Anti-Authority Nowhere Land: CONVOY (1978)

America needs a hero again, c'mon back Rubber Ducky 10-4 and remember that song "Convoy" by ole Cash McCall? Sure, now that the trucker craze is decades gone, and rap is here to stay, McCall just sounds like some grizzled old Marlboro man babbling into his CB receiver while a Curtis Mayfield instrumental plays behind him on the FM dial, but in 1975-6, his "Convoy" was haulin' ass up the charts until it became the hood ornament on a full-on cross-country trucker fad going no place at 80 mph, downhill. It was the kind of thing we all heard on the radio in the car nonstop and either loved or ignored. We didn't really 'hate' things in the 70s, there weren't enough options. We had to listen to what the DJ played, so we just figured it was 'new' and we'd get used to it, all passive-like.

Well, now, Convoy's been gone, but now it's back - on Blu-ray no less, so c'mon, good buddy, put the hammer down all the way through, and join the CONVOY at long last.

Why? Because Pauline Kael liked it. And cuz Kristofferson is in it.

But why? Why was it ever made?

It's hard to fathom nowadays, because songs are too scattered along generational formats but, back in the 70s, a single could get so big across so many demographics that movie versions of goddamn songs were commissioned. We loved some songs so much we needed, some producers guessed (wrongly), to see a film version the same way we needed the novelization of a movie (but that's different since --don't forget--this was the time before videotape, so the only way to 'own' a film was via the paperback).

But the more we pull a song to us the harder we push it away later, so the movie inevitably comes out too late to catch the wave. It bombs and quietly sneaks off the marquee never to be seen again. Ttday only a few of us remember it even existed. Let me give you an example: a 'softie' radio obsession crept upon us, tugging our heartstrings mightily: Debbie Boone's 1977 hit "You Light Up My Life." Whole families (including mine) would pull over when "Light" came on the car radio, and cry in unison. It was such a hit, such an obsession, that a Light up my Life movie was immediately commissioned. Its producers ill-advisedly presumed America wouldn't be long sick of the emotional hit by the time the film came out later that same year.

We were, mighty sick of it. And to this day no one has ever seen the movie version of You Light Up My Life.

But Convoy (1978) had more than a feelin', by which I mean Peckinpah directing, which meant slow-mo bar fights, so maybe it'd be all right. It came out three years after the song had been forgotten and besides, truckers ain't as fickle as the sedan types. For the hard riders, emotion didn't enter into it, not the sappy kind anyway, rather a comforting feeling of strength and solidarity. The trucker as an icon sat in our minds next to Burt Reynolds' middle finger. Truckers were the friends of all children, bored in back seats on long drives. We all had the ability to get truckers to honk real loud if we turned around and made a 'toot-toot' gesture as we passed them. We loved that!

The real appeal for those of us too young to drive, though, was the novelty of the CB radio and all its crazy code words: You could get on there and DJ to maybe millions, maybe no one; you could tip off the reverse going traffic if you spotted a 'bear in the woods'. We didn't have Twitter or cell phones. CBs were 'it'- but you needed cool parents to get one and install it and teach you how to use it, usually in conjunction with a 'fuzz buster.'

Car culture was huge, still. Once in awhile we got rides in the older kids' cool Trans-Ams or Firebirds and it hooked us. The automotive store became a kind of secondary Spencer Gifts. We eyed the Playboy bunny mud flaps and bought novelty rearview ornaments to hang over our beds like dreamcatchers. We'd sit in our sixth grade class wearing black driving gloves. Meanwhile at the movies, the masses clamored in love of the motorized outlaw. Sugarland Express (1974) and Vanishing Point (1971) paved the way for the whole "mass of Americans rallying 'round one outlaw car'" cause thing, so big at (of course), the drive-in. By the time Convoy rolled off the line that moonshine running high-balling racist sheriff-baiting thing was quite overdone. There was High-Ballin' and Every Which Way But Loose, Smokey and the Bandit, Handle with Care, Breaker Breaker, White Line Fever, Truck Stop Women, and Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw. On TV, the genre devolved into Nielsen scavengers like BJ and the Bear, Dukes of Hazzard and TV movies like The Great Smokey Road Block and Flatbed Annie and Sweetie Pie. I could go on and on,

If you're curious, the junkyard in the back of Amazon Prime streaming is laden with them. Most look like shit but some still got the gleam in their grille. (Ed note: recommended: 1974's Truck Stop Women!)

