Your Clowns Bid You Goodbye: THIS IS THE END, IT'S A DISASTER

A cohesive, 'tight' film, funny even into the maw of Hell, THIS IS THE END (2013) comes long after 12/21/12, late to the apocalypse party, which is of course in character considering the cast of stoner royalty --James Franco and Seth Rogen, still soaring on PINEAPPLE EXPRESS fumes, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Jay Baruchel, Emma Watson, Channing Tatum, and so on--all playing themselves. Unlike 95% of its ilk, END skips the zombies and instead goes full literal-biblical, mixing heavenly ascension, childhood buddy friendships stressed by fame and distance, growth and kindness as essential to survival, an actual bible, LA vs. NYC rivalry, raping demons, ethical dilemmas, and lots of weed. The genius touch is to have them all play themselves (only more so) and they bring a lot of brutal self honesty: Jonah Hill acts like Oscar's A-list sycophant, bandying the word "tight" around and treating resentful New Yorker Jay Baruchel like a special needs child. Jay instead blames his own paralyzing social shyness on LA; Michael Cera snorts coke and bullies groupies in fits of drunken Reptillian overlordsmanship; Daniel McBride ramps up his dirtbag townie craziness; James Franco is a vain but guarded host with a weird bi-curious vibe; Rhianna, Aziz Anzari, and countless others disappear down a giant blast furnace hole in the ground. Being a star guarantees nothing as the flame pit widens and the stars are revealed to be tough and resourceful only via movie magic. While the demons howl outside and devour those unlucky stragglers, these dudes duct tape the cracks in the concrete of Franco's party fortress, pool their booze, and wait for the cable to come back on.

When I was counting days inside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, I used to like to imagine Armageddon as a great excuse to relapse on whiskey, and hoped one day I would get the chance, for whiskey is so so good. But if an alcoholic vows to drink again only when hell froze over, sooner or later he'd drive down into the flames on a stolen Zamboni. That's in the bible... if you know which bible I mean. Still, for some of us, the apocalypse is our last chance to reunite with our deranged lover in all her brown... intoxicating....  proof.

In other words, I would be the first to volunteer to leave the compound and forage, because maybe... maybe somewhere in the hellish mist of the Hollywood Hills... there might be unbroken bottles of sweet sweet booze. That's the comfort for a recovering alcoholic in the apocalypse. No demon can compare with that one, no scare or threat can stay that eternal thirst. Without that carrot lure I can't see ever stirring from my bunker. But I am the alcoholic thing in the black crib with the upside cross baby mobile ROSEMARY'S BABY dashboard. I am the third heat, the eternal thirst carved large as Asmodeus' initials into the EQUINOX oak tree soul. I guess we all have our reasons for wanting this damned parade to finally end, in a blaze of glory. That's one of mine.

But these guys--Seth Rogen, Franco, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, all playing themselves-- are more grounded than I am... which is odd, considering they don't seem to have girlfriends and the first thing they wish for (outside of weed) is a Back Street Boys reunion (nope, nothing gay here). Perhaps that's the secret to success: girls always Yoko up a band sooner or one of you goes to college, or leaves it. I can only imagine what would happen if I never moved to NJ or my buddy's parents didn't get divorced and turn him militant, or if I never became a hippy punk rock boozer. All these things killed our comic book making, super 8mm filming, dungeon and dragons module creating, and selling, and marketing company. Girls were but the coup de grace. 

If I had known nerds would conquer the world, that the "Comic Con" would one day be a prestigious event, I might have never have choked down that first pilfered warm beer at my punk rocker friend's graduation party. I'm funny, too, man. Can't you tell? Why did I give it all up for a life of hipness, boozy abandon, and relationship-attempting? None of the dudes who wind up at Franco's seem to have any long term relationships, or kids, to worry about, and it's damned refreshing. At no point does any character say, "I can't leave without my children!" or "If Kathy's back there, I'm going to get her!" These guys don't give a shit!

