BEST of 2012

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1. DJANGO UNCHAINED!

Some films this year were loftier or more intellectually advanced, but none provided the pure visceral cinematic euphoria of DJANGO UNCHAINED! And none have as much to say about this country (the USA) and balls and the N word.

What this year's election showed us, incontrovertibly and probably permanently, is that when minorities and liberals and freaks like me stick together we can finally and forever outvote the repressive white Christian male conservative bloc. They can drag their heels in the sand over every new little change if they want but if we stick together they will go down. DJANGO is the dancer on their grave. It is the year's cinematic equivalent of a lit stick of dynamite tossed into the stagnant Mississippi swamps of conservative oppression.

Of course like all QT's films, DJANGO references far more of cinema history than its title would indicate, namely the social issues and mood of late 60s-early 70s cinema like THE WILD BUNCH (1969) and MANDINGO (1975). Critics at the time (with a few exceptions, like Robin Wood) misunderstood and panned MANDINGO during its original release, and it's a harrowing stretch of dehumanizing violence that clearly traumatized DJANGO director Quentin Tarantino as much as it did me.  And like INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS before it, DJANGO uses a title from an Italian action flick from a certain drive-in era to deconstruct issues of cinematic genre, social oppression, class, and history, all while delivering visceral, awesome revenge highs only dreamed of by lesser directors with lesser running times who don't understand how to build tension and so their films are all release, no tension, and so suck. Tarantino undoes the open ending of the original MANDINGO, which left a horrific plantation in bloody disarray, but hardly broken, and and obliterates it all with a howling vengeance and splattering of blood that for once actually does what such violence is supposed to do in movies, provide a heady cinematic catharsis that connects the multiracial multiplex in all the good ways, finally. In short the film delivers what the great 70s trailers promised. It vindicates all film, and all shackled souls who resist dehumanization no matter what the cost to their own safety. For in honoring our cinematic dead more than the tropes of bare life we honor ourselves. Sam Peckinpah, your Wild Bunch did not die in slow motion vain.

(Wait there's more!) yea, for in the unchaining from the soul-crushing bonds of antebellum mentality (the film includes a blood-curdling phrenology lecture) we can finally rise up and be the apocalyptic nightmare the red state uneducated "Christian" right think we are. Let them arm and barricade themselves in bunkers and strangle themselves on the twisted nylons of their own hatred; their progeny will see the benefits of having an open palm instead of a balled-up fist and they will be as 'the boy' who leaves 'the man' to his death on THE ROAD. As the great Stevie Wonder once sang, and I paraphrase, we don't even need to do nothing to them / they cause their own country to fall. It's their country that falls, that has never done anything but fall, and ours that has already been rising, and has always been rising.

And Leo, you took my advice and added some truly Widmarkian relish to a despicable dandy fop villain and hit it so far out of the park those racist rednecks will be picking that swatted fly out their teeth for the next 300 years. I wanted you to be evil but I could never imagine you'd go THIS evil! I go all the way around from worrying about you growing all puffy from beer and tough guy from the streets-itis to once more worshipping you as the elfin powerhouse actor demi-god you are. Dig those tobacco-blackened leprechaun teeth!   If Oscar rewards you as it should with a best supporting, the way they did for Waltz as Tarantino's last super villain, my faith in Oscar will be restored after the aggrandizing nostalgia-huffing of last year.

2. MOONRISE KINGDOM 

Pair-bond romance has always been Wes Anderson's weak point--he tends to focus on the childhood friendship of two ne'er do wells or scoundrels which a girl comes betwixt, but here he nails it by bringing together a bespectacled but eerily confident weirdo boy scout together with a slightly more mature girl who's got mad 1965 yeh-yeh style and an obsession with post-fairy tale / adventure books. Their romance is never weak or sappy or creepy because they are outcasts and they fight back when pushed. They do not cower! She even stabs a kid who tries to come between them. That is rare. Underneath Anderson's moon vest beats the heart of a basement fight club brawler. This is the first film of his, then, since Rushmore that I've actually loved with that fierceness one has for some romantic outcast films,  where you get a fierce protective instinct and want to go rip open hostile critics with your tiger claws.