I never really had more than a fleeting yen for the trucker life back, myself. And even as a grade schooler in the 70s, catching the stray commercial for Convoy during Saturday morning cartoons, I was horrified by that cropped afro look rocked by Ali McGraw. The commercials seemed almost apologetic for being so post-curve, like that straggler who shows up at your party at dawn after it's already over and your parents are in bed, but you're up watching Captain Kangaroo or Hong Kong Phooey, and he's drunk and snoring /laughing to himself on the couch as you sit on the floor in front of the TV, keeping the volume low to not wake your hungover parents.

That cropped afro, man, what a bad bad bad decision.

Still, Pauline Kael defended it, and 38 odd years later, that was enough for me to get the Blu-ray:

"Peckinpah uses the big rigs anthropomorphically, and while watching this picture, you recover the feelings you had as a child about the power and size and noise of trucks, and their bright, distinctive colors. Graeme Clifford's editing provides fast, hypnotic rhythms, and sequences with the trucks low in the frame and most of the image given over to skies with brilliant white clouds are poetic gestures, like passages in Dovzhenko. As a horny trucker, Kris Kristofferson lacks the common touch that might have given the movie some centrifugal force, though he's as majestic-looking as the big trucks. 

Hell, forget it. As Kristofferson might say, "Dovzhenko, my ass!" But I am a Pauline Kael disciple and thanks her odd associations and my mancrush on Kristofferson, for better or worse, I have joined the Convoy. Wanna ride with the Duck, come on back?

Burt Young - the king of country

Yep - Kristofferson's handle is 'the Duck' and despite the name--and Kael's opinion-- he, alone in the film, looks, talks and acts like real live trucker might, and is the only member of the main cast who does. Peckinpah clearly didn't know much about the trucker red state mystique because for the rest of the cast he apparently didn't look farther than the NY Actor's Studio: Queens-born Burt Young (handle: "Love Machine") is about as cowboy as a Nathan's egg cream. When he delivers lines like "Long highways sure grind the souls off us cowfolks," you wonder if it's supposed to be a joke. If it is, it sucks. Couldn't Peckinpah find real country boys to ride these rigs instead of a bunch of uber-ethnic NYC character actors? Brooklyn's own Franklin Ajaye is the black trucker (handle: "Spider Mike") and Brooklyn's own Ernest Borgnine ("Cottonmouth") plays such a foul, greedy Southwestern cop he entraps Duck, Spider and Machine on an off-road, shakes them down for $50 each, then follows them to a crowded diner where he tries shake down Spider Mike a second time, with everyone watching, which is beyond idiotic, like getting away with stealing someone's wallet, then following him into a crowd and shooting him in broad daylight for not having a second wallet.

In sum, Peckinpah ain't thinking things through. Is he even reading his own rewrites? Maybe he can't see straight. Maybe it's the booze. Hell yeah, it's the booze. But the truckers need a reason to be chased by the law, because Burt Reynolds was chased by Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit, and Gleason had such a grand time that he birthed a whole archetype: the fat and sassy Southern sheriff, a comic foil for every subsequent picture ever made that has a fast car in it. The Fat Sheriff archetype even made his way into Bond films, a mere four years earlier. (1)

But Borgnine sucks the fun out of it. Convoy aint a fun picture. Cathartic at times (the big trucks smashing the jail scene), but not fun.

But hey - fights happen, truckers all become outlaws and then folk heroes without ever bothering to question any weird plot device that happens along. Duck picks up this close-cropped perm-fro'd Ali McGraw on the way out of the diner fracas (she jumps ship from her previous ride) and she becomes his chronicler with her fancy camera.

And that's the final outrage: McGraw may be still gorgeous, but  her close cropped permed hair is continually depressing. In the annals of 'bad hair' decisions it makes Orson's cropping Rita's long tresses for a short blonde flip in Lady from Shanghai seem inspired instead of merely churlish.

Together, in fact, Rita's and Ali's hair crops make a great collective illustration of how a petulant male auteur unwittingly reveals his misogyny. As Vincent Canby wrote at the time: "to transform a naturally beautiful woman into a figure of such androgyny seems, at best, short-sighted; at worst, it's mean-spirited."

Don't mean to shit on this otherwise interesting flick but considering the amount of shitting on our collective hats Peckinpah does during the movie, well, we need plenty of venthillation.

