Best of 2014 (Movies and TV)

Here's the future I read in the blood spatter from my Herculean hacks at the digital hydra of 2014 film-TV-video: even the most lovable pop culture icons--the ones with whom I spent some considerable time in childhood (listening to my parent's LPs of "I started out as a child" and "Why is there Air" over and over)--can turn out to be monsters, and the low pit of the stomach sense of childhood being whisked away by obsequious demons must be soul-crushing at a high enough decibel; and that a few wily filmmakers can shake the world just by depicting worldshakers getting comedically killed, and that the amok digital technology curve we're headed for involves software-direct-to-brain connections--the getting rid of screens and earbuds altogether by installing them through the third eye--and we should be very careful about that and maybe not even go there.

In short, the year in entertainment seems to have melted into a lump of digital coal these last few months, it has seen my America scrambling for contextualization, hoping to right our virtual axis before we cave in the core of the world culture simulacrum. We are the world, through Seth Rogen. Long may his dick jokes reign.

But as for the other thing, the slow pall of realizing that maybe David Icke and the hysteric Satanic panickers who sank my faith in humanity during the slasher 80s and the anti-porn crusaders were right all along, it's to Disney's dark, brooding, strange masterpiece MALEFICENT I turn. I has import and dark beauty priapic critics missed, perhaps because the film came out before the Cosby thing broke, so they weren't ready to realize how well the film mythically situates the perils of trusting the Prince Charming garments of our childhood friends not to hide slimy toad intent. Trouble is there's no good men left in the family unit to turn to--dad's been left alone to die in the Disney world bathroom and the inhumane experiments of industrial science on chimps shall haunt us for a Triassic age as traumatized apes deliver unprovoked violence (or just the threat of it) to change the world into the vile place we made them see it is; and the goodness in our hearts will have to triumph again and again just to stay afloat in the bullshit sea of godless despair, and the cowardice we exhibit today will kill us tomorrow, but constant courage is hard when the BLACK MIRROR shows more and more of our decomposing Dorian Gray visage.

from top:UNDER THE SKIN, THE BABBADOOK, BLACK MIRROR

MAYBE If we can fall in love with humankind and not worry about the approaching cliff--be like Scrooge Redux, combat strangling with soft cheek caresses, challenge bogeymen with tiger-sized ferocity tempered by love and forgiveness, and keep the bogey in the basement and give him a bowl of worms at lunchtime--then maybe 2015 will open the door to Humanity Mach 2.

BUT we're still growing in population, it's doubled since the last time we worried about it. We've become the kind of space parasite we routinely defend against in sci fi blockbusters, and Matt McConaughey's heading the swarm to the next host planet while SNOWPIERCER and NOAH realize that pulling the plug on humanity altogether may just be the most heroic thing we can do, our gift to the cosmos and the inbred animals from that ark. OBVIOUS CHILD even dared wage comedy in the face of abortion, without being crude, didactic or mean-spirited --a major first. And for the badass superstar East Village bitches in BROAD CITY, and in the post-digital terror in BLACK MIRROR, and the beyond-the-pale metatextuality of TOO MANY COOKS, and ERIC ANDRE show, it's business as usual for the apocalypse of televisual memory, nostalgia and spinoffs like ever-evolving tentacles through the horror film ether. We may be heading into a black post-modern melt-down abyss, but we're doing it together, goddamn it, so be true to your friends even if they're trees.

Now if we could only get rid of the bad people... but they're everywhere, they're inside our systems, and our basements, and our childhood nostalgia vats, fermenting. Killing them only makes you one of them, and they're part of you already. Only through tiger fierceness and unconditonal love enough to embrace even the foulest of our hidden inner lepers will we at least be able to... get our wings back and/or watch MANHATTAN again. But is there any fairy paradise un-parking lot paved left to fly to? Will there ever be a rainbow? Well fly there one day... either way... sweet Lucifer Ball. The flames are there for your protection. And please mind the receptacles on your way out.

1. MALEFICENT
Dir. Robert Stromberg

Critics said it was too dark, Jolie was stiff, and it was too much like WICKED, as if two feminist revision / witch character redemption tales in the same century would topple them from their papers' lofty mastheads. Maybe they're right. Toppling has already begun. And all the while, WICKED has been around, it's been contained up in mid-town: no film version, so what in Sam Hill are they waiting for? Meanwhile, if you dare to find it / look to the western skies and see MALEFICENT, a great Xmas present to the girl who's just turned too old for FROZEN, and needs a myth subverting the patriarchally-instilled importance of a handsome prince in the heroine's maturation. It's a complex work of psyche building that can also stand proudly next to Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" on the shelf labeled "Feminist psychoanalytical myth re-balancing of the patriarchally-endorsed brutality towards womankind through the recapturing of her chthonic power" Yeah, I said it!

Scripted with great sensitivity and Jungian Girls who Run with the Wolves-ish archetypal revisionist awareness by Linda Woolverton, Jolie's not quite back at her GIRL INTERRUPTED levels of wild, but she's at least got the regal bearing, razor blade cheekbones, joyless laugh and a peerless sense of wry poise down pat. I know a girl or two just like her in AA and maybe they're cold for similar reasons. What's more important, maybe this film can heal her. For young girls and children have at last been given a mythic contextualization of that most odious crime, the date rape. One doesn't realize the extent of it as a problem of female maturity today (or any day presumably, just kept quieter before, to all our detriment) until we see it added into the mythic iconography of Disney.

And from there, the healing: Elle Fanning is a great snaggle-toothed princess, like a combination Drew Barrymore now and Dakota before, and Juno Temple is a welcome face as the younger of the three good fairy godmothers. In short, it's potent stuff, alchemically healing as a caustic salve that brought up from deep into the murky chthonic of a growing girl's true poltergeist power. With art direction that can stand proudly next to the Pre-Raphaelite work of Edward Burne-Jones, J.W. Waterhouse, Michael Parkes, Maxfield Parrish, and William Blake, Maleficent's fairy kingdom pulses and writhes. Trees grow and change at an accelerated rate; warriors of stone and tree root rise up from the ground on command; beings small and large fly and shimmer at night in ways Max Reinhardt would have been jealous of in his 1935 production of MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. And this time there's not a single Mickey Rooney to queer the deal.

2. THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS

(L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps)

Dir. Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani

Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani, cinema's first and only mixed gender / race / nationality writing-directing couple have been setting my head on fire ever since their 2009 feature debut AMER. I was so blown away by their unique mix of modernist experimental and post-modern 70s Italian horror narrative, especially as they're not alone in finding a creative wellspring in the updating and abstracting and melding of classic Argento, Morricone, and Antonioni (like Peter Strickland), dubbed from hereon out by the spirits deep in this blog, the Darionioni Nuovo. Argento may not have made a decent film since the mid 90s, but Forlani and Cattet have taken his blazing primary color and straight razor iconography and shattered it into a million psychosexual grim Freudian mind-meld slivers. Granted their looping-loopy style will no doubt prove alienating after about twenty minutes to people who don't know SUSPIRIA and INFERNO like the black of their gloves, and who don't swoon at gorgeous ironwork mazes of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance. But even those of us swooning over the ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance might need a break halfway through.

The plot concerns Dan (Klaus Tange), a very French middle-aged executive who returns home to his very cool apartment after a long business trip to find his wife missing and only a series of bizarre clues as to where she disappeared to. Apparently she's either dead or in bed with some sadistic lesbian lover somewhere inside the massive byzantine, super strange building. As we gawk in awe and wonder what parts of this amazing edifice are sets and which actual building interiors, we-- irregardless of the sensual dangers behind every wall--long to move in forever. As strange clues are whispered through vents; elderly neighbors relate haunting story flashbacks that don't ever return to the present; eyes peer through ceiling holes and vice versa, a gendarme detective drops to help Dan knock on doors but no one he's met before is the same person who answers this time so of course Dan looks guiltier than ever.

Going up to the roof for a cigarette Dan meets Barbara (Anna D'Annunzio) and we just know he's found some dark dangerous anima void, the type of girl a man meets only in rare and strange dreams where she hides or waits within rooms within locked rooms and only by sheerest chance do we ever actually meet her face-to-face. She's so hot yet dangerous that death and desire, agony and ecstasy orbit and merge into her aura as time stands whirlpool maelstrom still - she could be the evil daughter of those witches in the Three Mothers Trilogy. How she manages to convey this with little more than a black satin shirt, open collar and long dark hair, dark red lipstick is beyond me, but just meeting her causes a blood chilling sensation in both Dan and the viewer that's like a razor blade dipped in ice water before being run down our backs. A sublime and terrifying anima, we get the feeling that we'll never find her again, or escape her bedroom vortex if we do, except on her own mutilating terms. She may be the one who sliced up our wife (presuming she's dead) and going to bed with her will be a fatal mistake we'd be a fool not to make. Harrowing enough to make Hellraiser's Pinhead reach for his safe word, this harbinger of slashing, glass-eating, and multicolored gem fingernail gashing, is so vividly photographed that sweet pain and unbearable pleasure, intoxicating agony, nonexistent time blow your brains back in right onscreen like a reverse R. Bud Dwyer.

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LAS BRUJAS DE ZAGGARAMURDI 

(AKA Witching and Bitching)

Dir Alex de la Iglesia

Speaking of crazy witches, over in the modern Spain the gender war seems lost to the women, and it's about time.  If that sounds sexist than you've clearly never been married to or dated a Spanish-speaking mujer, como yo. If you have, then you'll roar with delight over this film, in which, far from the dubious victory run by Burton in TAMING OF THE SHREW or the bloody draw in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, we have something far more subversive and strange. Alex de la Iglesias directs with lots of rapid cut multi-camera editing like Romero uses in DAWN OF THE DEAD, so if you can handle subtitles or speak fluent Spanish, just hold on tight, and roll with it, at least until the gigantic strutting... thing... shows up. And forgive the film its stupid American title, WITCHING AND BITCHING. I've given it the far better name in my head, BITCHES' SABBATH. (my full lavish praise here).

4. SNOWPIERCER
Dir. Bong Joon-Ho

Joon Bong Ho's film is technically from 2013, but what are you going to do? It didn't really come into any kind of theatrical release here until recently - and is currently on Netflix streaming. But it's a great work of existential train class warfare druggy social critique. You can tell Ho's a fan of RUNAWAY TRAIN and every other damned train movie worth a damn. The film's a fucking work of genius. Who cares!! Fuck you!

5. OBVIOUS CHILD

Written and Directed by Gillain Robespierre 

The first great abortion comedy, OBVIOUS CHILD is hilarious down to its fertile core. SNL alum Jenny Slate stars as struggling Williamsburg hipster comic Donna who "would like an abortion, please," and respectfully declines hearing the other options from the Planned Parenthood counselor. She likes the guy she met on a one-night stand, Max (Jake Lacy, from THE OFFICE), who was too drunk to get the condom on, but not enough to keep the baby, or even tell him, especially since he might be a closet Christian. Credit a beautiful script by director Gillain Robespierre (based on her short film of the same name) that we never doubt Donna's sensitivity to her situation, even as the jokes fly furious. We can respect that her mind is made up and that she's smart and has considered her options without needing to hear them from a pro-life zealot and is neither martyr nor lost soul, checking her own tendency to leaven her inner tension to convey she's aware of the gravity of the situation, yet never presuming that tension is somehow 'valid' because of the surrounding controversy. There's such a perfect flow between Slate and the material it's hard to believe it's all not happening in the moment, with special attention to the way people actually talk --not 'normal' people, the kind of banal life-affirming doltishness Hollywood jadedly associates with the 'true America'--but real young Williamsburg or Greenpoint-dweller college-educated witty individuals. I've seen this kind great naturalistic flow only with the best 'ensemble' female comedy teams--Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph in BRIDESMAIDS (2007); Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in BROAD CITY--women who've done enough improv and rehearsal to make their characters breathe and roll rather than submitting to some half-assed plot twists thrust on them by some clueless male or self-hating female screenwriter. (more)

6. DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Dir. Matt Reeves

It's not quite the howl of freedom for oppressed primates that the original was, more a ballad about what's good in tribal living vs. bad, the way one act of violence ricochets forever with ever-increasing retaliations--that fear makes sure we're never more than a swing state away from dystopia --unless some kind of forgiveness is learned, and the painful idea that the animal kingdom may inherit our violent species-ist paranoia, that the inhumane medical experiments on primates will have dire and far-reaching consequences to our collective karma. In short, it must be hard to work in a slaughterhouse all day unless you're a Conservative Republican. How else do you live with your crimes--the ones needed just to survive--without the ability to become a sociopath as needed? And of course, Andy Serkis is still our new century's technological groundbreaker. He is to motion capture technology what Sinatra was to the condenser microphone, what Louis Armstrong was to small combo jazz-- its full expression beyond what we thought possible in a dawning medium. Serkis' Caesar here is so human as to be recognizably animal, and--like it does for Kim Jong Il--the goofy face of James Franco projected on a screen has uncanny power for him. Serkis' Caesar elevates both species just as the factual Kim Jong denigrates just ours --either way, el Franco is there.

