Isles of Löwensohn: THE WILD BOYS, LET THE CORPSES TAN

Funny that after decades of seeing her only hither or yon, I find Elina Löwensohn (NADJA herself!) in two new auteur-driven super weird movies (both en français), which I happened to watch, back-to-back, on two consecutive nights. In each film she plays a semi-insane ruler of a gorgeous but remote location wherein she presides like some kind of perverted Ms. Roarke over a Fantasy Island gone horribly wrong, and R-rated. Owning her masculine side with a cigar chomping swagger. In THE WILD BOYS and LET THEIR CORPSES TAN alike, this Romanian-American actress (just one year older than me and she's handling it way better) sure can swing a wild dick, if you'll pardon my French. N'cest pas? Both films just arrived in the US via streaming; both are shot in blazing Super-16mm celluloid. Both are so surreal they make Buñuel seem like di Sica. Coïncidence? Non, mon ami, Absolument oui

Wait, has she ever been in a movie that's not surrealist? The last time I saw her was The Forbidden Room (and before that, Nadja), and she looked, frankly, like a different person in each those. She was gamin-esque. Gone is that gamin! La gamin est parti... She has surrendered even late-inning Delpy/Huppert-style mature Parisian hotness in favor of a stogie and a laugh throaty enough to choke the communism out of Lionel Stander. Wagging her sun-browned body around like a Bowery-born scrapper, bounding over piles of enemy corpses with Patton-esque gusto, breasts bared with the 'who cares?' haughtiness that marks European women as the superior to all other genders and continents. Rocking punk rock bangs and a stare that could freeze the blood of a drowsy, sun-basking tiger, Löwensohn poses and shifts around on the rocks and beaches with the short guy beatnik cool of Dick Miller and the existential ambivalence of Warner Herzog. 

Yet those breasts are young and full-still, as if eternal. Shall you not try to swing the same?

8 THE WILD BOYS

(Les garçons sauvages)

Dir Bertrand Mandico

***1/2

Gender-bending a Clockwork Orange / Captains Courageous bad boy rehab adventure into erotic surrealist shapes not unlike like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve,  comes Mandico's Les garçons sauvages. Five over-privileged boys are pressed aboard a rough trade reform school rehab fishing boat after Trevor (a malicious spiritual force envisioned by the boys as dog with a jeweled mask) incites them to violence against their indulgent lit teacher during a masked drunken Macbeth performance. A kind of 'scared straight at sea' adventure, the ship is helmed by a very salty sadistic captain with a map tattooed on his penis--one of many we'll see, though they all seem rough, uncircumcised and woven from burlap--results. Collared and tied to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the salty captain's whim, (most of) the boys gradually become submissive, the rough living snapping them out of their entitled sadistic prep school funk...

But that's just the beginning of this bizarro odyssey! The destination of the ship is a mysterious island with sexually active vegetation (which the boys are encouraged to take relentless advantage of). Oysters, oozing tree sap, pollen, the salty sea, and other island fragrances infise a strange hormonal magic in the air, enough to slowly turn these rough trade specimens into girls (their penises drop off and are swept away in the uncaring surf, suddenly no more relevant than land crabs). Meanwhile trees and rocks become giant asses and mocking breasts. "Luckily," a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Löwensohn) arrives to take them under her wing; together they will eventually start sexually devouring and killing randy sailors, committing high seas mutiny, and surrendering to the intoxicating touch and taste of the local plant life. For the in-cahoots captain and the doctor, it's a living. 

Announcing Mandico as a vital new presence in the international film scene (there should be dozens more like him), Les garçons sauvages is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies, drinking manna-jaculate from phallic tubers, screwing between leafy legs, sleeping deep in the shrubbery, Uranus' severed testicles foaming into Venus, then back to foam again. There are signs of other unclassifiable movies, everything from Naked Lunch to Matango to Valhalla Rising in its hallucinatory amok Robinson Crusoe wanderings... but there's only Batailles and Carter's fiction and maybe moments in the films fellow French provocatuers Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noe, but they never quite go this far into the Cocteau mirror. 

 The great twist though is that these boys are all played by girls, to start with, and the freedom accorded these already free French actresses allows them to swagger and strut in ways that do a heart good to see. Female sexual aggression isn't, apparently, the same existential threat in France as it is here in the US. It's merely recognized as performance, one the girls-as-boys are all keen to embody, strutting and making lewd gestures and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, their fair feminine features actually make them perfect as teenage boys. While their burlap members fall off, they behold their new breasts like they just earned their team colors. It's quite revealing when deconstructing the postures and posing of performative manly mannishness ala Beau Travail  (with which it would make a wild double feature), all swivel-hipped sailors and grabby crotch-forward surrender --the way letting your unconscious anima/animus stretch out in drag brings all sorts of in-the-moment awareness and mojo. It's twice as sexy as it should be, really, no  matter what your persuasion.

What does it all mean? Why don't you read some Batailles, Huysmanns and Angela Carter and learn something about just how precarious your own sexuality is. Words on a page can reorganize the molecular structure of your private parts! Read the wrong book and get aroused in places you didn't even know were there, and maybe weren't before you read it. Suddenly buried infant memories sweep up onto the rocks as gender's social constructs are surrendered to the lapping oyster-rich waves.

--

LET THE CORPSES TAN

(Laissez bronzer les cadavres)

Dirs. Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani

**1/2

My expectations ran mighty high for this. Too high, perhaps. being such a gigantic fan of Belgian writer/director/producer team Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani's 2009 debut, Amer, and their sophomore effort, The Strange Color of Her Body's Tears. It's been a case of too much early promise to keep up with. This, their third feature is still suffused with their signature style (gorgeous 35mm photography, tastefully-recycled Ennio Morricone music, lots of feverish close-ups of eyes, hands, knives, guns, mouths, wild clothing, dissociative nonlinear editing, stylized violence) but there's no room in a traditional crime thriller (adopted from a potboiler French novel) for the kind of psychosexual or post-structuralist departures that made their earlier more giallo/Argento-inspired work so delectably artsy. They make some feints towards that level of giddy experimentation, like early Dario Argento and Maya Deren fighting with Stan Brakhage and Luis Bunuel in a phone both kind of style, but the result is that neither element quite gels. Maybe the bottom line is, there are just too many sunbeated old French male actor faces that look too much alike; with all the Leone eye close-ups and mouths and arms and all that they seem quite interchangeable.

The terrain though is lovely. Blazingly shot almost all outdoors--church ruins, filled with winding passages and cold rock interiors, an artist enclave high on a hill overlooking the crashing Mediterranean surf: clear deep blue sky, blazing sun --you can feel how hot the stones are where the sun hits them; you can feel how cold it is in the shade. It's run by a crazy middle-aged artist (Elina Löwensohn, still smoking those stogies) and her has-been writer lover played by the indefatigable Marc Barbé (they were last paired together as killer and final girl/lady in Sombre) and at the moment mostly inhabited by shady character. Stephane Ferrara is a guy named Rhino, but he's not the big bald bruiser you'd think was named Rhino --that guy's in the cold storage cave, humping the roast lamb hanging there (that lamb gets pretty gross and shot up by the end of the film--in slo motion). At least I think that's true. Who can keep all these craggy old man faces straight?