The album that sets the romance in motion, Francoise Hardy's "The Yeh-Yeh Girl from Paris" becomes a beautiful chorus to the action the way the music in Tenenbaums wanted to, but failed for trying too hard and instead setting the bar for unbearable tweeness. And the action is sublime: these two legitimate oddballs start a romance that's so vivid it doesn't need to travel past second base to seem like the biggest score in cinema this year. With her dark eye shadowed fox eyes and focused fearless deadpan expression, 14 year-old Kara Hayward is to Anderson as Lauren Bacall was to Hawks, or Lana Del Rey to Val Lewton, and the effect is the same; Jared Gilman as her opposite number, an intrepid woodsman orphan, is shorter and seemingly younger, with owlish glasses, but possessed of an eerie confidence and curiosity that sets him leagues apart from the 'average' shy doofus so many lesser directors mistake for 'real' kid behavior. As I've written before, kids who love movies HATE seeing awkward shy kids in them - we watch to escape the mirror! But I've no problem with cool kids, and these are the coolest since the gang in Over the Edge. 

We all have felt this type of heady connection, this thrilling outlaw romance, at some point in our lives, I hope. I would regret anyone missing it, this lightning bolt that comes at any age, at any time, and we either rise to its challenge or drown our cubs in the bathtub like Paltrow's snuck cigarettes. Moonrise Kingdom commands you turn them loose and hope they don't get run over crossing the highway, but don't impede, or you will get bit. And this is maybe the best and most undrowned wolf of a film Anderson film he's ever released into the wild, it's a true wolf whirlwind. Did I cry? I did.

3. THE GREY

Speaking of wolves... As Claire Trevor says in Murder My Sweet --pouring Marlowe and herself heroic tumblers of Scotch from her rich feeble husband's crystal decanters --"Let's dispense with the social drinking shall we?" The Grey dispenses with all the social drinking, the tommyrot about kidnapped daughters and struggles for freedom and lengthy debates over cannibalism and just crashes a plane in Alaska, sets the dire wolves upon the trail of Liam Neeson and company, and lets cruel nature take its frozen course.  I don't want to spoil it but the ending is one of the toughest and best since the Black Swan or Runaway Train. What else do we have, as men, in the end, other than how we face our own Sebastian-ish rending? Whether with cringing arms up to block, or out to embrace the fangs of our final freedom, Neeson and cast are top notch, and the action flows like a blast of Arctic air. The aesthetic is relentless, captivating, and final - what it is to be man is to surrender being anything at all And it's not long... aye...it won't be long at all.

4. THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER

Is this the best movie about the first love and acceptance of a mentally-scarred high school freshman? Yes. The heady acting chemistry of the three leads and the deep American Beauty-style cinematography turn 80s Pittsburgh into a magical place where anything is possible, including finding cool friends who recognize the beautiful genius buried inside you, and the bonding glue of friendship is still mix tapes. Here they are so important that the music used--even if we've heard the songs before, in the 80s--seem deliriously new, even Dexy and the goddamned Midnight Runners sound vividly alive.

In addition to all that is a refreshing absence of the bawdy sexual humor that mars 91% of coming-of-age films, and the energy pulses so well with the colors that it becomes a dizzying dream I still can't let go of. Emma Watson made my knees weak all through this film, even when her character's longing risks becoming a cliche, she has the guts to ride right through and sell it like it's the first time it ever happened, to her or us, proving that when a film is this good it can have cliches, because the actors will be so faithful to the material it transcends the ordinary anyway. Meanwhile, Ezra Miller blows any complaints about the gay best friend stereotype clean out of the picture and has such magical alive chemistry with stepsister Watson that when the movie was over I already missed them. I wanted to write them all a letter from camp, and make them a mix tape.

5. CLOUD ATLAS

It had profound effect on me, and still haunts me in some ways, to the point I had to travel back in time and add it to this list, bumping lesser titles off. If like me you avoided it because you're wary of Tom Hanks, maybe even especially if you're wary... you must come baaaack....see here)

6. COSMOPOLIS

 Hilarious and disturbing in its low level candor, Dr. David Cronenberg turns Don Delillo's book of post-modern Wall Street Samuel Beckettishness into a sophisticated addendum to his misunderstood semi-masterpiece Crash. Critics may decry it but Robert Pattinson's performance is genius. He wryly critiques his Edward mystique in a manner that's not trite and seems always about to morph into some new Cronenbergian advanced hybrid life form. His square alien face seems like a computer monitor with pale skin stretched over. Note the way his British mouth twists and curls with druggy last-ditch hunger at Juliette Binoche's mention of an available Rothko chapel. Such pointless desire recalls Christian Bale freaking out over business cards in American Psycho, but that was an isolated moment of high brilliance the rest of the film never quite matched. Cosmopolis is like if that one scene was slowed down to 90 minutes and moved to a car. So yeah, I'm getting in. Keep your chainsaw 'fantasies' and cocaine, Cosmopolis is far more subversive. Pattinson brings it to life in ways I never could get from just reading the book.