On the plus side, there are some stretches of Peckinpah brilliance vis-a-vis his signature rapid editing through tight shots of crazy locals in various states of intoxication. A series of old faces, drinking and smoking in the proximity of flags, feels authentic enough - and all done without Easy Rider's redneck-demonizing, Altman's tacky judgmental mummery, or Smokey and the Bandit's lecherous bouncing and guileless harmonica score.

No

Then again, it also lacks Easy Rider's truly revolutionary spirit, Nashville's sense of moveable feast community, and Smokey and the Bandit's star chemistry. In the latter, especially, Jerry Reed, Burt Reynolds, and Sally Field bring out a special something in each other hard to duplicate.

Yes

See, Burt Reynolds might come off macho for the press, but he genuinely loves (and is not threatened by) strong female co-stars like Fields, and it's clear that goes. vice versa. A deep love and respect is apparent from the get-go in their bankable chemistry; and Jerry Reed well, he loves Fred, his hound dawg. All four of them look authentic, like they could have driven straight up from Florida or Texas, and all of them got charisma to burn. Even Gleason's sheriff and Reynold's Bandit kind of love each other. Fights end in handshakes and laughs; CB radio conversations post-chase between Smokey and Bandit confess admiration for each other's driving skills, their feeling of emptiness once the chase stops, their willingness to keep it going just for the hell of it. See, that's the part of the red state mentality whiny blue state liberals don't get. To them boxing is brutality. To the red states, it's a sport. In the end which attitude generates the most negativity?

CONVOY clearly is a leftist blue state product. The only authentic looking 'red state American' main character in Convoy is Kristofferson, and even he feels out of place. He's too cool to behave logically, too pointlessly iconoclastic to even try to save himself from 20 years in the pen, even if it's the easier, righter thing to do. There's no love anywhere in the film except between Duck and 'America' as faceless adoring mass. The sheriff isn't fun but unaccountably vile. Yet it's hard to root for Duck either - the whole mess of issues this "ain't so good at stringin' words together as you are" folk hero creates for his self, his stubborn insistence on not being this and not being that, begins to feel less like working class heroism and more like of Munchausen-by-proxy stupidity. He's like the idiot kid who's too dumb to hide his weed going through customs, and who then bitches and moans about violations of human rights when it gets taken away. (If you let the officer see it, he has to take it, idiot! Just make the effort).

And Duck's hypocrisy is glaring. He likes to drink "Everclear" and listens to "we don't smoke marijuana and we don't take LSD" like there's no hypocrisy there. Again--a joke? The alcoholic Peckinpah has no right to get anti-anti-establishment.

That said, Duck's not afraid to have a few big rigs get together to smash open a police station where Spider Mike's been violated, rights-wise. Shit gets smashed up for real (it's pre-CGI) and that's why films like Convoy will endure. If you see a cop car go flying off the interstate and through a billboard, better believe some stunt man did just that. And it just feels real good.

Alas, when not crashing cars or eye-fishing roadshow funerals, the Peckinpah signature over-editing thing does not always work: that truck stop cafe brawl with Cottonmouth, for example, isn't quite the same ode to violence as the opening or closing of The Wild Bunch (1969). With all its slow motion and quick cuts it becomes abstract and unseemly: cutting back and forth to about eight different characters in various states of falling, rolling, punching, ducking or running - all in a very close quarters diner environment--is numbing and dumb rather than riveting. It's a fight that would have blown our minds in the hands of a tight-editing Walter Hill (as in the bathroom fight in The Warriors) but Peckinpah infamously wasted weeks filming and it's clear that about 100 different takes are all used for one single movement to create a bewildering sense of time and relative space (a character might start falling off a stool at one end of the counter and land behind a table on the other, his eyes indicating he somehow has aged 20 years in frustration with his director in between the two angles). Then there's the big events and demonstrations as the rebel convoy gets longer and longer, word spreading analog viral through the CB network of all the 'little' people from Flyover USA who are tired of getting pushed around. Yawn. It works at times, in others, it's just a lot of nowhere shorthand for 'everyday' America. I guess it's inspiring, but man, that food in the back of them trucks crawling along is gonna spoil. And what about them poor live pigs being hauled by Love Machine? What about their freedom? The sooner I can stop associating Burt Young's harsh face with actual pigs and the tang of sulphur, methane, diesel and asphalt, the better. Son, dump them pigs loose upon the plain! Set the pigs free and you'll prove you really do like freedom. If not, get thee to a ROCKY pinball machine, stat! Gaze in drunken brother-in-law rage at what a real hero looks like, and make sure that pint bottle of whiskey you're about to throw at his picture is empty! There are sober children in India who could really use that last sweet swig.