The main star of THIS IS THE END though is the raw kinetic energy and flow of weird ideas that doesn't stop, just snakes forward from LAX to chillin' with buds to a party at James Franco's house all the way to....  The big budget CGI in the film isn't used for guns and nonsense. There's only one gun in the whole damned movie. Instead there's great towering demons to rival The Night on Bald Mountain sequence in FANTASIA, and Jonah Hell spewing green bile like a portly homoerotic Linda Blair, but no monster is quite as scary as Emma Watson with an axe. Or more balls-out-gonzo than McBride gone cannibal --the role of the year in the movie of the year.  Like many Piscean artists and writers, I've always admired--from a distance--the McBride type. We Pisces never invite them to parties but they always show up, draining our bar but bringing us awful weird new drugs like angel dust, jimson weed, and crank and introducing us to carnivorous whores. You can't get rid of them, so you may as well enjoy their ferocity, use it before it destroys you. When the world ends and the savage monsters reign, we could use a man like Frank Booth again.

Didn't need no welfare state

I don't want to spoil what may be my favorite movie so far this year, but if you haven't seen it yet, you can still take a page from its bible and start to be nicer to people; even if there is no one true God it couldn't hurt your chances for ascension. I've written extensively on my arcane beliefs regarding soul density, in that the more self-centered and hateful you are, the more dense your soul gets, allowing demons to capture it when you try to ascend; it follows then that the more positive and selfless you are, the lighter and more expanded your soul gets, so demons can't catch it anymore than one can catch smoke in a butterfly net. Hence demons are all about convincing you goodness and lightness is for suckers. It's just a theory, based on a mix of Thaddeus Golas, Egyptian mythology, and David Icke, but it's a solid way to structure it.

If only life were just buds and booze, how simple and joyous! But instead how complicated and downer-ish it is to watch dudes from your crew marry and--unless you join their creepy 'we have kids' cult--never be seen from or heard through again. Maybe that's the real fantasy, that the world will end before maturity's inevitable bro-pocalypse wipes out your network. I hear it's just like falling asleep. Push... push... and then, I hear, lots of worry about the right schools. Dragged to recitals... pretending to give a shit about Little League. Oh the smell. Pass. I'll stay awake.

And that brings me to the stifled world of the couple's brunch where--if they had girlfriends with bourgeois hipster tastes--the dudes in END would be going on Sunday afternoon (after a nice early bedtime) instead of to Franco's on Saturday night (or if I was there and it was the 90s, both). I'm of course referring to the 2012 'couples' comedy IT'S A DISASTER.

David Cross is the stranger being vetted by his internet-met steady Julia Stiles' posse. He moseys around the nice house, drinks some Scotch with the boys, hears how they got problems of their own, blah blah. Suddenly, a neighbor comes in decked out in a hazmat suit. A dirty bomb has gone off downtown, poison gasses everywhere. Commence duct taping! And then the couple who are always super late try to come in, coughing and hacking and begging to be let it in. But the duct tape is on. What do you do?

Damn right you don't.

That kind of satiric moral querying is welcome when the less humanist decision is pre-empted, and the swinger couple (Rachel Boston and Kevin Brennan) slipping a subtle menage a trois come-on to Cross are hilarious; America Ferrara mixing all the drugs in the house together to create some homemade ecstasy--determined to get super high to face the end--she is my hero. While her beau seems to think ranting about conspiracies will turn the deadly real situation abstract enough to deal with, i.e. what you can deconstruct can't kill you, she's doing the right thing, the thing the old black jazz pianist on the cruise ship or Woody Harrelson does in the movie 2012, get lit bright as a Lincoln Center Xmas Tree.

Overall it's some good ensemble work, giving off the impression these people all know each other and respect one another's comedic rhythms, and if it all seems over before there's any special effects fire and brimstone to run up the tab, well, it makes up with in the kind of inner-hell only the relationship-anchored truly know.