7. IS THE MAN WHO IS TALL HAPPY?
Dir. Michel Gondry

Noam Chomsky + magic markers + Michel Gondry = Magic. Chomsky delves into the roots of language, how our entire unconscious is structured by basic rules of grammatical structure (or vice versa), and the way the symbolic register coheres between the real and imaginary like both the greatest and worst thing that can possibly happen to not just interpersonal communication but the formation of the human thought process, from neuron to mental image, infancy through old age, in a flash of a neuron, and all while Gondry weaves hand-drawn magic marker miracles illustrating everything far more perfectly than any lone still image or real life recreation ever could --  even when, as a freely admits, he's getting it wrong. Daring geniuses with fathomless limits of benevolent creative compassion, man.

8. A FIELD IN ENGLAND

Dir. Ben Wheatley

Great as the existential Sartre-Godot-Aristophanes-style robust gallows humor is, and the weird mystical angles with ropes into the alternate realities, etc., the peak aspect comes from a unique recreation of a ground zero time-distilled psilocybin freak-out wherein--buzzing and soaring in and around its droning center--the score sirens out across a series of overlapping strobes and mirror splitting. And you might say yeah yeah, that mirror effect hasn't been fresh since Led Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same, (I even used it in Queen of Disks) but you're wrong! Shit is fresh! And the strobe cutting is so seizure-inducing it comes with a warning label, but 'tis no stoner fucking about but a calculated specific effect. Wheatley and Amy Jump, who co-edited the film, alternate split second imagery until new shapes emerge that breathe and pulse. On one hand it's nothing too different than what one might shoot with their friends on mushrooms in the graveyard as I once did (and Syd Barrett before me) there's no unusual sight or diegetic sound (I was thinking for sure they'd switch film stock to color for the tripping parts, ala Wizard of Oz or Jose Marin's Awakening of the Beast) but the strobing overlapping images create a truly psychedelic effect, the two or more images cohering into one buzzing throbbing molecular NOW waiting for us all just outside the veil, ala William Blake or the old school alchemist woodcuts. And the thin fiberoptic line between waking life and the collective archetypal unconscious is frayed for a moment rare, and the black hole sun overlap between waking and dreaming is exposed afresh, and the union of birth and death, past and future, real and unreal, speed and stillness up our perceptions fast enough that death's hidden-from-the-sober-living flag unfurls for all three of your agog eyes and the psychedelic peak across linear time's usually uncrossable river is at last crossed. And when one returns to the sane bank of sanity, one is a renewed, a third eye Popeye coming back from the dead and now completely made of atomic spinach. (More)

9.a. THE LEGO MOVIE

Dir. Phil Lord

It's hard not to swoon and get chills from the cumulative emotional effect of this well-thought out barrage of sensory stimuli. And I'm grateful for its message about letting your freak flag raft inflate and never buy Lego sets that come with instructions and guides to how to build cities, because it will make your dad into a control freak. It might dampen sales of such sets, but it's a lesson needs teaching, because with cell phones it's never been so easy to hover. Hopefully helicopter parents who see this with their kids can maybe see the error of their ways with the kids right in the same room, and that's golden. Though once again, Hollywood's idea of the 'average guy' hero is painfully narrow --the blankest and naivest of nerds.

9 ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW

Dir. Randy Moore

Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all work wondrously ambiguous in this undersong testament to the madness and derangement that results when immersed too deeply in Disney's subversive archetypal psychology-accessing 'scape, where mind and fantasy land are one, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details--and as with Antonioni, the realization there are details that aren't missing is the post-modern frisson. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but I'm guessing it's like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, and eventually declaring "I am the Lizard Queen." And little moments like the pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards them and away at the same time until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable and Clift rodeo lassos. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive glamorous witch costumes, "plushies," and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park every day it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off under their noses, but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, an--aside from a few missteps, such as a scatologically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped)--it's pretty damned artsy. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen of park footage ring with an absurdist post-modern unease (MORE)

10. a-c: The Marvelverse:

CAPT. AMERICA- THE WINTER SOLDIER
Dir. Anthony and Joe Russo

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
Dir. James Gunn
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
Dir. Bryan Singer

GUARDIANS left me all verklempt with the giddy boy rapture I felt watching STAR WARS at some North Carolina theater, months before anyone else knew about it; this time I was the very last to know how Chris Pratt is a genius in the lead, as he fits the perfect cool older brother mode, what Han Solo was to us 70s kids, sparing us the icky Luke looking at horizons and aww shucking with Uncle Ben business and getting right to the good stuff. Story-wise it's nothing new - but neither was STAR WARS. It's mythic so doesn't need to be; just savor the nonstop feast of imagination and great cut-through-the-crap dialogue Marvel is by now bracingly good at.

(From Dystopian Parables for the Masses:) In WINTER... the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is akin to when rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut, too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense. When what you didn't see coming comes not on the horizon ahead of you but behind you, next to, within, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism and disarmed, isolated, and surrounded, then the NSA takes off its mask and the Sixth Reich Paperclip draconian totalitarian future-present is right there, and has been, in disguise all this time, and the Homeland Security emblem turns out to be a scrambled up swastika just waiting to re-form, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us (Muslims the Homeland Security/Nazis themselves funded). We chased the messenger Snowden who tried to tell us what was happening. God help us, we activated SKYNET. General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids.

But the best... X-MEN. Now that Bryan Singer's returned, there's no super hero series ever been better. With the anti-mutant hate and fear making an ideal modern parable for everything from homosexuality to drug abuse, and bolstered immeasurably by the powerhouse acting and great love-hate relationship between Fassbender and McAvoy, it's not only knock your socks off badass fun, it's potent. Not in a tired IRON MAN 3 Pepper belittling of manly nonsense way, saving the Earth as a poor excuse not to settle down and blah blah but in a truly understanding the guts it takes to stop drinking or using heroin, or coming out of the closet, asking for help when your gay, abused, or suicidally depressed kind of way. In addition, it has an ingenious fusing of time travel, superhero myths and good writing / great acting that make it in a class by itself. The worst thing about it is Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique (maybe she's overextended?). With her cross-eyed yellow stare and terrible bottle "red" hair (the type of rust color so inevitable amidst the bitter divorcees of the UES) she's a slight on the great and underrated Rebecca Romjin's ferociously icy adult version in the original trilogy. That said, it resonates and McAvoy and Fassbender are perfect, each a master class in how to bring Shakespearean gravitas without sacrificing a drop of that old comic book zing.

