Best of 2018 (Movies and TV)

Here's the list and if this intro is shorter than usual, just note that there's less and less to write about as far as unity of direction and theme in cinema as a whole, the line is so spread out thanks to streaming there's almost no way to get the whole picture. Titles proliferate faster than any one critic may see. The working professional (i.e. currently paid) critics get the screeners for the Oscar bids or go to press screenings, but for the rest of us, if we're no longer getting paid to see them, why would we even want to? Those of us with the right Hendrixian 'experience' prefer films that take the trappings of genre and twist them all up in to groovy, psychedelic tie-dye twists that then become a steep Eisentstein-Rosencrantz bridge deep into the heavy mystic. As Jim once sang, blowsy and belting: "tell all the people that you see: follow me.... follow me down!" OK Nation, world, let's goooo.

#1: (a Nic Cage Tie): 

MANDY

Dir Panos Cosmatos

Saturated in a druggy wash of deep reds and dark blacks there's so much beauty in every composition of this sludge rock vengeance masterpiece as to deserve a painted mirror you might win on the Seaside Heights boardwalk back in 1983, when you're an impressionable 14 year-old so every Frazetta cover blazes with aliveness. 1983 is also when this set, and deep in some magical forest deep in the Shadow Mountains... Cage is a lumberjack living in a very groovy pad with his artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Happy as could be, they live as any of us might, eating dinner while agog in front of the TV, telling weird Erik Estrada knock-knock jokes, and rowing out to the center of the glassy lake out back --perfectly in tune and in trippy love, all captured in dreamy dissolves. Naturally a bunch of crazy acidhead Manson-esque Jesus freaks show up and... well... soon enough Nic has plenty of reason to go on a bizarro drug-fueled killing spree.



Throughout Cosmatos detours into sludgy canvasses of deep red and black, which if it's your favorite color combination as it is mine, you will love this sludgy film. In one of countless great choices, Cosmatos foregoes the usual heavy metal or hard rock classic soundtrack, aside from an unforgettable opening title set to "Starless and Bible Black" by King Crimson. The great, dearly departed Johan Johannson score lays a deep abstract Carpenter carpet underneath the wildness, occasionally going over the deep end as when Red (Cage) samples the jar of Black Rider grey jelly, a kind of super psycho-meth that hits him as instantly and crazily as any ever. As with Cosmatos' iconic debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, your familiarity with 70s-80s Canadian horror and sci-fi films, novels and heavy metal album covers, and mind-bending drugs isn't needed, but it sure helps. Add Cage at his wildest, and badass behavior from both him and Mandy in the face of pure evil and this movie leaps right over the... two moons?! This movie, I tell ya. The whole revenge of one simple man with chainsaw skills on a one-man druggie vendetta against Manson-esque Jesus freaks (and their demon allies) may not be terribly new, but what Cosmatos does is far more ballsy than just adding dour self-importance of social messaging, he brings in the supernatural in a way more holistic and connected than, say, Lynch does in Twin Peaks; The Return. And best of all, does the slow weird meaning-tentacled abstraction of strong psychedelic drugs better than any other working director today, x 2
(see full review: Acid-Etched Damascus)

MOM AND DAD

Dir. Brian Taylor

There's an ingeniously simple, savage, disturbing premise to this wild satire that basically sends a cold shot of Drano-laced meth up the IV tube that's been keeping suburban tract home 2.5 children family bliss/stasis stabilized with cheap corn sugar glucose nigh these 70 odd years (since the dawn of the suburbs at the close of WW2). Tapping into a kind of unspoken universal American rage but reversing the flow (instead of protecting children from harm, etc.) Nicolas Cage is letter perfect as the weirdo dad, and Selma Blair is a whole extra book of revelations as the spin class nervous breakdown mom and it's always nice when Lance Henriksen shows up, giving everyone--even crazy Cage--a lesson in balls-out crazy lunge-for-the-jug style acting. Best is the real-time single 24-hour time frame of events, the way--as in  the roots of what's going on are never overtly spelled out (beginning with the super weird early and confusing evacuation of school). I haven't enjoyed a movie this much since, well, ever. Mr. Bill's unruly industrial clatter/whoosh score keeps everything rolling with seven layers of ominous adrenalin. Director Brian Taylor is the nutcase who gave us Crank and Crank 2: High-Voltage in case you're wondering how he got so good at lunatic real-time mayhem and blacker-than-the-anti-sun comedy. He and Nic Cage were made for each other, as they already proved in the 2012 guilty pleasure Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance!   I mean, just look at Cage in the pic there, have you ever seen a man crazier? He's right up there with Toni Collette in Hereditary as far as new high water mark level of nuts, which, in our Trumpian post-wasteland, I think more than sums up the tenor of the time.

3. HEREDITARY

Dir. Ari Aster

Successfully goes where others of this decade have only tried, namely to the whole "is there a difference between inherited bi-polar manic depression, and literal matriarchal conspiracies of witches?" split. There's room for both answers in all the best films on the subject, like Rosemary's Baby, and even the ones that are only partly successful (House of the Devil, The Witch, Lords of Salem). The subject--when examined right--treads so close to the line where acute perception--reality stripped of its facade--becomes paranoid schizophrenic insanity that it's very easy to forget which side of it you're on at any given times.  Living with a person suffering from such a problem, always teetering over the edge, is truly unnerving. Thanks to a terrifyingly vivid performance by Toni Collette (the most tragically scary mother in a horror film since Essie Davis in The Babadook) we get just how tragic and extra-deep that rabbit hole vortex goes.

It's funny to read all the backlash from critics, after hearing it compared it to The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby (I think it's actually better than the former). The other backlash, from the public, is based on how traumatized they are by seeing certain people of certain ages having certain bad things happen to them onscreen. The set-up for Hereditary's big early-inning shock is so subtle and deflective we feel the way audiences must have felt the first time seeing Psycho.

The weird thing is that none of this stuff seems at all gratuitous or even sadistic - it's all leading to a certain place and every chill is earned. This is no 90 minute thrill ride but a solid legitimately rich character study that marks the crossroads between mental illness's effects on families and the way paranoia about witchcraft and life after death exacerbates these effects. Is devil worship a system created out of our brain's compulsive need to find hidden systems and motivations that explain away the random events of nature and our tiny place in it? Or has a life of being manipulated by Satanic forces have permanently warped even our most mundane collective conceptions of reality? Rosemary's Baby explored these same questions but, as that film's dream sequence reminded us, it left a whole ocean unexplored, with enough unsounded depth to make a dozen such voyages as full of terrifying epiphany and 'take-away' madness as the first.

