Pre-Code Capsules: ROAR OF THE DRAGON, THREE WISE GIRLS, BED OF ROSES, LONELY WIVES, SMARTY

Everyone says 1939 was the best year for movies, but I'd say its 1932-33. Before the code started being enforced in mid-1934, s--t was tight! TCM's been dropping 'em like hotcakes, s--t I never even heard about prior to. Pre-code cuckoo land next stop!

ROAR OF THE DRAGON 

(1932) - ****

Did you know they had a fake Marlene Dietrich (named Gwili Andre)? And she played the abductee/obsession of a no-good Russo-Chinese bandit (C. Henry Gordon) in ROAR OF THE DRAGON (1932?). Set in China during its civil war era, it's the kind of TERRY AND THE PIRATES-esque action film with oodles of Paramount's sparkly exoticism. Richard Dix slurs (for real?) as a very drunk but able riverboat captain, the kind that Stefan on SNL would describe as "pony-keg chested." He's so macho he chewed the ear off the Russo-Chinese bandit before the opening credits, and said bandit has vowed reprisal in violent spades. However, Dix's riverboat was critically damaged in the same fight, and under hurried repairs at a nearby port while the bandits ride forth to kill every white man they see.

Gwili Andre wants to help Dix, she's white too, after all, but Dix doesn't trust her as she's the bandit's ex-lover; she comes onto him in an early scene, offers him sex in exchange for passage downriver on his under-repair steamer, but then he suspects she's a Mata Hari even after she shows him the cyanide tabs in her necklace and offers him one (he almost eats it, even knowing its poison! Now that's an existential gentleman!) When they finally hook up, the 'cutaway' scene between before and after 'that which cannot be shown' is Zazu Pitts twisting a handkerchief while listening to a romantic lullaby on the radio, her eyes drippy with by proxy orgasm!

donn-mine-difahdooo

Gwili Andre even uses Dietrich's inflections and her big scenes are all lit like Sternberg's (though not as sublimely, and her face is kind of too sharp and baroquely angled). Her evil bandit paramour is bound to capture and torture Dix, so it's all pretty sick and riveting, a variation on the whole business with Warner Oland in EXPRESS but with way more violence. Meanwhile Edward Everett Horton fusses over his hottie girlfriend, Bridgeport (Arline Judge), who in turn fusses over a cadre of war orphans (not as bad as it could be, thanks to a decidedly unsappy worldview, though a scene of their nonstop crying begs for fast-forwarding); there's an old Jewish butcher (Arthur Stone) who winds up burned at the stake for trying to sneak out of the besieged hotel for some smoked meats to feed all the hungry people!

I wont spoil the events, but suffice to say Edward Everett Horton goes ballistic with a tripod machine gun. You heard me: E.E. Horton, the effete cuckold from so many golden screwballs, frickin' tears it up! He rocks it. The square-jawed Dix also rocks it; Gwili Andre rocks it as well. I haven't said this in awhile about anything, but this film is the shit! Like if Paramount's SHANGHAI EXPRESS joined up with MGM's MASK OF FU MANCHU and it kicked BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN's ass all the way back to Columbia, dragging Capra's canoe behind him!

THREE WISE GIRLS 

(1932) - ***

Shortly before Jean Harlow was signed to MGM she was under Howard Hughes who loaned her off to Columbia where she first struck with Capra (in PLATINUM BLONDE where she was miscast as a rich socialite) then made this, directed by the far less flashy William "One-Shot" Beaudine.

There's one great early scene, where Harlow changes into her negligee and gets readu to go to sleep after walking home from a date (we never see the guy, but he presumably got fresh): it's a tight, lengthy close-up semi-profile of Harlow's face and chest line; her face conveys weary sadness, bone-tired ennui, and you can see the layer of sweat on her body. She looks like she really has just been walking home on broken heels for three miles and her weary half-absent dialogue with mom is so real and honest and goes on so long you get the feeling the Beaudine--as he usually did at least once or twice in a film--struck gold. The moment is out of sync with the rest of the film, though, which follows the "three girls find love and/or loss while climbing the class system" boilerplate in static medium shots via the old Beaudine cookie cutter. In her lovely OCD blog, Jenny the Nipper sums the sitch thusly:

Of course, the entire premise of this film--that a girl could hook an unhappily married rich man, secure his divorce and walk happily off into the sunset-- would have been impossible a few years later. Though Harlow's character is more virtuous than Clark's (she actually breaks off the relationship when she finds out he's married rather than using the money to keep her poor mother in furs), she would still be a home wrecker in the Code era. Three Wise Girls fits into the working single girl as hero mold that so many pre-code pictures did and though it offers no solution to their problems but an honest and happy marriage, at least its willing to admit in a realistic way, that a single girl did have problems.

I'd also break it down like this, the film offers the CAST OF THE TYPICAL (not in a good way) PRE-CODE WOMAN's PICTURE:

1. Hard-working 'good girl' - usually gets fired for resisting the boss's advances
2. Her 'gone-wrong' best friend, who's dating a married man and later commits suicide
3. Her practical gal Friday - less attractive but quicker-witted, marries the chauffeur or whomever is being played by Andy Devine or Hugh Herbert.
4. The rich married sleazeball who will never leave his wife and/or mob for #2.
5. His wife (either a heaven-bound brunette cripple, or evil harridan).
6. The bad guy (possibly as in TEN CENTS A DANCE, a false fronted 'good guy') found in m'lady's boudoir giving #7 the erroneous impression girl #1's innocence is actually a stall.
7. The nice rich guy who waits around until the smoke clears, then goes back to #1.
8. A discreet butler for #7 and/or #4 -- bemused and/or shocked, possibly goes for gal #3.

But within this formula a better filmmaker than Beaudine might riff out something pretty decent, as in our next offering:

BED OF ROSES

(1933) - ***

Who'd of thunk there was a fake Mae West? At least that's how Pert Kelton (Molly the maid in MY MAN GODFREY) plays Minnie, the unrepentant gold digger pal of Constance Bennett (the fake Bette Davis/Tallulah Bankhead) in this film by Gregory La Cava. Constance is an even sharper digger but gives up her kept woman status (earned in a hilarious office seduction scene) in the boudoir of rich publisher John Halliday so she can "scrub floors" for pony keg-chested barge captain Joel McRae. Love is seen here as a chump's ticket to the poorhouse! But love is worth it, so the songs all sing. Those songs are scams, as Pert Kelton (below) would say.

