Hex and Taxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, no maybe about it.

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

Nearer my Templar to Thee: WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, BECKETT and THE BLIND DEAD

I never thought I'd be glad that parental over-protective hysteria is so rampant in this country, but thanks to widespread anti-Catholic demonstrations and the recently released documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN  there's finally a real answer to "Won't somebody think of the children!?" Hopefully the protests and awareness will spread amongst the uppity parents of the nation and gain force in showing up these protectors of incompetent, dangerously apathetic teachers, papal pedophiles, and other abusers and saboteurs of our children's welfare who hide behind tenure and other outdated legalities that protect the guilty and champion the mediocre.




And another thing: none of it's at all new! Let's take a look at BECKETT (1964, above), for example. Richard Burton is the jaded intellectual pal of Peter O'Toole's happy-go-lusty King Henry. Henry appoints Beckett (Burton) the archbishop of Canterbury in hopes of continuing his lascivious ways unhindered by marital rigmarole, but it all boils to a head real fast when Beckett gets all pious, giving away his fancy clothes and then protecting a pedophile priest! O'Toole wants to do right by the locals and send the priest out to be hanged, but Burton insists the priest go to the Vatican, for 'um', whatever amount of rosary-related penance the pope sees fit to assign.

Time for a quick personal anecdote: Of my 'group' from college, friends of friends who have since gone on to become doctors of psychiatry, professors of social work, professors, etc., a good portion of them were total flakes in undergraduate college, and it's hilarious to hear them solemnly and sanctimoniously preach the same stuff we used to make fun of... ala Burton in BECKETT. I'm not saying I'm any better but if I was Peter O'Toole I wouldn't trust them to screw in a light bulb and yet they're the one's with the degrees and certification higher than mine... and I'm jealous! An...an... and I blame society!

Tomb of the Blind Dead (1971)

Hey, another reason I'm not a doctor is that I hate studying and going to class, but I know something about the embattled world of academia and the difference between real thinkers and educators vs. professors who just protect their little niche: a lot of times they just sort of follow in some (long dead) real thinker's footsteps (see my "Kill All Jonesers"), and appoint themselves 'experts' on people like Wordsworth and Whitman and yet, were they to meet them in person, said profs would probably run away in disgust (Whitman I bet you smelled really bad). I used to see these types in AA, touting how program-perfect they are and while no, they never actually got drunk or liked to drink, they're sure they would have had a problem had they ever started down that road to ruin! So now they're fucking experts on sobriety and so glad their "nightmare" is over!" Dude, what nightmare? We used to joke about how leaving behind half-full beers was alcohol abuse, and on that level only are they 'problem' drinkers.

A lot of this problem could be solved by taking the status and dusty immunity of academic, medical and religious positions away, and adapting a broader socialist system, like Argentina's.  Last I heard, a doctor made around $400 a month, A MONTH, in Buenos Aires. A cab driver, maybe $125 a month, a teacher, $250... and they get by, cuz it's socialism. Here we're blessed with a capitalist system, wherein doctors and lawyers are supposed to be robbing us all blind; we're supposed to not be able to afford our rent. In Argentina, the doctors make house calls! They come over to look at your tonsils, have a mate', smoke a cigarette with you in the kitchen, use your phone to call in to the office, get the next address of a patient in need, and they're off, like firemen. Imagine if your house was on fire but you had to go the firehouse and fill out forms and show your insurance before they'd go out to your house? Absurd, right? Imagine if before a cop would come investigate your robbery you had to show him your police insurance card? Why is that more absurd to us than hospitals where patients die in the waiting room or are turned away to bleed to death in the streets? Imagine having to pay the cops for them to arrest a burglar in your house? Actually, if that was bribes you mean by paying, that would be Argentina, too. But why is that different than health insurance? Why are doctors and lawyers chosen more from rich parents who can afford medical school vs. true humanitarians and gifted healers who may have something to offer, but are too lazy to study and think cadavers are gross? 






Now let's move over to the priesthood and the issue of celibacy. I understand the motivation behind the vow of celibacy, but the celibacy thing should just be a natural result of being close to God. When God is near, sex falls away like a booster rocket, but only if the subject is truly dwelling 24/7 in the conscious grace of perfect love. Being called a priest does not automatically lift you beyond sexual desire, anymore than graduating college means you're an intellectual. If you're forced into the priesthood by fucked up parents and are horny as hell, not even allowed to masturbate by Catholic consensus, then you are a like a ticking time bomb. Why are celibate priests expected to somehow abstain from a basic human need? There's a reason straight guys get with other guys in prison - and a priesthood's no different. What I'm getting at is, you can't expect a dickhead to suddenly be a saint just because his parents paid his way to get a degree from the Sainthood Academy.