Best of all is the ways Aster clearly gets what's wrong with modern horror films--the overly detailed horror make-ups and unearned shocks with bombastic mickey mouse music cues--and eliminates it all. Watching Halloween again for the first time in a few years I especially noticed that, during the whole extended climax, the single note ominous repeating 'dun... dun.... dun..." during the closet upstairs sequence is preceded by a whole downstairs thing with no music whatsoever! The silence is more terrifying than any movie could be, and I wondered how overbearing a modern orchestral score would have made that sequence, feeling all our fear for us like a micro-managing den mother. The climax of Hereditary is right up there and a reminder of the effectiveness of silence as well as music: Colin Stetson's score underlies this with weird eerie drones, sparing but unremitting --other horror film composers should take a mighty heed. (see also: Hereditary Witchcraft Reader)

4. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Dir. Orson Welles (w/ Peter Bogdanovich)

Thanks to the more decisive, less debilitatingly brilliant mind of long-time Welles' friend and biographer, director Peter Bogdanovich, and state-of-the-art digital remastering, the last unfinished Welles film about the last day in the life of a Wellesian director working on his last, unfinished film is finally.... well, finished. What makes it even more meta is that Peter Bogdanovich plays such a key character in the film, as more or less himself, and he finished it, with John Huston filling in for Orson. Together they seem to be working through the angles of male friendship, biographer-subject, father-son, remora-shark, fan-hero, and apostle-Christ --which suits the unique nature of the finished product so well it seems like fate--like the ultimate metatextual Welles flourish, as if he knew the film couldn't be finished until long enough after he died that Bogdanovich could use digital means to clean-up the film stock and have the chutzpah to tackle such a mammoth project. It may be Bogdanovich's best film as well as one of Welles's, with film quality and sound are so good it's hard to imagine this wasn't all filmed a few months ago -it's actually better than new, even, since it's on film - and every frame is lovingly color-saturated or otherwise cleaned up to the point it all shines better than any new dime. As the Welles-like director, Huston is another great meta-choice, for he--like Welles--was a raconteur genius working outside/inside the system. And when he discusses having boxed with Hemingway etc we know we're getting a fair dose of himself (for Welles never boxed, obviously). And it's no easy feat to play a high-functioning alcoholic at a party surrounded by sycophants and needy technicians wondering what they're getting paid for and when they will be, over years and years when it's all set in one night. So fractured it's set to the rhythms of a crowded moveable feast party like few I've seen, sustaining itself at a glib raconteur height Altman only reached a few times in his whole oeuvre. Especially as Huston gets progressively drunker and more belligerent, it transcends narrative and dating in a way that makes similar films--8 1/2 for example, seem horribly mawkish and antiquated.

As in that film, we realize much of a director's life is spent being hounded by underlings--writers, make-up artists, personal assistants, young girl intern/eye candy/drink getters, and sycophants galore, all wanting to either get on or stay on his good side and/or payroll. Swirling in and around a 70th birthday party that involves screening the director's unfinished, very artsy and psychedelic late 60s hippie movie (the kind of thing neither Welles nor Huston would ever do, presumably) on the one hand, and the movie itself on the other (and for the end, a fatal intersection of the two), The Other Side is a relentless attention grabber, full of blink-and-miss clever edits, guns, mannequins, and retorts zippy enough that by the time you untangle their genius, three more have passed you by.

The film-within-the-film is harder to peg. Certainly it's definitive Welles--with deep focus Dali-esque compositions reminiscent of passages in Welles' Othello but--especially during the psychedelic stretch of film that finds the heroine in a deserted train station in the desert, then a rainy street at night, a psychedelic rock club bathroom, and subsequent getting it on in a car in the rain with no music but the sound of the wipers and the clack of her bead neckless against her breasts as she gyrated atop this beautiful but similarly mute boy. With all the brilliant, lovingly restored colors, the sequence, lasting well over 15 minutes, is a marvel all its own evoking, of all things, Amer's co-directors Helen Cattet and Bruno Forzani with its intelligently arranged sequence of open-ended surrealist imagery.ich in rich Suspiria colors. With its tail of a beautiful blank looking boy feebly following a Cher-like Native American woman--unsmiling and dead-eyed throughout--the dour mood of dream-like student film art-for-art's sake seems to be almost mocking Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, yet is so rife with Welles' signature expressionist style it kind of takes off anyway. We certainly can't blame Welles for wanting 'in' on this new type of Age of Aquarius expressionism, since he invented some of it.

Taken all in all, Wind is one of the biggest, best surprises of the decade. It fulfills the promise so many 'last films' never seem to do, ala Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again . Since Welles isn't around to second guess and overthink it into endless abstraction, it's a real gift to cinema that someone who 'gets' Welles and knew him and respected his notes almost slavishly, yet is a talent in his own right, was there to pick up the million pieces and finish what may be one of the best 70s movies of the 21st century. Though again, not unlike most of Welles' work, the overall effect seldom transcends its maker's larger-than-life male ego. The hall of mirrors climax of Lady from Shanghai is again the definitive Welles' image, albeit with him firing at himself firing at himself, self-love and epiphanic realization of that love's hollowness revolving in an endless reverse ouroboros. Doesn't matter, though - his gun never misses and his puking bite is never totally fatal. He even lets a few female characters make their comments. A bitchy lady critic (played with gusto by Susan Strasberg) get in some cruel barbs before someone punches her out. Auteurs will be boys, after all. Hey, speaking of boys...

5. THE WILD BOYS

(Les garçons sauvages)

Dir Bertrand Mandico

Surreal and strange in ways that evoke erotic deconstructions like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve, but in an homage to a kind of Haynes-Jarman rough trade queerness with a dash of Maddin and, and of course, Clockwork Orange,  this surreal fable concerns a gang of unruly violent boys (all played by girls in drag) forced into a Captains Courageous kind of youth rehabilitation program cure after they brutalize their literature teacher (once a voodoo-like spirit of violent destruction overtakes them during a masked drunken performance art version of the opening three witches scene of  Macbeth). After a brutal period at sea, collared to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the captain's whim, they wind up on a  mysterious island with sexually active vegetation, the ever-present smell of oysters ("the whole island is an oyster") that has strange hormonal magic, including the ability to make boys grow breasts, and watch as their penises fall off into the relentless surf. Drinking milky manna from phallic tubers and screwing flytrap style flower monsters, everything from Naked Lunch to Matango may well and goodly be conjured here, with the overall effect transcending anything so mundane as tawdriness, or morality.

And while they may be girls, these kids are still badasses, though, soon joining forces with a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Elina Löwensohn [Nadja]), sexually devouring and killing randy sailors. Or something. Touching Lord of the Flies meets The Blue Lagoon kind of castaway weirdness, this is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies and volcano penises erupting into bubbling crevasses. What does it all mean? You know damned well: when surrealism sets sail, the wind that blows the ship forward is the gas bag exhalation of meaning dying in its conformist straitjacket back on shore. When French women put on male drag, they swagger and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, it's really something. Shot in startling black and white with forays into surreal 16mm color, this exercise in gender bending psychosexual surrealism is a breath of fresh island air, salty with sex, oysters, and horny vegetation, the sequences at sea are great too - not sure how they did it, but its some of the best stormy ocean, (non-CGI) floundering ship work I've seen in a long time. (in French with English subtitles) - See full review: Isles of Lowensohn

6. SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

Dir. Boots Riley

A fresh new African American voice, pitched somewhere between the social surrealism of Michel Gondry, the urban agency of Spike Lee, and the savage middle class satire of Jody Hill, Boots Riley announces "I am here" with a truly weird and engaging feature debut. In some weird alternate LA, slacker Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) intends to pay rent on his uncle's garage apt. as soon as he gets a job. He's got a cute girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson)-- an artist/activist who works spinning a sign on the street, but who aims at something better, so Cassius better pull himself out of his slacker spiral before she moves on. Working largely on commission as a telemarketer, Cassius flounders until he's counseled by a wise cubicle neighbor (Danny Glover) on finding his 'white boy voice' - which means he's soon dubbed by David Cross and moving up the ladder, selling arms and slave labor but making so much money he can't complain, even as he sells out his former co-workers, now unionizing. Meanwhile there's a controversial work camp arrangement heavily advertised as an options to the struggle, one where all bills are paid, needs are met, and you live where you work, eat and sleep all in the same place - though apparently once the Wal-Mart-ish sheen is stripped off, it's slavery. From there it only gets weirder including a WTF moment so insane I can't spoil it (it wasn't spoiled for me, I won't do it for you). You're bound to laugh at least once, nervously, and come away with new ways of asking the right questions so wrongly they don't even need an answer.