The dialogue is great throughout, though, with Halliday and Kelton trying to wise up Constance to her self-inflicted class-ceilinged moral code. There's a big Mardi Gras scene that's all dressed up to go nowhere, but it's altogether a gem and a hoot. Hooter regulars Franklin Pangborn as a prissy (what else?) department store manager and the fake Hugh Herbert (perish the thought, tut tut, perish it) Matt McHugh as Minnie's dopey rich husband round out the deal with ersatz class.

LONELY WIVES

(1931) - **1/2

Laura La Plante is pretty funny and sexy as the 'fake Thelma Todd' in this "giddy" romp, but Edward Everett Horton, in a dual role that's supposed to be Jekyll and Hyde-ish that instead comes off like Michael Cera in YOUTH IN REVOLT-ish, stretches the patience. And I say this as one who loves a small dose of Horton as much as the next man (and think he's pretty badass in ROAR OF THE DRAGON). The problem is that it's hard to take him seriously as straight with his cachet of fey mannerisms. The strictly enforced closet of the era made a big tent of acceptable straight male behavior, but now Horton's effeminate fussiness seem like he's got two separate lives all right, but only one would even pretend to lust after Laura La Plante. And the TCM print is washed.

SMARTY

(1934) - ***

This one stars Joan Blondell as a bossy sassy ball-buster who divorces Warren William after he slaps her--just once, mind you--on the advice of skittish divorce attorney Edward Everett Horton ("sigh"), who promptly marries her himself and then lives in his house, in his bed, and one wonders to what extent Blondell's playful idiocy will go just to annoy our dear Warren William. He thrives--as do all men when Edward Everett's their competition-- in the race to win her back, but if I were William I would stick with the liberated, married lovely (Joan Wheeler) who follows him home. Oh well, a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand when it comes to wolves like William; he can't resist old Joan B., whom I guess is the 'smarty' one, but she's so annoyingly smarmy, continually ragging on William while they're playing bridge, that she's immensely dislikable, at least to anyone married ever who had their wife think she's terribly clever by relentlessly insulting you. An AWFUL TRUTH-style screwball battle is on (Horton being the pre-code Bellamy), and 'tis lively but there's a lot of yelling, so don't be hung over while viewing--you just may want to slappy Joan and socky Horton in the eye yourself. And if Horton's hissy and indignant tantrums start to lose their welcome early, just remember SMARTY is one of the many pre-code gems that has a sense of morality and battle of the sexes relationship minutiae far more complex than might seem at first glance. Is it funny? More like painful... but it is an engaging example of the posh adult pre-code pre-screwball era screwball comedy, all the films that, like James Whale's REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? wind up just being shrill and strident the hardy it tries to be urbane and insouciant.

From Russell at the excellent Screen Snapshots comes this look at the weird use of domestic violence as a comedic topic:

Smarty is almost a great little movie but sadly also a very, very wrong one. Ultimately it probably says more about male film industry attitudes in the thirties than that of the average man or woman on the street. Despite this, I think several books deserve to be written about whatever issues Joan Blondell’s character has in the movie. Did she get on with her father? Was she hit as a child? Does she feel undervalued as a person? We need to know these things and give her all the help she deserves. Maybe she just needed a cuddle. Actually, I’m not sure I want to know, to be honest.

The idea that Blondell's character needs help or was molested just because she enjoys / or rather reacts so harshly a good slap is actually more denigrating to women than the slap itself, I feel. I know a lot of women who love being slapped, choked, etc. if done the right way at the right time. Go figure. 1) A slap in the face is nature's 'reset' button - the sting jars your senses, distracting you from whatever was driving you to hysteria beforehand (think of all the times in old films people slap, or splash water in the face of, a hysterical person), 2) it's archaic connection to ritual pack leader dominance goes way way deeper into the core of the psyche than some late inning feminist theory can excavate. 3) It releases endorphins, and a flush of shame, which can be a turn on. I respect Russell's concern but I think it can become too close to a kind of universal victim mentality to just deride her interests and needs as tragic and the film's treatment of the issue as 'wrong.' After all, Joan sues for divorce based--at a time when it was still a shocking thing to get divorced at all--on a single slap in what was beforehand a relationship of equals (clearly since she's so strident and belittling to him beforehand, during, and after--treating him in a sense like he's an ordinary imbecile, i.e. a Horton. It seems more petty (and spurred by Horton's divorce lawyer wooer just looking for any crack in the marriage to wedge himself into) than, say, a brave standing up to domestic violence (she could have just given him the cold shoulder for awhile). The film is a little too blithe perhaps in its handling of its issue, but I'd counter that the sensitive feminist outrage over a comedy about a masochistic woman is itself a subjugation, inferring women are too weak to decide for themselves if they're being abused or just getting their rocks off. A slap, as Camille Paglia pointed out, can be a good thing. Sometimes we all could really use one.

Which I herewith macro dovetail to Bunuel's TRISTANA (1970, above), which I saw yesterday at BAM before watching SMARTY, and will write about tomorrow, yo! It was a meta moment of liberated women who love to be dominated at the same time. That infernal belle rings on!

Capsule Reviews: CALIBER 9, CATFISH, LAST SUMMER, MACHETE; SOLITUDE OF BLOOD; RESIDENT EVIL: RESURRECTION

CALIBER 9 

(1972) Dir Fernando Di Leo
***

"We need to remember that property is theft!"

From the awesome new Fernando De Leo boxed 'crime' set comes this tough little picture, first in a crime trilogy from the robust director. Barbara Bouchet sizzles as the go-go dancing femme fatale girlfriend of pug-ugly Ugo. Fresh out of the slammer and the only one who might know where the loot is buried, Ugo's instantly a target for his former crime pals, including Lionel Stander (CUL-DE-SAC) as 'The Americano" - a mob head who rehires Ugo into the crew, hoping he'll slip and reveal where the stash is (all the other suspects in the theft are wiped out before the credits in a punchily-edited montage). We don't even know if Ugo took it until later, making his many beatings and denials fraught with strange tough guy ambiguity.

