Arctic Air Conditioning: 7 Reasons THE THING (2011)

 Shanna: Do guys like THE THING?
Arlene: They like it better than NO thing. -- Death Proof (2007)

I don't use that quote to be a punny wise-ass, but to illustrate the how and why that I like the new Thing and shall defend its freedom to be you and me. Why? Eight reasons. And all it takes to realize the world sucks and deserves to be taken over by mutating monsters is to peak at rottentomatoes, where this Thing (2011) gets a mere 36% approval. Cosi Absurdum!

What is it about genius that they don't understand?

A big issue with the film is the confusion of this being called The Thing when it's clearly a prequel to Carpenter's 1982 film, so why not call it "The First Thing"? or "Pre-Thing" or something?

Don't give it crap for being a remake either. Remakes are a long and noble tradition dating back to the silent era, there were even silent remakes of silent films! And so what if they're aimed at teenagers? They always have been. We who revere John Carpenter do so because we saw his films as teenagers and recognized a true compatriot. My friends and I in high school watched Carpenter's Thing over and over, like we did Repo Man, Escape From New York, Rude Boy, and Gimme Shelter. We didn't like that Thing that much at first either. It improved with repeat viewings. Still does.

Here's eight reasons:

 1. Strong female lead: We've come a long way since the 1951 version, which had only two (albeit very capable) women in the cast, and the 1980 Carpenter (which had none) to this, which has a woman in the lead role, ordering around men twice her size! Mary Elizabeth Winstead (the elusive girlfriend in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World) is respected and not treated with condescension for being a woman either by the characters or the writer. And even though there's some cultural friction between her and her few Americana buddies and the rest of the camp which is all Norwegian men, she rises above it and as the shitstorm hits assumes a Kali stance almost like Sarah in The Descent (2002). Expert in thawing out mammoths (which is why she's called up to the Arctic), I almost wonder if some of the flak this movie received comes from the fact that she's so unlike nearly every usual final girl: both iron and in charge and yet a hipster to the core --she's deadpan to near Daria levels and yet she believably orders around a bunch South pole Svens. Winstead, you are fast becoming my new favorite!

2. Subtle Variations on action and science fiction cliches: When a helicopter explodes it does so behind a mountain and all we see is a far off wisp of smoke and all we hear is a distant thud -- this is a movie that dares value artsy surprise over explosions, though there are plenty of both, sure as hell more than 36% worth. And once the characters realize they're dealing with a creature from another world there's a real sense of wonder and excitement tempered with some reserve fitting the occasion rather than the usual Spielbergian 'awe'-expressing foreground close-ups. But this underplaying makes their realization the world of science as they know it has forever changed conversely palpable, as does the nervousness that the secret will leak out and their camp will swarm with newsmen, gladhanders and people trying to horn in on the glory.

3) Faithfulness:  Unlike so many tossed off remakes of Carpenter films--The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, this one clearly is made by people who revere the Carpenter original and can probably quote it as well as you, me, or Eli Roth. You'll be pleased to find everything left right where Kurt Russel finds it when he and Doc fly over to the Norwegian base camp.  The situating of burnt-out corpses are exact! 

4)  Make-up and CGI: The alien is clearly modeled after the Rob Bottin makeup work of the original but thanks to CGI it can go a lot farther, more fluid, in its mutations, including a hilarious and disturbing melding of two dudes hairy faces... and the photography is crisp. Unlike the 1980 film's prosthetic make-up (which was awesome, don't get me wrong) the biomorphing of the creature here generates and evolves and sprouts new mouths with every intake of breath, which is how I'm sure Bottin would have loved to duplicate but the tech just didn't exist in the pre-internet 80s.

5) Badass Score: Marco Beltrami, gently nodding towards the Ennio Morricone original.
6) Arctic locale: Lots of great icy reflection that looks perfect on Blu-ray.
7) Norwegians: There's even language barriers, though of course all Nordic scientists can some speak English, and have great shaggy haircuts and blonde beards. It's all very well handled.
8) The name of the Antarctica dig is Thule Station, a slick reference to the Thule Society, a group of Nazi psychics and mystics studying the Vrill, which was an energy harnessed in their secret bell dimension traveler, and recovered alien technology... (for a full socio-paranoiac examination of all these interconnections, see my Uma Thurman is from Venus and The Tibetan-Nordic-Fashion-Huldra-LSD Aliens Connection (Uma Thurman is from Venus - Part 2)

A few minor quibbles: It becomes annoying that Winstead has to pause and stare blankly at every major realization, but maybe that's her thing, she tunes out to tune in, and keeps a level head instead of crying and shrieking. Also, the film speeds along way too fast once the bodies start piling up, at times on the verge of becoming disjointed trashy B-movie nonsense, like a Predator sequel; characters we don't even know go flying to their deaths and everyone's running hither and yon, and shouting. It never gets as incomprehensible as the big climatic battle of Alien 3, though, if that's what you're thinking. That movie sucks.