Anyway, it's a perfect location. Who wouldn't want to shoot a movie there, or hide out after a crime, even without air conditioning, phone or electricity? Even the the has-been writer's young black wife comes there, uninvited, with her kid (stolen from her ex-husband who has sole custody), a cute young maid. Complications! The father might get the law on the place now, so the crooks will have to kill everyone. And then two motorcycle cops show up. Oy, it's going to be a long afternoon. 

The cast dwindles out like ticker tape as visions of everything from Point Blank to Django Kill... If you Live, Shoot cohere amidst the coronas, vaginal solar flares, Brocken spectres, fata Morgana, and sun dogs cohere amidst the lacatatin tied-up breasts and flying bullets. A cliche'd close-ups of ants crawling on an arial photo of the ruins may pass with only mild groans. Ask not when deconstructed homage becomes cliche! We just know.

Alas, sometimes Forzani and Cattet have such devotion to their startling compositions and deep colors that the big picture falls away. They cram in surreal details like afterthoughts that take away rather than add: when one man is shot the gold he's carrying is hit and explodes as if liquid, splashing all over him (art... from Django Kill!) but aside from a very cool skull-headed hobby horse, and a painting Elina makes in the beginning by shooting paint pellets at a canvas and burning holes in it with her cigar, there's not much art on the scene to make the splashing gold have relevant context. It all has to be made up on the spot by the filmmakers who showed keen awareness of Jungian archetypes and surrealism in Amer, but here when they resort weirdly sexual or death driven tableaux (below) it doesn't signify much beyond its own ephemerality.  Should have been watching Bernardo Bertolucci and Ingmar Bergman the same time you be watching them giallos and westerns but maybe school is out, so they watch what they want rather than what the teacher assigns... and as Merlin says in Excalibur, it is mens' nature to forget.

I think.

But hey -shock value abounds and there's nothing wrong with that (aside from its desensitizing long-term effects). In what are either fantasies or flashbacks, a young silhouetted anima figure (presumably Löwensohn's character in her younger artist muse days), stands over a group of men and pees on them as the Morricone guitar stings bray. In another she's tied to a cross; cruel tight ropes over her breasts cause them to lactate in great rivers down her body (evoking similar imagery with the lit teacher in the early portion of The Wild Boys! What's up with Lowenson and rope-forced lactatio?). Later still she jams her heel into the mouth of one of the men  intercut with the use of a gun in a similar orifice, ala the 'dying primal scene reverie' images in Argento's Tenebrae. 

And yet, the synergy that made Amer so magnificently Antonioni-meets-Argento-esque (dialoguing with Lucretia Martel's paranoia and Claire Denis' butch sexuality as well as Argento's psychosexual post-modernism) is missing. Aside from the snarky obviousness of "gold"-en showering, or the commerce/art compromise when gold coins become liquid gold paint, the twin voices--the feminine avant garde experimental non-narrative lovingly ying/yanged with the masculine/Apollonian linea narrative--so indicative of the Cattet/Forzani union in the past--don't connect like one would hope. We end up admiring the lovely location, the photography, the range of styles, the great use of classic Italian film music, but eventually we lose any idea of which craggy middle-aged heavy is shooting which, or if we're supposed to care who gets the gold or not.

The reason those new wave crime movies (which Corpses clearly pay homage to) worked back in the day was their pro-crime attack on cultural norms of the time. Censorship and big budgets made mainstream fare so tedious and conventional that unusual angles, splurges of sex and giddy violence, the bad getting off free from their crimes, was fresh and new. The usual plots were subverted, even rendered meaningless; the crime was the style. Outlaw culture was born, leading directly from Breathless to Bonnie to Badlands. I'll definitely see Corpses again and hope my feelings change but as of now, I'm just left confused by the plot and disappointed by the mismatched Franco-esque asides.

Another weird connection: seeing this film the same year as the release of Other Side of the Wind, for Welles' artsy film-within-the-film is the Cattet-Forzani film I was hoping for. Welles keeps all the surrealism connecting properly, the colors and imagery are trippy relevant because they connect. You know what it all means even if what it means isn't clear. The part of you that 'gets' weird art knows what it means and if that part doesn't tell you, it's because it's saving it for your dreams. He keeps it simple, allowing the style and symbolism to directly link. He taps into the myth. He was doing psychedelic modernism back in the goddamned 40s so he doesn't need to underline Big Messages (his message is always the same anyway: having a massive ego and the confidence to flim-flam people eventually backfires. It's that message every time with Welles. But hey, along the way he points to the eternal truths as they pass by in parade, like an excited kid at the reptile house who knows all their Latin names.

,

In the same way Amer worked. It had form and unity of modern and post-modern in a tale of one girl's evolving relationship to her parents and animus. Three-vignettes of sexual awakening in a girl's life are told in three distinct retro styles, allowing for true new wave energy, giving us the modernist frisson of slip-sliding signifiers we find in the best of Antonioni. We didn't need a narrative in Amer because we saw the common thread through it all, as if all the movies made in Europe about woman's sexuality suddenly rearranged themselves into a completed puzzle. Amer didn't have to make sense, it was sense. Forzani and Cattet's sophomore effort, Strange Color of Her Body's Tear, on the other hand, was more like an exercise in bravura style, but with enough enticingly lovely actors and such a gorgeous art nouveau hotel setting it didn't matter if the story got monotonous and incoherent. With Corpses though, what do we have? Bronzed Mediterranean fifty-somethings lounging amidst the cloudless blazing blue sky and groovy ruins? Up close shots of eyes, guns and gross mouths stuffed with food and bad teeth? One is tempted to recall Hitchcock's line about how some directors make slices of life, while he mades slices of cake. Alas, Cattet and Forlani have tried to make a slice of a slice of a slice of a slice and we're left with nothing but an empty fork.

Anyway, it's worth the trip, just for the view.

And the balls.

----

Laureate of the Laid: Terry Southern, CANDY (1968)

Life is a latticework of coincidence, whether we see it or not. Usually we don't want to --we're worried we'd go crazy if we did  -- and we would, if the stayed down too long. With our blinders up, thankfully, the coincidence matrix scans less as a pineal gland-buzzing 9-dimensional grid of raw wave energy and more as an abstract field of meaningless white noise with the odd splotch of identifiable pattern-- a ghost outline of an unintelligible word that comes and goes long before any deciphering of the cosmic hidden message can ensue. But dig this, man: when you're alight with manic magic or 'awakened' or 'enlightened' or 'tripping balls' or schizophrenic or a genius, then every single goddamn moment of conscious existence holds a hundred thousand coincidence matrix four-dimensional linkages, stretching from your mind into the TV screen and out to America and into your own cellular biology, everything macro- and micro- fractal-ing out and in, through the past and future, and in higher dimensions than we can consciously perceive, except through the metatextual incorporation of media (i.e. virtually).

Whether or not we can handle it, this interconnectivity exists like vast and unknowable tendril lattice matrix betwixt our eyes, ears, TV, film, music (only what is currently playing in that moment) and the outermost limits of one's living room and mind. It's all connected to the point of Rubik's Cube inextricability; the retinal screen tattoos the mind and the DVD spins as if a windmill testament to our mind's ability to perceive shapes, faces, voices, targets. Every single element of perceived external and internal reality is an interconnected 'other' staring back at "us" as blankly as we stare at TV commercials, perking up only when we're going through emotional extremes. This 'other' groans in boredom if we don't keep it entertained, as much as vice versa. If we behold its gaze directly we're either dead or insane, but art, baby....art... Art gives us the Perseus Medusa mirror shield by which to cautiously glimpse that which we cannot behold head-on, that which the blinders are there to block. In other words, we can keep our blinders on but widen our perception at the same time.

