Long and Tall XXL in the Saddle

The way John Wayne rides a horse is the closest thing lazy big and tall men have to their own form of liquid poetry. Always bumping our heads going down basement steps, cramping our legs in ordinary airplane seats, dangling over edges, looking apish in hand-me-downs from normal size cousins; we're often light-headed from being head in the clouds all the time and John Wayne is all these things, but turns them upside down through sheer moral charisma. He's so tall he seems like he's outgrown the pony below him, even if its a roaring stallion. He forces us to re-examine the sheer surreal strangeness of a man riding a four legged animal like some strange Martian centaur. He's the father who is both fearsome, protective, loving, and just a wee bit of a jokester. All that adds up to perfection, so when Wayne goes rogue on us, like halfway through RED RIVER, we're traumatized in a way we're just not when the diminutive James Mason loses it along similar lines in BIGGER THAN LIFE.

I'd been avoiding John Ford's cavalry trilogy (FORT APACHE, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, RIO GRANDE) my whole life, smarting from the childhood terror of Henry Fonda's stern anti-Indian policies and the mix of honor, tradition and whiskey-besotted sentimental blarney that is life in Ford's patriarchal colonialist west, and instant tedium to any kid who doesn't yet know the sweet soul-stirring taste of the 'water of life.'

But I should have known better not to just glance at labels and mustaches. (Wayne's mustache spooked me away from SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON). The problem with assumption means you're always predicting the lowest result. Period westerns with frilly bonnets and well-meaning old matrons stirring pots and yelling at young Jeff Carson to come in from the fields for dinner can be dull, but that doesn't mean Ford's are dull. In fact every aspect of every Ford movie would be dull in the wrong hands. In Ford's hands, however, it's poetic. The iconography comes to life. As he probably invented most of it, I guess that makes sense

To me it's proof that the conservatives and liberals are all mixed up - the neo-cons should making more movies and the liberals saving their sermonizing for the senate floor. And for god's sake, more drinking. If you look at the films of the 1970s compared to the films of now, it's clear what made them cooler, earthier, more poetic, dirty, cool, and real: more Valium, cigarettes (indoor smoking), booze, casual sex, long hair, and whatever the hell else.

In Ford's cavalry pictures we actually see (heaven forefend!) a situation where drinking, dancing, and killing are all socially condoned rituals. Most boys today find themselves stricken as social outcasts, hunted by the cops, the minute they sip their first beer or toke their first joint. Rather than an initiation into the social order with its laws, values, and common enemy (outlaws, Injuns), the first beer or toke casts us forever outside the social order - we become the outlaws.  Is it the drugs that are to blame, or the laws, those nanny state control freak tantrums that result when laws are passed but Americans don't instantly fall to their knees and renounce whatever it is the hysterical old people see fit to demonize? The sentences are lengthened, the fines stiffened, and still Americans cling to their freedom. Whether hurling tea into Boston Harbor, rising up against the whiskey tax, or growing dope in your parent's upstate New York basement, you're a true patriot! And you know who would agree with me? Ben Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, you heard me, and John Ford, John Wayne and BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS star, John Agar, before, that is, the evil brain took over his body.

And especially if you're tall and heavy and don't move so well, let Wayne show you how it's done - and remind you that you don't have to do it. Summer's here, so soak it up the way the west was meant to be, in the dreams of a TV,  with Irish in your air conditioned blood finding itself warmed in every song The Sons of the Pioneers sing to their holy Shirley Temple.

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?