So what, in the end, is the right scenario for you? A lot of us were hoping the world would end last December 21st, so we could skip that much-needed root canal, or get out from under our credit card debt. Now here it is a year later and we know we're saddled with seemingly immortal life. So pick your poison and live to die another day: going out with the bros is of course the more fun option than meeting the new girl's posse at a petit-bourgeois couples brunch, because the deeper you look the more you see how hard it is to grow when you can just blame your significant other for holding you back.

Unfortunately real personal growth only seems to come with pain, fear, and trauma. With the boys up in the Hills of THIS IS THE END, though, there's no one else to blame, no one to take the bottle out of one's hands and wag her finger, and so, convexly, no escape from the awfulness of one's own true self and one's own addictions. If that's not a reason to relapse I don't know what is, 'hic'.

Oh how time flies / with crystal clear eyes

'Transgalactic Delta House Ebullience,' Comic Book Evolution, and Timothy Leary's Head - PAUL (2011)

Like most people I know who follow exo-politics, I thought PAUL (2011) looked grim from the outset. First off, this is supposed to be a brom-com about a surviving Roswell alien, and here his huge eyes aren't dark black. The black eye on grey aliens is, as we now know now, a kind of DNA-implanted contact lens, as if we humans decided we loved Raybans (tm) so much we had them surgically grafted. Without the dark eyes Paul looks just like a big E.T. / Close Encounters love doll - and it turns out he was the inspiration for both films (we learn this thanks to flashbacks of long chain-smoking phone calls he had with Spielberg in the 1970s) which makes perfect sense from a disinformation standpoint (if you see an alien on the street eating Reese's Pieces, you're a lot less likely to get taken seriously when you report it to the cops).

I remember well at the age of around 15-16, gazing at my surly, bald, bespectacled comic book store owner (Quality Comics in Somerville, NJ, if you were there, you know him) and thinking: 1. I'll never stop being into comics no matter that they say people grow out of them, and 2. I hope I don't end up looking and acting like this surly bald bastard. Back then 16 seemed suspiciously old to still be into comics, even if you were into the sophisticated stuff like Frank Miller's Daredevil. And now... these clowns.

In other words, seeing what I'd look like if I stayed friends with my Frost-ish pal and never discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll is kind of crushingly weird and terrifying. And Yet -  they actually grow as characters as the film goes on, how emotionally un-arrested of them! And Kristen Wiig is adorable, as the NY Post's Paul Smith noted: 

There may come a day when I tire of Seth Rogen’s shtick but I hope it doesn’t come soon. (Yes, I loved “The Green Hornet”). His sarcastic insults and Transgalactic Delta House ebullience keep things rolling along (even if the gay jokes are a little stale) as the boys pick up more enemies and a kindly one-eyed fundamentalist Christian (the indispensable Kristen Wiig) who says of Paul, “He’s not evil. He’s just a bit rude.”
  (Read more)

"Transgalactic Delta House ebullience" - I think we can all aspire to that, both as writers and as people. The ultimate message of this cosmic trip then becomes this: stoners are the smartest of all humans. Paul's very advanced, yet he acts just like a stoner slacker crossed with a less spastic Kermit the Frog. What does that tell you if it's not that stoners rule?!! That's what got me out of being a comic book nerd, I can tell you - drugs and alcohol were my socializing and talking to hot girls without blushing and stammering spinach. And as drugs, bass, and babes became the major force in my life, all the other comics stopped for me except Love and Rockets, Dan Clowes' Eightball (below), Pete Bagge's Hate, and old Zap! reprints. I yelled excitedly when I saw this guy (below) on one of Pegg's awesome T-shirts. That's a Clowes!

