..." - Leonard Cohen / "quill from out.... my heart" - Poe, The Raven  42. Tab - common 70s slang for square from a sheet of blotter acid, also one of the earlier Diet colas: the latter of which I am now hopelessly addicted, and for which I blame past use of the former - ya dig? ii. ".... Why the long face?" - lyrics from "Sawdust and Diamonds" by Joanna Newsom / "make you lasagna' - Clerks iv. Purple Barrel... - play on a common form of mescaline from the 80s 87. "Holly Martins..." - Third Man, The  xx. "If you care to blast for it" - Ben Hecht - Nothing Sacred (1937) 17. Harper Valley - Cockney-ish slang for Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) - re: "Harper Valley PTA" 21. Al Shean - AKA Abraham Elieser Adolph Schönberg (Marx Brothers' uncle, credited for coming up with their names and schtick) 

Blu Water/ Summer/Heaven Ray

Summer - if you can't be at the beach, watch Blu-ray movies on a big HD TV that have lots of good ocean footage, underwater caverns, surfing, bikinis. Whassapppbra! Blu-ray can make these images so 3-D vivid that if you put some coconut oil under your nose, some coco de oro in your hair, baby you're there. 

As der ausgezechneiete Hasselhof's Baywatch proved, people feel relaxed looking at the beach, the surf, even if just on TV. Give them tanned bodies and lolling surfs, and just enough plot to keep their analytical mind from getting restless, to keep you looking at the screen until the surf images trigger inner waves of relaxation, a feeling of bobbing up and down in the current, and urges to buy sponsored products... Pamela Anderson was a great poster child for this sort of no-fault / no-foul proxy pleasure trip. But Jessica Alba has her beat, if only because her acting is moderately better, her features less synthetic, and she seems genuinely healthy and athletic rather than one step away from Hep-C.

INTO THE BLUE (2005) 

I saw this at a press screening back when it came out, on a big big UWS screen and so I knew in advance that all the brilliant underwater footage of swimming with sharks was more or less 100% real. I was stoked--that is the word, my friends, "stoked"--to find INTO THE BLUE lived up to the hype... of its press release. Criticisms of the overall douche-bagginess of the two himbo leads (Paul Walker and Scott Caan) aside, when you can't even sneer more than a a handful of times, even when the righteous Walker is throwing away bags of coke out of principle, then you know a movie's not bad. And you don't really want a movie like this to be "good" because then it would be awful, you know what I mean? You want it to be good enough to be hold your interest, bad enough to not stress you out during the 'tense' cross-cutting.

INTO THE BLUE marks also one of the first times I ever laid eyes on Josh Brolin--hidden under cap, glasses and beard, I thought he was Matt Dillon going incognito--and even though he's the bad guy, he's so cool you root for him anyhow. He's one of the few non-douche bags in the film! In fact all the bad guys are cooler than the leads!

In fact I saw this on Blu-ray  last night with a young woman who didn't even recognize it was Josh Brolin under the hat, shades, and facial hair either and yet she was all, like, "I'm rootin' for that guy - he seems like he could be my uncle." This is some of my original 2005 Muze review:

"It's based on THE DEEP, a 1977 film that tried to capitalize on the JAWS phenomenon of the time but disappointed audiences by forgetting the sharks. This version is a much more exciting film and features shark attacks and real sharks swimming among the actors, thereby righting a 32-year-old wrong. Director John Stockwell also did BLUE CRUSH (2001), so it's a given there's no skimping on the beautiful scenery, both above and below the water line. With the gorgeous bikini-clad Alba undulating through the water like a mermaid, this movie becomes, in its own unique way, a perfect 10." (Muze c.2010)

  BLUE CRUSH (2002)

Underwater and/or beach movies are cool, but the best in my mind are "water-line" movies, those that plunge in and out of the waves and give you the effect of actually being in them -- like after a day spent in the ocean when you're lying in bed and can feel the ocean current still tugging at your body. Director John Stockwell's first big blue movie, BLUE CRUSH nails this with surfer-eye-level views of the clear blue Hawaiian waves, bobbing up and down like we're out there waiting our turn with the locals. Why isn't this on blu-ray yet? Answer me!