Mandrake, isn't it true that on no account will a commie ever take a drink of water?

And not without good reason!

When these latticework lightbulbs are flashing atop each pylon neuron around the pineal car wreck (presuming fluoridation hasn't encrusted it), one turns naturally to Terry Southern, America's dirty Swift, the Texas Voltaire, the Watergate Lubitsch, the Lenny Bruce of lauded literary lustful libertinism, the acidhead Brecht, the Ayatollah of cock rock lit. Southern took the ball from randy sordid authors like Nabokov, Poe and Henry Miller and threw it straight through the Cuban Missile Crisis' fire hoop, shattering the speed of the three martini lunch's glass bottom end zone and through the Hindu deity receiver's fifth and sixth arms, scoring the free-love mind game psychedelic put-on touchdown. True anarchy of spirit finds full flower of expression in his R-rated Marx Brothers protozoic chest-thumping. His scripts and/or original novels for films like Barbarella, Candy, The Loved One, The End of the Road, and Dr. Strangelove mix jet black humor with guilt-free sex, bawdy anarchy, trenchant satire, anti-Vietnam rants, un-PC skirt chasing, grim apocalypse flashing and vintage slapstick in ways that make the puerile inanity of today's sex comedy seem tragically flaccid.   
Maybe you don't, but I remember the year (circa 1995?) that that girls' dating guide book The Rules reaffixed a heavy price tag to free love. It killed it, in fact. It had just begun to fly (in the 70s) and already it was being called back to the nest for overhauls, when it returned it was all date-rapey, the masses never getting the correlation between the popularity of Game of Thrones and the news' latest sex abuse charge. On a side latticework spider strand: let yourself wonder much sex would be in books if not for the juicy free press provided by censorship, probably not as much. Dirty books once were banned in many countries (including ours), and were therefore exceedingly popular. Authors like Burroughs, Southern, and Nabokov could make fast money churning them out for Parisian small presses, which were then smuggled into America as 'imported' erotica (what they were really importing, was literature. (The only way to get America to read 'the articles' was by printing them in Playboy).

Lax censorship in our current age on the other hand has strangely led to a second Puritanism, reminding one of the clean-cut Nazis rising up from the ancient Rome-style decadence of Weimar Germany. Southern is from an era when 'adult' cinema was adult--by adults for adults--and not the sole purview of 'endearingly' foul-mouthed nerdy immature boys or rapey HBO writers. Literary lions have no place on our bookshelves now, except in the library , where erotica isn't always welcome. And more and more, old dead straight dirty white guys are being scissored from college reading lists to make room for minority and female voices. As a result, erotica now seems the result only of immaturity and a small vocabulary, a sad association from which it may never recover.

This putsch of maturity and learnedness from the realm of sex may seem a victory to the easily deluded PC snobs of the Ivory Tower, but they've never been good at spotting coincidence latticework anyway, their pineal glands being so fluoride-encrusted they're blind to even the idea of blindness. They've forgotten that when intellectual satire is volleyed at sacred institutions, exposing the truth of the latticework to all our awakened horror, it destroys only the dead cells within, leaving the rest vibrant and now hip enough to incorporate critique. Only the mundane and banal need fear (and even then, the teacher's union springs to protect their right to keep boring students). Meanwhile the potty-mouthed prattle of today's grown infants is never a threat to the higher-ed gestapo and can indeed be yoked to the PC mafia's repressive practices, encouraging said banal literati that not one dead cell shall slough off from the obese corpse of "literature."

Jane Fonda - Barbarella

Thus Southern, the Alvarado Swinburne, the heterosexual Wilde, was obscene only to illuminate the truer obscenities of religion, Washington, the pertro-chemical industrial complex, the funeral industry, the American military, Wall Street, academia, the American Medical Association, even the counterculture of which he was an active part. His was the the voice of the savage American expatriate id, run aground in Paris after the War like the Lost Generation before him. First he attended the Sorbonne on the GI Bill, then became a Paris Review co-founder, then a dirty book writer full of unbeatable Bugs Bunny trickster tactics, then a black comic screenwriter. Willing to look deep into the obscene eye of humanity without blinking, or even judging, his adults-only humor wasn't aimed at naughty boys of fifteen, but real live adults, with deep smoker's voices, at least one STD to their credit, maybe a few scars from the war. Theirs was a level of maturity we seldom see today (think Johnny Carson's smooth elan vs. Jimmy Fallon's beer-bloated fanboy gushing or even Animal House vs. Old School -- and weep for an America that will one day make Adam Sandler seem a stalwart fount of manly gravitas).

If there's still an author with 'adult' intellect left standing after this latest PC putsch, one yet able to be lusty without merely lapsing into unconscious misogyny, that author is well-hidden, and would never dare come forward until said putsch hath passed (I predict it will by 2020). One day he (or she --why the hell not?) may write a book that could bring us out of this maturity death spiral, or that could be made into a film like Candy, which seems to condone molestation, drugging women without their knowledge, borderline/date rape, etc., (seems is the key word in that sentence). In the meantime, men now feel so bad for saying no to a relationship after saying yes to sex that we'd just as soon pre-empt the whole thing.

(Sorry, another latticework side strand): I mean how else are you going to know, for sure, you don't want to go out with a girl, unless you sleep with her first? But that's 'wrong' now. Not back then, apparently! Back then no one was meant to feel bad at all; even a man chasing a girl young enough to be his daughter around the room, his tongue hanging out, honking like Harpo Marx, was under no unseen liberal arts lash of penitence. It may have been annoying for the girl, or not, who knows. But either way, there was no lashing going on, no souring of the air to lead to repression, which seems to me the main underwriter of misogyny and vileness.

If you neuter your satiric watchdog, he may stop humping your leg and peeing in the corners, but he's also apt to hide when the burglars of phony morality and 'sacred' patriarchy show up, thus making his entire existence superfluous. And those burglars he lets in are actually squatters who-- once ensconced within your walls--will linger until they've worn your masculinity down to a mawkish enfeebled little nub. All you will have left are James Bond marathons and then only when your wife is away at spin class. When you hear her car pulling into the garage you quick change the channel to PBS, and bury your nose innocently in The New Yorker. And then, only then, will said squatters leave you to your misery.

You know what I'm trying to say: the institutional targets most deserving of take-down sit smugly behind walls of standards and practice policies, while once-proud writers are assigned stories of mundane consensual love affairs between rational adult celebrities who just happen to be married (albeit to other people). All bawdiness is now relegated to teenagers at band camp or softcore augmented SOV puerility on late night cable, and anyone who texts the wrong person at the wrong hour risks having their texts read aloud on CNN or sent around to all her friends by morning, by that afternoon they're out of a job, hounded from the human race. By dinner, forgotten.