Carpenter's film has its problems too, but it grows on one with repeat viewings, and I am sore that I held off on seeing this prequel in the theater due to the bad reviews. I'd say give it a chance. Either way, it's way better than no thing, especially when it's too hot to move off the couch and you're anchored by a frosty beverage, air conditioning, and an erratically behaving cat. Dude what's the matter with the cat? Stand back!

Speaking of which, here's a hilarious video from Johnny Neill's son, Arlox!

Russian Orthodox Roulette: Lindsay Lohan, THE DEER HUNTER, TROUBLE FOR TWO

"It's a cursed life where even death has become a luxury." 

- Prince Florizel (Robert Montgomery), Trouble for Two (1936)

ADDENDUM  PREFACE (6/8):
I had been working on the below post for almost six months, until finally publishing it mainly because I had nothing else more 'relevant' to put out... then, the very next day, or the same day, these sad, twisted photos come out of our dear Lindsay. Of course, it's coincidence... or is it? Just look up into her false-colored eyes above; if anyone in the media would join a suicide club like in THE DEER HUNTER or TROUBLE FOR TWO, it's Lindsay.

Let me tell you, to be FORCED to stop drinking and doing drugs when you don't really want to, either by court order or just your almost dying too many times from your escalating addiction (for me, well, alcohol withdrawal will kill you, unmedicated DTs are dangerous; opiate withdrawal just causes you pain but isn't fatal), and to have your every vulnerable misstep chronicled by hyena pack press photographers, well, I can truly understand the pain in her eyes... and I've seen it before, in the pictures of Kurt Cobain, who would be my age were he alive today. It's like your last escape from the insanity of your mind / life / reality / is locked and your stuck in Hell with only one way out.

All I can say is, just hang on, LL --keep your powder dry and your pecker hard... and the Earth will turn.(that's from PLATOON)
-----

Over the years I've seen Michael Cimino's tale of small PA town Russian Orthodox churchgoing / hard drinking steelworkers going to 'Nam, THE DEER HUNTER (1978), in a lot of different situations, but the weirdest was via Betamax in high school Social Science class, where it was supposed educate us on the Vietnam war (and allow the hung-over teacher--and some students--a nice nap in the dark). I can still remember the collective sigh of relief at the sight of some AV geek dragging in the big old TV stand, killing the lights and drawing the blinds against the 11 AM sunshine, knowing this meant there would be no test or class discussion, just VC goons and Pittsburgh drunks.  Each class period was only 45 minutes, so we saw HUNTER in daily installments, the Social Science teacher rewinding and forwarding trying to find the right spot (since each class the teacher had was watching the same tape, but left off in different spots), so it seemed to stretch on for weeks, until it seemed half my junior year of HS was spent watching Asians slap around Bobby De Niro and Chris Walken.

Not a lot of the film made sense, especially back then (1983), a land before internet could put us wise to some things. The film's central group of buddies for example never need to sleep. They work the late shift at a steel mill, clock out at dawn, drop by the local bar on their way home to breakfast, then get dolled up for a wedding reception that afternoon into the evening. They party all through the early morning hours then drive out to their cabin in the mountains to go deer hunting, drinking all the while. Until finally -- after being awake for 24 hours at least -- they're back in the bar, playing piano and standing around. BAM! Vietnam. Well, no wonder shit was so fucked up over there!

And so it came to pass that everyone in Bridgewater-Raritan HS West thought Russian roulette was the cool game to play overseas. Russian roulette was simply what one did in Vietnam, the way bridge and shuffleboard are what one does on a cruise ship. Sitting there, even in 10th grade, we knew the law of averages made prolonged play of the game impossible, but to point out its absurdity required raising your hand, and the teacher would label you a smartass and hand out a quiz, the same one he was supposed to give us a quiz last week.