As the film and vehicle progress we realize Pattinson's billionaire alien (think David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth) can't really die because he barely exists, and a lot of the credit for that surely goes to Pattinson's knack for queasily possessed self-implosion. It's a marvel the way he can convey such moment-by-moment disintegration without any of Cronenberg's usual prosthetics (there may be some ultra subliminal CGI at work on his skin tones, or I was just hallucinating). Critics may grumble now but when his demographic gets older they will write of Pattinson the way mine write of Karloff or Lugosi today. He's far more complex with that strange alien face than maybe any of us--except Cronenberg--give him credit for. Robert Pattinson is the future. When he begins to get older and more in control of his career, look out. This being is no ordinary heartthrob but a reptilian hybrid with a willingness to contort into shapes and moods yet to be imagined by sober men.

7. Three Way Tie:

a. Lana Del Rey - "Ride'

No, it's not art, or trash, just the best film made about the American endless highway since Natural Born Killers. Lana Del Rey proves with "Ride," that even if its an act she's got the truest sense of operatic-sexy-sad-dangerous going in music, cinema, or anywhere. She's sexy-dangerous, not Madonna or Miley dress-up dangerous, but the flagging down Mike Hammer's roadster in the middle of the desert in a raincoat and bare feet kind of dangerous, the kind where self-cutting, anorexia, nymphomania, and pill addiction all swirl together to keep a young girl barely one step ahead of her rock and roll suicide or Goodbar murder. She goes in this video where most coy lip biter pouter jailbait-poseur pop girls wouldn't dare no matter how much attention their gigolo boyfriends promised. She goes right over the cliff, into the arms of a bunch of guys at least twice her age with Harleys. She gyrates like a cub in their lion paws and they award her a gun, a bottle of whiskey, cigarettes, a Native American headdress, and a bonfire full of fireworks. She deserves it.

b. R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet 

(Chapter 3)

I was lucky in enough to attend the NYC premiere of the third installment last month and it was a perfect fit to a hilarious, fun thrilling time. Del Rey's video features a persona I know very well, and while Kelly's vast cast of personae are well outside my zone of direct experience, but they're such a fun, crazy, tragic, hilarious, and insightful array I love them all anyhow. With that catchy yet hookless incessant repeating stanza, Kelly sings the vocals of all the characters, even females. My favorite is the stuttering Pimp Luscious and his three special ladies, one of whom is Asian and blind. And if the whole powerful fade-out with 'the package' reverberating across endless phone lines in the second chapter is gone, the mystique and fun and sheer ballsiness of Kelly's aimless narrative remains, making it a perfect double bill with Del Rey's video--two portraits of two different artists who somehow in their fractured role playing managing to capture the gist of America's strengths and sadness while they smoke and look good and do damned well whatever they please.

c. Dewars' Scotch ads with Claire Forlani as a sexy after-hours Lady MacBeth

Claire Forlani may not be really Scottish but it's about time we had more 'Red Flag' style nutcase women pitching booze and ruling in hell rather than letting these khaki-wearing 'regular guys' think a new flavor of Bud Lite is heaven. I vote for the natural hell habitat of stumbler psycho hotties storming through 4:20 AM clubs, ranting about some guy you've never met pouring you enough post-last call slugs of near-top-shelf from behind the bar that her anger and narcissistic indignation is seductive instead of chilling. You'd follow her anywhere rather than listen one more minute to the still preachy echo of last call wives and moms and bosses and sanity hand rails and mothers-in-law, all shuckered loose from as you inhale the scent of her skittering perfume and real fur (faint scent of kitty litter and/or bile amidst the Chanel), her marble ice covered in melanin-melting thinner in older age hand slipping from yours soon enough. Aye Angus, out along the slimy ocean cobblestone streets, into more and more warming drinks, floating you home on blackened bruise cushions (for the nonce mere tingles), a vague memory of a cab driver shouting but no sound in the oceanic roar of your ears, handing a crumpled twenty like a flag of surrender, the hallucination of soft applause dampening your fall into the comfortable trash pile.

8. HAYWIRE

UFC kickass Gina Carano is the hottest most believably ass-kicking American babe since Cynthia Rothrock, but this is no Hong Kong cheapie, this is Steven Soderbergh making up for the outrages of his ill-conceived CONTAGION. Here Carano herself is the contagion and the men don't have a fucking chance of survival if they cross her.  My favorite film in Soderbergh's canon, I've already seen it four times and it's going to be with me forever, thank god for I bought it on Amazon Streaming. I could go press play and re-see it right now! (PS - it's ideal to see in an airport on your kindle or iPhone while waiting for a delayed flight back from Arizona to NYC, then finish watching when you get home at 6 AM and the sun is coming up over the skyline. Word)