It would have been cool in Paul to see examples of other aliens or humans working inside the alien vessels to further advance the notions of a global elite conspiracy but it's great the way the CGI alien interacts with the humans so flawlessly--on the level of Andy Serkis' Kong and Golum, rather than the stilted dread knots of Jar Jar Binks and SyFy channel stuff. It works so that you forget altogether he's just a CGI hallucination. So see PAUL with a bunch of friends late night after the young person's AA meeting, or while getting hammered and it will treat you right. There's a subtext in there that any dope fiend or former dope fiend will take to heart, and it's traceable back to--what else?--a comic book:

The one big genre-buster comic I know of that deals with the issues of life after death and the universe and aliens, the only truth that sets one free, is Timothy Leary's Neurocomics (Last Gasp, 1979) which describes the circular DNA arc of life with the following being indicative of where our Paul is on the evolutionary scale:

In this strata, the hippie stoner is a whole evolutionary cycle above the family man preacher (below) who is the end game on the highest level of 'terrestrial circuits' while the stoner is the lowbrow level of post-terrestrial, so a whole DNA sequence higher on the celestial step ladder.

 

(Read the full comic  here or download here)

This should be good news to the moms of stoners and trippers everywhere, and explains why the religious right considers psychedelic drugs such a threat. It's because the 17 year-old mushroom dealer is a whole circuit higher on the DNA chain than freakin' Jerry Falwell or Michelle Bachman, or even Osama Bin Barack, or whatever his post-Bohemian Grove mind control reptilian takeover name is. And that's enough that those comic book geeks Pegg and Frost should really grow up and start doing some drugs. Paul's got a great magic power where he can send you all the cosmic truths in a big rush of DMT that will take the dogma crust off any cutie pie conservative, and it makes a good point for arguing that the bible belt might come around and be less closed-off if they got a nice dose of LSD in their morning cup of joe. If you want to 'see' the truth, you know who to trust, and it's not those Bohemian Grove owl-worshiping conservatives and their masochist leatherboy slave Antichrist, but the real deal, Tim Leary! LEARYCON, now that's a comic convention worth believing in. Vote Leary's frozen head for president in 2012! 

Max Vengeance per Gallon: DRIVE ANGRY, THE GREEN HORNET (in 2-D)

Two titles made it to Netflix in time for the heat: DRIVE ANGRY and THE GREEN HORNET (both 2011). Saw them and now can't remember the difference, but I remember the cars. America!!

ANGRY especially seems to labor under the impression that if it filters in enough Sons of Anarchy auto-erotic Americana --churches, faded American and/or Confederate flags rustling from their tin roof awnings, barbecues, Satanism, gasoline, redneck bars, hot blondes in jean short cutoffs with tattooed abusive juicehead boyfriends, trailers, diners, engine failures, and trigger-happy Arizona cops -- and of course cars, cars, cars--we'll forgive it its lack of any legit trespasses. It dresses awfully badass for a film afraid to drive even a hair outside the pre-established yellow lines of the "vehicular Satanist" genre. Even old Nic Cage is more or less on cruise control, unwilling to floor it with any of his signature hammy over-emoting. Outside of speeding and shooting some cops (who shot at him first, yo! Stay in school) he may as well be a Sunday school teacher.

Both ANGRY and HORNET  think they can get away with having opening scenes where a cool character is walking in slow motion towards the camera as some car or building slowly explodes behind him, like it's not been done to death, buried in an avalanche of parody, dug up, satirized, buried again, re-exhumed with reverse firing rockets after being buried alive by bulldozers. Such scenes are not cool or fun anymore, they are like blank spots in the screen while we doze off, dreaming of other films, from the 70s, when real cars were destroyed by the dozens instead of through pixelation. When we felt alive, tactile...

DRIVE finds Cage--once again back from the grave to avenge his daughter's death and/or save his granddaughter. Apparently Hell consists of watching helplessly from beyond the veil as your loved ones suffer. If the veil in this case was the screen and we were his loved ones, well, there you are, all meta and--unless you're at a drive-in or 3-D ready--choking on the exhaust fumes of cynical producers and product placement.