And yet, do we think we can shame human nature? No matter how much PC lip service they pay, chicks still pick the brutish lothario over the sensitive poet, most of the time. What's the point of being a feminist if it doesn't get you laid? It took me 20 years to figure out (with the help of Camille Paglia), what Terry Southern knew all the time: intellectual writers could be just as wild, chest-thumping, and aggressively sexual as any jock, greaser, thug, or motorcyclist. We didn't need to associate the masculine literary intellect with pussywhipped PC enfeeblement, is my point. I despise what's passing for a 'men's movement' these days, and their vile misogynistic corners of the web, but that world has nothing to do with Southern's, any more than a rabid Chihuahua to do with an Alaskan wolf pack.

The vanishing of Southern's pack, then, is a reminder perhaps that writers are not allowed groupies anymore, or if they have them they must either hide that fact lest it compromise their nebbish image, or boast like douche bags, and lose our respect that way. Most comic talents lament their loserdom, their failure with women, their small dicks. Reduced to the status of a shiftless older sibling in the home by their ballbusting mom and her incestuous darling son, dads turn back to their buddies for support: bromance, and gay jokes, whistling in the hetero foxhole dark as women become more and more unapproachable (Jody Hill's Observe and Report a rare, glorious exception). When we do see a famous comic in a standard groupie hook-up, it's presented in the most mutually demeaning manner possible (ala Adam Sandler in Funny People).

In France and England (or Argentina) on the other hand, writers can be pot-bellied, balding, too drunk to even make it to the party plane but they're allowed sex, groupies, and lovely ladies on each arm. and they feel no reason to brag or feel bad or be made to look sleazy or pathetic. Smart is sexy over there. Or was last I checked. Or so I hear.

Southern centered

Southern's oeuvre now represents an era where it may have been a little sneaky getting some bird into bed but it was under the rubric that both of them would have a good time, no one would be 'slut-shamed', and that free love was just that - especially if you were a friend of the Beatles. So the high-functioning gropers of Candy may come from Southern perhaps witnessing blokes gone instantly from birdless to beflocked with a single hit record. Maybe he noted the accompanying changes in their sexual drive and finesse or lack thereof, and that's what shows up in Candy and Barbarella. This is because the safety of loserdom allows for Lacanian objet petit a self-construction, i.e. it's easy to be a stud when you're not actually getting any offers. Once the girl makes it plain she's up for a roll in the way, once the free room and bed are located, and once pants come off--then all sorts of embarrassing equipment failures can manifest... Cialis for daily use is still decades away, erection-deflating coke dust in the party plane air ducts, and groupies impatiently waiting, their plaster cast a-drying more with every flaccid minute.... It's no wonder men have to boast later to their bros --getting the entire deed right, from first eye contact to putting clothes back on and sneaking back downstairs, to satisfy her needs as well as your own without fumbling the condom, losing the erection, and making it all seem organic --it's no easy task. It's a triumph, and there should be more than one other person to bear witness!

All of which is an elaborate, rambling set-up for my discussion of Candy (1968) because even in contemporary America's chilly intolerant climb we wouldn't dream of calling Ringo Starr or Marlon Brando a dirty womanizer, or Richard Burton or James Coburn a pathetic joyless bathroom groupie humper -- which is one of the reasons their characters' over-the-top sexual harassment, abuse of patriarchal authority, even medical malpractice, flourishes into full subversive flower in this film, in ways that would be too unappetizing if ugly hairy-backed plebeians were doing it. That Brando, Coburn and Burton, particularly, lampoon themselves and their status' and profession's own most private (dirty) groupie-trawling here should brook no scolding. Indeed, should be celebrated!

Especially when juxtaposed with modern stuff like HBO's use of graphic rutting which stresses the more mutually demeaning and bestial aspects of sex, Southern's brand of erotica is positively life-affirming. He takes the Voltaire hint and presents the sex drive, and the naked body with all its hairs and gasses, as incorruptible and forgiven all trespass. Ultimately, what is being satirized is the sexual repression that forces men to strike comically unaffected postures before lunging at a passing hottie naif, and the way all their strutting oratory just make them all the more ridiculous once their trousers are halfway off, for no amount of bluster and male pride can smooth the awkward transition from civilized gentleman to a spastically humping mastiff. One look at today's conservative hysteria over birth control on one end, liberal PC lockstep on the other, and the Joy of Sex deflates to a pleasant moment before acres of guilt and anxiety. Dr. Ruth is still out there somewhere, but her voice has grown so faint...

And as far as movies are concerned, the kind of ravishment women like to read about in some of the more disreputable Harlequin offshoots is completely out. One false step and you wind up being demonized in a Lifetime movie.

Though only based on Southern's original novel (co-written with Southern's fellow Parisian ex-pat and Olympia Press dirty-lit writer Mason Hoffenberg), adapted for the film by American satirist Buck Henry (coming hot off The Graduate), directed by Christian Marquand (a French actor, as odd and illogical a choice for an American satire as Mike Sarne for Myra Breckinridge [1970]) and filmed by a French-Italian crew, Candy seems quintessentially Southern at first, standing alongside Dr. Strangelove as a savagely honest critique of America's noisemaker patriotism as well as its drug-fueled paranoia and the sexual puritanism that keeps each at odds.

Kicking things off, Burton is mind-blowingly grand, spectacularly pathetic, and thoroughly hilarious as McPhisto, a grandiose 'dirty-minded' poet making his first appearance, wind in the hair, electric rock blaring, at a student assembly attended by Candy (Ewa Aulin), setting the mechanisms in motion. Brilliantly modulating a cascade of punch lines in a cue card rhythm  - "I wrote that," he says after reading his first poem, long hair and scarf blowing, "laying near death... in a hospital bed...  in the Congo... after being...savagely beaten... by a horde of outraged Belgian tourists." His fluid Welsh wit makes great rolling use of pauses and accented words as he orates, speaking in Latin only to admit he's not quite sure if it means anything, mentioning his books have been "banned or burned in over 20 countries... and fourteen... developing nations." Shifting from famous genius grandeur to hangdog contrition as he mentions his book is available... signed by the author... for three dollars... in cash or money order, even bringing Welsh florid anguish to the mailing address, culminating in "Lemmington, New Jersey."

Burton, orating with creepy alien hybrid

Candy: "Oh my gosh, (watching Burton fall out of the car, soaked in whiskey) he's a mess!
Zero: "Well man, that's the story of love."

Moments later MacPhisto has Candy in the back of his Benz (indeed there's the idea he came there expressly to pick out a nubile co-ed) while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) drives, though there seems to be a kind of understanding that they share the automobile and like to get into sexual adventures together, ala Don Juan and Leporello (switching roles nightly, perhaps). "Candy - beautiful name," McPhisto says as prelim to his attack. "It has the spirit and the sound of the old testament." A Scotch spigot in his glass bottom Benz gets turned on by accident, and McPhisto winds up crawling around at Candy's feet, booming on about his 'giant, throbbing need' and pathetically lapping spilled Scotch off the floor, getting it on his trousers, and ending up in Candy's basement with his pants off, heroically making love to a doll that looks eerily like abductee descriptions of alien-human hybrids, all while reciting random verses and sobbing heroically.

Then, alas, with a terrible Mexican accent, Ringo Starr joins the fray. Playing the 'innocent' virgin gardner, he hears the noise and comes down and starts molesting Candy on the pool table, all while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) helps himself to the basement bar while dispensing bon mots ("Quo Vadis, baby!"), beaming so approvingly at the crazy scene methinks I was in the kind of hetero-camp heaven I once believed the sole province of Russ Meyer!