Here's an updated version of what I wrote in Bright Lights back in 2008, and it still goes:

The common critical response to the film at the time was that the awesome photography more than made up for the trite story and bland acting, but critics have always had a hard time with accepting truly free girl characters; if you can look past the surface colloquialisms this is practically a Howard Hawks film for young women: overlapping dialogue; strong camaraderie, good sense of continuity and pace, issues of courage, maturity and nobility. It’s all there, and best of all, the issue of romance getting in the way of your dreams–yeah you heard me, ladies, getting in the way of instead of being your dreams-–is handled with care and ballsy skill.

Matthew Davis plays the vacationing quarterback who romances Hawaiian surf rat Ann Marie (Kate Bosworth) causing her to lose focus right before the big pipe competition. Michelle Rodriguez is the best friend/trainer who sees what’s happening and knows Ann Marie is just scared she’ll hit her head on the coral reef, like she did last time. Real-life surf champ Sanoe Lake is, just, well, awesome; she’s a natural star and makes a perfect third in their posse, letting her surf sisters carry the emotional weight while she brings sandy authenticity and a deeply entrenched-in-the-termite-moment joi de vivre. When she rolls out of bed to answer the phone with a sleepy “how are the waves?” instead of aloha, you feel like you’re right in bed with her, covered in sand, and still drunk from falling asleep three minutes before.

Plus, there’s even a surreal horror element--like a META-TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE--when you see this one dude surfing wearing Kate Bosworth’s face (above). What? Maybe that's why there's no Blu-ray for this title? Too much detail on the Bosworth surfing long shots might turn the whole thing Tobe Hooper?

MIAMI VICE (2008)

Sooner or later, vice cops make criminals of us all, but hey, maybe they have mutton chops. Crocket and Tubbs fund their jetset lifestyle with confiscated houses, money, boats, and cars from busted cocaine traffickers, which means they have the morals of a guinea pig and the ethics of a gangster, fucking narcs! Would'st thou arrest a lemon tree it if it drops lemons upon thy head, officer? And I don't even like cocaine; I've seen it turn too many of my friends into corpses or windbags or worse.

So, for all its acidemic incorrectness, MIAMI VICE still made the "decade list" of the inestimable Keith Uhlich over in the House Next Door. The British Time Out Film Guide meanwhile notes Mann’s got “images intricate in their expressionist eloquence and mythic in their noir poetry.” What does America’s Leonard Maltin book say? “Super cool cars, boats and planes keep this watchable on a fantasy level, but the final showdown is awfully conventional.” Whaaaa? "Super cool"? Lenny, the British just made you look stooooopid!

And Lenny, bro, one more thing: applying “conventional” to Mann is like applying “predictable” to the story of Madame Butterfly: “Colorful Clothes and impassioned singing make this passable, but still ends on the same depressing note.” Mann uses cop conventions like Puccini uses romantic tragedy or John Ford uses the western. The final showdown in VICE is actually unconventional in its conventionality, carrying various metaphysical significations, such as that yin/female energy is interconnected and serpentine, and how --on certain nights, you "can feel it / comin' in the air" - and by the dawn, everyone you know will either break up with their current lover and/or hook up with their new, as if some magic equalizing ripple effect gives and takes away in equal measure.

Great minimalist dialogue, great use of Moby featuring Patti Labelle ("One of these Mornings"), and those great trailer park mutton chops, and Colin Farrell doing what L. DiCap couldn’t do in BODY OF LIES, which is impersonate Russell Crowe successfully.  These guys are super tough and every line of dialogue is emptied of everything but professional balls-to-the-wall plot advancement. In their own way this Crocket and Tubbs talk as mystic-existential as the driver and mechanic in TWO LANE BLACKTOP.