There's lots of De Leo's patented pro-commie dialogue (see above quote) folded into the police procedural scenes, something American character actor Stander (a European exile on account of the blacklist)  no doubt approved of. Money is the root of all evil and in every close-up shot of large amounts of it being handed back and forth we're always afraid it might explode ( BOOM! eh, Ugo? The big a-fireworks, eh? HAhahha! BOOM! hahaha!). A pathetic 'party' is the setting for the big climactic gundown: a handful of lawn chairs on parched grass around an empty pool: classic De Leo. Of course it wont take canny Acidemic fans long to figure out who stole what and where, but they'll be too busy rocking out to Luis Enriqiez Bacalov's funky Ennio Morricone-wannabe score (talk about property as theft!) to give much of a good goddamn especially when the flute and crunchy electric guitars get started.

MACHETE 

(2010) Dir Robert Rodriguez)
***

Could this actually be Roberto Rodriguez's best film? It actually uses everything from that GRINDHOUSE trailer - including Cheech Marin as a shotgun-toting priest saying in a magnificently flat affect: "God has mercy. I don't!" Mind-boggling. Danny Trejo shows--after centuries of playing Mexican bad guys and even being one for 11 years as a child--that he has the depth of presence to handle a lead role, no sweat. And the ladies? My notions of feminine empowerment are completely in sync with Rodriguez's, and I dig the large quotient of strong, ass-kicking hermanas.

CATFISH 

(2010) ***

An eerie downer with some stray grace, CATFISH is the Blair Witch of internet romances, to the point where a violent freaky unseen ghost (with a beautiful profile pic borrowed from someone else) is as a modern ecstasy compared to the soul-snuffing truth at the end of the Facebook rainbow. The story involves a handsome slacker falling love, as we all have, with a phantom from the internet; things get weird when her kid sister does paintings of his dance photos.... and then things get really weirder when he and his buddies drive down to see her, for a surprise visit.

As someone who in the wild west days of the AOL chat rooms (mid-90's) went on many dates with sexy-voiced, able-writing sirens who turned out to be deceiving kraken-gorgon hybrids, CATFISH's documentary sense of excitement and possibility struck deep in the core of my bruised soul; all those post-date Silkwood showers and whiskey shots to wash the wan desperation from my feelers afterwards, and to no avail. Haven't we all been there? Now you can go again! Terrifying, hilarious and deeply sad, no shower is scalding enough to sear the Catfish stains off your soul.

SOLITUDE OF BLOOD 

(aka STEREOBLOOD, aka ODINOCHESTO KOVI)

(2002) Dir. Roman Prygunov
**

11This Russian would-be giallo-esque nevermindbender uses amnesiac tactics to make us ever unsure what's going on in its heroine's head, the result being an underpopulated Russian pharmacological BLACK SWAN minus the dancing, with an intense green, white, and deep commie red set design, as if THE ROOM married SUSPIRIA and none of their friends showed up to the ceremony.

Ingeborga Dapkunaite (!) plays a top flight pharmaceutical researcher named Maria who's recently created a miracle drug for overcoming female infertility. Some really uninspired murders and needless crosscutting make half the events onscreen seem like a dream, but which half? One hopes our heroine is suffering from possible amnesia ala THE HEADLESS WOMAN (see my Amnesiacs in Cinema entry, here) but it's doubtful.

Still, this film helped me realize a few things about how to make movies cheaply by wasting running time dragging out meaningless shots and scenes that require no extra time or $$. So here is my

GUIDE TO CHEAP HORROR FILM PADDING:

1. A phone rings, but no one is on the other end! Or else just deep breathing or whatever:
--All you need is one actress and a phone! If you don't have a phone, she can hold a banana or shoe or even just air, in a phone hand; you can add the phone later in editing.
2. Ben Nye stage blood - $40 a quart! 
You can pour it all over your actress as she wanders around white hotel bathrooms for long pointless dream sequences.
3. The old J-Horror 'coughing weird things up' dream sequences.
Same bathroom, she just does the old magician trick to apparently vomit scorpions or scalpels into the sink (with Ben Nye abounding!)
4. Taking strange pills
A no-frills way to ensure you can let the editor run rampant with weird non-associative editing tricks.

The film has only a few stalk and kill (i.e. 'giallo') scenes and they're all pointlessly intercut with scenes of Maria at lunch or otherwise bored or agitated, making us think she might either be involved or next on the list. She's clearly meant to be a suspect or a victim but we're never really scared for her, as we should be. And then it ends. Could be worse. At least she's hot... and there's a theremin!

LAST SUMMER 

(1969) Dir Frank Perry
****

There's ever so often I catch a fellow critic giving away that he's not seen the movie he's capsulizing (always a temptation for overworked second stringers), as in the Time Out Britannia Film Guide entry on LAST SUMMER, which calls it "winsome," and notes 'typical lessons are learned'?  

There's nothing "winsome" about LAST SUMMER, unless LORD OF THE FLIES or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER are to be filed amongst GIDGET and BEACH BLANKET BINGO. There's a rape (by the protagonists!), pot smoking, race baiting, group hair washing, nonstop groping, evil-confessing, seagull torture,  riveting monologues, and other typical--but far from typical for coming-of-age beach summer movies.

My friend Max turned me onto this movie during one of our wasted-as-we-wanna-be summers hanging around his parent's Long Beach Island beach house. We never found a Barbara Hershey for ourselves (we were too hungover to actually go to the beach... at least during the day) but the meta-ness of it all was not lost on us in our bourbon or gin (in a strict either/or regimen) fog. It was the perfect thing to watch on a rainy Sunday over hash oil pills and190 proof Devil's Springs vodka strained through a flannel shirt. Add some girls and lessen the whiskey load and we might have been looking into an evil mirror.

The casting is awesome, too. I was never into The Waltons (as you might imagine) but when John Boy raises his sadistic demonic eyebrow, or pangs of empathy shoot across his Satanic features during his psychic threeways with Barbara Hersey and smirky Peter Norton, hell, that right there is enough to change my mind.

Coming in for the last half as a frumpy fourth wheel virgin-type they meet on the beach, Cathy Burns steals the show with a single take monologue recounting the last hours of seeing her mom alive at a cocktail party that had been raging at their house for days. By the time she's done you can smell the tang of gin and ocean salt emanating off skin, the heavy mix of cigarettes and lust tempered by drunken dissolution. It's enough to get her just far enough into the Hershey clique that her later glum buzzkillery all but spurns the evil trio into their final vile action.

Criminally not on DVD, this shows up on TCM from time to time and must not be missed.

