American Grievers, Part Two: THE FOUNTAIN

"Death is the road to awe."

Was it an accident I watched Darrenofsky's THE FOUNTAIN (2006) the very next night after INCEPTION (see Grievers part one here)? There are no accidents in cinema when its imagery is way more high-def than your foggy day-to-day 'reality.' There's a handful of differences twixt the two: DiCaprio's brooding dreamweaver in INCEPTION becomes FOUNTAIN's Hugh Jackman, but they're really the same -- one bends time through dream-invasion, the other through past-life recollection.

THE FOUNTAIN's American Griever, Jackman, claims to love his wife (Rachel Weisz) but he dismisses her attempts to show him the wonders of the stars as mere imbecilic prattle. A visibly concerned neurochemist trying to cure her via ancient tree of life scrapings, Jackman's many lives/one master hero is even more dour and dull than Leo in any of his many 'American griever' sagas. Poor Rachel just wants to find peace and die but Hugh's too ridden with angst and devoted to his grief to give a shit what she wants.

In the eliptical narrative, director Darren Aronofsky skims forward and back through time (via Weisz's calligraphy hand-written journal) like we're skimming a glossy-paged graphic novel: a shadowed inquisitor is self-flagellating and plotting against a golden-hued queen and her seething conquistador, whom she sets off to South America in search of the same mystic tree. All well and good, but what makes FOUNTAIN such a classic American Griever saga is contemporary Jackman's blindness to Weisz herself. He loves only the thought of her dying, like a 'hurry up and die so I can drink to escape the pain and admire my drunken grief in the mirror" kind of thing. Weisz has seen the light but Jackman buries himself in sunless jungles in search of a light he can micro-manage (a tree can't talk back). All this, when the deathlessness of light already is eternal! Right? You can float like a Buddha all you want, Hugh. It's as phony as a tree dolla bill.

The parts in the beginning where he seems to die and be reborn into another aspect of self are very cool, but even then the film and he turn out to be kind of clueless about humility - the bedrock of enlightenment. When and if he dies, this humbler-than-thou seekr demands the whole earth shake and dissolve in admiration. He may meditate and look as self-righteously enlightened as Richard Gere, but the ego is a cunning focus-puller.

Personally, if I ever lost a parent as a child, or vice versa, my attitude might be more conventionally 'oh death, I'm mad at you!' Instead I  have a great grandmother who lived to 107, and her daughter, my granny, alive and bored at 97 (PS 4/17- she died at 102) is put on suicide watch at her home if she even jokes about going out in a bang not a whimper. So I'm going to represent, for her sake, that under-represented, pro-death voice: If your eyes are truly open, and life appears as it really is, infinite, then you know death is just the brief dream-filled prologue to life's 3-D space-time main attraction, whereon the fields of space and time are once more merged totally into the 'one' eternal I AM, the consciousness of which we are all reflections. Living in the moment is impossible without feeling this to be true; making peace with your own mortality is all it takes to get there, what your whole barrage of egoic distractions--your daily litany of judgment, desire and fear--has been so instrumental in avoiding. If you reach this place of contemplative serenity in the face of impermanence, the whole 'life is still life even if that life is less than lovely' jazz rings mighty flat. Our medical system is so fucked up, we'd outlaw death if we could, jamming a crowbar into the wheel of life and wondering where that grinding sound is coming from, and why the lines at Epcot are so long, and why so many people are being born with such cheap, knock-off souls.

I know it's a touchy issue and I don't mean to sound all-knowing or callous, but in not even daring to touch on it we're killing quality at the expense of quantity. I've known people who've pissed away their life savings keeping a vegetable hooked to a machine. And I've waited in lines. At Epcot. And had panic attacks in the pre-class crowds at the tonier yoga studios. And I've seen the limitless expanses of trash dumps, and mass production, and stockyards, and phone books... and suburban sprawl. Know who benefits from our fearful overpopulation? The soul-eaters, the reptilian overlords, and CEOs of giant conglomerates.

And the box office, of course.