9. THE MASTER

I know, I know -- only number nine? It's a Masterpiece! Nyuk Nyuk. PTA found the problem at the heart of the American male once again but wasn't able to mend it the way he's done in the past, or Quentin or Liam or Wes Anderson did this year. He could only to point at it and then encourage us to both marvel and wince while Phoenix and Hoffman act the roof off to ultimately no cumulative cathartic or moving effect. Maybe I was just too damned apathetic to take a subway, dirty and dank, into Manhattan to see it on 70mm. My 35mm trip to BAM (much closer) gave me lots to write and think about (i.e. here) but no real Plainview-style jolt, no emotional wallop, no moment of stand up and cheeritude. Hoffman offers little spurts of insanity that are then crushed by the concern of the clueless cultists and local law enforcement and Phoenix is such a great actor it's a little annoying that we just don't care about his scumby persona. This is Anderson's driest work since HARD EIGHT. Is he at the point in his artistic evolution where his characters' alchemically masculine outbursts against idiots must be considered childish? Who was the girl, Steve?

10. TIE: SKYFALL and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

These two big cold films have a lot in common: a crazy villain who represents everything our hero has failed to incorporate into his persona over the course of a long, embittered life; analog masculinity facing the computer digital generation; the tragic sudden self-awareness of how a fleeting male fantasy has ground into a permanent way of life.  Both films raid Homer's archetypal trough in telling of an old Odysseus-type, thought dead, lost at sea, now returned to save his bride (Judi Dench, Gotham) from Vandals, and does he have any new tricks up his old dog sleeve, and once more unto the breech dear friends, live and die on this day, time to dust off our hidden go bags, and unsheathe.

In each case it seems odd that so much firepower, manpower, triple-crosses, and imprisoning would be expended on something as banal as revenge. Bane claims his vendetta is a 99%-er social experiment but it's really a grudge, and Bardem's macho fey nutcase claims he wants revenge against 'mum' for leaving him to rot in an enemy cell. Both have anticipated the hero's every move, both use the sewers and underground tunnels to stage attacks and both draw endless amounts of arms and armed support from out of nowhere. Just as the main 'woman' of 2012 is the 1963-retro beauty combination of Kara Hayward in Moonrise Kingdom and Lana Del Rey, the 'man' is old enough to be their father's boss, but still wearily facing sharper, more damaged foes. (for Dark Knight see here)

HONORABLE MENTION: 21 Jump Street, Chronicle, Snow White and the Huntsman, John Carter, Cabin in the Woods, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Miss J. EDGAR Regrets...

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.

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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 leaves the mob alone in return for their privately eliminating threats to his tenure while he waxes wroth at the safe-to-wax-at danger of communism.

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 with a wave of piss jars and a round the clock screening of HELL'S ANGELS, so  J. EDGAR will wave away 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 sentimentalized as in John Ford/Norma Bates/Spielberg sunset sanctification 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, sex will be shuttled to the shadows. 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 Eastwood or DiCaprio thought he'd fit. 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 longss to transcend.
If he wants to return to this era in his historical biopics, he should consider playing a scumbucket racist like 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!

(POSTSCRIPT: See my praise that Leo did just as I advised - as in his racist role in DJANGO UNCHAINED! In best of 2012)

American Grievers, Part One: INCEPTION (2010)

Was INCEPTION--released this week on Netflix--the trippiest film of 2010? Outside of THE BLACK SWAN, TOY STORY 3 and ENTER THE VOID, perhaps. Is it great? Perhaps not. The high-def uber artsy set and lighting make it impossible to hallucinate into; the hallucinating is done for you, by professionals. Jungian resonance glimmers, swirls, and fades away before it can cohere into myth, a sad failure to launch -  the question is, who chickened out at the last minute when it came to laying bare their sad soul?

We know the answer. These same elements occur in SHUTTER ISLAND, therefore it's Leo. It's like he can't see his own elephant in the room, and he's the big star so the movie wears a blindfold while lecturing about the importance of sight. What is it about being a tight-lipped professional man with dark family secrets and a dead wife taunting from beyond that so appeals to Leo that he has to play it over and over? A fine actor and true humanitarian, DiCaprio is certainly a success on many levels, so why is he so obsessed with this narrow-minded 15-year old's idea of masculinity?  Can it be mere dream coincidence that all these ghost wives and beautiful little ghost children and houses by the shore with swing sets are so very dead and far away? He's sorry, Rose, but he has a job to do. That job is looking tortured and behaving with little in the way of self-aware humor as he laments he can't be home with you, Rose. Don't you get it? DON'T YOU GET IT??? (emotion)

Still, if nothing else INCEPTION should illuminate--and make a great double bill with-- Nicholas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW, which always confused me before, but which now I understand and want to see again. Like INCEPTION, Roeg's film deals with a shifting reality (the ancient and ever-crumbling Venice) and involves parental grief and guilt, out-of-sequence narrative, a city sunk knee-deep in water, and little children whose faces you never see as they're always turning corners. Man, it's a trip, if you know what I mean.