7. ZAMA
Dir. Lucretia Martel

As serenely brutal and sexually hostile as an Ilsa film stretched to slow motion (sans Dyanne Thorne), Martel's adaption of a popular Argentine historical novel stars Daniel Jiminez Cacho as the sexually-frustrated magistrate of a sweltering Spanish outpost in South America in the late 1600s. Desperate to return to civilization and his family but needing the approval of an almost entirely absent governor/treasurer, Zama spends his day hearing complaints that underly the horrifying systemic brutality and oppression of the enslaved caste of natives, trying to keep his libido under control (he refuses to 'lower' himself with one of the eminently available local native girls), and inevitably feeling himself dragged as if by magnetic force towards the horny wife of the treasurer, said treasurer being one of the few men whose good word might get him transferred. Better go careful, Zama! Enterprising slaves are ever watching and listening at keyholes as the only racially acceptable woman in town trots out heady bottles of rum, her crooked powdered wig and corseted bosom wobbling with boozy heat. Meanwhile rumors of a rapist bandit sneaking into the village during the afternoons finally drives Zama to form a posse and head into the jungles.

Borrowing elements of Herzog's kind of deep focus documentary-style canvas approach to the ambivalence of the jungle while ladling on her own masterful ability to index an array of characters moving and parrying at cross-purposes inside a frame, Martel takes on gorgeous tracking shots through room after room of fascinating, heat-ravaged tableaus. Ever trying and failing to conquer the natural world and their own inner urges, the 'civilized' Spaniards literally fall to pieces. Tarkovsky-esque--disoriented sound design amps the paranoia, thrusting us up against Zama's nose as he navigates clustered hallways where tall powdered wings wave like unsteady ship prows atop heat-drunk heads, native slaves stand around in silent opprobrium, the in-between caste does their chores, and by the time one's decoded the meaning of what's going on, the chance to do anything about it is long past. Brilliant, but withering, and without any of the maternal comfort offered by some Martel's previous films, Zama is a dish as potent and pungent as a punch in the head with an soaked sock full of sea-slimed emeralds. (in Spanish with English subtitles)

8. ROMA

Dir Alfonso Cuaron

Clearly a letter of love and gratitude to Cuaron's maid/nanny while growing up, a reverie of life in a big family in Mexico City circa 1971 actually functions together with Zama as an almost sequel (even the names are familiar, neither has any music --relying instead on a tapestry of diegetic sound--and Martel made a similar film to Roma in her feature debut, La Cienega) - showing the result of all that Spanish colonization in the 1600s. Here it is a mere 180 or so years later, Native South Americans aren't enslaved anymore, but rather work as servants to the more European-blooded upper middle class or else scrabble around in the outskirt slum areas. The mostly silent maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is much loved by the children and the mom even though she seldom cleans up after the dog (it clearly needs to be walked more often), so there's piles of shit all over the driveway. She winds up pregnant (the boyfriend disappears as soon as he hears) and eventually finds a sort of peace in the arms of a household where the men run off and abandon and their women and children. Told mostly in long slow pans, the shots are amazing. The standout: an extended sequence of the grandmother and maid trying to buy a crib at a furniture store while a full-blown bloodbath riot goes on outside (ala the car attack in his Children of Men), leading to her water breaking; their attempt to get to the hospital in the thick of tear gas and traffic and climaxing in a genius over-crowded public hospital (where the deadbeat husband happens to work as a doctor). It's topped later in an amazing glide shot that follows Cleo from the beach out into the deep deep water to rescue the kids nearly swept out to sea in rough tides over the holiday. From far up the beach all the way out to the whirling depths without the slightest tremor in the camera, there's not even salt spray on the lens. It's beyond amazing. Every inch of the screen is used for masterful compositions, the incredible extended sequences, and invisible acting, make this one a real winner despite the 'have your cake and critique the power structure that made someone else bake it for you' subtext. (in Spanish with English subtitles)

9. EIGHTH GRADE

Dir Bo Burnham 

Lots of angst and pain in this torturously awkward film. Set in the last days of junior high school as experienced by a typically awkward girl, it posits the terrors we all felt as children in the horrible 'body changes' portion of childhood (that we tend to block from our memories as if some brutal assault). With this film they come flooding back, and we learn since we escaped the self-consciousness has been amped to eleven thanks to the proliferation of smartphone technology. Now, every awkward attempt at socialization shall be preserved and disseminated amidst a teen's peers faster than you can even regret what you just said. The one advantage: even with no hits you can pretend you're sort-of famous. First-time feature director Bo Burnham (see his comedy specials on Netflix, please!) keeps the acne-ridden face of our frumpy heroine front and center, forcing us into a kind of aesthetic corner, a self-conscious nightmare prison. It all climaxes in a horrifyingly tense backseat seduction attempt that will be truly illuminating to a lot of men. It's all illuminating, but in the end all it perhaps does is remind us why we blocked those memories out, making us wonder if Bo's a sadist or just trying for a unique catharsis. It succeeds in both counts, but I never want to see it again.

10. INFINITY WAR

Dir. Anthony and Joe Russo

Speaking of unaccountable dread, this WAR was so epic it gave me an anxiety attack and I had to stop watching (on Blu-ray) and go to bed, where I dreamt of it. The idea that a power could come along and beat all the superheroes in a massive fight was too much to bear in my sensitive state. And yet, as a proponent of population control I couldn't argue with the logic of the ruthless intergalactic monster played so well by the great Josh Brolin as the villainous Thanos. Our world especially could use a good 'halving' to the overpopulation levels we had during the time of Soylent Green, when we were only at 3 1/2 billion and worried that, if left unchecked, our population growth would kill the planet. Now, of course, it's already too late. So no one--Thanos aside--even brings it up. Leave it to Marvel and their sympathetic villains, to point out the elephants choking up every available free space in the room. But that's not even the reason this rocks so hard. On earth and in space, the wit and energy flow nonstop, the battles so ingeniously staged, the mood so dire, so much at stake, that it's hard to find a single dead spot, I mean aside from the soapy, tiresome Vision and Scarlet Witch romance (just writing that sentence I hear Juliette Binoche laughing derisively behind me) and the buzzkilling Pepper Potts-Stark inter-helmet 'be careful' moments. The rest of the time, the action and wit overlap in genius doses -- the superheroes all working as such a quick, focused team that it's jaw-dropping. The pick for most critics as the best Marvel this year was Black Panther, and while it was great and with a potent social message, it it got a little too 'real' and some of the banter seemed a tad too chipper. No, I think the best one was actually Ant Man and the Wasp. Call me crazy, but they're all winners! They'll stand the test of time, and constant reruns. Unlike the depressing Eighth Grade, I'm looking forward to seeing this one again, albeit in bits and pieces, safely broken up by commercials on FX, and FXX, especially after the second part is released so I can rest, presumably, and get down from the stark, terrifying cliff we're left hanging from.

11. HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES

Dir. John Cameron Mitchell

Philophile director John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) turns Neil Gaiman's graphic novella into a punk rock sci-fi odyssey about the healing glory of love and music (surprise!). Alex Sharp stars as Enn, an insecure punk rock fanzine artist growing up in 70s Thatcher-period England. Brave when it come to plastering ugly stickers around his drab Coyden hometown, he's shy as hell when it comes to girls. "They're not from another planet!" counsels the more confident alpha in his little posse of mates. When the lads crash the wrong post-gig house party, they find themselves partying with a color-coded latex-wearing hive mind collective that pretty much proves that adage wrong. Self-organized according to a chakra-style energy scale, engaged in super weird dances and ceremonies, they'd weird the boys in Enn's crew out, except this is the 70s, mate, and this may be some new wave fad. Meanwhile, upstairs, doe-eyed Zann (Elle Fanning) wants to get out and actually explore something of this grotty new world that the rest of them are only passing by on a worlds tour. She wants to get off the bus and go native, so she runs off with Enn into the Croyden night. Thanks to Mitchell's gifts with setting mood, and the stars' own chemistry, we feel their connection. Their time together is magical... even in Croyden!

After Zann catches the eye of local punk den mother Bodacia (Nicole Kidman in a silver wig) things get even more intense. Played with her Aussie badass roots exposed to the core, Nicole Kidman gives us a throaty ferocity we haven't seen from her in years. She'd make it worth seeing all by herself but other highlights come raining down like stardust: The song Enn and Zann sing on her club stage evolves and leads them to a full blown mystical encounter replete with swirling cosmic forces. And if you've kind of hated yourself for being reduced to tears by Hedwig's "Origin of Love" back in the 90s, you'll be glad that this one ("Eat Me Alive") just gives us deep punk rock chills, with a foray into Ziggy cosmic wonderment instead - with the blazing energy so well visualized you'll feel like you're getting off on good ecstasy at the best punk rock show of your teenage life. And like ecstasy and punk, its sense of love transcends dichotomies like sex/death, fear/desire: it's the love that has no opposite, and Mitchell--like few others--knows where the sweet spot it.

That's Mitchell's big gift to the world, but he has another too, music (or are they the same?): his you-are-there camera and sound mixes really capture the live punk rock basement club event momentum. You can hear the instruments echoing off the low cavernous ceiling of the club, yet it's all vivid and electric and immediate. It's maybe the best-mixed live punk music I've ever heard --raw and immediate, powerful and yet low-fi, both celestial and punk rock earth. I'm not sure, but I think Mitchell may have just redeemed the entirety of the long-sold-out punk rock movement with this one film, and I think Ziggy would like it as much as Iggy  - and isn't that the whole Mitchell mission? Accomplished. 

TeleVision

--

1. THE SHIVERING TRUTH

Created by Vernon Chatman
(Adult Swim)

Adult Swim continues their descent into the void with this mind-bending claymation spectacular from the demented mind of Vernon Chatman (Wonder Showzen). Following a kind of Rod Serling-meets-the "in a world" movie trailer voiceover narrator, we go on a bizarre free associative trip into the looking glass with the result being like the entire run of The Twilight Zone all compressed into 15 minute windows, liberally dosed with weird sex, violence, and Cronenbergian new flesh appendage removal, the "yes -and" improv-style relentless compounding lunacy of it all has reduced me to rolling on the ground convulsing with laughter like I haven't done sober ever. There's no going back after this. It's so out there it makes pretenders to the throne of strange wilt and fold. Accept it.

 2. BABYLON BERLIN

Created by Tom Twyker, et al

(Netflix)

Germany's big budget TV series revolves around the "first female police detective" in Weimar Berlin, a time between the two world wars, when Berlin, mired in economic depression, became an art, sex and crime mecca. Prostitution, homosexuality, drug addiction, pornography (silent era), and a decadent cross-dressing night club chanteuse master criminal white Russian equals the dusky TV series equivalent of a great, trashy, page-turning massive paperback of sexy historical fiction. If it eventually runs out of time without winding up in any profound way, well, is history any different? I like that the male-female crime-solving team of prostitute/party girl (Liv Lisa Fries) and drug-addicted police detective (Volker Bruch) become close without sex, and that the National Socialist party is only--at the very end--just starting make a brownshirt ruckus. The plot concerns, among other things, the planned assassination of a Treaty of Versailles-adhering politician and a train car full of gold fought over by an array of sordid but fascinating characters, commies, and causes, but the take-aways are the details along the way, like the rollicking song ("Zu aush, Zu Staub") that acts as the club's big theme. It's all done with great style and atmosphere, complex, hearty performances, and excellence all around. Acidemically, it's great to see a girl whose love of champagne and dabbling in prostitution doesn't mar her self-esteem and lead to tired self-sacrifice like it would in the states even during pre-code times, and a genuinely complex (neither good nor all-the-way) villain in the portly red-faced corrupt cop Bruno (Peter Kurth) partner. (in German with English subtitles)

 --

3. MANIAC

Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga / Created by Patric Somerville

(Netflix)

One of the first shows since Rick and Morty to seamlessly integrate psychotherapy into science fiction, this alternate reality sci-fi dramedy (?) stars Jonah Hill and Emma Stone as participants in a looney drug-AI trial, meeting and becoming good friends during deep dream realities managed by an artificial intelligence that takes their hang-ups and repressions and builds scenarios that will help them process and move on. Or something. As with the above Sorry to Bother You, it's set in an alternate reality and occurs largely at a big retrofuturist pharmaceutical corporation during a week-long drug trial / sleep over. They together or alternately move through adventures ranging from LOTR elvin sojurns, mobster dramas, white trash lemur reclamation, and high end through-the-looking glass bending of the light between dreams and virtual reality.

With great lighting and deep human insight as well as tapping into that great sleep-over feel (as participants are in this cool 70s-modular deep bunker within a giant pharmaceutical corporation for an entire week) it evokes 60s-70s vintage sci-fi films (and modern retrofuturist wonders like Beyond the Black Rainbow). The only wrong notes are the terrible name (there's already a downbeat 1980 horror movie by the same name, its remake, and at least one other movie or TV show also called Maniac!) and Dan Romer's opportunity-squandering score, for he passes over the modular synths and analog Moogs (imagine the seat-rumbling analog insanity Sionoa Caves or Tom Raybould could have brought to this!) in favor of the same alterna-twee folksy nonsense that's been warning men away from rom-coms since Garden State. Justin Theroux and Sonoya Mizumo are a great team as the brainy scientists who put the whole thing together, and try to fix it when it all falls apart. Sally Field is Theroux's Dr. Phil-like daytime TV therapist mom, called in to relate to the AI when it starts to go rogue. Considering the rumor that the show itself got its start through a computer program reading and assembling elements of the most watched Netflix shows, it's mad meta. Don't even worry about where it's headed or why, just note the similarity to films like John Dies at the End and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and know that's a good thing.

4. THE CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA

Created/developed: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
(Netflix)

Aided by a stunning cast this gorgeously wicked show is one of the first to make full use of the modern HD widescreen TV as its primary frame, filling every corner of the screen with sumptuous dark detail. The story is one of the ubiquitous teen fantasies --the 'there's a magical society operating right under our townie mortal noses and if we meet the right friends or hit the right birthday--we'll get to join and leave suburban tedium behind' trip. I spent the season hoping Sabrina would sign the book of the devil and be damned forever yet bestowed with countless evil powers since her smarmy mortal half was a drag. Unfortunately she lets herself be dragged down, as so many girls in real life are who are destined for bigger and better things, by love for some doomed luddite townie named Harvey--the fantasy equivalent of not going to college because your dumb boyfriend didn't get accepted. Still, it all works because though aimed at younger viewings there are ample killings and exclamations like "Thank Satan you're all right!" by worried aunts. As for the adults, all very fine with a real full-blooded stand-out in the evil Michelle Gomez (aka "The Master" in later seasons of Dr. Who) as Satan's henchwoman, so relishes her own wickedness we practically are inhaled through the screen in her torrent of marvelous evil.