What makes THE FOUNTAIN all the more troubling is actually its most interesting aspect: the way death is viewed as a form of public transportation; if you surrender to death in the right spirit you never really die. The tree of life herb they discuss might be meant as a sister to ayahuasca, and that would make sense, which is why it's so disappointing that the psychedelic aspect isn't explored so much as passed, like ship-shaped phantoms in fog, on the way to another tearful tantrum. I stood up a few times and yelled at the screen: "Hugh. we may already be immortal, soul-wise, so why cling to one body forever rather than find out?" It may well be that radiation treatments prolong your life if your body has cancer, but at the cost of warping the weave of your immortal soul, which is an electromagnetic field that can become permanently damaged by radiation, hence William S. Burroughs' description of the atomic bomb as a soul killer:

Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.

Imagine if in doing chemo we are prolonging our current life at the expense of mutating our immortal soul, like the Bridey Murphy witch in Roger Corman's THE UNDEAD. Now that is an awesome movie.

My point with 'American Grievers' is not to be controversial for attention but to illuminate a gap between romantic male characters in today's cinema and those of old Hollywood, when men related to their female partners in a direct and tender manner while remaining tough (not falling into rom-com territory) rather than soft but surly and self-righteous. Think of the rapport between William Powell and Myrna Loy in THE THIN MAN or William Powell and Kay Francis in ONE WAY PASSAGE and JEWEL ROBBERY. Think of Bogie and Bacall; Newman and Woodward; Taylor and Burton; Gable and Lombard; Gable and Scarlett --all instances of actors able to be both masculine and tender, deep and badass but also sexually healthy compared to the anguished loners of post-'82 American dramatic cinema, who can relate to a woman only when she's dead, so he can drink alone staring at her picture; or dying, and he can scream at her "I won't let you die!" Either way, she doesn't get a voice.

I must be preaching to the choir in the case of Aronofsky. In his last two films, THE BLACK SWAN and THE WRESTLER, death is practically advocated as the one truly badass artistic climax of performance, so I grant the benefit of doubt we're meant to side with Rachel Weisz's right to die vs. Jackman's tiresome "you're not gonna die!" tirades. This keen and subtle critique of America's blase' closed-mindedness towards any talk of death with dignity or eternal life as a reason to let go of a dying body is a subtextual touchstone for Aronofsky's last two films. The characters Jackman resembles are SWAN's Barbara Hershey as a micro-managing stage mom, and WRESTLER's Marisa Tomei as a single stripper mom wary of ex-client Mickey's headlock.  The trouble is that Jackman's the main character in THE FOUNTAIN. He's supposed to be the good guy. Would you want to see THE BLACK SWAN if Hershey's character was the lead, and Portman just an ungrateful daughter, ala MILDRED PIERCE?

In the end, Jackman may or may not get wise to the joys of nonexistence, but his life as a lotus-posin' baldhead taking care of an outer space yum-yum tree doesn't seem real, doesn't seem "earned," based on his record of glum tantrums. Meditation is where one goes to find the truth of what lies beyond our current mortality, the full immortal self that survives when the rest of us is burned away. Hint: the part of you that is immortal is not the part you think. If you imagine the total self as a movie projected on a wall, the immortal part is the empty rectangle-shaped white light that's still projected once the film runs all the way through. So why get attached to the shadows that make us one thing vs. another, that bring shape and form and illusory permanence? All movies are just light, with some parts blocked or shaded for effect. What makes Aronofsky's later films much better than THE FOUNTAIN is the introduction of artistic drive to that equation: dying in the service of Art equals a very cool resolution to the problem of life, regardless of your clocked meditation tree-time. As a doctor, Jackman's whole Hippocritic oath thing stops him from being true to the existential resolve of Mickey's wrestler and Natalie's ballerina, the ideal of deathless fierceness in the name of performance. Yet truly good doctors know when to stop torturing the patient with temporary stave-off measures and endless spinal taps and start encouraging them to enjoy their last remaining moments. Maybe, and this has been proven effective, slip them some magic tree trippy herbs rather than just bogarting the bag, so they know death is going to be a total gas.