 RESIDENT EVIL: RESURRECTION 

(2010) Dir Paul W.S. Anderson
**1/2

When it comes to directing action, Paul W.S. Anderson is a great one for color contrast, slow motion rain drops, cavernous all-white spaces, bullets, bullets, bullets and that's all. His action movies are like an expensive video game you're watching someone else play. There's such a shortness of believability or grit or guts in his uber-sterile mise-en-scene that you wonder how in the hell this hack has done so well for himself. With huge budgets and a marriage to the super sexy lead siren Milla Jovovich you know he must have some big connections. On the other hand, no way I could duplicate even a single moment, or even play the game without dropping the joystick with shaky hands... do they still even use joysticks?

And then again, RES EVIL the series was not meant to be great, just meant to be watchable for an international audience, over and over, to play on Syfy in subsequent decades, etc., so any earmarks of a particular culture or time or moment are shorn away, replaced with obvious references to other movies -- DAWN OF THE DEAD meets THE MATRIX in this case--painful cliche and obvious now but in 20 years might seem like its own wild style. It's all the head villain can do to not use that Hugo Weaving "Mr. Andersssson" voice as he dodges slow mo air-rippling bullets in his black trenchcoat and shades but hey---Syfy probably has the movie in the slot too. Milla, meanwhile, appears hung over and tired and "rocks" some weak mom bangs. The rest of the cast try their best but the most interesting character turns out to be a big lug with a black cloth over his head and a ridiculously huge ax! Go get 'em, brother! Machete don't text!

(POST SCRIPT - 2/9/15 - true to expectations, this has been on Syfy a lot, and I've come to love it - see my Milla Jovovich: God's own Avatar post from 2/24/14)

The Rosebud Principle

 

"Maybe it was something he lost"

Gawker founder Nick Denton recently learned the Zuckerbergian teachings of THE SOCIAL NETWORK the hard way: don't go changing formats in midstream, i.e. you can't expect people to endure slow confusing menus on their lunch break. Denton's recently lost tons of readers in a bid to redesign Gawker for the future. Redesigning is never smart until you have a billion friends, which is why Mark Zuckerberg is so uptight about the server being down even for a day in David Fincher's movie. You can't have doubt, or distraction or difficulty - the competition is too great. Was it self-sabotage, a fear of getting too big too fast that sent Denton on the wrong trail? And if one is, like Zuckerberg, free of such self-doubt, is it because of confidence, or just that the self-doubt already has a home, in bad relationships?

NETWORK's semi-fictionalized (?) Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is not as pompous--yet--as Charles Foster Kane in decreeing people will think "what I tell them to think!" and he's smart enough to never go down with the ship, because he sells everybody else out first. By contrast in the Big Jim Gettes segment of CITIZEN KANE (the only movie SOCIAL NETWORK can really be compared with), Welles' egotistical billionaire lets go of his common sense and decides to not bow out of New York's gubernatorial race, even if means exposing his love nest with "singer." Zuckerberg knows far more about the death knell of bad press than Kane, who smears right and left in his Inquirer but thinks himself immune. Hmmm-hmmm Zuckerberg knows better.

But I mention Rosebud because of the overarching theme of Fincher's film, which begins with Zuckerberg on a date with Erica (Rooney Mara) and hints Facebook was the result of a drunken bit of coder geek vengeance against her after she broke up with him just because he was more concerned with getting into snooty Harvard clubs than he was about her and her stupid personal issues. Once all Mark's problems are solved, and he's got 24 billion dollars, he remembers he invented Facebook just to stalk her, and lives obsessively ever after.

If old Foster Kane had been around in the age of Facebook, maybe there wouldn't have been so much confusion over who or what Rosebud was: he'd have a picture of it in his online FB albums! He'd have a sledding game on there, and a 'design your own vintage sled' app. The ornate picnics and famous guest-collecting could be canceled, because he wouldn't need to see his friends to prove they existed (only their pictures). He could make Xanadu online via one of those online worlds with the Sims.

In short, for all his fancy talk, Kane failed to crush the social sphere down to a small enough crumpled ball that he could find his obscure object of desire, that Rosebud. Zuckerberg on the other hand destroys the last vestiges of the gasping public sphere all so he can continually orbit around his beloved lost sled/girl because, in the process of amassing his fortune, he dissolved the meaning of wealth. The need to flaunt has been replaced by the need to haunt. A hundred bedroom mansions mean nothing if a poor hipster can party with 500 friends just from a desk in a studio apt.

In each case (Rosebud, Erica) we're caught in the same dramaturgical principle: the 'suspension of functional maturity.' The subject 'freezes' in time when the opportunity arises to escape the confines of his current life - and it resumes when he's climbed so far up there's no one in sight to see him 'need' openly. As a boy Kane dropped his sled when it was time to go to New York and learn to manage his inherited fortune. He remembers it only later, but "singer" Susan Foster comes into his line of flight right as he's about to go uncrate it. Finally preparing to project his objet petit a, Kane's receptivity finds an accidental screen in Susan. His purpose changes from resuming his interrupted childhood to trying to enforce the success of an unwilling opera star on an unwilling public. When his whole life crumbles to shit and he's on his death bed, only then he finally remembers the sled again. It's as if the 'story' of the rope ladder to success at the price of your soul hinges on this surrender of linear personal evolution, or something.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK is similarly constructed as the long personal grudge/obsession of a genius computer nerd over a girl... entrusted to inhabit the parameters of his objet petit a by the near-guarantee of her never wanting to see him again, no matter how many billions he amasses. Once she gives in and sleeps with him (or Kane finds Rosebud and holds it in his hands), the dream is over - it's just wood again.

As David Fincher is so able a candidate for the role of '21st century Welles' let's examine the nature of genius auteurs in depicting genius millionaires, with the fact borne in mind that movies are an intensely expensive endeavor. Even the smallest indie picture can cost millions and one can only assume that there's more skulduggery involved getting a film made than we will ever know. Compare for example Welles'--perhaps unconscious but nonetheless inexcusable--sabotaging of RKO via his boondoggling in Brazil in 1942 whilst attempting to edit both JOURNEY INTO FEAR and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS via long distance phone calls and telegrams while he slept with local models, waxed poetically over the suffering poor, and danced through Carnivale. (1) Compare that kind of infantile entitlement to Zuckerberg's in SOCIAL NETWORK and all the dots suddenly connect. "You don't make a billion friends without making a few enemies," and sometimes a billion friends are the worst enemy you can have.

Welles in Rio, alone with his million friends

Mark Z, with his.