11.a/b - Entre les Maenads:

UNDER THE SKIN
Dir. Jonathan Glazer

VENUS IN FUR

Dir. Roman Polanski

"Stand over there! Dominate me!" these two seemingly contradictory commands given by Polanski-esque stand-in Mattieu Amalric (the bad guy in QUANTUM OF SOLACE) to Polanski's real-life wife Emmanuelle Seigner in VENUS. Her character veers from begging him for the lead role while dripping wet and disheveled for a last ditch audition as he's packing his script notes to go home--to having him beg her to stay while she badmouths the infantile myopia at the heart of his beloved Sacher Masoch source text. From this beginning, Polanski proves once again he's the one true inheritor of the von Sternberg-Bunuel dog collar. To prove it, she even starts talking in fake German saying she's adding some Dietrich to her role. As a Woman who seems too educated on the intricacies of Masoch's text to be just a part-time temp / call girl / actress threatening to call actor's equity one minute and taking his money and passport the next while he becomes more and more dependent on her brazen gleaming energy, Seigner runs with her part (she's also several inches taller --something that never seems to faze the diminutive Polanski with his giant brides).

 (From Antichrist in Translation:) "Under the Skin tries hard to puncture some hidden and vital vein in our culture, the way any sense of a dislocated universal all-seeing perception dissolves in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere; Scarlett drives slowly trying to lure into her SUV figures of hunched over men, pummeling their way on foot through the darkness, shopping or working long after normal people go to sleep, and Scotland especially seems as abandoned by God as the most lifeless corner of the galaxy...

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12. a/b -When Good Moms Go Bad
THE BABADOOK
Written and Directed by Jennifer Kent
OCULUS
Dir. Mike Flannagan

There's a special nightmare sense of forlorn abandonment when moms turn evil, turning the once-secure house into something foreboding and sinister. In both these films, children must be very very brave as their parents are possessed, and--among other things--block all access to the outside world, to sane rational adults who might help. In other words, the Overlook is anywhere a parent is susceptible to the madness of isolation. If dad's alive and regularly gets out of the house to work, maybe reality will have a fighting chance. But if he's dead or gone or works from home, the monsters get him early on. All it takes--as we learn on THE HAUNTING TV show--is for the kid's screaming about bogeyman under the bed to rob him of a few nights sleep and he becomes the very bogeyman they fear.

In OCULUS, dad spends long hours of the night in his front room office with a strange antique mirror and gradually it makes him go very very bad. And mom's not far behind. The film brilliantly collapses flashbacks from childhood and current paranormal investigations, so eventually both sides see each other from beyond the pale. (See full review).

In BABADOOK, the widowed mom of a precocious and possibly deranged boy must resist a dark energy that's overtaken her (spurred by a lack of sleep that's due largely to the kid's constant barging in - which also prevents her from 'ahem' - due to a monster under the bed and in the closet). I'm not sure it's as great as some critics are saying, nor UNDER THE SKIN either --but if I hadn't read all this gorgeous advance press maybe my expectations would have been sufficiently lowered, as they were for the magnificent OCULUS. What's great about BABADOOK is the tight attention to Jungian fairy tale detail. We see all the time how too much surface goodness gives rise to erupting gushers of crude oil evil, never about the vice versa. (full review)
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TELEVISION

With whole series dropped all at once, expressly for "binge viewing" - it's clear more than ever that thanks to cable and Netflix, the line between TV and cinema are quickly blurring beyond all recognition. So on that note, for the first time on Acidemic, the best-of the year for TV:

 1. TOO MANY COOKS

Adult Swim - Cartoon Network

No amount of David Lynch or Eric Andre can compare with or prepare you for TOO MANY COOKS, the recent 12 minute long informercial on Cartoon Network. No matter where you think this bizarrity can go, it goes far farther than a fur-forn farddio brand of beyond the black rainbow farrity, beyond even the swords of photo bomb "Bob" Dobbes / giallo and Fun with Real Audio What on Was the Britney old Thinking SNL. See it and understand the cryptic proclamations of the pie Von Trier, and understand, at last, how the need to break free from our programming is so intrinsic to our identity as to be inseparable from the programming itself. It's enough to make lesser actors go mad but that's enlightenment: the acceptance of one's eternal actor darkness. Heaven for an actor is just the Hell of a sitcom cycle of endless retooling fully surrendered to, letting your ego construct dissolve as the infernal flames lick your soul clean for sweeps week, award season, reruns, royalties, stalker fans, Buddhist hell, sweet sweet royalties and backforth... backatcha... and baller. (see it here) (royalties)

2. BLACK MIRROR

BBC Channel 4

... as far as nightmare dystopian parables, BLACK MIRROR is twenty years ahead of its closest neighbors and that it's on Netflix streaming is just too perfect as far as metatextuality. Watch and be warned, though: This show questions the very presence of media in your life in ways I know I, personally, wasn't quite ready for. The show has left a burnished patina of dread to my life; the usual amniotic safety of the widescreen HD image is no longer so reassuring. There's no magic at work, no hallucinations, no monsters in BLACK MIRROR - just sci fi-tinged (but believable as a real possibility) future dystopia parables about where the light speed advancements in digital media and advertising saturation are hurtling us, and maybe it's already too late to change. Maybe all those contracts we clicked 'I accept' on have quietly stripped us of 'real' self, like watching a commercial for the swinging pendulum from the couch-strapped pit, as thousands of avatars cheer from nearby screens, or the razor coming at your eye in a Dali or Fulci film right as you leave the last few scraps of 'reality' behind and enter the no-exit image, trapped in a nightmare feedback loop. It's a feeling I had forgotten about, safe in my mediated womb, a feeling I know only from the few times I took way way too much acid back in the 80s. But this show's got my mediated womb all cased out and they cut right in... . (MORE)

3. BROAD CITY

Comedy Central

These girls are so great I wish they didn't feel the need to add this doofus pantless roomate (not even a roommate, a freeloader more or less) who eats all their food. It's basic NYC 101 learning how to get rid of dipshits like this, and these girls aren't naive simpletons like the ones in FRANCES HA or JUNO, so what the fuck? I've kicked a fair share of crashers out of my apartments and houses since I moved out from my parents in 1985, and so has my roommate, who once even threw Andy Dick out. Had to eject him out of the building. But do it he did. It's a rite of NYC passage to evict the mooch and the dork and the wally. That aside the show is priceless. How rare to see smart as whips, hard-partying girls not afraid to get belligerent or violent in the name of posterity. Check out their holiday guide where they among other things start an orgy, smoke weed in the bathroom and hurl molotov cocktails. 