The visuals of THE FOUTNATIN are quite impressive, but again you can have acres of hallucination and it's no more than eye candy for something that never seems to really happen, i.e. the transcendence of the duality of life and death into one eternal deathless state. In a word, it's not psychedelic. If you're going to be that deep, it's cool to not show self-righteous American grievers getting rewarded by the cosmic good fairy for their dour self-importance. There's more to Zen than baldness and Jason Patric-style sanctimony! Look at Jack and Rose in TITANIC, they loved a lifetime worth in a few hours, but ole Hugh doesn't care about a few hours, and that's the very definition of un-Zen. Imagine for example, Leo spending his last moments with Rose just lecturing her about how stupid it was she jumped out of the lifeboat to be with him... that's THE FOUNTAIN.

Fortunately, Aronofsky learned the lesson from its failure at the box office and with critics.  THE WRESTLER and THE BLACK SWAN would keep the best elements of THE FOUNTAIN--the even-keeled examination of mortality-- and sideline the relentlessly blind clingers. Aronofsky learned in THE FOUNTAIN that the best way to make a point about art and the death drive is by portraying artists in physically masochistic fields like wrestling or ballet. Without some true artistic pain, these greenscreened actors are as lost in the winds as Jar Jar off his meds.

Totaled Recall: THE HANGOVER (2009) and WHO IS HARRY NILLSSON? (2010)

Full of triumph, tribulation, amusing comic turns, and a manageable portion of tiresome dick humor, THE HANGOVER is a fine way to end mid-life crisis month, i.e. November. It's all about memory and manliness and lack thereof, and if it took me awhile to see it, well, I confess I used to have problems with Bradley Cooper - the beady eyes, the cocky glassiness, the way he didn't deserve Jennifer Garner in ALIAS - but all is forgiven here. Now I love the nasal nonchalance with which he greets the next morning's calamities with a shrug and a swagger. Annoying Ed Helms (THE OFFICE), meanwhile, wakes up and starts instantly to fret about a missing tooth and that there's a tiger in the bathroom so he can't even get in there and check his gums. Cooper just chortles and rolls with it, like most people would. Dude, to me it was just like every morning/afternoon waking up on tour with my band! I was always trying to find my pants, like Zach Galifianakis does, but we'd never slip anyone Rohypinol unless they specifically requested.... which they did. My crew loved Rohypinol, we didn't waste them on girls, we didn't need to. We were men, y'all, men who loved to pop Mexican Quaaludes as they used to be known. Even if they made our parties turn into snoring Jonestowns, I'm sure we must have had fun before we crashed. Didn't we? No one had phone cameras in those days so we'll never know. But also, our crew had no Ed Helms whiner character, just various degrees of Galiafinakis, and all was bearded and chill with the worrlzzzz.

Erroneously called 'rufflin' or something in the film, by a dentist who should know better, Rohipynol is sooo much more than a date rape drug. Don't let the frat boys give it a bad name. May any man whose ever spiked a girl's drink with one drop dead instantly, by Crom!

Oh yeah, THE HANGOVER. Well written, well directed, well photographed, it solves nearly all the problems I usually have with dumb Nevada-set comedies, and in fact is better at depicting that special drug fueled blur than Terry Gilliam's much more pedigreed FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. Frankly, despite Helms' histrionics (he's worse than Alan Arkin in THE IN-LAWS) there's a real sense you'd want to hang out with these guys, whereas Depp and Del Toro in LOATHING seemed way too pretentious and violent to want to actually have more than a quick shot with before excusing yourself, going to the bathroom, and running for the hills. To bond with the HANGOVER posse one need take only a sixth shot of Jaeger, whereas Hunter would need to wave a gun in your face and scare you off, so you wouldn't see how alone and twisted he was inside.

Yeah, when it comes to drug-fueled mayhem, Zach, Brad and their dorky friend are like a good band - the alpha, Bradley Cooper on lead guitar and vocals, getting them in trouble with daring reckless drive. On bass, the rooted crazy calm of Zach G, and the clatter of nervous Helms on drums. Hunter's band would never even learn two chords before they smashed their guitars... that wouldn't fool me. I saw the Replacements in '84! Matsbra!