 So there's three summer fun films for you, and also check out A PERFECT GETAWAY (2009), which is also another blue water / Blu-ray summer must, this time starring Milla Jovovich and one of my new favorite B-list beefcakes, an Eastwood-talkin' bro named Timothy Olyphant! (my review here).

Great Dads of the 1970s #10: Josh Brolin as Dr. Block in PLANET TERROR

I'll grant you that Brolin's character in this beautifully constructed gonzo gem from Robert Rodriguez (can I go out on a limb and say it's his best film, even if it's so gross I have to avert my eyes 1/10 of the time?) is in fact rather evil. Yes, he tries to kill his unfaithful wife even before he gets turned into a zombie, but damned if he ain't a good dad to his kid, Tony (played by Robert's son Rebel and named--presumably-- after Danny Torrance's finger in THE SHINING).

First off, there's the fact that daddy and mommy are doctors, who wake up at night to go to work! Pardon me, but I think that's just about the coolest thing in the world. Maybe it's just that I'm so sick to death of those tiresome scenes of domestic tranquility around the breakfast table--dad with briefcase and condescending pat on the head; mom in her apron chastising the kids for forgetting their mittens, etc.--that pass as 'character development' in so many bad, censor-approved films. Here that breakfast family dynamic is inverted and made as cozily sinister and exciting as getting ready for trick-or-treating. Also adding to the inverse, the dad sits down to cereal with Danny and notices instantly Danny's lost a tooth. "Hey what happened to your tooth?" he says, conspiratorially, cooly, interested but not 'worried', just one cool cat to another. Meanwhile, mom is pattering around like a nervous wreck, oblivious to them both, too busy double dealing on a cell phone AND a Blackberry.

Third, there's his line to his kid, his request Tony join him in the prayer/wish: "No dead bodies for daddy tonight." How cool is that? This one phrase lets the kid into dad's world as an ER doctor at the local hospital. Similar to the "give us a kiss" line in JAWS, it delineates just exactly how the kid serves to help the father deal with his big adult issues, i.e. by acting as an conduit back to (relative) innocence, albeit an innocence still able to face and be immersed to a degree in the macabre. The son becomes the touchstone of decency which enables dad to wade into the blood, vice and depravity of 1970s monster hunting, eating, and becoming. It's a quid-pro-quo as the son's innocence centers the father in his bloody quest, but the father in a sense centers the innocent son in the experience of death, destruction, and blood. Block treats him like an equal, like a young man deserving of respect and confidence but at the same time Block doesn't pass responsibility onto him or betray any emotional dissonance or anxiety that might traumatize or adversely affect him.

By contrast, Dakota, the near-hysterical anesthesiologist mom (Marley Shelton) is so terrified her husband will discover she's about to run off with her hot lesbian lover (Carmen Electra) she barely notices Tony at all. Naturally she wants to take Tony too but one can see the wretched life he'll have fleeing from locked motel to motel while Elektra and his mom get it on in the next room- - he'll be as neglected as Freddie Bartholomew in THREE ON A MATCH (1933).

Irregardless of Dakota, it's that Block's not afraid to mention dead bodies to his son, that he doesn't exclude him in that babying way overprotective parents of today might, that puts him squarely in the great dads pantheon. He even shares his suspicion over Dakota's lies with Tony: "Do we believe her?" Block calmly asks when mom lies about the text message she receives while preparing their nightly breakfast. "Nope," Tony flatly answers.

Dakota shows all her anxiety and fear to Tony, while dad Brolin never would; he's even respectful of Tony's action figures and their desire to "eat brains."

How can a man convey such a great and complex dad in such a short single scene? One word: BROLIN! He even starts the nigh at the hospital off right --in prime doctor mode--until discovering Carmen Electra dead under a sheet, wheeled in by paramedic Joe Bob Briggs. From then on he's a dickhead monster, but hey -- his wife proves her infidelity and lying ways, and then even blames Tony's death from self-inflicted gunshot wound on him later on in the night --and he was nowhere near them. That ain't right!

P.S.
Have you heard Brolin is going to play George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's new biopic? The mind boggles, the stomach contracts, and the gall rises. I may have to avert my eyes, as I always do in Joe's VD slide examination scene.