Alas, the MacPhisto adventure is the best part of the entire film and even that is marred in the second part by Ringo's terrible performance.  Luckily John "Gomez" Astin kicks it back into some sort of gear as Candy's swinger uncle, who comes home later, setting up a nice contrast to his square twin brother (Candy's father, also Astin). Uncle's nymphomaniac swinger-in-furs quipster wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli) tells Candy she'll like New York, where kids "aren't afraid to scratch when it itches" but a drive to the airport finds them all accosted by Ringo's three sisters riding up on motorcycles, their long black veils fluttering behind them for a brilliant wicked witch of the west / harpy / Valkyrie / flying nun effect.

Alas, the film has already fallen into it's start/stop rhythm. Once the whips and brass knuckles come out, the film starts to just hang there. Director Marquand and screenwriter Buck Henry don't know what to do with the scene, how to resolve it or make it measure up to that awesome chase. The family winds up running onto the tarmac and hopping onto a B-29 taking off with a crack paratrooper cargo, always airborne in case of nuclear attack.

Then, determined to seem more miscast than Ringo, comes Walter Matthau as a deranged Albanian-hating airborne paratroop general (it should have been George C. Scott or Lee Marvin -- who ever heard of a New York pinko Jewish-intellectual US Army general?) And another thing -since when would a general waste his rank in control of only a single planeload of shock troops? A non-com could handle that duty easy- it's what they're there for.

Still, ever a pro, Matthau knows how to keep deadpan when mocking military patriotism, but his cadence as he rambles on about having a kid with Candy and sending it to military school lacks the kind of deranged jingoistic ring that Scott brought to both Patton and Buck Turgidson or Sterling Hayden to Ripper: it's just depressing to imagine his scenario coming true, that poor kid.

But Candy's next fornicating adventure is one of the greats, involving James Coburn's toreador Hackenbush-ish brain surgeon Dr. Krankheit ("This is a human life we're tinkering with here, man, not a course in remedial reading!").

Coburn's histrionic operating theatrics might seem a bit Dr. Benway-esque but Burroughs was a friend of Southern's and Coburn has the spirit of the thing, modulating Shakespearian antithesis and masculine actorly power, seizing the chance to let his sacral chakras vibrate and hum. Aside from Burton, he's the only other star in the film's luminary cast to recognize the covert brilliance buried in even the most seemingly mundane lines (which Matthau breezes right over, missing all the half-notes) and to let each word ring like freedom's infernal bell. Amping up his patented actorly mannerisms, Coburn conjures a physician as a liberated but insane as any before or since, accusing the operating theater audience of thinking what he was a moment ago just saying--throwing his scalpel to the floor and just sticking his finger right into the comatose Astin's brain (one slip and the patient "will be utterly incapable of digit dialing"), saluting the crowd with his bloody middle finger in triumph...

My friends, there is no other word for it: Coburn is MAGNIFICENT!

And just when it can't get any better, Anita Pallenberg (alas, dubbed, as she was in Barbarella) appears as Krankheit's number one nurse. Then, kind of worse: Buck Henry cameos as a mental patient in a straitjacket trying to attack Candy in the elevator. Then, better: John Huston shows up as a prurient administrator who seems to get off trying to shame Candy in front of the entire post-op party after she's caught being molested by her uncle. But hey! Krankheit dispenses B12-amphetamine cocktail shots at the party, and the pink-clad nurses wait around like beholden nuns in some religious spectacle. Coburn's medical innovations include a 'female' electrical socket affixed to the back of Candy's father's head, so he can drain off the excess wattage by powering a small radio. Again, the kind of thing that modern films would not approve of, i.e. how dare you satirize a litigious, lawyered and humorless institution like the AMA, sir!? Sir... Sir?

Candy - w/ James Coburn and Anita Pallenbeg 

From then on, alas, the film's mostly downhill: a scene with a trio of groping Mafioso and a crazy Italian stereotype-a filmmaker is just crude, pointless and skippable; ditto the shocked cops playing up their blue collar bewilderment and earthy hostility as they bash frugging drag queens, crack nightsticks down on hippies, and wind up crashing the squad car because they can't help leering down Candy's dress (alas, who can?). Southern's/Henry's dialogue stays interesting but the targets are too easily skewered and not every actor knows where the cherries are in their monologues. Why not have the cops be groovy, just to be weird, man? But it being 1968, I guess cop-bashing was still 'in'. Now, though, the blue collar drooling thug cop angle comes off almost more like class-based snobbery than cutting satire.

Another low point: Candy joins up with a criminal mastermind hunchback (Charles Aznavour), who can climb up walls and jump into watery windows ("an old stereoscopic trick" says the unimpressed cops), all well and good but Aznavour's aggressively twitchy rat-like Benigni x Feldman-style behavior eats up another soul-deadening stretch, centered around a gag you'll see coming a mile off (if you've seen Godfather 2 - which admittedly came after). And seeing this humpbacked little pisher rutting away atop the luscious Candy is like watching a cockroach dying of Raid atop a vanilla cupcake; with all his hippie minions showering them with down feathers from busted pillows from above, it's also very gang-rapey and uncool.

Escaping once again, Candy winds up in the holy water-flooded mobile ashram of the guru Grindl --played by Marlon Brando. Half-baked and not quite at the level of Burton or Coburn--his voice stuck in a congested limbo between Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson and Abie the Fish Peddler from Animal Crackers, Brando's Indian accent ends up just sounding congestedly Borscht Belt, mining the rhythm of Lenny Bruce as Groucho or Alan Arkin as played by Sky Masterson. Brando's way too internalized and self-righteous for this Grindl to reach the compromised grandeur of Burton's McPhisto or confident carnivorous genius of Coburn's Krankheit (better Brando himself be satirized by some other actor). When he says you 'must travel beyond thirst, beyond hunger" while eating a sausage he sounds just like Hugh Herbert, which is great, but it's such a dick move not to share the food that it's hard to feel anything but a sympathy headache with the by then-starving and much-abused naked girl, and since by then the movie's cresting the two hour mark, with plenty more vignettes to go, you almost certainly will be ready to just smack someone, hit stop and go have dinner or a nap.

Shocking and racist as it might be for an actor of Brando's caliber and political leanings to appear in brownface while noshing on a sausage (which no guru would ever eat) and floating phony guru raps to some blonde in the trailer equivalent of a shag carpeted party van, just remember he (and Burton) liked working in European adult films at the time (when adult meant adult, remember) making things like Last Tango in Paris, and Bluebeard (both 1972, both X-rated), respectively. Abroad they could be free to drink, eat, smoke and screw to excess without having to hide it all lest America's post-Puritan pressure cooker explode all over them. The wine was better, the vibe looser. Who wouldn't rather be there than unbearable gossipy Hollywood?