The ultimate tragedy in both AMBERSONS and FEAR is they could have been great, if Welles had been there to see them through the studio machine to distribution. He wasn't, and ran so far over budget in Brazil he basically bankrupted the studio, then got sore when they re-edited and trimmed AMBERSONS without his consent. The nerve! Fincher seems more reliable as far as wasting other people's money, but don't forget ALIEN 3, which sucked - he all but sabotaged the entirety of the franchise. And frankly I don't like SEVEN, which seems the most claustrophobic and misanthropic of the post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS genius serial killer movies imitations, and features one of Brad Pitt's most annoying performances, yeah?

Fincher digs coding

But all is forgiven with FIGHT CLUB, which almost started a revolution in the theater on E. 86th Street where I saw it, and of course ZODIAC. I still can't listen to any Donovan, let alone "Hurdy Gurdy Man" without getting nightmares. And yet, it's telling that there exists the question of which came first, Fincher's inability to create human warmth onscreen, or his themes of alienation and the collapse of the social sphere?

Like many emotionally-challenged auteurs, Fincher finds warmth at the office -- the autumnal 70s mod beauty of the newspaper bullpen in ZODIAC, the chummy office spaces of Facebook, but overall his worlds are dark and cold and always on the  brink of savagery. THE SOCIAL NETWORK then, is perfectly suited to his talents, or is it the other way around?

The night Zuckerberg creates the first FB prototype-- a 'who's hot / not" program-- Fincher cuts back and forth between Matt in his dorm and a sterile yet self-consciously 'decadent' exclusive Harvard club party, with bimbos bussed in from all around, for what is basically a long night of strippers and douchebag boys in club ties and backwards white baseball caps. Perhaps it's because my experiences on these lines were clouded in cigarette and pot smoke, full of drunk shouting and noisy bands, but this exclusive party Fincher depicts strikes me as tragically sad and date rapey hollow. Fincher's clinical dep-ick!-tion of it sets the tone for all subsequent SOCIAL gatherings. The women are all drug-addled groupies or wise, centered ladies who look down from their taut heels at lesser mortals--and the boys are either the aforementioned douchebags or rich nerds hiding behind CRTS, funnels, shots, and/or six-foot Graphix bongs. No one is 'connecting.' Ever. Even superstar Napster-creatin' Justin Timberlake is just boastin' and toastin' in a void where he knows everyone's name, but only to show off his memory. A Jewish fraternity's Caribbean night party, for example, is dead in the water since there could be a better party elsewhere. No one can enjoy a party if a better one might be going on somewhere, and by the laws of Groucho Marx, the best party is the one so exclusive they don't even know about it. During the day, lectures and classes are merely backdrops for late arrivals, note passing, and early, dramatic departures.

In sum, Fincher's version of Harvard represents the beginning of the end of the social sphere even before the arrival of Facebook. But again, which came first, the nanny state censoring nearly all our public acts (sexual harassment, smoking, basically everything done by Don Draper in MAD MEN) or the rise of online communities satisfying our final social need, allowing us to stay home alone forever without getting lonely?

Jack Daniels makes a brilliant 1.75 cameo

And is Fincher a misogynist or is the SN mise-en-scene meant to conjure misogyny, and gender stratification? By the end of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Zuckerberg is blissfully alone, to stalk... and stalk... without getting rained on, or splashed by passing cars, or noticed, or paying for his crimes. The only ones who suffer in this new deal are the women who would prefer their men not hide, sneer, or shout obscenities from the safety of their limousine windows. But that's what money's for. It's to make willowy gorgeous waitresses with attitude smile at you for a 20% tip that could buy a jet ski.

I remember I used to suffer from great social anxiety before the arrival of Friendster. What helped me were my precious testimonials: "Erich is so cool" etc. I had like 300 of them! Being able to read that list of validations any time, like alone at four in the morning after a bad date, saved my sanity. So at the same time, the need to socialize in real time dropped off. By the time I'd migrated to Myspace and Livejournal I was depressed again (neither had testimonials) but I now had my insatiable urge fulfilled and, as smoking anywhere indoors became verboten, my socializing dropped off to nothing.

Now, on iMeds and Facebook I never go anywhere. Bars look weird with all that clear air. Now you can see the sad drunk all the way in the back of the room...  on his laptop, and the cute girl has her iPhone at the ready, repelling any and all would be hitter-onners with the inarguable pre-emptive presence of her black mirror while she waits for her internet date to show. Might as well stay home then, and hide, and wait for the collapse to complete, or until girls who aren't coke-addicted groupies finally find a way to see keyboard clacking as something sexy.... maybe via the flesh of the crushed black centipede?

But anyone can see that the gap between the 'real' of physical nuts-and-bolts-and-eye-contact reality and the safe anonymity of the web is widening to the point that soon not even a ten-foot pole will vault you across it.

A Rosebud by any other name would smell as sweet, until one finally uncrated it. Once exposed to modern air it would smell of musty, warped wood, traces of snow having long since gone to glowing liquid rust along the blades, the oxidation tempered by the crate's suffocating darkness. Better to keep it crated, then, forever, and just dream of it--all perfectly, preciously sad and abandoned--while you race down white sloping hills on that online winter sports app on your phone, pressing 'play again' over and over... until suddenly it's morning and there's no one left online to hear you crack your snow globe balls.

1) See Simon Callow's Orson Welles Volumer 2: Hello Americans

Hey Betty Blue, Come Blow Your Mind!

Beatrice Dalle: few other women have created such affectionately crazy characters. And I don't mean affectionately crazy like rom-com Sandra Bullock tangled up in wedding dress crazy, I mean batshit tear your jugular vein out with her teeth while on top of you in bed crazy. That she can make such terrifying characters affectionate attests to her charisma and fearlessness; she's like Asia Argento's SCARLET DIVA with a mild case of rabies. She is, all the time, what Courtney Love used to be, at key drunken moments (not a dig, I love Love), and Angelina Jolie before she got Sean Penn philanthropic  by which I mean, that precious moment when you're neither boring/shy nor boorish/belligerent, when you're awash in the mystic formula of fierceness. Dalle stayed fierce. She found the fountain from whence that fierce formula flows. She's the hot female version of Robert Mitchum in CAPE FEAR or Brando in STREETCAR. She's berserk so you don't have to be. It's okay to be turned on even as you're running for your life. And you better run. 