Young in Rocky II - made the following year (1979)

.  

NOTES:
1. J.W. Pepper in Live and Let Die (1971) and Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
2. This coming weekend I'll be one-year quit -- not being able to absorb any oxygen in your burnt lungs - that'll do 'er.

The War Against Normal: A STRAW DOGS remake and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

I just saw there's a remake of Sam Peckinpah's great misunderstood masterpiece STRAW DOGS. Take a look at this poster:

First of all, what is up with that reflection of a face when we can see clearly that the chunk of glasses where said reflection would be has broken off? Did this guy get a tattoo of a dude's face on his eye? Did only his reverse clip-on shades get broken? See the original poster below and wonder to yourself what kind of poster artist would think lenses that have broken off still reflect?

And of course, no crap remake poster would be the same without a meaningless tag line. Are they asking us or telling us about this breaking point? Have they tested every man for one? What about women?  Sexist bastards.... Deconstructed, the tag intends to align the viewer with 'everyone' - indicating the sneering contempt the copywriter feels for their target demographic: "Don't worry, the hero of this movie isn't going to get pushed around for long!" Chances are the author of that tag didn't even see it, or the original, or any movie made before 1993, the year punk broke! 

The original poster was terrifying since if you look at Dustin's expression it's calm, even smiling, and compacted down to resemble Roman Polanski after a night of some energy expenditure. His eye behind the broken glass is dead like a shark's, or as if its been gouged out at the pre-photoshop art department then pasted back in by a nervous intern hoping the boss wouldn't notice. Yet he's smiling.

The weird thing is most people don't realize that Peckinpah considered Dustin's STRAW DOG math professor 'everyman' (who breaks the point and kills a bunch of locals to protect a child murderer), to be the bad guy, a self-satisfied liberal who considers himself six cuts above the riff-raff of the icky rural England locale that he settles in with his hot young wife (Susan George). See, she's easily the cutest bird inside a 60 mile radius of this Cornwall dump. She was born there so everyone knows her; she even left behind several strapping ex-boyfriends when she escaped. Now she's back. Some call this a rape-revenge film, but Hoffman never finds out about her being raped (by her ex-boyfriend and his sadistic pal after they trick Dustin into going quail hunting with them and leave him stranded way out in the middle of nowhere, then double back to the alone and kinda terrified George) and his refusal to turn the caught-red-handed pederast (David Warner) over to the mob for a right proper lynching is what sets the bloodbath in motion. Mostly, I'm betting Hoffman goes ballistic because of the dead cat (discovered hanging in the closet) - that would surely get me fired up too. If someone killed my cat I'd probably raze the whole town.

Long lumped by the literally-minded critics (how small town riff-raffish of them!) in the category of vengeful ass-kickers like Buford Pusser in WALKING TALL, and Cameron Mitchell in any AIP biker film, one can only assume the complex shadings of self-righteous lefty nerd narcissism in Hoffman's smug everyman will be weeded out in the remake until he's American Average like "everyone" with their "breaking points."

I've been reading the new Pauline Kael collection, so forgive me if I sound astringent, but apparently the idea that the one educated man who stands alone against the many armed yokels might actually be the bad guy (or at least not a cut-and-dry hero) in a film is beyond the average (petit-bourgeois) movie critic unless it's spelled out with ominous music cues and sudden outbursts of misogynistic violence. It hasn't been done to death so they don't believe it even exists. The fools! The bombastic ignoramuses!

And then there's the reverse: sometimes the villain everyone presumes is evil is actually the only sane, sympathetic person around!