I mean I wasn't high while watching INCEPTION, but I could feel the tang of salvia divinorum, the 'ride the snake' dragon teeth face melt with fried time-space onions and trans-dimensional sweetness inside select INCEPTION images and scenes: Leo and Juno staring at each other as slow mo Zabriskie Pointed Parisian cafes explode around them; Ken Watanabe as ancient as Bowman at the end of 2001, his liverspots aglow in perfect unison with the lanterns on the wall behind him like an Alex Gray painting (I couldn't find a screenshot, alas)

But the similarities in Chinese puzzle box construction between INCEPTION and SHUTTER ISLAND are too great to ignore (substitute planes for boats and it's more or less the same movie). In both, Leo is a dour, myopic brooder haunted by images of his dead wife and kids. In both films we must ask, WICKER MANnishly, is Leo actually investigating a crime or is he trapped in an Escher-like maze of the mind engineered by a hostile anima? Is he just paranoid or is everyone really out to get him? Or are they really just figments of his imagination? Or the classic latency test: is he convinced the whole world is a show put on just for him, and nothing exists outside his own realm of experience? To get meta: is he anima-dominated due to emotional dysfunction as a result of a show business childhood (abusive stage mom giving him drugs to allay puberty - hence his eternal baby face)? Can it be that for him love is contingent upon uncrossable absence? No dad is more needy and pain-stricken about not being with his kids than a dad who can NOT get back to them. If the kids are actually there, then why bother even lowering the newspaper to behold their latest construction paper art projects?

That's how that objet petit a keeps you crippled, as the Anima-Kali-Cotillard projection beats you senseless for not wanting to take her out more often, you long to have her back so you can ignore her once again!

Whenever a movie is made about the mind, any evidence of  unresolved inner conflicts in the filmmakers' unconscious will inevitably be made apparent via simple deconstruction, so be careful! We can discern from the text that Leo DiCaprio has never been married or had children. He only dates models. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it shows-- at least on the surface-- a level of laddish insecurity: his women must be certified gorgeous --so everyone knows he's a man. Playing a humorless widower allows him to be--in theory--a deeply romantic and caring soul yet he doesn't have to unfold even a gram of tenderness... doesn't have to risk ridicule, doesn't have to get all sensitive up close and caring. As said kids and wife are not alive he can both sleep around AND stare moodily at mantle pictures from some happier time beach trip. It's the one kind of emotion that an insecure actor doesn't mind displaying as it's all just him, there's no other performer jockeying for reaction shots. When the wife does show up, she's just a phantom, so he can yell at her without upsetting the feminists. He can, instead, brood.

Opium is the heroin of the masses

In Jungian terms, the dead wives here assume the role of Leo's anima--or the projected feminine ego of his unconscious (ala Ligeia). The anima takes many forms: she can come to you as a hot babe, or as a castrating vagina dentata Katharine Hepburn in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. When she's just a dead wife fantasia, it's kind of a 16-year old virgin's comic book fantasy of a real conscious-unconscious relationship, or am I just thinking of my own pre-adult fantasias wherein, for example, I pined and longed for Jean Grey to rise again as Phoenix in X-Men, and then Elektra in Daredevil? Or Lindsay Wagner in The Six Million Dollar Man? There's no benefit to falling in love with a living comic book character Of course we were all glad when they came back by our popular demand, we had collectively re-animated them so to speak. But in each case, we knew something was missing, we just didn't have the Lacanian context to understand what.

Now we know, Leo has taught us. It was the ache of the pine. 

We see it in real life all the time, if you've ever been in a long distance relationship you know the feeling. Sunday afternoon and she's about to get on the bus or train back to wherever and your heart breaks with sadness, already missing her and the joy she brought. But THEN she decides--at the very last second--to stay and leave Monday night instead and you're like oh shit, I should be glad so why do I feel strangely robbed? You lost the pine.

Pining is, above all, a performance... a slow... motion... tantrum... and it can be sweet, but on the basic level, it's absurd, juvenile, something Bella might write in her TWILIGHT diary and, years later, with nostalgic relish, read aloud to her sorority friends for cheap drunk laughs. Should art cater to juvenile minds or should it not also educate, enlighten, and transcend? When you blow the doors of your mind wide open, make sure the floors inside are clean, even if your movie is about dirty floors. Company is coming, and the company is a future self with a clean house that you made possible, defeating your ego at its own game.