She's played in many films, in many different but distinctly Dalle roles, but there are three unforgettable movies that, taken together, circumscribe a 20 year devolution of her screen persona:  BETTY BLUE (1986), TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001) and INSIDE (2007). Taken together they form a loose, unofficial 21 year trilogy of taboo-busting French cinema wherein our heroine evolves from bi-polar sexually ravenous waif (BETTY) to batshit cannibal nymphomaniac (TROUBLE) to full-on female Michael Meyers / Jason unstoppable Kali womb ripper (INSIDE). Let's slow down and delve!

Blue kind of retro-actively launched the whole 'quirky comi-tragedy with casual nudity and sometimes random violence" French post-Rohmer subgenre; Trouble took the always popular vampire myth to its bloody extreme end, Gallic-style; and Inside fit the torture-porn mold of the late 00s if transposed to do-or-die agonies of childbirth and child envy. What's interesting is the way the movies are separate -- different directors, scripts, etc.--but Dalle plays the three in a way that can be read as a cohesive arc: character threads left unresolved in Betty continue through to complete homicidal psychopathology in Inside, the way RED kind of wound up the threads of WHITE and BLUE in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy.

And what a hell of a journey because, you see, this actress needs no makeup our double to be terrifying: she's got those teeth!

One thing our own Hollywood heroines never seem to have is scary teeth. This sad truth compromised the rawness of Rob Zombie's DEVIL'S REJECTS (2007) for example, with its scuzzy Manson family cannibals flashing top notch orthodontics, and--for a couple of them--voices lacking the deepening effect of decades of cigarette and meth smoke, i.e. thin and tinny (Sid Haig being of course the golden exception). See, in America our teeth are either perfect or godawful based on our parent's health plans or lack thereof; there is little in-between the have-braces and have-nots; the rich get even their minor imperfections sealed over and whitened; the poor can only watch in the mirror as their incisors and bicuspids overlap and twist sideways. With socialized medicine however, the very-crooked get fixed to merely crooked; the merely slightly crooked is good enough for the state, so deal. Dalle's lupine chompers are definitely in this unique, disturbing but not unsexy median; she is a truly brave actress and sexpot for not wanting to hide them. Their dark crooked contours especially shine in all their H.R. Giger glory in TROUBLE: hers are the castrating incisors that squeamish last-minute castration cop-out films like TEETH and HARD CANDY boast of, but are scared to deliver even on rapists (both films resort to a JK-sew it back on-kinda cop-out at the last minute). 

Dalle doesn't need a reason to kill or castrate, it just comes naturally. Thus her crazy sexual frenzy in TROUBLE EVERY DAY is truly terrifying and sexy at the same time, putting the softcore sleaze of BASIC INSTINCT's ice pick murders to shame. The guy she eviscerates in TROUBLE isn't even that bad of a guy, just broke into the wrong house and didn't run when he had the chance, not unlike the poor string of sods falling victim to doe-eyed Marilyn Chambers in RABID. 

I came the long way around to BETTY BLUE in early 1991. I rented it on the advice of a hot chick I was after, thinking me talking about it would win her heart. It was my first time actually renting a movie with subtitles that I didn't have to for a class. Now of course it's no problem, but you may remember that back then they were hard to read on VHS (sometimes they were just cut halfway off by the bottom or where faded white-on-white lettering?) But - a strong gin and tonic and 20 minutes past the credits, I fell 'in love' with BETTY. After hitting my third or fourth drink of the morning--felt like I understood the French! By the halfway point, I was ready to fight to defend this crazy sexy movie. I wanted someone to come along and denigrate it so I could rush to its defense. I swooned for Beatrice, I even had a mancrush on Jean-Hughes Anglade! I balled my fists, drunkenly enamored of them both, and the two friends they make and drink tequila rapidos with, crying over their absence, and the melancholy perfection of their piano duet. It was like I had fallen in love with a movie as a collective person, a person who couldn't walk straight or uncross her eyes, maybe, but if anyone made a wise crack I'd belt them one. Roger Ebert, for example, missed the point and thus decided everyone else missed the point, not him! Here's what he wrote about the film on Christmas Day in 1986:

Reviews have been written debating the movie's view of madness, of feminism, of the travail of the artist. They all miss the point. "Betty Blue" is a movie about Beatrice Dalle's boobs and behind, and everything else is just what happens in between the scenes where she displays them.

 Oh Roger, with that snide sexist comment your back-end misogyny is laid bare (even his word choice gives him away). Imagine if I dismissed VERTIGO so snidely: "people say VERTIGO is about obsession, madness, and castration anxiety, but it's really just a San Francisco travelogue, coupled to occasional shots of handbags." Imagine how mad Roger would get!! Yet it's far truer than what he says about BETTY.

See? I'm still fighting to defend that film, and YET, though I bought the DVD some time ago I've never even watched it. Maybe it's because it's such a drunk binge movie to me. I sobbed over it while drinking so much it's almost like an ex-girlfriend whose photos I no longer want to look at. Having since moved from booze to SSRI meds, maudlin Vertigo-style moping, adieu! Even when I watched it all the time I'd quit after around the 2/3 way in, and start again, rather than watching it all fall apart. Too damn painful. 

Looking back, it was, I realized, the first subtitled foreign language film I really 'loved.' PERSONA and LA DOLCE VITA were both close seconds, but my love for them was like an undergrad English student's love for Shakespeare: trepidatious, intimidated, afield of my comfort zone, but armed by the knowledge if I could talk about them in the right company, I'd seem intellectual. If they were girlfriends, PERSONA would be that aloof beauty you end up heartbroken alone in your room over as she wanders off into the rainy dark to kill herself and wont let you follow. DOLCE is that party girl who stays up all the time doing coke and is ultimately shallow and cowed by Catholic guilt. BETTY on the other hand is the sexy girl you meet at a party and bring home and a week goes by before you realize she hasn't left, even to get her things--if she has any. And by the time you notice she hasn't even left, and try to stop fooling around long enough to think of an excuse why she needs to leave, she's clinging to you like a python and you're too hooked on her hotness to even resist when she crushes your rib cage or froths at the mouth from jealousy after opening your mail. 

As her patient lover, the maintenance man, aspiring writer and part-time house painter Zorg, Jean-Hugues Anglade in the film can't go unmentioned. He's no mere 'beard' the way he would later become when strugglin' with English as a French cop in films like MAXIMUM RISK (1996) or as the default boyfriend for LA FEMME NIKITA (1990). Perfect as a drunken writer who loves his manic muse to the point he can only shrug every time she starts smashing the furniture, frothing at the mouth, and torching buildings, giving us that classic "what can I do?" Parisian shrug may make us mad when we're ugly American tourists trying to get directions to the Louvre, but in the context of dealing with psycho girlfriends, well, it's genius. He's aware on some level it's only a movie, so the damage is just imagery - her hotness is the only real thing. 