Kim Morgan and the Self-Styled Siren discuss one such film, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) across both Kim Morgan's site, Sunset Gun, and Siren's classic self-titled blog, and the realization that Gene Tierney's murderous bride is actually the complex heroine of the film, which is a kind of horror story about a beautiful bi-polar artist who gets trapped in a stiflingly normal marriage with a husband who hides behind Norman Rockwell facades and close extended family sing-a-longs to avoid being intimate (hinting he might not even know he's really gay). Here's a sample from Morgan's side: 

Gene/Ellen is a modern type of woman, a poetic, ingenious woman, and I always get the sense that her inner struggle to express whatever power or talent she has, well beyond her beauty, is pure torture. Many may look in her eyes and see cold orbs of hate, but I see… Wagner's entire Ring Cycle, and beautiful, damnable Richard W. seems especially appropriate since, for some crazy reason, he also managed to write, in 'Lohengrin,' 'Here Comes the Bride' amidst his Götterdämmerung. 

Is this an excuse for her dastardly acts? No, but she does serve to symbolize every trapped, powerful woman flapping around her white picket fenced-in bird cage. That war raging inside her twists into a a full-scale blitzkrieg on the… normal people. Her revenge is her final work of art! Her masterpiece! (more here - Siren)

 And from la Siren:

I always wait for that staircase, for Gene hurling herself down it after carefully leaving one slipper on the top step, like a psychopathic Cinderella. It's a wicked act, but she tells Ruth just before she does it, "sometimes the truth IS wicked." Along with Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven dares to go down some dark maternal byways, into things some may feel, but no one wants to admit--in this case, pregnancy as a cage, one that's about to slam shut for oh, about 21 years. Ellen's on bedrest, its own kind of "Yellow Wallpaper" hell. (Those insipid posies on Ellen's dressing-room wallpaper could drive a lot of women to the brink.) Look at what she's doing beforehand. She's talking to her own sister about the stroll the girl just took with her husband. Couldn't Richard be upstairs talking to his wife? Making sure she isn't bored and terrified, instead of taking it for granted for that she's rubbing her belly and practicing lullabies? So she grabs her most beautiful robe, and re-applies her lipstick, and she even puts on perfume--because she's about to go back to Ellen, the beauty, and leave behind Ellen, the terrarium. (More here / Sunset Gun)

"Psychopath Cinderella" - awesome. And here's something I wrote (link here) on the same subject for Bright Lights in March of 2010 when Film Forum screened LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN for a special week-long revival screening:

Wilde's straight-edge kid brother gets killed first after he decides to hang around the lodge like a third wheel albatross on Ellen’s neck. The way Stahl frames this event, in the peace and quiet of the lake,  makes a great ironic comment on the production code-approved craze for “discovering the great national parks” that was going on all over cinema in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I always root for Tierney in these scenes. I too know the frustration of having to run a cock-blocking gauntlet of resentfully undersexed friends and relatives every time you want to get your lover up to bed, or having to drag your urbane self out to buggy campsites to pacify your spouse’s yen for convention.

The drowning of the brother is nothing compared to the glorious moment when Gene throws herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage (Wilde must have waited until she was ovulating to slip her one). That's incredibly hard to do, and I think it's heroic, in its own twisted way, symbolic of her yen for flight and mastery over her own self-preservation instincts (I tried to throw myself down the stairs every week as a kid, to avoid soccer practice, and just physically couldn't--my body wouldn't let me).  Meanwhile if Wilde had bothered to pay attention to her in bed and maybe even give her an orgasm, none of this mayhem may have been necessary.

If we, living as relatively relative free as we do today, were suddenly stuck in a post-code extended family Americana hell hole like Gene's in HEAVEN, would we act any different? Or would we just quietly disappear–like Lea Massari in L’AVENTURA (1960)– before the bores could catch us and smother us back into Stepfordville? Maybe I’m just unusually squirrelly when it comes to the sorts of color schemes at work in the film; as Village Voice scribe Melissa Anderson notes, the color scheme “redefines mauve.” I hate mauve. It's telling that  Gene, whom Anderson calls “one of cinema’s most chilling psychopaths,” grew up with an intellectual, adventurous father who raised her far outside the claustrophobically chipmunk cheeked tedium of “sanitized” American small town life,  No wonder she can't adapt! Like those poor once-professionally employed heroines who had to give up their jobs, get married, and dutifully cook, clean, and obey their husbands, once the code took effect in 1934.