But, for all that, THE HANGOVER ain't perfect. First of all, these guys are pussies, because when you wake up with a super hangover like that, the thing is to just keep drinking. Nothing cures a hangover like more alcohol. There's no earthly need to sober up, dear friends, til the wedding's over. The wedding photogs can always redden up your pale, sickly countenance in Photoshop. Not that they did for me, that's show biz.

But, I totally felt that anxiety Ed Helms feels due to their  staying in a designer hotel suite, where you're surrounded by luxury items that cost ridiculous amounts, so you're dying for a drink and there's booze all around, but if you take it they charge you like $45 for an airplane bottle, or $25 for a small tin of nuts. Dude, when I go to a hotel I don't want to feel like I'm sleeping in the lobby of an expensive department store, afraid to roll over in bed lest I occur some exorbitant charge by knocking over a pillow. I mean, are they charging me for every splurb of ginger-lemon-scented hand soap? The whole thing never fails to throw me off, so even if I get a comp bottle of designer mineral water I become afraid to open it, afraid to even go down the hall for ice cubes, lest the top flight party girls see and judge me, snickering over how plebeian I am for expecting an ice machine in such a posh spot - everyone knows room service brings it... and charges.

On the other hand, when you're with 'the guys' there's often a kind of vertical displacement of responsibility, as opposed to going to one of these places with your girlfriend and being expected to show her a great time even as it's plunging you into debt and she's rolling her eyes, blaming you for the rain, and making wearying demands for 'spontaneity.' Groups of guys are more fun because there's no need to constantly prove why you're a good boyfriend, to make sure she's having a good time like some overstressed cruise director, and the HANGOVER is brilliant at showing how four guys riffing and going off in random directions at the same time in the same place, concurrent yet counter-intuitive, can bewilder the world around them into a kind of on the spot detournement societal melt down, thus enabling said guys to get away with everything short of arson. My band and I, for example, could take over and completely change the vibe of, say, a sleepy all-night diner, or an understaffed bar. Special shout out to the girls of Old City Hall in Oswego, 1992. Favorite blurry memory of that tour: Five in the morning, skinny dipping in a freezing Lake Ontario while the snow drifted down! Alcohol rules!

Aside from the not drinking more to cure the hangover aspect, my only other issue with the film was the shameful portrayal of women, which I will only excuse because of the sacredness of the "what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas" male bond. Still, why does Heather Graham always get stuck playing gorgeous, sexually available doormats? And even if that girl waiting at the altar wasn't Megan Fox, she was mighty Megan Foxy, with a dash of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Awesome, but one-dimensional. And wait, is that Cheri Oteri as the mom? Run!

But again, this is Vegas, the city of bromance and legalized prostitution...SPOILER: the final photos of the lost night smack of all the things the aforementioned stone cold bitch is right to condemn... Those implants have families damn it. They were once beautiful breasts and now just embarrassing, shocking reminders of a world gone wrong. Still it is cool to see the enemies of the day-after suddenly as the friends of the night before, preserved in the fleeting amber of digital phone memory cards. Healing, you might say.

The HANG director also made OLD SCHOOL, which I haven't seen, but I remember seeing photos of Will Ferrell at the keg, and remembering that I once partied with him, or his Syracuse equivalent, Mike "Ellis" DeAngelo. Ellis! Boys need to be boys, and what goes on under the roofie stays under the roofie, unless it doesn't, in which case, everybody's goin' to jail this moan-NIN! Some of us never left. Some of us have been here the whole time, shoveling our buckets of coins into cold, dark slots while the sheriff stands watch and we hear Tom Jones sing work songs. There is no jackpot so sweet as the one we don't remember, Lord. Just look at Harry Nilsson! What, who is Harry Nilsson? Glad ya acksed. Pull up a chair... grab a cup. Oh. No more cups? There might be one in the sink you can rinse off.

In the pantheon of rock/pop there's always those artists whose albums you see everywhere and never buy, though there's always one or two people who are into them and try to tell you how great they are and you're just not having it... Procol Harum? Molly Hatchet? Todd Rundgren? Foghat? Whaat? I used to always put Nilsson in with them, some relic of a bygone age...That won't happen again now that I saw WHO IS HARRY NILSSON (AND WHY IS EVERYBODY TALKIN' 'BOUT HIM)? a documentary with a title that instantly places him as the singer of that song in MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969, rated X).  Off to a good startbra.