Read a great interview with Brolin here.

The Well-Tempered Poitier: Thanksgiving with AMERICAN GANGSTER

After thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, then meeting a friend to watch AMERICAN GANGSTER later that night at the cinema, I come home feeling the need to scrub America off me with a wire brush. Russell Crowe's honest cop is the descendant of SERPICO, Popeye Doyle and Travis in TAXI DRIVER. They're janitors in a sewer with a mop and pail, and they're the only ones clean. They're obsessive-compulsive that way, the rest of the world has to suffer and get saved, grudgingly, by these control freaks. We keep hoping Denzel Washington's gangster will start sass-talking like Harvey Keitel (as Sport, that damned elusive pimp to Nell!), but Denzel prefers to stay emotionless, in a suit with lapels too thin that's way too chalky gray for the era, a representative of 00's corporate culture returned through time to buy up as much cheap pre-Giuliani real estate as the traffic will allow, sneering at the hideous polyester knits around him as he goes. Denzel bitch-slaps his underlings when they try to pimp up their outerwear, but he seldom bothers to correct them when they slip out of time (the film is set between 1968-1973) and use black lingo that didn't exit until Run DMC coined it in the late 1980's. Ridley's writers should've listened close to Lightnin' Rod's Hustler's Convention while writing the dialogue, instead of Eminem.

Another problem is that Ridley Scott and co. don't trust the audience's attention span: so much money is thrown at the screen that you hope they're planning a future extended cut to run about 34 hours. A whole trip to Vietnam and back--replete with massive poppy fields and decadent US-occupied Saigon streets--whisks by in perhaps five minutes. You feel for the hundreds of extras, slaving day after day, topless, over white powder while Ridley stomps around and changes his mind, and then their scene is cut down to a single minute. We don't get to know anything tangible about any of the vast cast of characters, except grandma likes money. They're even worse than blank slates; they're cliches out of time.

Crowe may be a composite of 70's antiheroes and to his credit, actually seems to from and in the decade, but Denzel is a composite only of past Denzel, more at the well-dressed end of the spectrum, which means early 00s. But if he thought he could play his psychological hand close-to-the-vest the way, say, Pacino was allowed to do in THE GODFATHER II and have it work, he was mistaken. Coppola knew when his actors were doing interesting stuff, and he trusted the audience to stay with it (or was that Robert Evans?). But now, instead of the colorful method acting at the Corleone table we get the relentless second-guessing of Ridley, who whittles things down in the editing room until there's nothing left but little actions from different eras, each with a complete new costume change and lens filter. More than anything, what Ridley has wrought is the home shopping network of bling: he throws open the closets of yesterday's rich and infamous, and when it all starts to get tiresome, he takes an expensive fur coat and hurls it on the fire. Did Ridley really burn that expensive ass coat? And does it matter, since that day's catering bill alone was probably more expensive than a dozen such garments?

Many are my maddening questions. Robert Evans is not on the producer's list and too bad, because he would have made Ridley throw on the brakes, and maybe even try for some original touches rather than ratcheting together FRENCH CONNECTION/SERPICO gritty momentum and the sort of insecure crosscutting that worked in the GODFATHERs but showed to be a real bad habit for Coppola in every film since (Gregory Hines tap dancing as gangsters are killed outside in COTTON CLUB? Why?). Like Coppola, Ridley's got the "second-guess" disease, like the sort of nervous mother-in-law that plans every last drop of life out of her daughter's wedding. He can't just have a big sting operation with micro-second cross-cuts between the cops in the hall, the crack factory workers inside, gunsels, and so forth, it has to go down right as the head bad guy is at church, ala GODFATHER II, and there has to be a baby bouncing a ball in the tenement hallway right where the shooting's about to start. Surely Scott could've spliced in a sexy wife tossing and turning in bed, waking up with the premonition something bad's about to happen and trying to talk her man out of going to work? And maybe a scene of hunters about to shoot down a high-flying hawk? And the old lady having a heart attack, and the ambulance coming in slow motion? Come on, Ridley. You're getting lazy!