But that's never the issue. The wifely anima projection in the unconscious of Leo's character/s is defined by her need for him, her wanting to be with him all the time, and of having no life of her own beyond her stifling adoration of her tortured husband. No true anima is that weak, or that crazy. They do their own thing. Half the time you can't even get them on the phone. The fantasy in these films is that Leo's anima is so needy and doting that she never just sinks into the dark and does something on her own. Just as Bella's animus Edward hovers over her like a clingy stalker, so too hover Leo's dead wives.

Perhaps it would be good if Leo owned up to his romantic streak: he might see that all the stale action sequences and need to embody Scorsese tough guys like Howard Hughes--and soon, Dean help us, Frank Sinatra-- scans as just a fear of looking wimpy to his laddish entourage. Word on the high-def rain-soaked GGI streets is that he's also going to be playing a serial killer in a period film about the 1919 World's Fair! If he doesn't make the character a tortured brooder haunted by his dead wife or lost children, I'll eat my hat! Maybe he'll enrich this killer with twisted joyfulness, ala your Hannibals, Freddies, Nicholsons, and Karloffs... instead of his usual dour tortured cowboy--ala your Jason Patrics and David Boreanzs. I doubt it, but I don't brood about it.

My own psyche is, after all, deeply invested in Leo as he reminds me a lot of my younger brother, Fred - the blonde hair, the baby face, the big bulky frame. God knows I've tried to reach him (Fred, I mean), but he just does his own thing - fixing motorcycles and listening to Metallica out in Phoenix, AZ, with his concealed weapons permit. It's an older brother thing. We have to live with our own frustrating inability to mold our younger siblings. We're America, beating up the world so it won't get hurt.

The Wicker-Shutter Laffin'-Spittin' Man

Watching SHUTTER ISLAND last night, I felt kind of like how I did watching EYES WIDE SHUT or THE WICKER MAN remake, two movies where big budget and directorial over-thinking were applied to a story better served perhaps by a grimy, no-budget backyard or city-without-a-permit shoot full of unknown actors, discovered on a Something Weird double bill from 1972. There, any of these three films would be instant "discoveries" for the cult film niche dwellers, but with so much high tech Oscar-reaching craftsmanship involved in these B-movie plots, so many highbrow toots and expository whistles, we end up looking at both less and more than the sum of parts that probably originated in some screenwriters collection of DC House of Mystery comics and was never intended to bear the full brunt of 21st century Hollywood craftspeople.

Spoiler Alert! 

Here are some issues I had with the film:

1. "GOOD" GRIEF: If Leo's character is going to be delusional and alcoholic from issues of his memories of liberating the camps and shooting the Germans, I can assure you he'd a) start drinking again as things got really fucked up on the island and b) his first instinct when finding all that death in his big flashback would not be to scream "Noooooo!" up at an overhead camera--as has been a cliche as far back even as 90s "McBain" satires on THE SIMPSONS (and which I even made fun of Leo doing a few years ago, before he even did it!)

No sir, he would not. Marty, Marty... Marty. You're better than that.

A real alcoholic in dealing with something as horrific as that big climactic flashback would have calmly gone back in the kitchen for that bottle and started drinking and calling the cops, going safely into a fugue state of numbness from booze and repression, winding up a bit like James Stewart after his VERTIGO breakdown, which he'd clearly never emerge from. He's a Ranger, for Christ's sakes, not a wailing widow, and if he's going to process grief in huge cathartic Oscar-baiting howls of anguish that means he probably won't repress the memory two seconds later; you can't have it both ways: you can't process grief with primal bawling and repress it at the same time. The person who has hysterical hallucinations in denial of reality years later likely never properly reacted in the first place. Basic PSYCH 101, Marty! Leo seems to be accepting all the blame and grief of the war in his ghastly howls: primal scream therapists would surely approve, except it does not good. He's still in denial - he should read Freud or his doctor should. 