Seeing the documentary helped unearth a lot of 'lost' childhood memories, such as being five and excited for the premiere of Nilsson's psychedelic 1971 TV cartoon, "The Point." Even then, at five or whatever, the cartoon made me annoyed with its YELLOW SUBMARINE psychedelic puns and Seuss-brand nonconformism. But I shouldn't blame Nilsson for being so proud of his ABC prime time slot-winning. Do we devalue Vince Guaraldi because that bridge in 'Linus and Lucy' is so overused in commercials? Nilsson was a partier, to the extreme! That is what we must struggle through the cold Las Vegas afternoon to 'remember'.

Throughout the documentary various musicians talk about losing huge stretches of time partying with Nilsson. Wives all across Laurel Canyon came to dread his husband-napping phone calls.  He'd pick up their men and they'd vanish into the 'Rufflin' haze... surfacing later drunk and belligerent, just to pick up their guitar and accidentally break a table before driving off again, with a merry laugh and tire screech.
Meanwhile Nilsson's record producers loved his incredible voice and gifts so much they seemed to just let him go too loose, recording every drunken sing-song blather that came into his head. They were all broken up still by his leaving them. (Apparently John Lennon was a negative influence). And leave them he would.

His younger Irish wife speaks as well as she can of our Harry in the documentary, and she still looks a pretty hot, and his gorgeous children remember a loving but mostly absentee dad. Though I wished there could be a Polaroid trail of his wild lost weekends, ala THE HANGOVER, it was enough of a change of heart for me that I ran to my emusic account and downloaded NILSSON SCHMILSSON and NILSSON SINGS NEWMAN. A long time Randy Newman fan (pre-TOY STORY only, playa), it's been my pleasure to hear Nilsson sing "We got to tell the people 'bout Utah / 'cuz nobody seems / to know," while walking to work down Brooklyn's scenic Vanderbilt Ave. every morn...nin'. 

But man, this country needs to remember more than Utah... we need to remember that remembering is for chumps and blackouts mean you must have had a blast, and hangover cures don't come better than a 50-50 mix of gin and grapefruit juice... chased with an overnight jail sentence, rehab, 90 AA meetings in 90 days, and... toast... it takes you an hour to eat one piece of toast you're so shaky and nauseous from alcohol withdrawal or poisoning, whichever comes first and sometimes both at once, to be so full of whiskey you can't stand up or talk, but still twitching from alcohol withdrawal.

But in the end, is having all that candle at both ends-style fun even worth it if you don't remember a damn thing? As someone who used to spend his week dreaming of Friday when I could grab a bottle like a reverse parachute and just plunge into the void, I can tell you flatly, "nobody seems / to know." Memory is not to be trusted, and the moment itself doesn't exist outside your own slicing of past and future like a dwindling cube of sopium in a room full of grubby jonesers. You're better off seeking Jesus, but churches smell like the elderly, and you can't smoke in the pews. Your best bet is this: download Nilsson's "Jump into the Fire" and listen to it walking down the street pretending to be a coked-up Henry Hill. That should answer all your questions, you black-out reincarnater. You jumped into the Lake Ontario fire a million times and don't remember... Hopefully someone, even now, is up in the ether, savoring and recording your every lost howl.

If the Quirks offend thee...(DIMINISHED CAPACITY, ALIEN: RESURRECTION)

Put the blame on Mame, boys, for filling her widower pad with eccentric whimsy, or Frank Capra, for filling our heads full of pro-capitalist blarney, either way we're at a saturation point with "quirky" indie family comedies; anything after this and the flood will get into the basement and warp the floorboards of cinema. Hopefully this weekend's release of the tepidly reviewed "never should have escaped Sundance" LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE-cum-DAN IN REAL LIFE style quirky family comedy "about heart, about growing up, and growing old..." this Alan Alda-Matthew Broderick senile old bonding movie, DIMINISHED CAPACITY,  is the water line by which overdone cliches meant to pacify the whole extended family will now be over and done with. Presuming the poor film makes no money. I love Alan Alda, so it's a shame, who can I blame? Capra would scoff, and Mame would shudder with douche chills at this toxic level of cutesy-poo clowning.