4. Kyle Mooney's "Wing" and "Bad Boys" short clips on SNL
NBC

It's a testament to the power of their post-modern genius that I have almost no frame of reference for the 90s TGIF line-up (shows like STEP BY STEP, FULL HOUSE, FAMILY MATTERs, etc.) Kyle Mooney and Co. are presumably satirizing here. Awkward and bizarre, they speak to the weird overreactions to small things; in my day it was WHAT'S HAPPENING? and the bootleg taping a Doobie Brothers concert, here it's throwing someone else's ball back and forth without permission from its owner or the gay come-ons attached with getting the last wing. Either way the atonal strangeness, on-point guitar lick scene change cues, completely random cutaways, deadpan monotone acting and keyed-up studio audience laugh track all combine to make these small masterpieces of post-modern deadpan hilarity. Overall, this season's SNL was very uneven (and no end in sight to the mealy Jost) but there were two shining lights: the larger-than-life wild woman energy of Leslie Jones, and the amazing Kyle Mooney (see here for his brilliant calling card, "smoking")

5. THE ERIC ANDRE SHOW

Adult Swim - Cartoon Network

I'm a big fan of deconstruction mixed with literal destruction, especially when harnessed to genuine subversive wit and not just gross-outs and double entendres. I can't literally can't stomach TIM AND ERIC, for example, but I like that both Andre and co-host Hannibal Buress are black yet race never really factors into the show - which is more about bizarro mondo video moments of near Subgenius-abstraction, i.e. they don't need their blackness. Instead they have a bemused band, sullen Mexican day laborer producer, and strange gags, including guests that turn out to be deranged impersonators, rappers, and confused B-listers. It's short, too.

6.a. THE LATE LATE SHOW

CBS

6.b. THE COLBERT REPORT (w/Stephen Colbert)

Comedy Central

Goodbye you beautiful bastards' current incarnations.

7. the Lucas Bros. Moving Co. (Hi-Def Animation)

Fox

They're like the Brooklyn stoner version of the Olsen twins. 

8. DRUNK HISTORY

Comedy Central

Here are important or at least interesting moments in history, generally not taught in school, that need to be learned. Some of our historian drunks don't seem to take to the format as well as others (it probably helps to lay down a good bed first) but the booze works to short circuit any prosaic meandering while adding the oomph of revelry and truth, and the idea of getting an all-star cast to enact and lip sync the drunkenly related narrative is genius and the overall effect makes it the most tangible and accessible of all history shows, ever. Originally a Funny or Die video series, I hope it breeds similar education-subversion hybrids. Drugs and alcohol have a long history of being associated with idiocy, burn-outs, the unemployed and mean-- this show proves they can be associated with edshacation too.

9. HOMELAND - season 4

Showtime

I wanted to avoid continuing series like MAD MEN but HOMELAND is now free of Brody and his nagging family--and thus is barely even the same show. Carrie's tenuous sanity is accepted as a reasonable risk for her bravery and brilliance and by setting it Islamabad, involving a Pakistani government more friendly to the Taliban than they publicly admit, the show gamely gives us a CIA that starts out more or less the bad guys, with Carrie known as 'the Drone Queen' for her merciless bombing from the air of Taliban figures -but nothing is as it seems and it all seems to reach a peak with a storming of the US Embassy. Carrie even has a similarly brilliant counterespionage spy lady foe, and there are tons of explosions, Duck Phillips, a possible friendly Pakistani ally, a hostage exchange, escapes, and other riveting stuff, the highlight being a deranged Carrie freaking out on psychedelic-spiked meds while loose in the Islamabad streets.

10.  FROM DUSK TIL DAWN - season 1

El Rey Network

The Robert Rodriguez-backed new cable channel El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) premiered with the From Dusk til Dawn series, a ten episode-long retelling/elaboration of the RR-QT 1999 film, adding the full measure of hallucinations and replacing Tarantino in the part of psycho brother Richie Gecko with a much more mesmerizing lad named Zane Holz. As Richie's brother and fellow bank robber Seth, D.J. Cotrana diffuses Clooney's terminal charm with hothead overreactions, so now the two feel like real brothers who actually grew up together, rather than the charismatically mismatched Quentin and Clooney. And the queen Mayan reptilian hottie Santanico Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, fully and luxuriantly embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star (and staggering beauty) Eiza Gonzalez. T2's Robert Patrick is the disillusioned preacher, Don Johnson the Michael Parks sheriff, and a cast of handsome well-spoken Mexican-American actors with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity as an array of partiers, bikers, tourists, hostages, and vampires. The ten part series all occurs over the course of one 24-hour period, from dusk to dawn more or less, which slows things way down with that old tick-tockality and a novelistic attention to detail. And I love any movie or series that can go all night.  (MORE)

CinemArchetype 19: The Holy Madman

Okay, here is where it gets tricky. This is the last stop. This is when you finally, after that long night before the dawn, surrender your last vestige of self-centered fear and open like a full flower before the void, trusting the open arms to God to appear and warm thee, arms open to embrace even death and even your enemies and even your own twisted self. Viola! No matter how zombie-rotten you think you've grown all those decades in the dank predator basement soil of your own lacerating wit and delusions you are now as blooming with radiant joy as if you never were a moment without much hydroponics and greenhouse sunshine. Every last tendril is unfurled and unafraid, you bask radiant in the light of -----, whoops, what am I allowed to say? What can I say that won't turn off my reader? Some of my readers will wince if I say God, Lord, Jesus, others will wince if I say anything else--Buddha, Allah, Ganesha, Quetzlocatl, Kali, Indra, Sabra, Jah, Vishnu, Carmine, the door-knob--they'll say those are the wrong names and they have to burn you at the stake or on the cross or hang you from a tree to protect His holy name, but we all know, even they know, those people, the fearful of God, are on the way out. They cannot stand against the love tide. The love tide washes out the hateful fire. The burning Kundalni serpent of awakening swallows and digests the sexual-violence-promoting reptiles of intolerance and false profits. All you have to do to help is love them both without limit. They HATE that! Inverse the Lady MacBeth ratio: appear the fiery serpent but be the flower under it. If you are a man walk tall and roar your love for God and self and truth, but know this: when you hate the person who roars less, or the same, or louder, or when you praise the hottie but stinkeye her un-stunning friend, when you split the dichotomy so that you love one thing but hate its neighbor, you've already lost god, become your own enemy via duality's ugly hear rearing. You can walk tall all you want after that, but you will fool no one. You can't escape my love for you, even then, in that sorry state. May this post bring out to you what it has brought me.