And hey, man, no one had studied for that quiz, or knew what it would be about, that was why hearing those squeaky TV stand wheels coming down the hall every day was like hearing the empty chamber click on that roulette pistol. We knew we were safe for one more round.

"Click."

Sometimes, Mike, when I dream, I'm back in class, still unprepared for that quiz, hoping against hope those TV wheels are going to come squeaking down the hallway.

And of course we were too cool even after it was too late for the test to be administered to ask the teacher why Christopher Walken's character, Nick, becomes addicted to Russian roulette, why--even after escaping the VC--he plays it of his own free will in sordid back alley games; nor could we dare point out the sheer absurdity of the idea that anyone could work an eight-hour steel mill shift followed by 24+ hours of partying, or last more than a week on a suicide circuit, not to mention months. It all was accepted without comment. After all, this was a modern American classic, with something to say about our national identity. It must be because these guys are from Russian immigrant stock (the wedding is at a Russian Orthodox church), we figured. Russian are fearless and disturbed. Violence is in their blood like vodka; that's why it was called Russian roulette instead of, say, Polish roulette, or Jersey roulette. (Russians didn't invent it I later heard, nor has it ever been a thing outside fiction - it's based on a rumor of one angry moment in the life of an old Cossack general.)

Don't try this at home

Since those HS screenings, I've seen the HUNTER dozens of times, each time thinking it's both better and worse than I remembered. And despite the yawning chasm of illogic in its actual prolonged practice, the ambiguity of Walken's motivations on 'the RR circuit' has over the years forced a nation of film lovers to contemplate macho self-annihilation at its most terrifyingly nihilistic. Here's what one helpful scholar notes of the film:

The roulette stands for the horror, the abjection, the repetition-compulsion, the split of subjectivity and the male body, the unwilling fratricide, the collapse of otherness and of the symbolic order. Negating the sexual gaze, the Russian roulette image transforms the Corpse into the subject of the history of defeat (Peter Lang, Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War, p. 187)

But according to the actual vets and POWs, that whole RR aspect of the story was total bullshit: there never was no such suicide circuit, either in or out of POW camps. While seeing the film in the sacred situation of high school Social Science class may have planted seeds of sexual gaze negation and defeat in our eggshell minds, it did nothing to actually tell us anything about Vietnam, which negated why it was in Social Science class to begin with.

Here's what a Vietnam war correspondent says:

I am now discovering that increasing numbers of Americans believe that the last act of the war took place in a sinister back room somewhere in Saigon, where greedy Chinese gamblers were exhorting a glazed-eyed American GI to blow his head off. Had I as a working reporter missed such a vivid human-interest story on the last day of the war, I might have opted for a similar fate.

I have found that enthusiasts are genuinely hurt when I tell them that while Vietnam had all manners of violence, including self-immolating Buddhist monks, fire-bombings, rape, deception, and massacres like My Lai in its 20 years of war, there was not a single recorded case of Russian roulette, not in the voluminous files of the Associated Press anyway, or in my experience either. The central metaphor of the movie is simply a bloody lie....

But Cimino defends his creative rights. During the filming in Thailand, he told reporters: "War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades. It's a question of survival, friendship and courage, and what happens to these things in people under stress." But they didn't play Russian roulette in the Crusades either. (Peter Arnett - LA Times, via The Veteran)

Creative rights or no, it's hard to believe Nick has been playing the game nonstop through the time it takes Michael to come home from the war, hang around their steel mill town awhile, move in on Nick's girl, visit folks, hunt deer, feel guilty, fly back and search for him while Saigon falls. The odds of surviving that long are probably the same as Nick winning the national lottery five times in a row. Further going unmentioned for good reason is that, after being released from the hospital in Saigon, Michael first spies Nick at an RR game which Michael himself is attending! How many roulette matches are going on all over Saigon that, well, fancy meeting you here! Is the yen for competitive suicide so unshakable, or is there just nothing else to do in Saigon? Have they tried heroin? It's soo much safer! Instead both Nick and Michael, independent of each other, find the same French promoter in a convertible parked behind the 'Mississippi' club, like he's just waiting for traumatized soldiers too zonked to care about booze, drugs and/or hookers to wander through the rear exit and get in the game, following the irregular sound of gunshots like zombies following the sound of human screams. That Frenchman must go through dozens of these shell-shocked soldiers a day, like Warren Oates with his cocks in Cockfighter.