5. BIG MOUTH

by Nick Krohl and John Mulaney
(season 2 - Netflix)

Amazingly instructive as well as relentlessly horrifying, there's abundant wit and compassion in this hilarious animated examination of those 'special changes' that demarcate puberty. Nick Krohl and John Mulaney once again star, with Jordan Peele doing the voice of the irrepressible ghost of Duke Ellington. This time there's a special "Planned Parenthood" episode, a drug episode and great new characters like the Depression Kitty and, most memorably, the Shame Wizard makes his debut and never leaves. Voiced with real slippery charm by David Thewlis, his undermining all the children with deep age-appropriate insecurity becomes the runaway scene stealer of the season. The snippy gay aesthete kid also finds a bit of a guide in a chance encounter with a Fierstein-ish neighbor at an bachelor apartment complex (Broh! He even vapes). All the good stuff more than makes up for the sleazier aspects like the eternally horny Jay and his talking sex pillow's rivalry with a downstairs couch cushion.

Yeesh, is that how I'm going to end this year round-up, talking about Jay's cushions?

Change of Subject: How about a shout-out to:

 FORGED IN FIRE 

(History Channel)

The best reality series on TV, a re-exhumation of the Iron John power that men sorely need and women inherently gravitate to (host Will Willis is the mancrush of his era). It fills a starved-for-positive male images nation with hope. Tapping into the riddle of steel has never seemed more accessible and vital. Even if no one is going to move into metalsmithing after watching it, we need this show's wild man archetypal power. Hurrah. We may be saved, after all. If you're listening guys: more ballistics dummies and fewer animal carcasses, please!

---

SOUNDTRACK COLLECTION:

SEE ALSO:
BEST OF 2017

BEST OF 2016
BEST OF 2015

BEST OF 2014

BEST OF 2013

BEST OF 2012

BEST OF 2011

BEST OF 2010

BEST OF 2009

BEST OF 2008

BEST OF 2007

BEST OF 2006

BEST OF 2004 (popmatters)

Best of the -00s: (2000-2010)

+

Dipsomaniac Amore: FALSTAFF (aka CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT)

We fans of Welles and of his boozy expressionist MACBETH (1948) dreamt long and loudly of one day seeing a CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1966) DVD, ideally on Criterion of course, or even a damned Kino VHS, if you want to reach deep back (it's been in legal limbo forever). Orson Welles' culling of Falstaff bits from several Shakespeare plays--put in a larger English history (circa early 1400s) context via Hollinshed's Chronicles--was damned hard to appreciate on graymarket shit dupes, the only way we could see it outside of a revival house. The handful of critics who'd seen it on the big screen assured us it was a masterpiece, but with the muddy image of a dupe and Welles' glaringly obvious lip sync re-dubbing already alienating us first-time viewers, Welles' complex expressionist camera angles--all running cross odds against the verbal parrying and cross-cross against the odd editing schemata--"functioned" together so badly it was impossible to wade more than ten minutes in before running from the room. The effect was so busy and discordant that it seemed to us that the only way to appreciate Chimes of Midnight on the small screen was to perhaps to have edited it oneself, or to have worked on the editing. The only other avenue to appreciating its ceaseless cascade of intricate movement, overlaps of drama, history arrestingly grotesque woodcut- expressionistic deep focus frames, discordant distorted perspectives, bawdy double entendre, and poetry was perhaps to be drunk, tripping, and an actor or scholar who knew the plays and history by heart. Enough forgotten words and slang phrases were used that we needed subtitles and a period English dictionary to unscramble it otherwise, and we didn't have either. What's worse, the whole cast within the film were laughing uproariously at every little movement of old Jack Falstaff, before we even got a chance to see him or get the joke, and that's an alienating effect, intentional or not. The character of Falstaff himself seems hardly fit material for such guffawing. We're trying our best to keep track of what's going on but end up only worried we're not 'enjoying' it right -- their laughter becomes at us for being dimwitted philistines.

The last hard-to-overcome element was Welles himself, looking so ballooned and decayed it felt as if he might bust or drop a sandbag out of his purse and float away out of the Mad magazine-meets-Bruegel frame. Thanks to the overdub, his voice sounded like a ventriloquist throwing his voice back in time across vast sound mixing chasms. And now, time has made us sensitive. Welles looks so bloated as to be quite sick - his obesity is not a laughing matter, sir!

I tried to watch the whole thing once or twice but gave up, decreeing I'd wait for the Criterion Blu-ray to come along and deliver it in a remastered form with English subtitles. Maybe if the full scope and glory of the cinematography could be appreciated, the sound fixed up, this mountain of aforementioned icy qualms could into flattened puddles melt? Well, the Criterion has come. No more excuses. Dive in, that puddle is deep! Sure it's taken me months to finish it, to find at last the right mindset for its odious savors, but I did, though it almost killed me, I did.

Now allow me to suggest the ways I did it might for you too work, for why else would one watch it if not to boast later that one has and imply in doing so one is, what is the word? a cultured aesthete? 'Hiccup'

It's not rocket science, man. I relapsed over Xmas. Yea, for other reasons than Percy's scourge, yet I pray thee --judge me not. Because if nothing else, my cups grew so cracked by mid-February that, by contrast, Don Birnim would seem a lordly Dunsinane.

And so I 'finished' the Chimes at last. In glorium intoxicado.

I'd learned from my last relapse (1998) that Welles and Shakespeare are the ultimate bender companions. I spent days watching and re-watching an old tape of Welles' Macbeth, swooning and laughing, following along in my gigantic red 'Complete Shakespeare' book from college, and scribbling incoherent journal entries as Orson ranted under gloomy painted skies, swilled from his drinking horn, servant ready in the wings with the jug for refills. Welles soothed the saucy doubts and fears of a lost weekend-into-next bender.

And it all made sense. The obtuse Elizabethan language was as clear as a bell. For when the brain is bobbing merrily in the amniotic surf, Shakespeare's language comes into delirious focus. And Macbeth and his guilty conscience is the perfect partner for when you know your bender has spilled into the work week, the boss's unanswered voicemails like an accusing blinking digit Banquo. I still have the pages of almost illegible, whiskey-stained, hand-written notes I took from that last bender, to the effect it was the ideal relapse play, the fall from sober workaday Eden and into the opiate-womb where three meals a day and a job as Thane of Cawdor are as unattainable as even getting up off your knees to add ice to your highball. (see: Hallowed be thy Shakes: Three Macbeths). Into that morass, Welles' deep booming voice, his mastery of Shakespeare's poetry, came a-rolling like a harmonizing deep bass chord, vibrating through the rapidly misfiring chakras and aligning them, shaking off some of the toxic fluoride crystal buildup from thy third eye pineal 'til it vibrates like a tuned electric tamboura.