Where I’m going with all this is to analyze the ultimately corrupting nature of post-1934 cinema’s phony morals; the “as long as you feel bad about it, it’s okay to kill” sort of compromise with the censors. You can see this in two roles played by Winona Ryder: HEATHERS, with Winona's refusal to 'enjoy' the killing of the evil jocks and janes nonetheless orchestrated by herself and Slater; and SEX AND DEATH 101 (which I decried in "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise - Bright Lights 4/10/08), where she only drugs her sleazy would-be lovers into a restful coma from which they awake at the happy ending. We need more LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN-style sociopaths, by which I man girls with cajones enough kill those who would hobble and baby them with prefab beige rusticity, and critics with the cajones to applaud them, to see purveyors of mauve domesticity as just as deserving of death as cannibal rapists. We had THELMA AND LOUISE to inspire us in this way for awhile in the early 90s, but somehow the drippy third wave feminism of Sex and the City gourmet shopping swept over that fire like a flood of designer bottled water and soggy Stepford ash is all that remains. 

Figures like Gene are essential because they blur the line of good and evil, and help us extoll revenge using art. A murder in the movies is not the same as real life, so let it be cathartic and wild. In this sense Ellen is just such a wild  artist, a frustrated panther goddess trapped in the hell of some L.L. Bean adman’s pre-presentation nightmare and busting out of the net through any means necessary. It’s just too bad she couldn’t take a few more of those little bastards out before the inevitable mauve ocean swallowed her in its tranq dart credits. 

*****
That may sound hardcore, but I embrace the Camille Paglia/ Nietzschean vantage point --beyond good and evil, baby. So how about a LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN remake, directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Vera Farmiga as Ellen/Gene Berent? And thank God that there are still women out there like Kim and la Siren who aren't scared to call a spade a spade, and then bury you with it.  Sometimes when life gives you lemons it's far more noble--well, not noble, but certainly more exciting and cinematic--to put them in a pillowcase and beat someone up with them than to make lemonade... especially if you're all out of sugar. Ellen is all out of sugar, America,  so take your lumps!

Hex and Taxes

Emancipation Day and The Income Tax Due Date bracketed this past weekend, making it the right time to rent a ghost story/steampunk Dirty South Risin' hybrid DC comic book adaptation, on Blu-ray, and play it loud... American proud. My newest hero, Josh Brolin stars, in scarry face make-up and surly voice, as Confederate cavalry officer JONAH HEX (2010), left to die by an evil rebel general (John Malkovich) when Hex wouldn't burn down a town of innocents, or something. Medicine men show up and bring Hex back to life but he stays half-dead, partially lost in the other world, and that's what gives the film its edge. Hex can talk to the dead, and the dead are pissed. And in this graveyard of a world, pissed works. Bonding with the friend he killed his final "see you soon," is awesome in a way that recalls the "Bye Bye Life" end of ALL THAT JAZZ

Co-starring as the love interest, Megan Fox-- a raven beauty whose flawless face is here for some reason shot through the kind of Vaseline haze usually reserved for older women--plays a derringer-toting, knife-under-the-mattress-keeping prostitute loyal to Hex for reasons vaguely like Charlene Holt loyal to Wayne in EL DORADO. She fights everyone else like a wildcat, and thank god we're spared their first date but also how she pays the bills (she's not in the comics). Come to think of it, the whole mess of mysterious origin stuff is summed up the way it would be in a comic book, if you were starting with, say, issue #34, as a page of flashback before the credits. So we skip all the tiresome first meets that lesser-handed superhero adaptations think we need in a movie version, which of course we don't. As this film runs a lean 78 minutes, there's a nice random issue feeling, all swinging axes, vast swaths of expository information left on the floor, lone figure on horseback riding across the surreal plains in silhouette, psychedelic graveyards splash page eyebrow raises and abundant stones still unturned (would have loved to see them thar hell hounds Hex speaks of). But I dig the scenes of Hex rapping with the dead, pulling them up out the ground, and I dig that Hex is followed by a murder of CGI crows wherever he may ride --he's the Raoul Duke of the Old West. In this he's even more acidic than Blueberry aka Renegade! 

Brolin's manly gravitas and deadpan humor bumps any film up a star so I'm cool with the fact I couldn't see what was going on in any of the night action scenes. I was pleased by the overall lack of rape or inordinate torturing (aside from the macho stuff) which makes it all relatively suitable for children and sensitive feminists, of which I'm both. Rather than kill Hex and Fox whenever he gets the chance, evil supervillain Malkovich just chains them up like those self-defeating Jokers and Penguins, allowing the dynamic duo to keep their utility belts, providing oodles of opps for easy escape and vows to return same Hex time, same Hex channel. 