1. Robert Duvall - The Apostle (1997)
I first saw this when I was first getting sober and going to AA and it was when I first realized God was and had been watching and taking care of me all this time through the movies I watched, like a stealth bomber pilot, but the bombs were of love and acceptance dropped throughout my viewing regimen. I was too surly perhaps to dig on that fully, until that moment, or this one. But Robert Duvall did, does dig it. He gets it. He got it in Tender Mercies. He got it in The Great Santini. He got it Tennessee. He got it on the moon. He got it at the diner over steak fries. He got it at the National Air and Space Museum looking at the moon rocket. He found it inside a Mockingbird birch. He found it in the worms under the floorboards in the basements, and he found it in the sunshine through the palm trees, even the smell of napalm in the morning, even the smallest flower and the largest ocean.

But even here his character still has one or two hang-ups, including bashing the cuckold in his nest with a baseball bat and then fleeing the state. In my case it was finding some hip huggers-and-tan booth blonde Scorpio and fawning over her at the exclusion of angry others, getting high on the exclusionary glue fumes of gossip. But I broke through my inner iceberg watching Duvall break through his, sensing some magic in his his high-stepping crazy dance of love for God, and I actually stood up, while alone in my apartment, and started crying right when someone else in Duvall's congregation stood up and we kind of looked at each other across the expanse of the screen like brothers who had both landed on the delivery room floor at the exact same moment.

2. TIE - Warren Beatty as Bulworth (1998)
I never liked Warren Beatty before this movie, but after it I'm a lockstep fan. The man has balls and character. I'm not sure about whether the God part is all there but the holy madness is the same. The bro takes a hit out on himself, and suddenly with nothing to lose starts telling the truth and living in the moment and events begin to crystalize around him with stunning power. His attempts to rap about social issues may be a little douche chill-cringish but get over it! Bulworth rules! I cried like a baby.

Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1951)
There have been many Scrooges. A big favorite at the Kuersten house is the George C. Scott TVM version. But no one captures the full shamanic enlightenment moment as well as the 1951 Alastair Sim version. The ecstatic morning after the three visits, the sight of Sim's Scrooge cavorting around his bed chambers while his broken-down maid slowly grows hysterical from fear and confusion is a highlight in all holiday moviedom. Like so many movies on this list, it tends to show up on telly right when I most need it. Sim makes me believe the humbug avoidance of the pre-ghost visit, the closed-off heartedness melting with the past and present, the regret and the mortal terror that comes blazing through you when one is finally forced to behold  his own inescapable death in full bloom. And the ecstatic release of a second chance, when, as Scrooge notes "I finally know that you know nothing!" is palpable and contagious. One thing he thing at last he knows: loving and supporting the world around you is a pretty smart investment.

3.a. Burt Lancaster - Elmer Gantry (1960)
Burt Lancaster's performance here can be read a zillion ways because it's, like.... a total masterpiece of energy expenditure. Just praising the lord-- no matter how snarky about it all you may think you're being - is still enough to get you high high high, so high you forgive all your trespassers. Sure, Gantry's a hypocrite, but when he storms downtown to smash up the bars and whore houses he does so with love in his heart, and when his church burns, and everyone turns on him, he's still got the love in his heart, which is why he's willing to share the holy trinity number three with...

3.b. Gary Cooper as Sgt. York (1941)
York's a wandering through the rain with hate and confusion in his sharpshooter heart until he stumbles on a church, inside they're singing "That Old Time Religion" and he comes in and slowly (in a scene similar to one in Elmer Gantry) is 'found' through song and acceptance. He then has to wrestle with some weighty issues before trudging off to war.

Though directed by Hawks this is neither a Hawks film nor a war film, per se, which is why I didn't like it as a youth. It's a peace film. York's a hero, not for how many Germans he kills but for many he takes prisoner. A sharpshooter in war is a pretty serious weapon, especially in WWI, and if he's peaceful then maybe enemy soldiers will get lucky and just get shot in a rifle shoulder, and the foot if they try to run. There's no need to kill someone if you're a sharpshooter. Not if you got that old time religion.

Of course, America doesn't want to hear that kind of stuff now, maybe, but one day, America, one day you'll be hateful in the rain and ready for the sound of singing.

3.c. James Stewart - It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Then again, maybe America is in some way already saved. Here's Jimmy Stewart through the eye of the needle, ravaged by the greed and thwarted desires that for so long kept him trapped in the prison of Potter's Town. But Clarence gets his wings and Stewart's hard work in the community pays off, as it must, by karma's inexorable law. Asking for help is, of course, incredibly hard for those who usually don't need it. Blessed are the poor and meek and deformed for, in having to depend on others, they are compelled to either dwell on the snowy bridge of misery or come in from the cold to gratitude and harmony with one another. Everyone may groan and sigh at the thought of seeing such a 'corny' film, so traditional and typical, but no one escapes the cathartic rush of tears and communal ecstasy when this film is over.

4. María Alche as The Holy Girl (2004)
Lucretia Martel is a complex genius of warmth from Argentina. Their culture's rich heritage of tactile affection is so brilliantly captivated in her films that it may be years before she's ever given her true due, before she's ever elevated in critic's minds to the level of saint, for her inter-class multi-generational Altmanesque overlap tapestry woven with a forward momentum that makes you giddy even as you can't understand, at first, half of what is going on. It's about a girl enraptured by her newly found gift of prayer, and the sublime joy involved in forgiving everyone of their trespasses, even the pedophile who brushes up against her in the street. Of course that's the tragic, strange angle, the immense sadness of those still sick and suffering in their mistaken, harsh refusal to admit they need and crave human contact and acceptance. Martel captures it all in a Buenos Aires hotel at which the holy girl and her friend's moms both live and work as maids. The camera sneaks around like a restless nosy child, a tactile counterpoint to the actors who have a five AM flush from all their monkey grooming and the hot air of the laundry presses.