I mention him because it's the lack of an Anglade in the later Dalle films that would signify the madness: Zorg would know when to walk away, know when to run, know when to commit to a sanitarium. Without him, Dalle runs amok and the dead bodies accrue. 

Like SPECIES later, BETTY BLUE was one of the films I would watch over and over during drunken week-long benders, and yet never see all the way to the end, either stopping or passing out beforehand, over and over - just as well. The only time I ever got to the end was when I was too drunk or half-asleep to change the channel. There's a reason for skipping both - SPECIES ends with a tour-de-force of crappy video game graphics; BLUE winds up aping the pillow snuffing end of CUCKOO'S NEST. As Larry Fishburne says to Chris Walken in King of New York, who wants to see you in a cage, man?

Better to black out before then, so you can wake up and re-binge to the giddy joy of the first half, when the pair hook up with a similar nutsy, drunk couple, Lisa (Consuelo De Haviland) and Eddy (Gerard Darmon) and spend many a fun night drinking, singing, joking about Alpha Romeos, and dancing around the apartment together in silk kimonos (below, opening them).

This kind of 'letting go' between two in-love couples is something that seems uniquely French. Americans never seem to get this loose unless there's a skeevy orgy vibe, or a sleazy 'mixed party' stereotype like the scene with Jane and her friend bringing those boors back from the bar in COMING HOME. Here the vibe isn't lewd like an American salesman out of town or sad like some Antonioni orgy; this quartet have already had sex, a lot of it, and it's not sleazy at all. They're just happy to have another couple to celebrate their post-orgasm glow with. Their sex is lived in, free of American-style moral hypocrisy: it's widened all four of their perspectives and their collective giddy gratitude is contagious. Dalle's 'behind' is sexy albeit deglamourized by a pair of ugly loose silk women's underwear; Anglade, nakedly trying to hammer apart a couch with a lit cigarette; their nudity is neither the airbrushed slickness of late night softcore or fuzzy banal Emmanuelle eurotrash, but a beautiful offhand slacker sexual deadpan freedom. Zorg and Betty are a couple that would never sit still for the slow seductions of Rohmer, but rather plunge through the world like crazy screaming brakes-off banshees - and yet not like the abstraction of Godard aping Gun Crazy or the noir fatalism of Truffaut or the airless youth worship of Araki or post-modern extremism of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.  It's the camaraderie of Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray, transposed to the joyously (but not tackily) sexual. You only realize what a rarity it is when you try to find it in other films. Or life.

 

Alas, it's sad it can't last even in the movies that convey it, those that divide the rush of joy at 'finding your tribe at long last' acceptance first half with a long downward spiral of overdosing, paranoia and cheap meth. We saw this a slew of late 90's and early 00's movies like BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997), TRAINSPOTTING (1996), MONSTER (2003), IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG (2004); and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) -- all very open about the highs and lows of drug use and the family bonding of a shared high --that fast white light upward blast of the first Friday night MDMA-twinkle and ending with the long slow downward death spiral that ends with crying in the office bathroom on Tuesday morning when the last few molecules of molly leave the brain and takes all your dopamine with it.  

If you were drinking the way I was, or just maudlin and 23 in a time before Prozac rose to prominence, it was the ultimate sorrow: 1990-1992 - the nights of fun with Eddy and Lisa were gone. My band broke up and college was over and there were no jobs and no weed (thanks, CAMP). The feeling was like you just got accepted by the cool kids and then the kids stopped being cool. It was rough. But thank god, the movies were there; Dalle howled a song to that roughness in its own language, like a Navajo code talker 

It's that sweet remembrance of things past that suffuses the rest of BETTY BLUE, and dies totally in Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY. A glacial, mostly nonverbal film, offering no sense of joy or belonging, only the terror of imagining your own human carnal lust leading you to a grisly agonizing doom. Thematically (STD metaphor!) like Cronenberg's RABID and SHIVERS, you know Denis is going way farther into the nitty-gritty, to sordid, evil places that, for all his weird appendages and 'new flesh', a Canadian could never go) Being torn apart by a maniacal lover in a maenad ripping sexual frenzy, is something we don't usually see (outside of our imaginations watching SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER) Such a grisly union of eros and thanatos forces us as viewers into weird moral positions, like a game of Twister devised by a coked-up pope, as the slow and relentless tug of sexual desire drags lonely people to their deaths via a very long, snaking chain tied to an anchor above the Mariana Trench. We risk our lives every time we climb into bed with a stranger - but in some areas, the drive to procreate trumps even survival, not to mention our family and careers: midlife crises, film noir, and Beatrice Dalle.

A good parallel to TROUBLE is Paul Schrader's CAT PEOPLE remake, which--like TROUBLE--posits a disease or gene that makes people become animals after or during sex. However, with Schrader. these killings are kind of tepid; the sex is over before the transformation starts, so it comes off a bit tame (the panther strikes while the victim is lolling around in a post-coitus haze). None of that waiting around for Denis! The way Dalle continues to obliviously whisper and coo into her torn-to-shreds dead lovers' ears for example, links to her a real cat lady, the type tries to keep toying and torturing their lifeless prey long after its dead.

Such scenes are few and far between in horror films. They make producers uncomfortable because--to put it a meta way--they threaten the safety of their model of the cinemagoer as one already dead and presumed therefore impervious to attack. It's as if the image and the eye are tectonic plates and the idea of cinema is to promise contact--a rumbling and shaking--yet prevent any actual rupture of the concrete, no buckling or triggering of a massive modernist earthquake. In true post-cinematic Asia Argento / Samara fashion, Dalle's sexuality causes the simulacratic rupture of the screen, wherein the covetous eye of the viewer is torn out in a fit of enjoyment that transcends all textual boundaries. She's like a knife that springs out of the screen as soon as her image lures you close enough to draw blood.