The idea of competitive suicide is of course fascinating to the minions of places like Central Jersey, and though it wasn't 'real' in any way before The Deer Hunter, it sure is now.

TROUBLE FOR TWO (1936) features a kind of Russian roulette (It's based on Robert Louis Stevenson's story, "The Suicide Club"), wherein a group of people gather around a long table and the emcee deals cards instead of a gun. The one who draws the ace of spades kills the one who draws the jack of diamonds (not at the club, but later). Set in Victorian London, the club is more of a response to the stigma of suicide as well as a condemnation of jaded thrill-seeking. Rich young scoundrels join the club, apparently because it's the only thing left that's new under the sun and they've already gambled up their inheritance and are left with nothing but shame -- a shame they've no wish to expound with suicide, which was then a 'crime' punishable by jail time or even execution (what irony  - being hung for trying to hang yourself) as well as a permanent blight on your family's honor. Old people with terminal illnesses are there too, at the table every night for the dealer to pass them a tasty card.

Robert Montgomery stars as a royal prince from the continent visiting London who stumbles on the club and goes just for thrills (as a baby he once played with a lit bomb tossed in his crib by an anarchist and has been unafraid of anything since). Rosalind Russell goes to the club also, because she's spying on him. Love ensues, but the next night she draws the ace of spades and he the jack of diamonds, so they better do some declaring, fast.

Of course there turns out to be reasons for all this suicide clubbing: it seems royal persons must prove their worthiness through regular bouts of courage. Luckily a gentlemen can always call on the aid of other gentlemen when it comes to scourging anarchists. And at any rate, duels, wars, rebels and horse-related hunting accidents were common enough at the time that a young man of honor probably had a one bullet / six chambers chance of surviving into his thirties anyway. Chances for bravery came close to home, with gentlemanly pauses while the other guy picks up his dropped rapier, and a doctor standing by, having a cigar with the seconds, instead of a lot of chain-smoking VC slapping one around.

In other words, for all its old world Queensberry rules Col. Blimpishness, Trouble is more realistic to its time than The Deer Hunter. The roulette angle works as a metaphor for courage-proving in general, i.e. if you were on the front line, you probably had a Russian roulette trigger pull chance of surviving....but that's for the entire war. If you're going to do a huge budget historical recreation, though, you don't need metaphors. After WW2, guys didn't need to hang around the backs of German and Japanese saloons huffing flame thrower exhaust to feel alive (though Dana Andrews did return to the nose of a bomber in Best Years of Our Lives, the effect was created just through sound and a nap).

Cimino perhaps makes the mistake of putting the masculine critique before the horse and sacrificing coherence for intensity, of trying to make it all super authentic and true by focusing on something that never actually happened. His vast crowd scenes, all brilliant and complicated, are suffused with such realism and vivid detail that we're automatically put in the position of assuming historical sweep and accuracy might be the same thing.

There's nothing wrong with adding fantasy / fictional elements into war films, ala, say INGLORIOUS BASTERDS but we know from the beginning that BASTERDS isn't about war but about war films. We presume from the beginning that THE DEER HUNTER is about war's victims, 'real people' from small American towns who play with fire and get burned, but it turns out it's not about them at all. It's about Cimino's desire to morph blue collar alcoholics into Slavic mountain gods who are then consumed and brought low by gibbering Asian devils and their own thousand yard staring contests. Suicide may be painless, but make a habit of it and you become a pain... in the ass... of valor.

LGBT Special: LOST GIRL

"You back off, or I will drop kick you into a women's studies conference."

Few things are more beautiful to me than someone 'coming out' - especially in our progress- reversing media; there's almost inevitably blowback and angst before the healing and ultimate triumph. But you can't go wrong when you reveal your true soul and that's why this parade coming this weekend is so beautiful, also AA conferences, and Psychic Kids and LOST GIRL, an adult-ish cultish show on Syfy and... wait, don't get your Boa-contagions and Arachnoquakes and Piranhacondas in an uproar, Syfy didn't make it; they imported it from Canada. And it's a reasonable-sized hit thar. As far as lesbain action chic, XENA set the bar, becoming a big lesbian favorite. (Read my analysis of the treasured Gabrielle-Xena bond here) and proving a loyal gay audience is worth risking alienating the rabidly Christian south for. And we all benefit when you take the chance.