Here's a personal anecdote: as a child I had a lot of trouble learning to tie my shoelaces. I heard other kids and adults say that everyone knows how to tie their shoes by the time they are five years old. As I was already four and a half I just figured I'd wait it out. So on my fifth birthday I actually expected I'd just miraculously know how to tie them. I ran into the bathroom during my birthday party, untied my shoelace (which mom had tied, of course) and just assumed I would now magically know.

Needless to say, I didn't know how to tie them just because I was five. But I learned something even more valuable: you can't think that a socially-conferred title (like 'five' or 'professor') actually has any 'real' power to change you - "all children should be able to read by the time they're seven;" "all graduates from medical school must know how to fix a hernia;" "all teachers in the union are great educators" -- yet this is the party line towed by deans and union officials the nation over.

 Being five doesn't mean you can tie your shoes any more than being chosen as a priest means you are miraculously free of all sexual desire. If you have said desire and repress it, then look out, because all the praying in the world is only going to prolong the pressure cooking of your libido, like thinking you can hold a Nerf ball under water for 30 straight years and its never going to pop up and smack some poor kid in the face, just because he has a certificate that says 'No Nerf.'


Now it's easy in retrospect to forget that plenty of children grew up going to Catholic school without being molested. There are plenty of great humanitarian doctors and excellent teachers, and teachers' unions are a good thing as far as assuring reasonable pay rates and so forth, but once in place, the union should be ready to get out of the way and let bad teachers be fired, unions should not be championing incompetence, or forfeiting across the board raises in favor of being granted more control, which our union recently did, the equivalent of your boss saying 'your wife and I agreed you would take a pay cut but she'll get to control your life."

Now I'll even go out on a limb here and say that most teachers who have tenure are awesome in every way, which is why they get tenure, but a very small and certain few got it by chicanery, string-pulling and just applying every year for decade after decade until a dean is overly forgiving and just gives everyone who applies tenure, and now there are 2-3 teachers who never should have gotten it and you can't get rid of them; or they get tenure and are great but then they let a little taste of power turn them into litigious, self-righteous grudge-carriers, kind of like old BECKETT. He was great as a teacher/drinking buddy but turn him into an archbishop/union rep and he's a menace to the public interest. Huffington's Kelli Goff writes about this in her review of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN: 

In a scene that will make every person's skin crawl, Guggenheim interviews a former superintendent who recounts attempting to fire teachers who were caught on video reading the newspaper as their students sat waiting to learn, and another who placed a child's head in a urinal. After firing the teachers in question -- like any normal person would -- the superintendent and district were forced to rehire them -- with back pay -- due to tenure. (Kelli Goff, Huffington Post, 9/28/10)

Peter O'Toole's Henry is pretty sure old Beckett's just fallen in love with his new sense of power and is not actually believing all that holier than thou business, but he's wrong, Burton's Beckett has bought into the rigmarole hook line and sinker. And that's the problem with power in the wrong hands whether in Beckett's, tenured faculty, the clergy, or the unions. O'Toole's nutty king is worthy of power because he wears all his evil up front: he's good inside with an evil shell. Burton's Beckett hangs back and looks pious, but he's the real danger in the realm: he's evil inside and pious/good outside. Give him a title and he'll be crazy enough to take it seriously. Such people are dangerous to all concerned, blind to their own absurd sense of inflated self-importance, dead to the compassion their role demands, afflicted with what Lacan might call "signifier-blindness" (1) - BLIND DEAD, in fact!.

The first of a trilogy, TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1971) involves ghost-zombies of old Portuguese Knights Templar chasing and killing all the sinful locals who trespass around their old Malta stomping grounds, wrapping their skeleton hands around all the lovely ladies and gigolo boyfriends,  most of whom behave in such a dumb, unassuming way as to be ridiculously easy to kill. It's a perfect metaphor for our current situation: we may be aware that these pious undead union Templars are out there, slowly shambling towards us on their slow mo horses, but unless we stop behaving like easy prey and start rising up en masse to demand radical reform of the tenure system, unions and the church, we'll be slaughtered by Templars, Draconians, and Freemasons, and our children will be abused systematically until the last spark of life drains from their dewy eyes. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!??

Until we take drastic steps like the above and/or failing that, getting out the torches and pitchforks, we're like those vice-engorged Portuguese in TOMBS, jetsetting ourselves and our children up for a royal trimming by the Templars. The idiocy of the humans in this movie is appalling. They're all alone out there and surrounded by zombies, and the guy goes: "Honey, you wait here. I'm going to go check out that weird screaming noise out there in the dark," leaving her of course completely vulnerable. Is this not what we say to our families, still trusting in the decency of the status quo to protect us? Honey you have to go to school - you have to listen to your teachers. And the teacher is always right, no one believes the kid in a me vs. him argument. Cuz they're teachers. They know things, until of course they're caught seducing a child - then they're hung out to dry. But what about boring a child? What about ignoring a child?




NOTES
1. Like snow-blindness, rather than like being blind to signifiers.