Which brings me to my final lattice strand--the idea central to Candy's Christian values--which begins with what MacPhisto says in the beginning about being willing to giving oneself freely as the height of human grace. Sure it's a line men use to try and get women into bed at the time, but if they didn't try, where would humanity be?  And as Lenny Bruce would say, that's the true difference between obscenity and humanity. The truth of our 'huge, throbbing need' is unendurable any other way except as a joke that paradoxically lets us save face and free ourselves of it at the same time. It's the last bastion of the healthy human body's societal failings, the hairy gorilla remnant that can't be hidden underneath the seersucker suit. We need society's forgiving tolerance of this gorilla, because if we denude the beast of his business suit only to sneer at him or deliver some drab lecture on morals or objectification, all we do is bum everyone out. We become just another nag, part of the problem. It's just sex, after all. In Europe it's just part of life. Only here does the Puritan shaming venom still drizzle.

In insisting on the okayness of these obscene trespasses, Southern proves 'nothing sacred' is itself the most sacred of philosophies, that there's nothing bad about the human biological system with all its warty needs. Let it be satirized but never condemned. Let only hypocrisy be attacked without mercy.

"We are not old men. We are not worried about your petty morals." - KR, in deposition

To sum up: Candy comes from a time when intellectual men were still allowed to be men, and hipsters were not pale smirking skinny jeans wallies crossing the street to avoid secondhand smoke or arguing in a mawkish voice against plastic bags at the food co-op. They were men, my liege! Southern's era had more repression and obscenity laws to reckon with, but they had the artistic clout to bash into them with dicks swinging, brain hanging, and fists helicoptering. If Southern and friends had been at that food-co-op meeting they would be hurling the organic produce at that anemic hipster, bellowing like a lion, inhaling every kind of smoke presented. Back in their own time all they could do instead was rage against the dying of their pre-Viagra erections, and then die for real, as nature intended, either in WW2 or Vietnam or that Norman Maine surf from which no faded reprobate returns. Rather than clinging to bare life like today's greedy octogenarians, bankrupting Medicare so they can eke out one more month (the impatient specter waiting in the reception area, rereading that old Us Weekly for the eleven hundredth time while doctors stall out the clock since they're getting richer by the hour), rather than that, sir, they died... like men!

Real hipsters of the older era--having faced death abroad or within, heroically dodged the draft or fought the war, leapt into the waiting arms of the angry fuzz, or served jail time for a single joint--earned their aliveness and their secret stash of war-issued amphetamine tablets (and any spare Pervatin liberated from dead German's survival kits); they were able to dig on and understand modern jazz, and to smoke anywhere, including the doctor's office. They lingered at the moveable feast of expat Paris, armed with coffee, whiskey, Moroccan hashish, burgundy and deep connections to literature when the canon was smaller and more homogenous; if they pilgrimaged south, to the Amazon, they partook of the holy yage or the magic mushroom. Today we're lucky if we can afford a single Sex on the Beach and there's no smoking, sir... sir.... no smoking (and in NYC no dancing either).

I'm not arguing against women's rights, or equality, or clean air, or any of the huge strides we've taken, just wondering if perhaps in revisiting Candy, we can, as a nation, whisper "Rosebud" for our lost sleddy balls and rediscover how well-read (SWM) intellectual weight might once again benefit from rabid id-driven boosters in trying to make it through the zipper of hypocrisy and into the erect stratosphere. Southern was the first to climb up on the A-bomb of sexual freedom in lettres and ride the New Journalism (which he co-invented) all the way down to the primary target, which is your face, and he had the chops to turn on your electric lattice of coincidence-detectors, because America still knew that facing its own monstrous extinction with a joke rather than duck-and-cover rhetoric was noble, that working through the terror that strikes when a hot blonde girl with no discernible income lands in your lap and--rather than running home to your wife or war in terror--plunging headlong into the moment, is heroic. It was a time when being able to accept and engage in casual sex with a random girl on your commuter train was brave and manly, and not callow, vile, and somehow predatory, while brandishing your wedding ring like a cross in a vampy graveyard, and racing out at the next stop to wait for the next train, was to be a pussy. Gentlemen, times have changed, mostly for the best, but we should still always be ready. Whatever may come, we cannot allow... a NYMPHOMANIAC gap!

From Left: Burroughs, Southern, Ginsberg, Genet

NOTES:
1. Not good: Southern's mincing gay stereotypes (espec. in The Magic Christian and The Loved One)

Milla Jovovich: God's Own Avatar (+ Laymen's Guide to the Resident Evil Series)

No modern actress has spent more time running in slow motion while firing guns backwards than Milla Jovovich, which considering her start as a neo-hippie musician with a small part in Dazed and Confused (1993), reflects cosmic levels of disillusionment. And I love her, from a safe distance. She's the female post-modern Brundlefly (i.e. Jeff Goldblum) slowly dissolving into CGI replication, from hauntingly gravitas-endowed folkie to warrior queen of the Uncanny Valley -- fighting for her last shreds of un-pixelated humanity with a world-weary sequel-after-sequel determination.

I didn't seek them out, but the first four Resident Evil films have been all over Syfy lately, usually on Saturday afternoons, and I've secretly enjoyed them in a half-asleep lollygag. Repeat viewings don't make the films better, but nor do they get any worse and sometimes that's better than being good in the first place. Having the violence spread between an array of intercut commercials is awesome too. Nothing beats seeing corrupt corporate goons machine gunning civilians / smash cut to the new Mitsubishi Turbo. The pulse of the afternoon advertising blocs entrains to the throbbing din of Milla's battles, creating a symphony of post-modernist random meaning generation.


Mee-la YO-vo-vitch, as her name is pronounced, plays a character with many clones and lives enough for an afternoon of multiple person play, and considering the amount of blue screen this poor woman has to slog through, that she keeps it all real and engaging remains quite a feat, especially considering English is not her first language, or French either. She was born in the Ukraine, wherefrom a genetically superior breed of humans seems to flow, like a 'wirgin spreeng.'

I still listen to her The Divine Comedy-- a 1994 album, equal parts Kate Bush, Arthurian bard, Nordic alien-hybrid, and Jane Birkin, and purer than a crystalline decanter full of airy Scotch--but it came out ten years ago. Does she even have time to pick up a guitar now, with so much zombie blood on her hands? I wish she would. The zombies have suffered enough, and my heart has too -- it needs her swoosh of a voice and 'tick-tock through the medieval graveyard' tromp pop to swain and swillow through the once-more wood.

She gave us only one other musical document, when she quietly plays and sings at a party and tries to light a joint and misses by a few inches to hilarious effect in Dazed and Confused (1993). That lighter may have missed the target but even with this small, mostly dialogue-free part. she established herself indelibly as one of those hauntingly perfect hippie-style goddesses that stir feelings deeper and more ancient than mere attraction, closer to the vicinity of chaste courtly love, wherein the main desire is to be her champion in a joust. The film didn't need her to be great, but with her it was able to break through, like a midnight sun, and it was a great echo of similar moments in films like Marianne Faitfhfull's a capella cafe "As Tears Go By" in Godard's Made in USA (1966).

Bigger movies beckoned, as they will when beautiful, talented, otherworldly girls present themselves and talented Frenchmen take notice their muse hath come. First, there was Luc Besson, commencing with The Fifth Element (1997) to weave Milla into existence from a chunk of raw material into 'the perfect being' and allowing her to speak her own (self-invented) bizarre language. She made a great savior of the universe, we wanted her to save us and so felt guilty and ashamed when she found our dirty little genocides on the historical microfiche she scanned. People mainly remember the crazy orange hair and Gautier white tape suit, but she was never objectified in it - she was more Pris than Rachel, and Besson clearly felt that same courtly joust vibe we did and it carried over to Bruce Willis' cubicle-dwelling cab driver.