We've come a long way since the days when if Xena and Gabrielle wanted to kiss it could only be through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or bringing a mouthful of water to one or the other dying of thirst. For LOST GIRL among other things we have an ancient creature rather like a gay art collector exhuming a gay Asian guy's ballet dancing husband to add to his collection. And Kenzie is the Gabrielle but human and straight and 'belongs' to Bo, the Succubus - as humans can only fraternize with the fae if they belong to one, like a pet. That's another of my first grade S/M fantasies come true. They all congregate at a bar (no drinking age in Canada) and big empty warehouses... "a world hidden from humans" where they play pool and flourish 'outside' the mainstream with no judgments. All you need to do is hear the opening credits voiceover from Bo: "I won't hide anymore. I will live the life I choose," to realize she's out of the closet and proud, and in refusing to pick a side, verifying the right to be bisexual in a world where both the gay and straight world often demand an either/or, but she's also verifying the credo so many of us writers and artists adopt when we realize that we're never meant to embrace either the good or the bad, or hate them, since it means the art suffers. It's a pact we all make in the dead of night when we can't sleep and suddenly find true peace in ourselves through our craft, and everything else becomes just grist for the mill, as Ram Dass would say.

What's refreshing in LOST GIRL is that the romanticizing of marriage and children is altered in a gay mythic arc which is about family-building with fellow oddballs and misfits, such as the lesbian thing where everyone has to stay friends with all their exes, so that it becomes a big chain of longing as past, present, and future girlfriends or in Bo's case girlfriends and boyfriends, such as lycanthrope cop Dyson. The casual sex indulgences of her character are explained as necessary for her to heal herself from wounds (her succubus DNA). In one episode everyone switches bodies so we have a scene of two sensitive girls bonding in the bodies of burly dudes! It don't get no better/gayer. And best of all, no children, and no biological clocks and rants about how 'ready' they are to adopt or conceive.

Overall there's a feeling of TV threadbare minimalism that I like: there's the bar, the apartment and a warehouse interior which seems to host a lot of fae functions. It all looks like those late night Cinemax action erotica movies, with mobsters and bad CGI, but you just need to look closer: listen to the clever writing; tune in to the mellow gold sense of tolerance and belonging you can grasp onto; the way all the actors have mastered their 'out' pronunciation so you can't tell their not con de estados Unidos. Knowing references abound to the sci fi canon, so if you know BLADE RUNNER by heart, you'll know when characters reference Roy Batty's death monologue or when the door to a witch's oven subliminally nods to art nouveau door in SUSPIRIA.

10 PM Saturdays on Syfy. It's not on DVD except from Canada and even then only season one (we're on season two and season three is already locked in). So ignore the dubious phrasing from Syfy that makes it seem like they made this, and ignore the occasional ill-advised forays into Diablo Cody-ish phrasemaking... and I'll see you at the parade, unless it's too hot, or I decide not to go, cuz whatever, I live in Park Slope now and hate the subways on the weekends. And I won't hide anymore.

And I will live the life I choose... I mean, can deal with...

Tripumentaries: MAGIC TRIP, DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE, 2012: Mayan Prophecy and Shift of the Ages, and ROBERT THURMAN ON BUDDHISM

As the age of Pisces ends, and June munches through its seed pod servings, and apocalypse-- according to nearly every ancient culture--approaches, now more than ever we must ask: Are we going to go out in style, like Slim Pickens riding his H-Bomb stallion. or like that old married couple who can't stop fighting about which way to turn even as their car goes roaring off a cliff? Pick Pickens, America, and then buckle up for these awesome flashback-inducing documentaries that explore the area where psychedelia, psychopharmacology, quantum entanglement, God and literature all mix.

I've rated them at the end of each description for saliva-thickening aspects, i.e. that aftershock, pre-trip flashback tingle when your mouth feels electric and your saliva slows to an aching crawl and your teeth start to clench, your pupils dilate and the hairs on your neck rise. That flashback saliva thing is sometimes annoying, it brings a lot of emotional baggage (remembering the lost highs and peaks in a deep, painful imprint way it took me decades to get over) which is why I sometimes avoid these sorts of films, even though they are the very foundation of this blog's raison d'etre! 