A pretty boy from the WB casting couch (Billy Burke) is the swaggering evangelical Satanist cult leader who's holding onto Cage's granddaughter until the moon is right for the solstice sacrifice which will herald doomsday. William Fichtner is 'the accountant' who's followed Cage up from Hell to ask him to at least call Satan and let him know when he intends coming home for dinner.

There are some plusses to DRIVE ANGRY: in one scene Cage is shooting bad guys while having sex with a naked waitress, fully clothed, with sunglasses (that's not the plus part) and holding a bottle of whiskey. He shoots the guys without spilling a drop and even takes a slow mo swig between bullets. Damn! The copious humiliated naked women parts however taint the film with that new leather misogynistic smell. Amber Heard, Nic's gal Friday has a lot of moxy and fighting skillz but does that really make up for her objectification? She all but grinds herself on the hood ornament like a frat pledge's dorm room poster. And doesn't she and that waitresss have mothers, too? Where's their moms roaring back from the grave to punch old Nic?

Hell, by the way, is depicted here as a kind of hustler's paradise, like Phoenix, AZ (where my brother Fred lives) but tinted red and with more ash. I don't know much about the autos in DRIVE ANGRY-- that's Fred's department--but I do know one thing, they're not stupid SUVs, and that's good enough for me. My first car was a 1976 Ford Maverick, which I could get up to 90 mph to jump this hill near my house and get massive air. A Maverick wasn't considered too "cherry" at the time, but now looking back that thing was the shit!

Mine was dark yellow, but you get the point

In DRIVE I do like that Heard is such a mega-badass and not afraid to really sink her teeth into the flesh of the guys she fights. But the whole thing with rescuing a baby from Satanists, that just doesn't work. Who can get fired up about the welfare of a baby? Unless your name is Wes Craven and your budget is three dollars, we know that baby's gonna be fine. When the budget's over a million and the target demo is 16 year-old boy, there's no emotional investment in a bunch of swaddling clothes - the kid may be cute, but he's not a character. He can't act. She can't act, excuse me. And if anything happened to that kid we would have heard about it from some concerned Christian group long before this.

GREEN HORNET is marginally more human, though Seth Rogen (who co-wrote) proves here that when shove comes to shovel he can bromance the crotch gags but he can't make us love again, and while director Jean Michel Gondry has made us love again--in the past--he doesn't do it here.  I was a huge Green Hornet fan thanks to an old radio show LP (left) I listened to five dozen times after getting my wisdom teeth out. Nothing like oral pain and opiates to make a 14 year old kid open to new ideas. I learned how to do an Irish accent based on Britt Reid's faithful chief reporter Axford (played by Edward James Olmos for some reason in this new version). I still use some of Axford's expressions in my everyday speech, such as "Sure'n it must be tha hornet!" So yeah, I know a little about this character... and that's what makes me dangerous. Broom Brooom!

Much as I revere some of Jean Michel Gondry's previous films I can only imagine how much more awesome HORNET would be with Jody Hill directing. The unsung genius behind the genuinely anarchic OBSERVE AND REPORT (see 'A Travis for Our Times'), Hill would have found the right note between comedy and chaotic, and the music would have been 15x as awesome! As it is, HORNET's music choices are too keyed to demographic market research to not whiff of cross-promotion, the best that can be said is that the songs avoid the 'word association' game these films so often rely on. I kept waiting for some emo cover of Joni Mitchell's "Just a little Green" or nu-metal crunk version of "It's Not Easy Being Green", or maybe "Green Onions" or Hold Steady's "Hornets! Hornets!"

The original Badass Batman-ish TV show

To its credit, GREEN plays with issues of class, sexism, race, and entitlement - stuff that also reveals its director's a socialist, which is okay (he's French). Shouldn't Kato be pissed that he's smarter, more talented and tougher than his boss? Of course he should! But Gondry is illuminating class resentment in a country that denies class exists. He brings up issues we in our American stupor have elephant in the roomed right out of our vision. How dare he suggest THE HELP is disgruntled? Jay Chou looks good in turtlenecks and underplays brilliantly but his martial arts skill is semi-buried under a ton of TERMINATOR DARK KNIGHT-style digital 'POV weapon-scanning' that's just not needed. All Seth Rogen as Brit Reid has going for him is a good party bro vibe and the ability to take a punch without losing a single tooth. A lot of prime real estate in the meanwhile goes to waste, and all the weirdly insular tics of rich kid cinema come wafting in from the pool like the stank of a maidless frat house.