There's a real comedy in there somewhere, maybe in a real early draft of Sherwood Kiraly's adaptation of his own novel. I mean, the pitch is great: a senile old man with a zest for zaniness heads to Chicago with a priceless old baseball card he finally wants to sell. The card is a great mcguffin, as nephew Broderick has to continually void all the bad deals the demented old man gets hoodwinked into (like swapping it for an editor's promise to print the old man's fish poetry -- don't ask). But along the misadventure-strewn way just about everything original must have been sifted from this idea and discarded; instead of an analysis of the meaning of value--an old, ugly, tiny piece of cardboard with a face of an ugly ball player being priceless, for no earthly reason--we're stuck in the mind of a senile fish poet (tell ya later), the cookie cutter mold is enforced right down to the hometown girl--divorced with clumsy child-- who Broderick leaves behind (Virginia Madsen, quietly searching for someone equally awake to do a scene with). Can you guess that the kid is a little league space cadet who keeps dropping the winning ball and it all comes down to him catching the card as it almost falls into a janitor's pail of soapy water? You can?

Luckily I was seeing this at the Sunshine in downtown NYC and so wasn't the only one groaning as quirk after tired quirk was upturned and exposed like so many bugs under rocks scored to mopey tunes off Sufjan Stevens' Illinois album.

A glimmer of blessed anti-sunshine arrives late inning in with Dylan Baker as a dealer at the Chicago baseball card convention. Playing a very serious Cubs fan, Baker lends a world-weary dignity as a guy who must continually endure the repeated failures of his beloved team. Wisely realizing Baker is really the only one in the cast halfway on the ball, first-time director Terry Kinney lets his scenes play longer than they need to, and for the time Baker's onscreen it's as if the clouds of stale cliche part and something hilarious, twisted, and true comes out. You can see the assemblage of quirky actors--Broderick, Alda, Madsen--watching him from the other side of the collector's table in awe, wishing his part started earlier and set the mood. Before Bakers' arrival, it's almost like a trading card session between two Sundance workshop veterans: "I'll trade you a quirky gag involving fish writing poetry for your 'learning to shake off your doubts and achieve greatness with your life' arc, I'll even throw in a white trash relation struggling with the first step of AA."

Of course the baseball card changes hands more times than an intercostal clavicle or secret roll of microfiche... as does Alan Alda's southern fried accent. His eccentric Uncle Rollie apparently orders his quirks from an old Sears catalog, whether baiting lines attached to typewriter keys so fish can type poetry (now you know) or drying his socks on an indoor gas grill; Ruth Gordon is probably rolling atop Harold, still screaming, in her grave. Sure Matthew Broderick has his chops, but I want to punch him even now for Bueller's interminable smugness. I don't feel sorry for him being stuck in this mess, but Alda is still way too witty and physically agile to be convincing as a coot and meanwhile the other actors all stand around looking like they can't find their chalk marks. But even so, Broderick looks mere stiff-jointed steps away from being 93, while Alda's still a breath of fresh air.
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As long as it's not completely terrible, we can fall into any movie like a dream, emerging only when the credits roll or the phone rings or when we need to go to the bathroom or refill our whiskey highballs. Similarly, the spirit upon leaving the body becomes amorphous intelligence seeping into the interlocking gazes surrounding it, merging with the all-seeing I.

Who is to say, after all, that when a really good actor dies on screen, that we do not also die, or that this character is really reliving his life through us, through our eyes, the way we might look in awe at photos of ourselves as babies, the way a chimp or Hamlet studies the human skull? It's astounding, Roderick, the basis of consciousness, the mirror regarding itself into infinity. That's why a much better movie was the one I revisited after trudging home from Sunshine Cinema: ALIEN: RESURRECTION.