I wouldn't mind if this was a result of giddy fanboy homage to POTEMKIN and INTOLERANCE as it was once with De Palma, but there's no giddy fanboy joy here, just nervous second-guessing, which I can only guess led to swiping, copying other kids' tests at school rather than trusting those old DUELIST instincts. With so much $$ involved, I can only accuse them all of bowing down to a corporate "memo" mentality. No one wants to stick their neck out, so everything is groupthink, and in the end, no one has any faith in any one single moment in the film. In Ridley's case, that means no faith in the scene as it is, no realization that any further additions is going to overpainting.

Every scene--except maybe big Oscar-bait moments with momma schooling her errant son--is cut away from before its allowed to develop organically, in an original direction. Can't risk it, man. So every shot, has to have been proven in past classics. Ditto for Denzel and his white co-star, now a Thanksgiving tradition - wasn't last year his tangle with Clive Owen in INSIDE MAN? And before that with little Ethan Hawke in TRAINING DAY? Ridley's version is careful to include nearly everything that worked from both those movies: Temptation of a cop with easy bundles of money? Check! Hot Latina babe as the spouse? Check! Dog, leopard, cuckatoo, or other pet? Check, mate!

Washington's interest in this sort of rote-a-role is understandable, as it's a well-respected course around which he can outrace the white man and not piss off the red state box office. As history records, a black actor with excessive pride and intellect as opposed to mere posture and dignity can create big waves unless he's given a sturdy white cliff to bash his rageful tide against;2 Washington is the waviest since Paul Robeson and he knows it. He even invites the spirit of Robeson into him for key moments, but is careful not to overdo it, to not step out of the careful blocking for the shot and go with the mood deeper than originally planned. In that, Ridley Scott is the perfect Thanksgiving director, hurtling through the action like he's racing to catch his plane, making silent eye contact to the rest of his immediate family--all of them as anxious to split as he is as they sit, scattered along the table playing with the remnants of their flavorless pumpkin pie--earning their grateful smile by silently pointing at his watch and mouthing "ten minutes." Keeping an eye on the stove all the while, Ridley lifts Denzel off the burner the second he starts to blacken.

Crowe on the other hand is the opposite to Washington's tailored-out-of-time look; Crowe makes himself all mangy and disrespectful, punchy and greased-up -- and thus he is all the more kingly. He's the legit patriarch, a pitbull's jaw of a man. Denzel's gangster has to keep stockpiling the long green or else he's simply a cipher, but Crowe stays Crowe. He's a man's man actor, a person who in real life you can tell has faced himself in the mirror; he's had drinking contests with his inner demons; he's earned the right to be a stand-up guy who can look the world in the eye. In that he's the closest thing we have to Bogart or John Wayne this decade. In TRAINING DAY, Denzel proved he could access some of that same sort of noble power, but there he was the bad guy so it was okay to loom bigger than life; when strait-jacketed in the "savior of the neighborhood-but-also-a-smack-dealer" double bind, he keeps trying add some well-tempered Poitier and it just seems to stall his development as Denzel the persona, whomever that may be. Poitier could roar when need be. "They call me Mister Pibbs" is justifiably legendary. But it wouldn't be if he shouted his way through the movie like he's teaching a rowdy class of East London mods. He kept the dignity as a bush from which to as a serpent strike when most effective. Denzel on the other hand plays the coiled serpent in the bush so long he forgets the coiled serpent is supposed to rattle and strike occasionally.