In Luc and Milla's next film together, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), she continued the savior angle and evinced great androgynous schizophrenia. You can all but feel some Old Testament-style God rattling her ossicles with shouted orders like an impatient, sugar-addled schoolboy. I know the feeling: every third autumn I become a supernaturally enlightened Taoist monk crazy man: power flows through me and all is love and holy light. But that light has a price, it's difficult to slow down for the normal unconscious and asleep people, but one must, otherwise they think you're merely manic. And one must not give away all one's money and possessions to the first needy homeless man along the road, lest the next one stab you when you can't provide the same for him. Milla gamely and bravely lets that same level of crazy flash across her beautiful features. She takes it all very seriously, commits fully and dangerously, which annoyed the unconscious and asleep critics, used to highbrow roles like Joan being played demure and ladylike and gimme an Oscar-ish. And Milla is too busy foaming at the mouth as the visions and auditory hallucinosis overtake her. For Milla, committing never means being placid or lady-like; she'd rather encourages us to wonder if maybe France was saved by the novelty of her androgynous holy girl madness. The French, unlike Americans, have a great sense of humor when it comes to their own mortality, and they worship gamins in a way America still hasn't grown up enough to understand.

Many critics felt that this was Milla's vanity project, that she had Besson wrapped around her finger and that she was out of her depth and Besson was letting her get away with it. But that's crap, my brothers. The turf is hers by right. For me, there was the sense that she's perfect for the role because of her courtly chaste love-inspiring beauty and grace, ala the loyalty she inspires as the perfect being in The Fifth Element. Messenger was the culmination of a slow build of global devotion. We were ready to storm castles in her name. On the other hand, the film couldn't help being a solid downer, with Milla's terrible bowl haircut and being sold out by the Dauphin in the name of diplomacy and caution and everyone in the French and English armies look so alike it's hard to know who to root for or what's going on. A third is that Milla plays Joan as such a schizophrenic, replete with eye twitches and brown outs, it's hard to know whether to root for her, join the fight, or move to a different table and hide behind a menu. But her notion of God's intervention is so like an alien abduction that it's all looney tunes enough to make one wonder why Besson felt the need to show the royal court scheming and intrigue behind her back at all. Why not just stick with what she sees and feels, so that the betrayal seems to come out of nowhere? The court stuff is a well-photographed bourgeois super snooze compared to Milla's wild jerky eyes and the awesome grey mud and blood.

Ancient Aliens enthusiasts such as yours truly love to contend that benevolent Nordic aliens and fifth dimensional projections from Arcturus have intervened at key moments in our history in order to keep the spirit of a free democracy alive. A Nordic 'angel' appeared to Washington at Valley Forge to convince him to keep going, there's the mysterious storm saving Washington DC from the British in the War of 1812, the surge of storm waves sinking the Spanish fleet for Elizbeth I, and Joan's spirit guide/life coach might well be the same weather-controlling Nordic angel. Recent theories on 'star children' as a newly emerging race of genius ESP children sent here to lead us into a brighter tomorrow might actually play out if one such star child kept her ESP brilliance into adulthood, and was charismatic and enough of an innate showman to genuinely lead an army to victory. I already know her initials: MJ

The idea of Milla as someone to fight for in a gallant Arthurian way (rather than as some obtainable 'prize') has continued into a long and financially lucrative collaboration with current husband, director Paul W.S. Anderson. So while we're here, let's take a gander at the entirety of the RES series, bearing in mind the importance of rock bottom expectations and intercut car commercials:

Resident Evil 
(2002) **1/2

Before it slides into overtly first person zombie shoot-em-up number punching this first film offers an elaborate set-up that promises better things: the Umbrella underground facility is laid out in impressive vertical tracking shots; the uncertain allegiance of the 'Red Queen'--and her projected image of a young girl with an evil (i.e. British) accent--and her gassing all the employees to prevent spreading; Alice waking up in a bath tub with amnesia with a "property of Umbrella Corp." stamp on the inside of her wedding band and slowly remembering how she got there in little expository flashes; the impeccable Michelle Rodriguez as a SWAT team member; the laser grid slicing up SWAT guys, etc. Alas, it's important (to someone) the movie match the feel of the game, so director W.S. Anderson makes sure the Red Queen exposits like announcing the mission of each new Raccoon City level, and each new floor has a new monster or challenge. Anderson gets so hung up on perfecting the MATRIX-cam tracking Milla's slow mo kicks at mid-air pouncing zombie dogs that he forgets any kind of narrative momentum. Still, if Milla's kiss with Michelle Rodriguez had gone on for a few seconds longer, that film would be an enduring classic. Still, it's no worse the fifth time as it is the first.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse 
(2004) **1/2

Bonus points for picking up right where the last film left off, with the zombie plague spreading all through Raccoon City, and for turning one of Alice's old SWAT buddies into a giant killing machine programmed to keep the peace. There's a fascinating moment where this shambling freak massacres a whole SWAT team surrounding a strutting black dude (Mike Epps) who isn't even scratched because as we learn from the monster's video game-like monitors, he's unarmed and hence deemed a civilian, a wry statement right up there with the one in Angels and Demons, on how carrying a gun is much more likely to get you killed than save your life. The cast here includes Jared Harris, late of Mad Men, as a doctor who has a cure and will help our locked-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-gate heroes escape (these including cop hottie in black boots Jill Valentine played grandly by Sienna Guillory [below]) if they find his daughter (Sophie Vavasseur) who happens to be the source model for the Red Queen hologram. So there's layers here, people!

Bonus Points: Some of the big money from the first film's box office shows up in large scale scenes along the wall built to keep the contagion from spreading and there's some natty wall-climbing CGI demons, a motorcycle through a stained glass window, and a big final brawl between Umbrella's top two killing machines, flanked by cool troop helicopters, and an interestingly Teutonic corporate villain (Thomas Kretschmann). Anderson seems to figure out some of his own weaknesses and gives up trying to be the action movie Kubrick and the film opens up a result. Never underestimate breathing room, and enigmatically evil children.

Ultraviolet (2006) - *

Then, in between Resident Evil films, this...  The feeling of flop sweat pervades, with nary a single interesting fight or character or uncliche'd moment and every actor glazed over with enough slick CGI 'make-up' to cause viewers to wonder why they didn't go full CGI animation as they'd clearly feel more comfortable. Written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, a hack who clearly has some mojo magic that convinces money to throw itself at him (he also wrote the dismal Salt and wrote and directed the underrated but still pointless remake of Total Recall), more than anything this film, along with the Charlize Theron movie version of Æon Flux from the year before, serves almost to make W.S. Anderson Walter Hill by comparison.