5. Harvey Keitel - Bad Lieutenant (1991)
Here's a movie that's like a long painful ladder, from heaven to hell and up it scales, naked, masturbating, empty, filled, vulnerable, angry, terrified, the mighty and fearless actor Harvey Keitel. I used to love to watch this movie high on Rocket bourbon, reefer, mushrooms, flybane, LSD, and Special K, but The Bad Lieutenant himself prefers crack, cocaine, gin, guns, and betting on a World Series between the Mets and the Dodgers. I've seen this movie a dozen times and it seems to be a different score every time. There's at least two different versions of the film, unrated and rated R, one with a lengthy and super strange scene where Harvey does some bad things in the company of two girls, and a Skooly D. track song sampled Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" without licensing, which the copyrights on sampling changed during the film's release--so only VHS tapes still have that version. But none of these changes diminish the gonzo power of seeing Jesus appear to Harvey and have him crawling around in the church shouting obscenities and crying because now he has to forgive and absolve two guys who raped a nun and stole "a holy thing." The nun forgives, and she counsels Harvey to do the same. In my virulently anti-Catholic days I didn't understand fully what it was all about, like Harvey's unnamed character I had to try every single damn other avenue, slowly wearing out my welcome at every purgatory pit stop. But sometimes all it takes is a spark and you're ready to roar right up like a burning midnight cornfield of heavenly absolution. When that happens it doesn't matter what else comes. The white light of love has touched you, has activated your pineal holy glandular third eye and now you're free.... free... free... BANG! You're dead, but too free to care.

6. Graham Faulkner and Judi Bowker as Brother Sun and Sister Moon
Graham Faulkner is fine and gorgeous as the solar brother, Saint Francis; his bright-eyed face contorts with spiritual ecstasy like Harpo Marx crossed with Sam Rockwell. As the lunar sister, Judi Bowker is a wispy knockout with such long gorgeous blond hair that for me the biggest tragedy of Christendom is when they decide to cut it all off so she can join their muddy little holy order.

That's where my Christianity draws the line. Would you pick the lilies of the field right in fullest flower just to cut the heads off?  Still, if I came across this nut Francis in the fields outside Assisi, what would I do? Probably join him; lord knows I've joined up with magnetic hippies far dirtier, and for far less noble reasons. Following your heart takes guts, and the best Christians are the ones who bow their heads to lions daily. The rest of us forget and run, and are ripped to shreds, lifetime after lifetime.

7. Maya Angelou, Tyler Perry, Cicely Tyson - Madea's Family Reunion (2006)
+ David Chapelle, Michel Gondry, everyone - David Chapelle's Block Party (2005)

If you think there's anything more beautiful than an elderly black man walking down a sunny Brooklyn street in his Sunday finery, then you dear sir or madame, are crazy. And seeing that level of beauty is one of the last stops on the heavenly choo-choo.  Will you join with me now in dropping your baggage and hopping aboard?

I think it's a truly beautiful thing that Tyler Perry's Madea has become such a success, and of course I also understand the baffled unease of the white critics who watch with jaws agape. I too would be like those confused critics if I had been assigned both these movies at my old critic job, and I will always be grateful to the editors for passing these films down to the second stringers like some unclean leper's foot that cures not just the leper, but the sinner washing it. I grew up in a time and place where on one hand everyone was open and loving and happy in our all-white comfortably middle class suburban Lansdale, PA community. But on the other hand--even the late 60s-early 70--it was a time when adults were openly racist, sexist, homophobic, and seven deadly sinful without ever thinking it was wrong, and after a bunch of cocktails it got worse, and I thought it was hilarious! I loved the permissive freedom, the easy and free human contact and I was high on that sugary fast food of group social bonding, racism and us vs. them-ism -- easy to find, cheap as hell, but leaves you hating yourself in ways it might take decades to even realize, or admit. So while some artsy white writers aren't racist but don't want to see Madea for its lack of artsiness, I wasn't one of them.

Madea's Family Reunion covers a lot of ground, it's got fart jokes and spousal abuse and this and that, but one thing it doesn't do, not for a minute, is back down from the Big Path, the full-on "love and forgiveness to all" angle. There's a stretch during the reunion when Cicely Tyson and Maya Angelou show up, and in the back yard is the old slave shack of their ancestors, and there's so much gravitas, wisdom, strength and beauty in this scene where Tyson and Angelou speak on the issues of rising up that I just lost it, and so did everyone there in the all black Union Square audience I saw it with, not in this choking back sobs quietly with kleenexes white people way, but in a powerful spiritual transformation way where we all began to breathe in unison, into one long crying one minute / laughing the next but in always outward motion that seemed to brighten the very auditorium us with some kind of multi-colored aural radiance that gradually became silvery white light. When we walked out of the theater, we walked out together. It was not in the usual way I was used to exiting a film, all hurried and quick to get to the bathroom, before the dawdlers turned the aisled into a stalled-out traffic jam. We exited as a family, our eyes met, warm and open and unafraid...

David Chapelle and Michel Gondry also created that vibe for me and my screening's audience in David Chapelle's Block Party. Chapelle's open-hearted good nature in trying to throw this free block party for his old Bed Stuy neighborhood is truly infectious, and as it unfolds the positive energy just creates its own healing space where a secretly semi-intolerant Brooklyn dwelling liberal like myself feels like he just had about six hours of massage after being in a cramped prison for 30 years. Anyway Chappelle and Gondry must have struck a chord because since then Gondry has become a kind of saint of racial unification, at least to me. I really needed it, and he gave it to me at the right time.

8. Bill Murray - Groundhog Day (1993)
The dharma flows through Harold Ramis's heavenly vehicle thanks to a script co-written with the celestial Danny Rubin. I've seen this film at many different station stops  of life, but one thing for sure, I now know, it's all true. Heaven and Hell are spread upon the bread of the earth, the crust dug deep by the knowing hog called Punxsutawney Phil. Even his name sounds Buddhist, as if filling the heart with some purple light of forgiveness and self-acceptance. Let us now consult the divine Punxsutawney Phil, for yes, in transmuting the day into night with peace and a perfectly open heart we actually do get to sleep with the celestial Andie McDowell of pure conscious light and reasoning. But that means no more meanness, Bill. But if you are just horny for the Andie McDowell action, you shall never achieve her, because it means you are caught in desire's sticky web, so all your sweetness to her means you must be sour to all rivals for her attention, and they seem to be everywhere, oh man they are here and there to the point you get jealous even of the flowers she smells, of the kid she smiles at in passing. It's as inevitable as you care to make it. But when even the most wheezing of dirty old men in your way to see her is your brother, and you stoop to help him, throwing all the candy hearts and flowers meant for her under his head for a pillow, only then shall ye finally have her. Watching the subtlety of Bill Murray's face as he slowly goes from angry to existential to resigned to bitter to horny and desperate and finally to this blissful acceptance is one of the great transcendental joys of pop culture comedy cinema.