The best analogy I can think of for that feeling is the dread one might feel when alone on a rudderless raft being swept out to sea and looking back at the receding shore (knowing the only way back to sobriety is acute alcohol withdrawal, which is like being eaten by a shark in slow motion over a week-long period as you swim vainly against the outgoing tide). At such a moment of quite desperation/resignation, Welles' thunderous oratory fills the sail of Shakespeare's words like a westerly gale into the canvas sail of one's no longer-becalmed heart, not towards the ever-thinner mirage of the eastern shore, but upwards, via a cloud passing low one can climb onto to the cozy confines of the Republic soundstage and sail straight to olde Scotland. The full measure of Welles' resonant voice and the poetry of the dialogue cohere across moody expressionist compositions to make all of Scotland feel like one gloomy haunted house ride up in the cumulonimbus woods, the marching figures with their tall flags and hanging corpses, ghosts, silhouettes of falling axes and men ("let it come down"); and Welles staggering around in his papier-mâché crown and furs like some drunken glorious fool at a masquerade. The court in attendance eye him with concern and useless suspicion, the way my own friend coterie was eyeing me as they prepared for another impromptu intervention, as I screamed at phantasms in the middle of Sunday potluck.

So this time, because of a horrible Xmas, after 19 years of not drinking, back in that bender apartment,and after running through my usual suspects (including, because it was on TCM, High Society which stuck in my head like a broken record once I ran out of whiskey), I found Chimes and remembered how Macbeth had so grounded me in its repeatable coil of brilliance 19 years earlier.

I did so hope Chimes might at last make sense, and that all that High Society suffering wasn't for naught. 

A German translator friend of my dad's told me one Christmas long long ago that all Europeans have a drink before a foreign language class, that it's like running a stuck jar lid under hot water; our language center yields its tight latch to let us think outside the parameters of sober syntax. Drinks (plural) weren't enough for me to learn French, I found that out (never studied), but they are enough to finally get and think in Shakespeare's old world pun-filled English (which I did). The loosening of the deeply-whetted brain's linear grip enables a kind of twisty tongue-tripping free-fall that the bard's hyper-articulate eloquence catches in mid-air and swings around as if a glowing orange between two high-wire acrobats, and Welles' resonant voice reaches into the bones of the rattled skeleton Calloway drummer and harmonizes them like so many low note Tibetan monk chant xylophone bars.

That's good, because while Chimes is filling thy hitherto becalmed sails, you're still out on that raft with no paddle, being sucked out to the open ocean without a soul around to notice (if you're lucky enough to live alone). Soon you're realizing you really need to jump off the raft and start swimming towards shore before it's too late --but you're tired and the current is against you, and sharks and the undertow, and you'll jump in a minute you're just trying to get ready; and then, presto, it's too late even for jumping. The shore is gone. Then you can't remember which direction the shoreline even is, so you realize the next song you hear will be the sweet lure of the sirens to your exhausted cabin fever dehydration death. Water! Water!

What this means in relapse terms is not water, of course, but it's just as desperate. You wake up--usually on the floor or couch--in agony and unable to move your head to see what time it is, or what day. Finally, moving your head by tiny increments you notice it says either 6 or 9 o-clock on your VCR. But you can't tell if it's AM or PM by the thin gray light outside; if it's AM you're fucked: the liquor store wont be open for hours (I realize I'm paraphrasing Lost Weekend here, but it's from experience). Worse, you can't tell if it's AM on a weekday. I mean, if it is, you're going to have to go to work soon. If its PM on a weekday you're fucked, as you forgot to call in sick to work... again. You'd try to call now, or sit up, or make coffee, but just turning the channel to the weather/time is hard enough you get the dry heaves. Find that bottle... fast, before the DTs get you. If no bottle is left, oh lordy.

See, while you're drinking - ooh lah lah, hallucinations and sheer ecstasy, laughing with joy as Hal and Falstaff trade off on their impressions of Gielgud's dry air oratory as the king. Even if his officers hammer at the tavern door like Monday morning's rail-thin skeleton, their phone calls go straight to voice-mail. Away to the wars with you, they probably say, or the equivalent: "Where are you? If you're there, pick up. Hal, the war looms," they say. Being unable to even the find the phone, you declare pacifism and defy unemployment's looming shame to the empty air. You grab the bottle, still half-full, and a few minutes later, the magic is already working. The pain melts away, replaced by swirling ecstasy.

To go from such withdrawal-based misery that you can't stand up or even move your head to see the clock without retching, to such narcotized bliss that you float beyond time and space in so short a time, is worth all the suffering. The swimmer, pushing off from the bottom, swims faster upwards, breaching like a porpoise at the thought of a tossed fish. Hitting "bottom" is just the Phoenician sailor corpse's word for "a whole new worrrrld." Those are pearls that were his eyes. You can't even find your glasses, maybe they're all bent and broken under foot somewhere. You can find your glass, though, of course. You're king!

So... hit play, clink-clink the ice and pour the cure that makes a heaven of hell, (add grapefruit juice - repeat as needed). Feeling better now, you realize, to your infinite joy, that it's only 6PM on a Saturday.You have all the time in the world to get straight. Feeling good enough to mix another drink, to steady your wobbly raft as it were, you sit down with newly-minted drink for Chimes of Midnight. Ah yes, it barely matters that you've seen it three times in a row. It's still so complex, strange, alien, that you often have no idea what's going on. But you know it must be art, because your soul feels so good.

This is because really, in a sense, like the demon in the whiskey that unites with the demon in your soul, Welles' Falstaff is the ultimate bad influence friend, both diegetically and metatextually. We know the analogy, every alcoholic English lit major does. We're Hal, and John Falstaff is the booze, and he has got to go, and so we vow to shun him upon our ascendancy to a full time job, but might we not put that off awhile?

Certainly there's little love for the father in Falstaff. Though Sir John Gielgud the actor is himself a poster child for charm and wit in the service of base dissolution, his sober King is such a square and so ignobly come to crown (and blanketed by paranoia and guilt about it) that his road there carries its own sort of Macbathean self-fulfilling prophecy: the bad boy behavior of his princely son Hal with that fat rogue knight Falstaff approximates the shimmering accusatory finger of his own private Banquo ghost. He'd rather wish that some night-tripping fairy would go into the past and swap out louche Harry with noble Hotspur in their cradles than try to understand his own culpable odium in the equation. Of course he already does understand it, not even lying to himself eases the pain, just as I wince to see my young wild magic repeated in the youngsters of today, all the same mistakes and illusions they won't be dissuaded from making and falling under... and to see my own hand in it by making it all look so damned cool, and so on down the line (even this essay could count), and then knowing my dad felt the same thing for my brother and I, as my dad watched but said nothing as his 1.75 Early Times Bourbon water line dipped and rose like a ship in a hurricane when e'er we were home.

That's why, for all its robust glory and rich language, Chimes is really a kind of Adam Sandler movie. Half the film is just compilations of elaborate insults, pranks, bad boy behavior, and real job shirking, and then---finally and with much (literal) trumpetfare--the turn to sobriety, AA- compelled to kick the jonesers, townies and mooches out of your life. The sun shines and the clouds part. Adam Sandler grows up, gets a job and a nice girl; Hal gets a crown; you get "some help" and a sponsor; Master Shallow goes back to his own ruddy taverns to boast of knowing the man who knew you when, and then they forget you - for more naive and hitherto-sheltered freshmen are coming into town every fall. The things they have seen, Master "Shallow" indeed.