Though based on the low rate of returns, ah reckon Hex won't be back. Except, probably, to pull me up from the dead in a century or so on to say, hey, you war the only one who believed in me. Thank ye. 

I read the DC Jonah Hex comics as a kid and they were always entertaining if not great. They endeavored to combine old west stuff (like the original horseback Ghost Rider on Marvel) with DC's safe-but-diverting horror ala House of Mystery / House of Secrets.  That was all well and good but his horrid scar, which has left a pointless strand of flesh connecting his lips, made me think of too many unsavory school cafeteria hot pizza incidents. I would literally be constantly feeling the roof of my mouth with my tongue and rubbing chapstick in my lips while reading, and one can't help but ask, Hex, just cut that thing - can't be no nerve endings in it - it's got to be scar tissue, just cut it and be a man.

THE WILD WILD WEST TV show is another a clear ancestor of HEX the movie, which doesn't seem to make sense since that movie didn't do well either, but then again steampunk is as steampunk does (not a lot of that in the comics, didn't need it) and idiot producers love to enforce bad copycat decisions then second guess them and triple guess and then blame the director for the resulting incoherent jumbled mess.

In the end, what counts is that Fox and Brolin play it as deadpan straight. Has Brolin ever phoned it in? Even under a whole Monty Clift-style half face paralysis he's got moody, touching gravitas and Fox follows his lead and gives as good as she gets, fight-wise. Villain Malkovich hams it up old-school, which is how it should be; and the awesome Michael Fassbender is his bowler hatted right hand man. The soundtrack isn't annoying or cliche'd John Williams recyclables nor dumb pop songs with the word 'Hex' in them. I bet the film was probably longer at one point, and got edited down like it was a Cantonese Kung Fu film after a trip through the Miramax miracle dub-and-cut threshing machine. Maybe there will be a director's cut? Eight ball says: Outlook not so good.

In the end, though, what finally tips the scales exactly even are the exposed layers of red state confusion in having a hero be a ghostly avenger from the Confederate army. In order to prove he's not racist he buys all his steampunk ordinance from an African American 'Q'-type, who makes sure we know--via expository dialogue-- Hex was never big on the whole slavery thing, even though he wore the grays. Seems the North because they were trying to tell him what to do... and Hex doesn't like being told what to do, unlike the rubes who follow the feudal doctrines of the quick buck.  Emancipation redaction operation alpha, engage! Fox and Friends hate socialism until they need a subsidy or a national highway, then just watch them go gimme gimme. That's America, buddy! Now you pay! You pay now! April 15 come. Gimme!

Seeing the beholden mess our country's in, it may be hard not to root for the evil Malkovich rather than Brolin's semi-heroic Hex and the movie doesn't care if you're red or blue or gray. Rather than the wandering soldier of adventure in the comics, Hex is maybe a bit too much like the Robert Ryan character in THE WILD BUNCH or Coburn in SAM GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, hunting down the anti-corruption 'Tea Party'-style rebels on behalf of an evil congressmen (Will Arnett).  And like those Peckinpah classics, the villains are always cooler than the good, even if the good are damn cool, too. After all, Col. Malkovich doesn't rape people, and he's into cool explosions and fighting the powa. Maybe he's right, and people who vote against their own best interests like hypnotized lemmings are the fatal poison of democracy.

In fact, no maybe about it.

Then again, maybe we're all a little bit Jonah Hex too; we still like to keep one foot in Hell just so the other toe seems heaven-soled. Sometimes talking to the dead and watching TV are really one and the same and though JONAH HEX bombed with critics and audiences, flaws and all it's aces with me, or at least jacks over nines. I hope Hex returns in either an unrated extended cut or in a sequel, some day, and maybe, in that hope... as in so many other things... I ride alone... but at least I'm not a slave... except to whiskey... and Megan's foxy raven haired-pale skin-black choker look... and mortality... and taxes.. and the pain of being powerless to help when executive groupthink and artistic second-guessing ruins possibly good movies... Helplessly, I can only rage against the ceaselessly gushing flood tide of base pasteurized moronic idiocracy that stifles our land's true grit. So go git 'em, Hex. They done you wrong, but there's no such thing as a final cut, or permanent death. And taxes, well, just save your receipts, in case the Auditor comes calling, played as--who knows--Richard Lynch in an eye patch?