Today, for example, being back at work, I feel hungover and sad, just from the flashbacks induced by this first film:

Magic Trip

(2011) Dir. Alison Ellwood
***

In 1964, three years before the summer of love, an era when, as Jimi Hendrix lamented, there was only surf music on the radio, Ken Kesey, famous for his acclaimed Cuckoo's Nest, went on a magic bus trip with an orange juice bottle spiked with LSD, a group of friends and lovers, and speed freak Neal Cassady at the wheel. Did beauty and truth ensue? Perhaps later, but in the beginning their magic bus looks more like it's embarking on one of those early 1960s surfer journeys, as in The Endless Summer, with everyone's all buzz-cut and folkie and wearing big unflattering red and blue striped shirts. He comes across mythic in Kerouac stories but in person, beat relic Neal Cassady seems to be like just some twisted methed-up townie ("he would never shut up" someone notes) and the bus keeps breaking down, and there's endless goofing instead of fixing, and the usual sexism, so the smarter girls, get out at the first train station and head back to their 9-5 jobs. Smart move, ladies! I've often wished I could do that when our band tours would start out badly, but if you do bail, then you're left out of the myth, presuming there is a myth, but how would you know back at the pupae stage? It takes years and you never know who amongst the horde of idiots gibbering in the back is going to turn out to to be the Thomas Wolfe or Kerouac or whomever will immortalize you in decades to come. Anyway, pass that damn orange juice!

Yes, the good acid is finally dispensed at an Arizona watering hole, the color 16mm film is loosed from its can and finally myth takes wing. Highlights include: epiphanies at Yellowstone because of a sign that says "Beware of the Bear" ("it used to be about being aware of the bear, but now it's just beware," Kesey laments); nervous "We're the only white people here" moments at a colored beach in Louisiana; a cold welcome at the Ivy League estate of Tim Leary (office-mate Albert-about-to-be-Ram-Dass is nicer, thankfully); a world's fair that imagines America as an all-white Jetsons tail-fin miracle that's already outdated by the time the pranksters pull in; the growing disenchantment with speed freak Cassady and his friend, the morose drunkard Jack Kerouac (Allen Ginsberg comes off as nicer, thankfully), and so forth. Kesey explains that the drugs were "part of our American personality -- you try go down deeper in the ocean and higher in the sky - these drugs were opening us up to new landscapes." No shit, Sherlock!

I guess you had to be there, and twisted yourself. But that's the deal --you need to be twisted to appreciate the beauty of the Magic Trip, but you'll never be as twisted, apparently, as they were. Because--as they so clearly like to think--they broke the mold. They were doing it to discover America, and then America did it to emulate them, and now we all want to glom onto their speedy Zen kicks because we read Dharma Bums and it moved our assemblage point and opened our third eye. But dig, man, our eye will never be as open as theirs (they think). They took it as far as anyone could, so now you better sober up and just read Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

That's the sour note being struck here, because--after a trumped-up pot bust got him jailed--Kesey cut a deal to renounce the acid. He was bid play his pipe and lead the rats out of town. He decreed this all had been a test, "the acid test" and he and his pranksters 'graduated' and the hordes of thrill-seekers and runaway dirtbags that descended on the Haight like a plague of locusts did not, the test was over, they failed because they were absent during test time. And now the allotted times is over. Turn in your pencils and go home, o errant wanderers, go back to your parent's Christian basements.

Zane Passes!

But is it really that simple? I'd vote we need to start recognizing the historical importance of today's dirty hedonists as legends in progress! Instead of putting Kesey's magic bus into a museum let's teach the kids to paint their own and go easing down the road. Why should the rantings of Kesey and company be gospel and the rantings of today be 'just' ranting? When Kesey notes "this wasn't literature anymore, this had jumped off the pages... and onto the streets," we can snicker at his cliche'd idealism and believe it at the same time, because the truth often comes caked in soapy crap. "Something is happening that is so new," Kesey says about the establishment's knee-jerk demonization, "they're scared beyond any power of reasoning." Asked whether he regretted taking acid for that Stanhope experiment that started it all, Kesey notes, "I think it's a good experience, every time you see more." Hey man, it's your trip.

Saliva thickening: 6.666

DMT: The Spirit Molecule

2012 -****

Go Rick Strassman go-ooo--ohm! In case you were born in some insane dimension where all the keys to chemically-enhanced enlightenment have been made into felonies for no real sane logical reason you should know Dr. Rick actually got legal clearance to do DMT studies by the big Health Overlords. He recruited dozens of subjects and gave them massive doses of DMT in a safe space, and then recorded their impressions once they cam back to reality. The results? Mind-blowing but inconclusive, raising more questions than offering answers. Luckily this documentary helps us realize the only answer to whether hallucinations are real or vice versa is that real itself is a meaningless phrase. If what you experience in the DMT-verse feels a hundred times more real than your waking, consensual reality, then--as quantum physics and bioverse theorists suggest--it is.