RECEPTION

It might have been pitched like that and done well at the box office--the violence of the battle and the lusty sex of the tavern with Jeanne Moreau's Doll Tearsheet played up, but instead, alas, Falstaff AKA Chimes at Midnight was paradoxically too old-fashioned and too sophomoric-- for swingin' '66. It proved yet another of Welles' art house flops, the equivalent of Oscar Jaffe's Valerie Whitehouse vehicle Joan of Arc. The art crowd of 1966 were flocking to see stuff like Blow-Up and Repulsion. A Shakespeare film starring a grotesquely fat malcontent with loads of overdubbing and complicated history, overlapping ornate dialogue that would be difficult enough to understand if read, let alone blurted in a post-dub rush over rapidfire grotesqueries and complexly interwoven fields of bawdy, profound, and historically-specific action, it was just too much johnson.

The first row is an array of successful art films from 1965-66 (for releases traveled slowly across country in a few prints) one might see in a row displayed before the local art house cinema.  Looking at the top row and imagining seeing all those posters in a row outside the theater, any promoter can see the subliminal issue why the lower row wouldn't fill many seats. Those movies have beautiful blondes; Falstaff has a grotesquely rotund brainiac nerd in full armor. Seeing it instead of, say, Persona is like admitting you're some wobbling bookish unlaid square with elbow patches on your tweed jacket and ink stains on your fingers from years of note-taking and running from the giddy, druggy thrill of svelte or buxom babes in shimmering mod clothes frugging to the latest psych rock jam or grooving down at the coffee shop to some bongo and guitar folk poetry until the (acid was still legal) drugs kick in. 

As you can see, there's no Janet Leigh or Rita Hayworth to put on the poster, no Edie or Catherine Deneuve nor Jane Fonda nor Raquel Welch. There's no 'sizzle' of the sort tarting up concurrent releases of similar length and film stock, like Fellini's La Dolce Vita or Antonioni's L'Aventura. There's not even any guns, or knives, or cars. All Chimes could promise was Welles--deep into his fake noses and rotund grotesquery phase--and some passing glances at Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet as far as sweet young things. There's a few wives on the opposing side (like Hotspur's lady, played by Marina Vlady who's vivacious and interesting) and gorgeous "seamstresses" up in the rafters, but they're seen only when they're needed to wave good-bye, engage in folk dances, run from the sheriff, or laugh obediently for Hal and Falstaff's impromptu plays. One or two are cute enough we hope to see more of them, but Welles gives us less than a few seconds at a time, so we come to rely on the random shots of Moreau's face for our respite from the rustic manliness of the blood vessel-woodcut old faces, Margaret Rutherford's pestering for money, and the inn's expressionistic rafters (Welles loves ceilings). Too bad, for with every strand of wild hair brilliantly captured in Edmond Richard's dusky Haxan-ish photography, her face wreathed in spiderweb lines, Moreau's Doll pulls doting delight from deep within Sir John's sack-and-gout plagued corpulence, but one shudders to think the abysmal state of his 'bait and tackle' after this long and chancrous life, and Shakespeare's bawdy double entendres on STDs, cleanliness of drawers, and full chamber pots ("empty the jason")--are all kept in to make sure we do, indeed, so shudder.

For a long time this was the only picture we could find of Chimes at Midnight
and it raised a lot of questions as to the age/relationship here, especially since, when I saw it first,
Welles' was in the news for allegedly bathing Pia Zadora (who was having her
Bardot-80s / Brooke Shields-70s x Zsa Zsa Gabor 60s / Charro- 70s  moment) in Butterfly (1982)

I mention this aspect only since it reflects the more elaborate expressionist approach of Welles vs. the psychedelic art house hit makers of the day, whose iconography moves intrepidly beyond signifier language, their focus on youth and psychedelic drugs provoking a post-modernist new aesthetic arrest that runs opposite to Welles' bellowing boozy poetics/ While booze dilates the mind's language center so it might easily swallow up Shakespeare's dense archaic language, acid eliminates words altogether, transcends them, to arrive at a kind-of 'impossibility-of-truth' with image and sound in and of themselves--the psychedelic impact on the senses is so amplified an intense that Wellesian intentional ugliness can create a bad trip panic - thus youthful beauty becomes essential to the point of compulsion. And music is the key...(3)

If Wine be the Music of War, Drink On...

In addition to the lack of sex and beauty, a problem with Chimes lies in the merry olde score by Francesco Lavagnino. Far too repetitive and jaunty in its main theme, it's as if he was so enthralled with Nino Rota's work on La Dolce Vita (1960) he forgot to bring in an actual mood of his own.

Then again, Lavagnino comes alive, or finds his own, for the celebrated battle, adding wordless female chanting and military drums so that the score becomes an ominous liturgy, heralding of the giallo eeriness to come in the work of Ennio Morricone or Mario Nascimbe's work on One Million Years BC, the following year. Deservedly at the top of cinema's best battle scenes (fitting perfectly between Potemkin's and Duck Soup's), the main battle sequence is a whirlwind of Eisensteinian movement-based editing: horse's stabbed, clangs of metal on metal, bodies in armor falling, charging lances and waving morning stars, waves of soldiers riding in and archers letting fly. From organized symbolic nationality and cavalry card shuffling we gradually get down to the pain and muddy brawling of the up close soldiers, no recognizable insignia to tell them apart visible below the mud and blood, as if starting out a Riefenstahl equestrian Olympiad montage and ending a muddy massive rugby riot filmed on a bunch of GoPros worn by the central rioters. There's almost no gore, just a gradual erosion of imagery--there's not even any judgment or polemic - just a real-time example of how men like to get dirty and deadly. It's also a master class is making a hundred extras seem like thousands and of staging battle, without condemnation or celebration. Instead Welles offers an in-between recognition of war's necessity for man's esteem and a sad realizing of his mortal frailty. In other words, Welles' battle is not a head-shaking "what a waste" dove polemic or a chest-thumping hawk call, but something more profound and important: he finds a sense of nobility and grace achieved through mud, crying widows, and grievous wounds. Only Conan and Patton have maybe come close since to tapping the same unspoken vein of true courage.

And naturally, I most adore that--after the field is won-- Falstaff turns his section of the front into a massive tailgate by pulling his rotund girth up to a big keg on the field of victory, and pouring out a measure of "sherri-sack." Chilling around it with a coterie of the surviving unkempt countrymen he pricked earlier, this is clearly a post-battle ritual he's experienced before, declaring his love of sherri-sack for it makes normal men both brave and droll, "apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of fiery, nimble shapes, which delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue... becomes excellent wit." Adding, that sobriety thins men's blood, he claims that's why Hotspur fell, and that "if I had a thousand sons, I would make them foreswear thin potations and addict themselves... to sack!" At that point of course, being drunk and feeling guilty about thy sack addiction, thou mayest cheer. In Falstaff's sanctioned view, your vice is a noble endeavor!

That's the rub of the nutshell, the full measure of Chimes' glory. We all wish it could go on forever, but war and the bender alike must end. A wild free-for-all is over in a flash, followed by months of recovery, limb mending, meeting attendance, and TV watching. Drinking speeds up time and the hang-over slows it, so eventually--as in The Lost Weekend--the only 'conscious' part of drinking is the pain of withdrawal. Pain is the only thing we remember, the only time we're conscious, aware of time's passage, plagued by saucy doubts and fears. If we get six whiskey bottles at the store, the misery will be postponed a week or so, but that week won't be remembered - it will pass in an instant. The joy of the plentiful glass may have been quite wondrous, but our takeaway is but a dim blur, a black space on the tape, a sweet narcotic black out, which is itself by shame and dread book-ended. We only have the evidence we must have had a blast -- cryptic clues: broken mirrors, ripped up pages, cracked DVDs--the vacuum cleaner left on, roaring away inches from our head on the carpet (true story) when we wake, or the stove left on, a pot of pasta reduced to scorched resin, empties galore, some bottles broken and jagged with chunks in our foot now crusted over with blood; the TV showing a patient DVD menu on eternal repeat (or in the old days, static), black bruises on our legs or arms, more empties-- all the battle fray equivalent of the dead bodies,  like unfinished vulture meals left to rot 'til the frozen winter stops the stench.