Variously dismissed, panned or gushed over by the few who've seen it, TROUBLE never really explains itself, presuming we're familiar with the pantheon of vampire and werewolf movies of ye olden times. For example, we can deduce that Vince Gallo is a chemist of the WEREWOLF OF LONDON / Henry Hull variety, tracking down a rare plant extract cure for his lycanthropic/vampiric malady. Gallo's malady is unnamed, but clearly causes an increasingly unbearable urge to devour and rend, especially during and approaching orgasm. Denis cuts back and forth between Dalle's LET THE RIGHT ONE IN-style handler (as he foolishly leaves her alone long enough for her to lure a pair of boys into the house) and Gallo on his honeymoon in a Paris hotel, where his stalker-killer lust is transferred from the wife to the cute hotel maid who comes in every day to make the bed. Dalle has devolved farther along in the disease, to where she can barely talk and spends each night breaking out of the prison her handler keeps her in, each night heading to the same lonesome stretch of road where truckers apparently pull over for sex, and are soon pulled to pieces. We can't really blame her. It's just a natural impulse. 

Gallo and Dalle-- it's gradually revealed through incidental conversations--once had kind of a thing for each other while doing research together in Africa (where they presumably found the plant that afflicted them, thus linking this film to GANJA AND HESS!) and, as their paths look like they will intersect again, we brace ourselves for what the Netflix liner notes erroneously refer to as a joint killing-spree. It never comes. Denis lives to thwart narrative expectations. Sublime moments compensate: Gallo and his bride hanging out atop Notre Dame, whose spires covered in gargoyles bear a passing resemblance to both Gallo (his weird eyes) and Dalle (her demonic teeth) - in parallel abstract ways I'm sure were at least mildly intentional. I'm not going to start getting into the whole reptilian conspiracy thing (read up on it here!) but Denis' thoughtful inclusion of these images brings a kind of Antonioni-esque post-modern amnesia to the events. We don't need plot exposition because we know the story and all its variations, from books, movies, and myth, and maybe on some antediluvian level, direct experience. In not laying out lots of expository dialogue, Denis allows the associations and timeless miasma to form out of a thousand minor details. In other words, post-modernism!

I wont spoil the particulars, but the key moment, the grisly highlight, is the sex/devouring scene of Dalle's with a horny neighbor kid who breaks into her locked room, and of course gets far more than he bargained for. Shots of the kids' accomplice downstairs waiting nervously for him to finish, hearing the muffled screams of agony and his ambiguous reaction (presuming maybe moans of pleasure), reminded me a lot of a key scene, quite similar, in the original I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. And hey, that's a good thing (if you know what scene I mean) TROUBLE EVERY DAY has got a bad rap as being disgusting and dull, but I think, again ale Ebert, its this squeamishness critics have with seeing hot girls castrate their prey and not just talk about it or cop out at the last minute. I get grossed out by a lot of things, but for some reason I find female-on-male sexual mutilation to be quite positive, maybe as there's so much violence done in the other direction, I'm a big one for balance... and anyway, it's the fuckin' movies! 

Inside (2007)

Last in the trilogy is one of those 'one night timespan' films which I love, especially if they end at dawn.  INSIDE tells the story of a pregnant woman (Alysson Paradis) living in a ROSEMARY'S BABY-style bubble that gets busted open, literally figuratively and metatextually, by Beatrice Dalle's covetous vengeance-seeker. 

And it's hard not to root for her as some kind of angel of feminine power. The patronizing treatment Paradis' expectant mother receives from her mom, the hospital, and her distracted boss sets the bar of pro-life patriarchal oppression at high right from the start, against which Dalle offers, at the very least, pre-biblical matriarchal alternative. There's a refreshing lack of "sanctity of motherhood" posing, an element so ingrained in the contemporary post-Spielberg/Ford American cinema that we only notice it by its sudden absence. With this disillusioning, we are made to realize that for all the babying, birth via C-section is a cruel and nasty business which no amount of drugs, sanitary surfaces and hospital hooplah can deny.  INSIDE gets to the meat of the matter, with humor and a fine sense of real time pacing.

Here Dalle's beauty has 'faded' drastically, even from even five years earlier, when she shot TROUBLE. She seems to have aged a great deal more in those five years than in she did in the 15 between TROUBLE and BETTY. She's no Isabelle Huppert or Isabelle Adjani--two actresses who will probably stay hot into their 80s, but so what? While both Adjani and Huppert can play super fierce and fucked-up women when the role demands, our Beatrice Dalle is something else entirely-- she is that fucked-up fierce woman, and if art imitates life you could take these three films as something like a portrait of supersexy evil genius insanity through the ages. Hers is the evolution from a bi-polar nympho-brawler losing her shit over not being able to have a baby (BLUE); to sympathetic cannibal (TROUBLE), to a completely unsympathetic monster ready to grab a a baby right out of another woman's womb. But is it a tragedy, or a triumph? Doesn't being the monster mean you--and you alone--get to not be afraid of the dark?

Now, the ideas on display in INSIDE were, I thought at the time, just a crazy French sensationalists' morbid imagination. But, as the Investigative Discovery TV show Deadly Women has taught me, it's happened quite a few times in real life! In fact it happened in 2007, the same year as INSIDE came out! Sacre bleu!! Crimes like these prove that, when push comes to shove, women can be just as crazy sick as men anytime, even sicker. Of course here at Acidemic we call that a victory. Why? Because, again, at least in the context of our discussion, it's movies! No one is really getting killed by Dalle, and after all, by the end of the trilogy, Betty Blue gets what she wanted, a child, now she just has to not kill it.

CONCLUSION:

By turns tragic, comic, sexy, horrifying and terribly sad, this loose trilogy of BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE form a grand and very French salute to our great big beautiful Dalle, a woman not even slightly winded by patriarchy's desperate chokeholds. Even if she's burned alive, electroshocked, stabbed, strangled, or smothered, she still wins, one way or the other. She appeals to the cultured European melancholic degenerate in us all, the one who sees not clearly but too far, and who knows that--once you clear away the social more haze--sex and death are so close to one another along the fault lines of existence as to be inseparable. Step too close to the crack and you find yourself caught in the thin slice of ground between their gaping fissures and nowhere to go but down into the crevasse. How, after all, can you get back up and keep a safe distance now? If you are Dalle, you straddle that fissure, one foot on each side, like a ravenous goddess! See these three films and realize: to desire sex but fear death, or vice versa is to live an anxious lie, what Buddhists call samsara. Dalle is way past your samsara. She dwells in the harrowing truth. She's the bubble gum card fluttering in the wheel of life's spokes. Her terrible teeth rend the mundane irrelevance of man like a celluloid Kali.