2. TOO TOUGH - Leo needs to learn that gaining a bunch of weight won't make him look coppish, just bloated. He still needs to try that thing of leaning on his baby face for dangerous criminal associations, ala Richard Widmark in ROAD HOUSE and KISS OF DEATH, which I've been urging since his Ridley Scott film, BODY OF LIES (2008). Instead, Leo acts as if he's been obsessed with the JFK-style "Bahstin" accent he learned for Marty's last film, THE DEPARTED ("the dee-pahhhted") and is determined to perfect the "tough cop who cared too much" martyr role even if it kills us. There's a kind of normally good actors who becomes laughable when they try to be menacing, thuggish. A really tough guy doesn't need to act it, that's Acting 101, Leo - you don't act tough to seem tough, you act like you are tough and trying not to as tough, to be a normal guy and not a thug. Exhibit A would be Tom Hardy or Russell Crowe, neither of whom, you will notice, never tries to talk deeper than their real voice, or play act a tough guy. Until Leo plays on his strengths rather than weaknesses, I'm afraid he'll seem petulant rather than assertive, sulky rather than manipulative, comical rather than dangerous. A role with John Wayne in a Hawks film might, like the Ricky Nelson part, might have saved Leo from this strait-jacket of masculine insecurity (we all want to be the one thing we never can). Without one, he's like Lancelot without an Arthur. And Scorsese ain't no Arthur, he's more like the New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court, scribbling down notes in awe as Lancelot prattles about his ability to poke other dudes in the shield. And PS, Lancelot would have been a washout if he didn't weaken and sleep with Arthur's wife. Until Leo does a similar high horse-dismount, he'll always be just a guy on a horse with a rod, trying to be tough, like Wilmer the neurotic gunsel in MALTESE FALCON, only he's cast as Samuel Spade. Again, Richard Widmark... turn to the Widmark, Leo, and he will show you the way, Leo. Or at the very least, Dan Duryea. 

3. BOOZE: Alcoholism is not a trait you can pick up and put down with the ease that Leo's characters seem to, espcially in Marty movies. For the non-Marty movie, THE BASKETBALL DIARIES, Leo ably--nay, brilliantly!--conveyed the effects of opiate withdrawal, so why in THE DEPARTED is he a doll head, a Valium addict but only when the mood suits him, as if he felt his cranberry-drinking little pisher character needed some edginess, then forgot about it two minutes later once Farmiga scribbles him a script for 20 Valium, even though she recognizes his sulky petulance as "drug-seeking behave-yeh." Other than that one session, the Valium is never mentioned again, and never affects him. And that's all Mahty and his lack of understanding of drug and alcohol enthusiasts. Exhibit 402P -why is his SHUTTER ISLAND United States mah-shall an alcoholic only in flashbacks and thus able to refuse offered drinks when he's clearly sweating and shaking like a lunatic and there's about a thousand justifications for a relapse all around him? And no AA Big Book in sight. No alcoholic suffering so much delusion would be likely to forget that relief is just a swig away. Also, his shakes and migraines would make much more sense if he was detoxing... i.e., if he never intended to spend the night at the island and so didn't properly, ahem, pack for the trip (we've all been there, bro, and it's a rough stay--most of us would just grab a raft and try to paddle back to the mainland at 5AM). If I'd have seen this with my old AA crew, we'd have walked out over these details!

4. DACHAU BLUES - The use of Nazi concentration camps could have been very effective but again it's overkill and explains nothing.  Leo's memory of it is refracted enough to make him a hero of the war by shooting unarmed Nazi guards during liberation. This is actually one of the film's most hilarious moments - a cliche'd ridiculous tracking shot along a huge row of disarmed German guards lined up against a fence, all patiently waiting for the camera to reach them before dying in a spastic dance, falling only as the camera passes onwards; before the camera reaches them they just cower in little clusters rather than running for it like any sensible soldier of the Reich (also with a row of shooters, they're hardly going to all shoot in the same linear row for Marty's camera; they're filmed like a row of girl divers in an Esther Williams musical number. Giving Leo this cathartic moment should be enough! Leo, you avenged the Jews singlehanded, how can they not cower Schindler-like, before you enough in gratitude!? But no, Leo also has to brood and sulk about it later (and maybe it didn't happen we learn later, not that anything matters by then). Again it's a matter of having cake and eating it too and then denying there is such a thing as cake. He's processed hate and grief and anguish but repressed them at the same time, saved the Jews but let them down, became an alcoholic to manage his PTSD but then just stopped cold and that ain't how it works, except when Oscar beckons, and Scorsese indulges.

As I've written before, these things seem to point to some inherent fear on Leo's part to alienate audience sympathy, and yet, Leo! Leo! Look at your antecedents who might have starred in this film were it made in the 1950s when it's set: Bogart, Van Johnson, Aldo Ray, Robert Taylor, Robert Ryan, Dick Powell (hell Powell's face was even babier than Leo's, yet Powell pulled off playing tough guy Phillip Marlowe pretty damned well in MURDER MY SWEET), none of them would have been afraid to delve into audience alienation via realistic displays of sadism, greed, delirium tremens (Mitchum in EL DORADO expertly plays one of those rare drunks that's funny, sad, and realistic at the same time), lust, avarice, masochism, uncontrollable rage, moral weakness, humor, or hostility. Look at IN A LONELY PLACE or ON DANGEROUS GROUND. Imagine the tortured resilience Ryan would have brought to SHUTTER ISLAND. Leo might have done all right if SHUTTER was directed by Nicholas Ray--they'd probably get into a fist fight and then Leo would get a busted nose and finally feel tough, ala Mickey Rourke, but instead we get lost in a house of guilt-edged mirrors that's both a noir-flypaper doom device and a taunting reflection of Leo's own inability to "go all the way" as an actor --the way, say, Nicolas Cage does so well in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, THE WICKER MAN and KNOWING. And Leo only did in WHAT'S EATING GILBERT GRAPE.