For all that, a lot of people put a lot of effort into both of these films, which means they deserve respect, and yet this too is a negative. The cool part of something like the Batman TV show was how our own imaginations were required to complete the illusion. The last thing it wanted, deserved, or needed was respect. Seeing the threadbare candy-colored splendor of that TV show now, I realize just how much detail my childhood imagination supplied. Gondry's film, by contrast, is so over-produced we don't even need to see it --it's already seen itself so many times, been so tinkered-over in post-production houses, that the dick jokes bounce around like polished stones in a tumbler echo chamber until the sound imitates canned laughter and applause. Only a robot could truly love it. The rest of us are all just dollar-affixed attention spans required for its own self-justification.

In both films the fingers on the hand of genuine characterization and emotion are cut to fit the glove of ADD-addled CGI. These movies leave you nowhere but numb and, above all, not-bored. Sometimes numb and not bored is enough, but most of the time, having your ADD catered to by the cinematic equivalent of a rich kid's indulgent butler is enervating instead of exhilarating. Even something as ramshackle and off-the-cuff as RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975) had enough rough edges, goofball termite moments, and semi-improvised human interaction to let you feel there was something in it you could call your own. An ashtray you could use where an unseen butler didn't deftly replace it with a new one after every ash flick (or in DRIVE, making sure each ash tray has a new product placement logo clearly in focus at the bottom, the edges each painstakingly distressed to smack of Americana realness. In this overly visualized characters in DRIVE and HORNET have no breathing room. Every breath is measured out by the frame and market-tested.

I'll probably have forgotten these two films by the time I get an actual 3D TV and can see them how they're meant to be seen, and I'm glad I'll be able to see them so fresh, if at all. But, seriously? What's up with Cage and these undead avenging dad roles? I haven't seen GHOST RIDER but between this and that alone (I'm sure there are a zillion others), Cage seems self-typecast as an all-American semi "good ole" boy, destined to return again and again from the dead to air his turbo-charged grievance against the demon/man/infrastructure that killed--or is about to kill--his child, wife and/or grandchild. All I can do is cradle a stack of Cage's latest films (all purchased for $2.99 in the Blockbuster sale bin) and shout "NoooooO!" while shaking my fist in slow motion at the overhead camera... then, in even slower motion, the whole chain of video rental stores blows up as I stroll boldly forth into the realm of internet streaming. Nooo, indeed.

But even that's not the end of old Nic! He's ready to drive up from Hell again and again, whenever a child is missing or money is needed, in whatever "role" you ree-quair of him. If what you ree-quair is he get his 3D ass up in them woods then maybe you're in DELIVERANCE or maybe you're an industry suit afraid to step outside the dirtbag revenge genre, preferring to again and again force some female relative of Cage's to be abused or killed in order to warrant his dour vindictiveness. Mess with his baby girl, he'll kill you. Mess with his car, he'll give you the horn.

A Travis for our times: OBSERVE AND REPORT

I used to have mixed feelings about Seth Rogen, but those feelings are gone after seeing OBSERVE AND REPORT, replaced by shock, awe and reverence. I like him better than similarly deluded psychopaths played by De Niro in KING OF COMEDY and John Goodman in BIG LIEBOWSKI-- because he's actually laugh-out-loud funny as well as disturbing, while in KING and LIEBOWSKI, you just want to get away from these psychos asap. Sure that's a controversial thing to say, but why not? Who gives a fuck? Not director Jody Hill, who's too busy capturing the  Quixote-meets-Col. Kurz madness of the American mall culture. As mall cop Ronnie, Rogen is like a snail crawling along a straight razor here, at times the Rogen aura completely vanishes in his character's self-absorbed, mutton-headed haze, but the two are inextricable. Forget about KING OF COMEDY, this is Rogen's TAXI ZUM RAGING DRIVER BULLSHOT.