Sooner or later, the bodies and the empties must be cleared from the field for the next big show; the booze gone, the wounded too messed up to even call downstairs for delivery, or Seamless, or an ambulance. The show finally doesn't go on, and in that--freedom. We just had a sample of what suicide was aiming for. We skipped the earthly record.

Me, after my recent relapse left me too messed up even to call and order a liquor delivery, I quietly convulsed on the floor from alcoholic withdrawal and/or a bad reaction with my SSRI meds. Sinatra's slightly buzzed-flat reading of the line "She got pinched in the Ass- / tor Bar" from "Yes, Indeedy" kept repeating over and over in my head like a skipped record, ensuring I'll never be able to watch High Society again. That is my grievous battle scar. I have its big indoor shimmering poolside Apollonian temple for lovely Grace Kelly (who seems rail-thin) and the big central foyer in Logan's Run blurred together like a fusion of the mall (where I spent my formative years' depression) and the hospital (where I'd be shortly). I can't watch that one again either. For awhile anyway.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, unless it doesn't know what you're laughing at --then it feels paranoid, like you're laughing AT it. 

Getting back to Falstaff- if you're new, let me assure you of this: getting past the first twenty minutes is hardest, for the film just plunges in and doesn't endear itself to anyone: the voices seem mismatched to the actors, the words a muddle, and Hal and Poins laugh and cavort through and around interwoven camera movements with such hearty dubbed relish at Falstaff's cumbersome knavery before we even see him, that we're automatically alienated and thinking we made a mistake coming here. After all, it's no easy thing getting up, finding a disc, opening the machine, taking the current one out and putting the new one in, all without falling over, smashing the tray, breaking or dropping or losing either disc, and putting the old one away before it's scratched. The whole operation requires a finesse ill-served by a bender. We're putting a lot of hope on old Jack Falstaff, but before he even has a chance to stir from his mountainous slumber, Poins and Hal are rolling around on the ground, laughing, planning all sorts of teasing jests and bringing up older ones, that they--at least-find side-splitting, it leaves a bad taste in our mouths (Hal being royalty who thinks he's being a rebel by robbing from the middle class - sound familiar?). Meanwhile the landlady bustles about demanding payment and reciting Sir John's bill, which the boys think is guffaw-worthy, but gets me mad. I hate the whole concept of credit and when people give credit to a rogue like Sir John or that terrible fisherman Mr. Johnson in To Have and Have Not  -- I lose respect for them! And it hurts.

At the same time we're thrown into the political intrigue with Henry's father King Henry VI, who's sort of held onto a temporary king appointment and left the rightful ruler (by his brothers' decree) rotting in some faraway French jail, refusing to pay the ransom. In this sense, Welles keeps our alliance divided -- we actually do like Hotspur more than Hal on some level, as he at least has a young wife he loves and a sense of fun in honor rather than reveling in juvenile vulgarity and deadbeat debauches. The best Hal can do as far as restoring honor to his name is the kind of half-hearted declaration of the prodigal son, who promises to straighten up after his dad bails him out on his second offense. And is this not the claim made by addicts, drunks and slumming socialites, that this rough company is an example of the sun permitting "the base, contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world," so that, when he pleases, he can shine again and be "all the more wondered at"? What a rationalization! "If all the year were playing holiday to sport would be as tedious as work" (and therefore vice versa). Haha, I wish I'd known that line when my dad was alive. Hotspur, on the other hand, clearly finds time for both sport and work, and has grown a far healthier landscape. Harry's not wrong to want some night-tripping fairy to redistribute the pair. And it's Hal's killing of Harry in the duel that makes this truth all the more painful. Truly, the better man has lost. We like Hal for the first time only then, as he admits it.

"The day is wasted if you're not" - La Greco

VALUABLE ONLY WHEN LOST
But really, the most offensive thing, what should have turned the tide for good, is that Falstaff takes credit for the death of Hotspur; since he's after all a key part of Hal's base company it doesn't matter if the king believes him or not, it's enough to sully the victory. For me, in that scene, Falstaff goes too far - and it makes me like the man even less than before. Maybe the problem lies in positioning along the scale between Welles' gruff but decent rascals ( Will Varner) vs. the charming but horrible villains. My favorite Welles characters--Quinlan, Macbeth, Harry Lime--aren't supposed to be o'er lovable. They aren't kept in the company of guffaws and loving looks. In fact it's only at the moment of his profound realization that his thing with Hal is kaput, that he's out in the cold and that he deserves it and it's the way of the world, and he wouldn't fit in anyway -- that Welles' Falstaff actually seems to become warmly human. It's a powerful, haunting moment for being so long coming and Welles carries it sublimely. It's one of those rare persona breaks that major stars sometimes perform in films, that are all the more valuable for their rarity--Cary Grant's breakdown before the child services director in Pennies from Heaven, for example, or Robert Redford choking up despite himself after bumping into Barbara Streisand at the end of The Way We Were. It's probably Welles best moment as an actor, and worth enduring the slog of his roguery to get there - suddenly we get that Welles maybe never intended us to think him as lovable as Falstaff thinks he is -  but how could we resist with that voice? It's always there, that larger than life ego with the genius to back it up.  But here Welles does one better.

If we get this far into these films, we're already primed for these sudden changes, which take advantage of the previous reels of cool detachment to hook us. By this point in Chimes, we've figured out Welles' unique rhythm and can comfortably let the words we don't know slide clear away. And, too, Criterion's disc has subtitles and audio commentary by James Naremore. He's good at keeping the historical background front and center rather than getting too lost in production history (which comes out more in the extras). This is essential for understanding as is (I found this very useful), the English subtitles, since so many of the words are forgotten slang anyway (which most adaptations would subtly modernize) and so casually tossed off, being able to look them up if needed helps greatly. Also, the more we watch the less the dubbing aspect becomes noticeable. Especially as the film goes on it seems to all but disappear as a problem.

In short, if ever a disc was worth owning and studying and watching obsessively while drunk, this is it. Welles' Macbeth for your first big relapse; Falstaff for your last.

The last, you have heard me. Never say never but we have heard the chimes. All things must end - and if we're lucky they end in an Ativan drip and Librium dispensed by beautiful young nurses in powder blue scrubs bathed in the nighttime glow of their mobile medicine tray computer screens like shimmering valkyrie. If not, god help us. Let no man stand alone in that dark and dingy hour. With no Welles, art thy cups abused.
Though his mud-and-blood besotted gravity swallows up thy trapped and troubled shoes,
in his boozy expressionistic poetry art thou art lifted,
shoeless... through.

Lifted, drunk and truly through.
For two hours.

1. NOTES:
 Bright Lights -'Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day blackout. .."
2. Corman imported so many of these and one wonders just how much his genius with marketing had to do with the entirety of the art house movement. Sex sells the first ticket and art keeps the word of mouth high. 
3. PS 12/18: Welles--it turns out--explores the youth-psychedelic/sex angle in his film-within-a-film in the unseen The Other Side of the Wind).

SEE ALSO:
Shrooms, for Remembrance: Mel Gibson's HAMLET (1990) in Psychedelic Context