9. Clark Gable - Strange Cargo (1940)
There's a beautiful moment in this endearingly odd and truly spiritual MGM film when the Jesus stand-in, Cambreau (Ian Hunter) lets himself be swept overboard, knowing Gable's 'saving' is imminent. That weird apocryphal savior is to Gable is what Obama's second victory was to me, the final dusting away of the last few layers of frozen cobwebs and crap stuck up in my heart chakra's blu-ray eye retina. The cracked iconography of MLK and JFK bled together back into life and there he was, better stronger, faster, the bionic MLKFJ-Ultraman. It doesn't even matter now what happens. If you've read to the end of our country and world's story, don't spoil it. Let me radiate in this one perfect moment with the power of a thousand gongs and the humility of a single hobo's tear as his beach ball drowns in a Sandy mudslide...

The look on Gable's face makes me cry every time when I watch this film, and so I've cried, now, twice. I think of it as the opposite of the look on Joe Buck's face at the end of Midnight Cowboy - when Joe realizes Ratzo is dead, and the bus is still going, and for a little while he's just sitting there in his little bus seat, guarding his bag with a look on his baby face like a little five year old kid trying to be tough on the bus to his first day of school, trying not to appear weak in case all the other kids are looking at him which of course he feels that they are. Jon Voight has the most adorable and sad little war face on in that scene, and it breaks your heart... and we all remember that first terrifying bus ride, the time we extinguished the light of love and joy out of our eyes like a lantern during an air raid black-out of bullies, jaded teachers, busy parents, none of whom noticed the loss or cared or commented. We thought that's what adulthood was. And in our matchless ignorance we drowned ourselves in 120 proof kerosine.

Voight's war face is reversed in Strange Cargo's key moment --suddenly doing the math and realizing the guy overboard is Jesus or the next best thing, because he's a man after all and what thou dost to the smallest and humblest of my creatures thou dost to me, etc., Gable's face is first hardened to the stranger Cambreau's plight as he bobs in the stormy waves, snarling to Joan Crawford, "I wouldn't go in after him if he was my own broth---" breaking off, so beautiful there in the rain when he realizes hey, that's his brother, all right - and suddenly he's five years old again, a wide-eyed pleading look of pure innocence washing over his face - like now that I found you I can't lose you, not now not ever, no matter who you are. It's part and parcel of a spiritual awakening to have this sudden newfound respect for every last life and living thing. A single beggar in the gutter is, in a flash of pink light, more precious than a dozen emperor rubies, without question, without pause.

10. Mae West as Klondike Annie (1935)
The early films of Hollywood found this a popular theme and it went on with Mae West in the very underrated Klondike Annie. I found it a very good theme to drink to, and later to get sober to--the con artist hiding out amid some religious sect, first thinking she will scam them, only to wind up getting 'trimmed' of their clutched wallets of vice and fear. Mae West starts out the main attraction of a San Francisco Chinatown brothel, singing "I'm an occidental woman / in an oriental mood / for love..." But her lover there won't let her sail with the tide so she kills him and escapes onto a steamer out of town. Or maybe she kills him, that scene / part seems to have been just shorn clear away by censors of forgetful editors. Another passenger on the ship (captained by gruff Victor McLaglen) is Sister Annie, a missionary bound for the gold rush Klondike. The two ladies become friends and though Annie doesn't drink or smoke or screw around, she doesn't preach at Mae, and that wins Mae's respect, even some interest in the good book she's reading.

Well, you can guess a goodly portion -- Annie dies, Mae takes her place at the mission while falling in love with the mountie that's got her Most Wanted poster on his wall, and all the while the hulking ex-lover McLaglen stomps around in jealous pique. West figures out what's wrong with the current mission and get it into shape, a bit like a female version of Sky Masterson packing the mission house in Guys and Dolls. One of the big leading moments is when Mae runs into an old fellow 'working girl' from back in Frisco, who's kind of incredulous Mae's been walking it like she talks it. Mae says out of the corner of her mouth, "I quit smokin' and drinkin' too" like it's a dirty secret. But she's proud of it, and so am I. Kinda.

This was labeled at the time as Mae's attempt to make peace with the Catholic Legion of Decency, but of course they didn't budge from their urge to hang her from the yard arm, good 'Christians' that they are Doesn't matter, in the end West's willingness to extend the olive branch makes her a missionary I'd follow into any position.
(see it here)

11 John Belushi and Dan Akroyd as Jake and Elwood Blues - The Blues Brothers (1980)
The boys are blessed with a sureness that allows for complete confidence, no matter how many trillions of Chicago cop cars are chasing them or Arethas are stopping their Donald Duck Dunn's and guitarists from going on their mission from God. As a kid in the 70s I was enthralled and intimidated by the Blues Brothers on TV. I had seen them first appear on SNL as a homemade musical act, with Dan Akroyd un-handcuffing his harmonica lunchbox. I contemplated the icky thumb-printed magnetism of their first album, which lurked in a box of cassettes at the King's in Lansdale.  The film starts out strong, on that unassailable mission from God, climaxing with that spectacular concert, then things got a little crazy on the way back to the kids' Chicago Catholic school. The cop cars begin to pile up to the point of insanity, and as the testosterone engines in my brain began to rev (I was 13), I felt they had cheated me by overdoing it, like teaching a kid to hate smoking by making him smoke a whole pack in front of you. You like to see cop cars crash, well we're going to crash every cop car in Chicago so you will have learned your lesson. And I didn't get the whole mission to God thing at all, not until later, much later, when I could feel it in my bones and it could make my soul tingle with the mighty blues and the healing sounds of that Aretha and that Duck Dunn and that heavenly Cab.

12. Stephane Audrane as Babette - Babette's Feast (1987)
There's still a long list to go on this one, stuff you wouldn't even think of, maybe. Maybe I wouldn't even think of it. But here's this film, on which I will leave you. I resisted seeing it for the longest time because my mom is Swedish and a Christian Scientist and never one to go all alchemical magic with food. So everyone's like oh you have to see this film oh oh and I'm like shut up man I don't like period pieces and I don't like foodie films and I certainly don't like Christian films, and then you mix them all together with wintry desolation in Norway, now I'm really out of here. I'm too cool. These girls aren't even hot, man. There's no guns. Godard said a movie is a girl with a gun, and this gots neither, just old broads and stark painterly light. But I covered it for a database, rented it, watched it, weeped hysterically, got mad at it, couldn't figure it out, wept again, finally began to get it.

Now I got it.
Thank you .... thank you... thank you.... everyone who indulged my humors or cockblocked or cuckolded or encroached uppon me or tried to get me to come out and play when I didn't want to. There wasn't a thing anyone ever did for me, in all the years of my life, that hasn't been absolutely needed to get me here, to this point, to this now. I owe you it all, all of you all of you all of you I love you all.