Another baby-faced brother, Orson Welles, shows insecurity in a different way when gave himself the would-be romantic lead/fall-guy in LADY FROM SHANGHAI when that role should have gone to Tyrone Power, and Wlles should have been playing the cranky genius crippled lawyer, a demon who gets all the lines and which Orson surely cast himself as before Columbia cast his alienated wife Rita Hayworth (his old Mercury Theater stock player, Everett Sloane, does a great job, but lacks the star power that even slimy lawyer villains need if they're going to get so many lines). And a romantic lead, poor Orson's all wet. That's the whole thing with LADY, (the second mistake is cutting off RIta's hair and dying it blonde, a purely spiteful decision on his part, akin to Peckinpah's insistence on doing the same for Ali McGraw. When sex and love come into the mix most of us act little better than sixth graders. If it were some other actress giving himself the lead would probably embarrass Orson forever, as it should. Sex and romance aren't involved with Leo, but it's still sixth grader immaturity--trying to seem tough so the bullies don't harass him on his first day of school.  

All that said, the film is still cool and I loved the ultra-ambiguous (tragic? who knows?) ending which leaves you with a lot to think about, and then forget ever happened. But hey, at least they freaking smoke in this movie, which was the style of the time and don't let 'em tell you different!

There's a lot of beautiful little ways in which the always superb and surprising Mark Ruffalo steals the show as Leo's fellow mah-shall (maybe). As his voice lowers, with only a hint of sadness, back to saying "What's up, boss?" we get a nicely understated and ambiguous look at the way insanity reasserts itself, a veritable entire MEMENTO warped and shrinky-dinked down into a single line.

P.S. If you liked the whirligig weirdness of SHUTTER ISLAND I'd also recommend the 1962 CABINET OF CALIGARI, an in-name-only remake of the old silent expressionist classic. Penned by PSYCHO author Robert Bloch, it's got the budget of an anthology TV show but really uses the limits of the frame and dodges the cliches of horror films and "sanitarium" films to play with audience sympathy and narrative expectations. And it tells almost the same story. Or does it? Mwhahahaha! And instead of a pudgy man-child determined to convince us he's Russell Crowe, we have a hot blonde chick with retrograde amnesia and a tendency towards violent outbursts, making this film like the limbo world between the two halves of PSYCHO (that is to say, HORROR HOTEL and DEMENTIA).

I'd still recommend SHUTTER ISLAND, but I'd lower my expectations, drink a bottle of whiskey and smoke "laced" cigarettes before watching, otherwise you might suffer from the compulsion to remember the trauma of watching millions of dollars and acres of craftsmanship and talent all laser-beam focused on telling a story that's been told before, better for a about 100th the budget. Well, even Hitchcock had his SHUTTER ISLAND moments, i.e. SUSPICION and STAGE FRIGHT. And sure, SHUTTER is entertaining and refreshingly free of sex or violence. But frankly, it's the sort of story John Carpenter would probably pass on as too cliche'd. And he's the one who should be making it, on a budget of $5, in his backyard, in the dead of night, with Adrienne Barbeau as the cop.

And Leo, if you keep frowning your face is going to look as Satanic as Robert Taylor's in his sleek MGM late 1950s prime. Is that what you want? Even then, you've still got about fifteen years to go before the lines will set. May I recommend next time you make a film like this, that you go ahead and play the evil doctor? Or learn some karate? Or take some freakin' roles other than the testesteronally-challenged wunderkind asserting his fierceness and cracking up in the process, cuzza his dead wife? (The ideal way to avoid intimacy, much easier to just drink and mourn) What Hawks would have taught Leo is that being "good" has nothing to do with gruffness or bulk, and crazy has nothing to do with screaming up to heaven while cradling a perfectly dead child in your arms. It has to do with being a good shot, with the balls to shoot when you need to, when a moment's hesitation could kill not only you but your friends, and most of all, being true to the code of honor, of brotherhood, of your nature, and freakin' takin' a drink once in awhile.

Luke, I am your Fah-thuh.

(PS I think I'm trying to older brother Leo because he reminds me a lot of my little brother, Fred)