Resident Evil: Extinction 
(2007) - ***

The contagion has spread all across the world by this installment - and Alice rides across the Road Warrior-inflected deserts of the American southwest in search of answers before coming to the rescue of a band of hearty young survivors (including Ali Larter) who in the film's best scene are attacked by a murder of zombie crows. Meanwhile a crazy industrial scientist spies on Alice from satellites and prepares his own magic invulnerable monster formula. It ends on a pretty wild cloning note, to become the best in the series up to that point, perhaps because it's directed by Russell Mulcahy, an Aussie behind such 'hits' as Highlander and The Shadow, and way more grounded and skilled as a storyteller and director of actors than Milla's husband, series overseer Anderson. Bonus points for a joint lit in a very moving moment by a SWAT survivor from the previous installment (Oded Ferhr) whose dimly smug smile annoyed me in the previous film but is finally put to good use in his moment of stoner triumph. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife
(2010) - ***

The series was on a roll now and Anderson steps back up to the plate, as if inspired by the lurch forward in quality delivered by Mulcahy in Extinction. It's inspiring to watch a director like PWSA slowly learn from his mistakes and criticism to deliver sequentially better work. Offering much more than the usual slow-mo 3-D shoot-outs and zombie hordes, there's a weird aircraft carrier finale involving monsters and freezer tubes; a hundred Alice clone attack on a Japanese corporation; a crash landing on a roof reminiscent of Escape from New York; cool trilobite-style gem-studded mind control devices; a gigantic axe-wielding monster, and detailed attention to continuing human story lines from the past films. It all adds up to the best entry in the series, not sure if it's still based on the video game by this point but if so, must be some game! I'll stick with the films, though, my wrists can't take too much excitement, too many years typing this shiite, and before that, Atari, and before that DOS programs for the TI-94A.

Speaking of age, after eight years of playing Alice for husband Anderson, and having born unto him a child, Milla actually looks substantially older and wearier than she did in the previous entry. Less and less are the CGI airbrushes able to disguise her slightly curled down nose, weakening chin, crow's feet. I mean this only as a high compliment. The younger girls here are airbrushed to near Maxim levels as part of Umbrella-Disney Corps continued process of filling in the Uncanny Valley with a billion CGI-make-up smoothings.

Despite wildly uneven, even cheap CGI and a dim grungy look (CGI is always easier when you don't have to worry about shadows or contrast), I give Afterlife high marks because it seems at times made by a John Carpenter fan, with a solid stretch of the action--from Alice's crashy rooftop landing onwards; low-key, naturalistic acting with Ali Larter, Boris Kodjoe, and Kacey Clarke to the from the ominous simplicity of some parts of the score to the idea of trying to escape from both a prison and a city rolled into one place: San Francisco. At one point I swear I could hear Kurt Russell hissing "Maggie, he's dead, come on."

BY NOW, 2010, the 'under siege' zombie narrative, with a ragtag dwindling group of survivors dealing with an external threat, was an inescapable cliche within the genre of horror, with the ultimate deadly serious and self-important Walking Dead series being the official last nail in the empty coffin. The arc of banding together with fellow survivors after the apocalypse is comforting to fantasy-retreated loners, of course, the types who watch these films over and over, and if Anderson doesn't quite get to the deadpan layered satirics of Verhoeven's Starship Troopers or basic rules of film (as opposed to PlayStation) at least he's really run with the whole insidious corporation angle until it hums almost meta. If you think I'm off the mark here, see if you can get a few minutes into Ultraviolet and Afterlife will seem like Citizen Kane.

Resident Evil - Retribution 

(2012) ***1/2

As with all the installments, RETRIBUTION continues immediately where it left off from the first, backwards in slow motion across the under-attack aircraft carrier until Alice wakes up from falling overboard and into a suburban idyll mirroring the one at the start of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. Herein Alice is married to Oded Ferhr and they have a deaf child who Milla must hide from the invading undead--seemingly on a loop--until she slowly realizes it's all part of a weird sprawling simulation-lab underwater lair. Explaining too much of the plot loosens it's 'anything can happen in billionaire corporate black box research, cos' vibe so I'll say no more except to recommend you see it with headphones blaring, at night with the lights off, on a big home screen, without your judgmental friends or lovers around, who are bound to snicker at the terrible video game upgrade exposition ("your mission: collect all the pink circles and escape to the surface--good luck!").

The story line manages the return of all Alice's allies and other avatars from past films: Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez and the always vaguely familiar Boris Kodjoe, not to mention the bad guy from the previous film is now on Alice's side and sends super spy Ada Wong (Binging Li) to her rescue. There are new monsters and old and I appreciate that Anderson has the good taste to make the simulations real, rather than just some Matrix or Sucker Punch bit of nullification and as with the third the idea of all the dead Alices from past 'simulations' adds an eerie metatextual edge, positing the viewer as just as much the evil Umbrella, bringing suffering Alice avatars into the world (3 for a quarter?) to vent your pent-up teen angst through. Milla seems game for these new roles within roles, though I'm not crazy about the leather bustle. Is Anderson abusing her like Welles did Hayworth for some imagined transgression? It just doesn't look comfortable, or particularly practical unless, like the western gunfighters did, you use belt holsters.

A bit like the Beckinsale-Wiseman Underworld series, there's a sense that the married director-star filmmakers are like hey, whatever we do the critics are gonna hate it but the fans are gonna see it over and over - so let's please the fans, layer it with detail only multiple viewings will bring out, and not worry about pleasing the bored second stringer critics, already resentful they had to see this Friday afternoon in the multiplex (as I had to) instead of in a press screening (which films like this never give, smartly).

Thus it is perhaps that filmmakers like W.S. Anderson, who began as tired hacks with a formulaic video game-based franchise, become, in a sense, slowly improved, along with the digital technology they use, through a decade of experience, benefitting from the rare opportunity of getting to work again and again with their same people, needing to find new things to do to keep their fanbase intere$ted. And I love that the big final battle is almost all women on both sides, and yet it never feels like some sexy catfight but a genuine dangerous showdown. Keep up the good work, ladies!

Milla's done other stuff, some of which I've written about:

The Fourth Kind (2009)

*

Milla gets to make grave diagnoses.... Resident Evil's Alice has filled her with holy power so she can say, "Something is going on, there's something strange going on in Nome" and have it ring with menace, or "conversion phenomena is something not a lot of people understand," implying she does! She understands less as time goes on, but is still miles ahead of the spooked and reactionary sheriff... or is she? A tense stand-off and a violent knife murder seemed shuffled in to keep you from nodding off and Milla's blamed for everything! Milla's haunted eyes are beautifully lit, so we can contemplate her hybrid status as we go along, and realize yes, Virginia, aliens are among us, and some of them are very, very adorable." (full piece here)

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

***1/2

I loved PERFECT GETAWAY, but my expectations were rock bottom as I think I was confusing it with reviews I'd read of TURISTAS! (more)

Faces in the Crowd (2011)

***

Milla witnesses a murder from the infamous 'melancholy slasher,' gets knocked out, and wakes up with face blindness; her husband is soon being played by an array of different actors, changing with each shot; her clique of cool girl friends don't change much (and one of them,Valentina Vargas, steals all her scenes as a lady so badass she says of one night stands: "when you wake up and don't know for a minute where you are or who is sleeping next to you - I live for that!") but half the time Milla doesn't even see herself in the mirror, and when you're as hot as Milla that's tragic, but even scarier is that if the murderer came into her house and said he was her husband she wouldn't even know he wasn't. And Milla expertly evokes that horror, showing the end result of a life in films that has not been joyous. She's fought and dealt with horrors for quite awhile. She's scrappy, but by now hasn't she paid her dues? Dear God, please give your favorite avatar a nice warm rom-com break, and a chance at another album.


And if you do nod lissen... den to hell mit you!