It's easy to forget, but Sydney Poitier radiated a sense of the polished intellectual because he was one. Characters were created with him in mind to fill them, but like James Dean, he was forging ground in himself as well as the culture with each role, for the term 'intellectual' was not always the bourgeois throw pillow it is now. That's what one's craft should be for: any field or action is a potential vehicle for self-discovery. Nowadays we assume the actors who dared bring this sense of enlightened entitlement to the screen were merely posturing to set an example, to lift their lottery-addicted brethren out of the ghetto and into a nice dry dark space, and on the other side of town, to show whites that the black people were capable of highbrow sophistication. The Civil Rights struggle made their kids understandably join the Panthers and stop debating Freud with us in our candle-lit bebop cafes. Today it seems unreal that anyone--let alone African Americans--could have had the courage to be classy and live by their own convictions. Bill Cosby is remembered for his sweaters and Godfrey Cambridge is forgotten altogether. Race performers like Willie Best are debated about and set as victims of Hollywood's bigotry, but what about the amazing Clarence Muse? Robeson? Even Poitier, certainly Cicely Tyson on the female side, were able to put big personal statements, vast tomes of depth far beyond merely being a victim or fighting against stereotyping. Washington occasionally seems to forget that it's not enough to not perpetuate black stereotypes: you have to invent something new, that is to say, a self that transcends limitations such as cultural, educational, class, and racially-tinged pre-perceptions.

Labels are what we use as bookmarks in the lifetime reading of our true selves. We inevitably get lazy, stop reading and just focus on the bookmarks. Denzel is an actor who is forever trying to get by on just reading the bookmarks of his heroes and forerunners. In his inner boxing ring, Robeson burns and fumes and punches the air from one corner, Poitier reads the New York Times in the other, and the bell to start the fight is never struck. Denzel just stands there, alert and inert, waiting for the credits to chopper him out of the ring. But his suit -- it's perfect, right?

Like CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, another holiday film about crooks and the cops who love them, AMERICAN GANGSTER presents two main characters who are fearless and therefore somewhat uninvolving; their bravery has no merit as there is nothing to overcome. We don't see the inner fire that makes Denzel's kingpin so calm about carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars into the jungles at the height of the Vietnam war or shooting a rival in broad daylight on the Harlem streets and then going back to his breakfast. Instead of the air of a coiled panther, Denzel has the air only of a man who has already read the script of his own life, already seen the GODFATHERS, twice, not to mention SCARFACE, GOODFELLAS, BLOW and even MASTERS OF WAR. When he first sees the tall Latina hottie in the foyer even he knows that in three brief courtship-spanning edits, she will be drinking champagne with him in the evening sun on some exotic beach, and in another two cuts, married or in bed or both. When life is this certain, why even feign surprise?

There are good things about AMERICAN GANGSTER, mostly what it chooses to leave out: unlike earlier versions of this true story, such as Larry Cohen's blaxploitation-era hit, BLACK CEASER, or the recent rap-centric gangster films too numerous to mention, there are only a handful of cliche'd pop songs used as shorthand to indicate time and place tropes in the film. And until Vin Diesel resurfaces, I'm nominating Josh Brolin as the coolest up and comer tough guy actor around. His sleazy cop on the take is a beam of unprocessed realness: he can stretch out the seconds he's on screen in such a way that he can relax and convey great comfort in the stress he causes others. That's something that comes from him, Josh Brolin, not from a focus group, three rounds of memos, second-guesswork, and a cliche handbook. Brolin just has something unique, something he was allowed to radiate and may not even know consciously he was doing. Lucky Ridley didn't notice it, or he would have probably felt the urge to call attention to it more, until it was as stale as hearing "All Along the Watchtower" over a montage of 60s imagery and a voiceover talking about "a time when anything went.. and often did."

Maybe what these Hollywood types need is to be able to smoke cigarettes in their offices again, smoke pot and take LSD and listen to the rest of Electric Ladyland, not just the focus group-sanctioned hits. Am I the only one who sees the parallel between the bans on smoking and the overall decline in American intelligence? In the 1970s people were still smoking in the doctor's waiting room. There were ashtrays in the grocery stores. Now we have our health, but at what cost? We've lost that loving, intellectual maturity. We've lost faith in our fellow man's ability to perceive the obvious. Instead of learning guitar, we're playing GUITAR HERO. Instead of dancing in the fires of creation and destruction, we're recycling... and recycling... until the slightest expression of originality sounds like the threatening cries of the wasteful heretic.