Even so, enough bad trips happened under Strassman's experiments that he now feels a little guilty. Is he a Pandora's box cutter, a modern messiah or an apex predator Albert Hoffman? Other heads talking include Daniel Pinchbeck and the 'other' McKenna...Dennis, and there's lots of groovy Alex Grey art and deep hallucinogen-ready kaleidoscope eyefuls.

Joe Rogan narrates, in black and white to give the illusion you're watching this in fourth grade science class, which you should be. I donated money to help get this film finished!

Saliva thickening content: 10

2012: Mayan Prophecy 

and the Shift of the Ages

 2009 - ***

Dude! I remember this as being good, but man they do show a lot of the same stock footage of natural disasters over and over again, especially some shots of a fire bravely eating away the side of a building. I dig the use of the Terence McKenna timewave study, though, and the idea that 'inner time travel' will one day be the new back, if you get my weird meaning. Because it's made in 2009, they're a little more confident in their doomsaying than some of the more recent Mayan docs, and even so they realize that the future lies within, not without. It may take light years to get to the next galaxy but that's only if you need to lug your body. If you can go with just your mind it takes less than no time at all. In fact, time itself reverses so you get there before you left!

Salvia thickening content - 3.9

Robert Thurman - Buddhism.

2-Part Series - ***1/2

There's big arguments between trippers and 'hardcore' Buddhists about which path is 'correct' -with hardcore Buddhists insisting that drug epiphanies, meditation 'shortcuts,' don't 'count.' But to me that's absurd. Even if, as they say, LSD is the helicopter ride to the roof of the mountain (i.e. we get to look but can't stay long enough to legally change our address), so what? In our ADD age, no one wants to waste their time meditating if it's not going to pay off. So let them go see the mountain and be sure there actually is a destination to work towards. That's what happened with Ram Dass, after all, and his documentary, Fierce Grace, is also on Netflix, if you want to go in that direction. And there's a Wavy Gravy documentary too if you want to go in the other.  I'm still at the crossroads, hanging by my left foot.

Because ultimately if we dabble in psychedelics in search of the truth, and that truth leads us to an ashram, but then we don't go in because we don't want to join a cult and the cult doesn't think we came there honestly anyway, then were we ever really truth-seekers or were we just bored and young and psychedelics and meditation offered a way out of our depression in the time before SSRIs? And are the cult members really humbler than thou or just pissed they didn't dare use your quicker method to get to the same place? And if we shun the ashram with its commitments and robes and many-armed deities, might we instead become addicted to the sound of helicopters, always hoping this next ride up to the top of mountain will be the one where we can get out and stay, skipping in the process all the chapters about self-discipline and humility?

It's the clinging to the skids of expectation, dragging our Apocalypse Now heads through the palm trees, it's the tired feeling when you see your 300th punter waving a glow stick and saying under his breath "OmanI'mtrippin'sohard" and you feel like you're still wading in a sea of melted kindergarten crayons while ever-younger kids ask you for doses. Better to just jump out the window and hope you fly, like Superman. That's what all the hysteric anti-drug crusaders think LSD makes you do anyway...

No worries about any of that, though, or enduring any dogma, grandiosity, judgment or incoherence when listening to Uma Thurman's dad, the great Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. You would think an old white guy, with a glass eye and a gorgeous movie star daughter, speaking for an hour and a half via a two camera set-up wouldn't be so riveting, but his tongue speaks much wisdom, and since it's sheathed in scholarly wit and humble perspective it goes down smooth as the pangs of truths you feel you forgot rather than never knew. And if you still don't think Buddhism is trippy, just realize that before she married Thurman, Uma's mom was married to... that's right.... Timothy Leary. Tibetan Book of the Dead, thou art connected!

 Through powers of pronoia I've traced the whole Uma lineage back to benevolent Nordic alien ancestors who helped manipulate our DNA so that there could be gorgeous blonde Swedes, who helped the original Buddha clean the land of reptilian demons so modern day humans could get a toehold, and who then opened up the still-developing human mind with the most potent of angelic wand taps, the doctor's delivery room spank of wisdom. I you dare to believe it! Let the music leaf off the page and finally become aware... of the bear.

Saliva thickening - 11.2