The astounding mirror character I am talking about here is the reincarnated/cloned Ripley character played by Sigourney Weaver. Is she the "same" Ripley who died at the end of ALIEN 3? Did her consciousness transfer via the cloning process of mad scientist Brad Dourif? The transmutation of self, of sentience, of soul, is what is the issue here. Is the soul as we perceive it really ego, and is ego really just an obsession with one particular locus of identification, with the body you inhabit at this point in time? Is ego then not a kind of imprisonment, being trapped outside the free floating locus of Polydent-ification?

The way Sigourney Weaver grasps these paradoxes is nothing short of poetry. Ripley is egoless and animal-like; sublimely sexy, languid and lolling like an already cool person taking ecstasy. I didn't like ALIEN: RESURRECTION the first time I saw it--in the theater with a backache the day after Thanksgiving visiting my girlfriend in Portsmouth, NH; but it's better with repeat viewings. There's a steady stream of redeemable moments all the way through though, like robot Winona Ryder jacking into the computer mainframe by sticking a tube in her vein like an Oxycontin IV. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet clearly takes the time to make each outlaw character memorable and not just a few cliche'd quirks stapled onto an actor, the way they are in CAPACITY.

Another way to picture it as three different levels of identification- which brings us from movie watching to being to watching being:

First level is identifying with a character in a story; second is "becoming" other people in the cast, wherein we can still shift the locus of our ego identification from one to another; third is one amorphous intelligence that moves from individual to individual voice and mind, staging its own elaborate rituals for self discovery. To see or hear someone or something is to become the seen or heard. Ultimately isn't all that is alive, or ever was, just DNA talking to itself along a few aeons of time/space? The paint paints itself through the painter, and it sees itself through its beholders. Your eyes are the mirror in which colors comb their hair --an endless cycle of creation and destruction. The brush, the brain, the subject all along one hideous serpentine chain leading straight up/down into the void; perception and perceived merely frets and bridge on the same instrument.

How's that for motherfuckin' quirky insight, Uncle Rollie? While the tired, overpaid, and overly cautious filmmakers carefully weed out the genuine eccentricity from their films and replace it with market-tested hack whimsy, real life goes on all around, more baffling and phenomenal than even the looniest Frenchman's conception of science fiction. Even all packed up with suitcases overloaded with grotesqueries, Jeunet--that almost stiflingly original amalgam of Mobius and Terry Gilliam, can't escape the net of hack cliche: the scientists are all mad; the outlaw crew finding and selling suspended animation space travelers for use as alien incubators are motley and macho--including the tough woman who can take care of herself, the gruff charismatic captain, the infirm engineer / comic relief, a big kind of misogynist bully type for the heroine to school, the tough black guy with dreads for a xenomorph appetizer, and in a moment of surprise casting, Winona Ryder as the nerdy tech guy who --twist!--is an android who joined the crew to get all human rights-ish, coming off like a kind of hyper- androgynous 90s hipster activist trying to irritate her conservative father over Christmas break. but luckily Sigourney is there like a kind of mother lion, keeping lil' Ryder too off guard to find her little pixie trope bag, resulting in some actual acting. Clearly Weaver got a lot of input on her own lines and performance and she's the only one who seems to have thought it all through in some kind of legit original science fiction way, rather than just ladling on the overdone types and tropes (a drop of acid blood falls on the wheelchair guys leg from the floor above! the ruthless corporate stooge tries to save himself and leave everyone else behind! Someone is grabbed from the floor below and dragged down through the hole after a quiet suspenseful build-up!), all gone is the effortless 70s low-key human interaction in the original, or the funny militarism in the second one, or even the British thesping in the third, now it's all practically a wordless story in Metal Hurlant. But hey, it's always worth the price of admission, or the effort to load the DVD tray, just to see Den Hedaya's fabulous eyebrows and hear the sonorous voice of Michael Wincott. He and Hedaya share a little oasis of tough guy acting and drinking whiskey while conducting their deal; they're so badass the scene becomes almost Hawksian! And as cliche as the rest of it may get at times, there's not a single faux-eccentric Uncle or Broderick square within a million miles.

In space, no one can hear your shitass fish poetry. 

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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