Naturally the critics at large are split down the middle (RT gives it a 51%) but for my money, OBSERVE AND REPORT should be praised as a black comic masterpiece, a satire of masculine character studies, the DR. STRANGELOVE to THE WRESTLER's FAIL-SAFE. The reason it wont be compared that way is because most critics let marketing, set and setting, sway them: THE WRESTLER came out with big Oscar buzz, the Micky Rourke comeback story; OBSERVE AND REPORT comes out with PAUL BLART: MALL COP still in theaters, and all the baggage of the momentarily overexposed Rogen-Apatow hit machine clogging the carousel, so people expect a grungy gross-out comedy with a heart of gold. What they get is a heart of darkness. That it's also brilliant, touching and hilarious doesn't seem much to these critics, who would probably be writing a totally different take were the film, say, British (ala HOT FUZZ) and screened at the art house rather than the multiplex. As the always fearlessly trenchant Kim Morgan puts it on Sunset Gun:

"Which makes this movie all the more shocking than, say, (and I admire the following examples) that junkie epic Trainspotting, and a lot more subversive than anything Michael Haneke hatches up. Because Observe and Report isn't playing at your local art house. No, it's playing right in the belly of the beast: at the mall."

The mall is the emotional and spiritual center of America's bloated consumerist belly, and the one Ronnie works in, almost empty, a little on the rinky dink side, sad with that weekday emptiness malls get in late afternoons. Ronnie is immune to its ennui, seeing this ghost town of middle-America's unconsciousness as his personal kingdom, resulting in a near-Brechtian fantasia for the artistically maladjusted loner who wishes they could just knock slow fat moms with strollers out of their way; punch whom they want to punch when they want to, have confidence even beyond incompetence. This is their moment. OBSERVE AND REPORT is the film that Terry Zwigoff is too inherently decent to make; the highlighted tantrums of his BAD SANTA--a similarly mall-bound film--errs on the side of late inning decency and thus undoes any attempt at genuine subversion. It's one thing to threaten children and then "come around," it's another to bash them into pulp with their own skateboards, as they deserve. In BAD SANTA, we watch a man behave badly, but OBSERVE AND REPORT itself behaves badly. And that has made all the difference.

One must look farther back than SANTA to find an apt comparison to OBSERVE, I would cast my vote on W.C. Fields' THE BANK DICK (1946), wherein Fields gets a job as a bank security officer; there were no malls then so he instead trashes his favorite target: small town Americana and its pinched-faced reformers. Like Jody Hill and Ronnie the Mall Cop, Fields makes films in the zone where we go to push and shove the people who've been oppressing us, the space where we can sock seemingly innocent bystanders on the puss, drink, snort, smoke and flirt with complete obliviousness to how we're perceived, and in the end manage to win all the marbles despite ourselves.

The BANK DICK finds Fields--ala Rogen's Ronnie--in a security guard uniform, the guise of authority (the mall cops similarly have no real legal power) but nonetheless wearing detective disguises and pointing his little gun at the mirror. Billy Bob Thornton's Santa costume, by contrast, is a joke from the get-go: the clothes of a saint worn by a slovenly drunk, but the saintliness can't help but come through, like it does for those countless movies wherein gangsters or thieves hide out in nunneries or missions and eventually 'see the light.' There's no legit authority to Santa, mall cops, or security guards, but in the twilight realm between a real cop uniform and the illusion of power implied in the security guard uniform it gets tricky; you can either navigate how far you can bend within the rules or you can deliberately erase them and that goes for the film as well as its narrative. If there's no hint of the Iraq war going on within Observe, for example, it's because the mall could very well be Iraq in an Animal Farm metaphor sort of way, more than just a mall in the same sense Poe's House of Usher is more than just a house or Don Quixote's windmills more than just windmills.

Even if he can't see past his own bullying ego and warped isolation, we can see Ronnie is a good soul. Like the martial arts instructor of director Jody Hill's previous film, The Foot Fist Way, Ronnie's a delusional but forceful alpha male picking up strays from other packs, making his own army of America's runts. He's the first buddy you make when you're the new kid in town, and whom you abandon as you begin to climb the social ladder. You eventually leave your mall cop job, go to college, get married, divorced, promoted, and then years later you go to the mall and he's still there in the same uniform and you try to leave before he sees you. Still, he's a hero because no matter how pathetic you are, he'll always take you back into his fucked-up fold and his own resolve and belief in his warped violent persona is admirable in its purity, the way we admire Travis Bickle, or Robert Duvall in APOCALYPSE NOW.

In truth, Ronnie represents the true American sociopath mentality that our country needs to win the war in Iraq. The whole place could be burning down around them and they'd still be fist-pumping to Metallica, just happy to be there, happy to have at least some Iraqis who like them. You can't tell a guy like Ronnie he's a lost his soul, or that his war can't be won, and that's perhaps the greatest victory any American can have, the victory of embracing in full the Don Quixote madness that bravely and finally makes sense of our fucked-up planet (and in the process destroying it). That's why we like George W., or Sarah Palin... in crazy times, we need a crazy leader. When reality sucks, vote for the sucker. America is a lost Sancho Panza, in search of just such a nutjob to follow over the border of collective "sanity."


It's a hard character to capture and Hill and Rogen nail it so perfectly it goes unnoticed. Thanks to its association as 'the other Paul Blart' it gets little respect. John Goodman in BIG LIEBOWSKI came close to Ronnie's level of insanity but tried too hard and became spittle-flecked; Thornton in BAD SANTA was too busy "trying" to be offensive to register fully as truly bad instead of just a weary middle-aged actor in the midst of delirum tremens; but Hill and Rogen get it juuuust right: Ronnie is every self-conscious young male repressing the urge to punch out rude customers, bosses or co-workers. Unlike most of us, he's touched glorious bottom in the abyss of delusion; he's Dirty Harry times King Arthur, no matter what anyone says. 

In order to appreciate such rampages it helps to have lived some formative years under the weight of deep-seated socially-inflicted repression, i.e. in the suburbs. Watching a superhero punch out a bad guy trying to blow up the world is a cathartic abstraction of teenage rage, but watching Ronnie run down a skate punk and crack him on the back of the head for no real reason? That's catharsis. In 1991, for example, I literally cheered in my seat when Cyberdyne Systems HQ blew up in TERMINATOR 2, because my own place of employment at the time, Ortho Pharmaceuticals, looked just like it. No offense to Ortho (I was a mail room temp) - I loved the people, and got a discount on Tylenol at the company store, but you know how it is - everyone in the theater thought I was insane, but I was beyond caring. I'd been set free, until of course Arnold's body count reads 'zero - killed' and the weird back-end morality undercuts our revelry. But it's characters like Ronnie, on the other hand, whom our big dumb war is meant for, and body count zero is just a dare. Their raging violent streak needs an outlet, and its better to just give them guns and send them far far away. War gets them out of their parent's house... war belongs to them, was made to serve that American muttonheaded drive to chew bubble gum and kick ass, the devil take the consequences and civilian casualties.

Which brings me to the third closest auteur to Hill's level of subversive deadpan comic savagery: horror icon John Carpenter, particularly in THEY LIVE (1988), with Rowdy Roddy Piper [pictured above] which brings us to THE WRESTLER. And of course, the promo for the National Guard with Kid Rock singing "American Warrior!" (Read my take on that here). Fascism's just another word for nothing left to lose! Time to shoot the mirror and set your reflection free!