PERIOD - END OF REPORT: Sigh... it's been a rough year so forgive the claws, self-aggrandizing self-deprecating ragged scuttling seas and bee plusses, reeling and writhing and tea trays in the sky and grim bahnhoff fahren auf der dumbkopf-- ness, Grand Hotel where nothing ever happens I shall return, whomever I am. Well, maybe I shan't. Aside from some pieces for Bright Lights Film Journal, and Art Decades, I've not panspermiated witticism hither and yon as in year's past. I just been here like a madman, so hard, bro. I'm here so hard. I'm here with a vengeance. Como venganza! Por que no? Why want? Consider the HD Anamorphic widescreen as seen through a clarity-induced foglessness by mind-altering (prescribed) drugs, and unprescribed, and unmindscribed scribbled.  I shall not wander, Shep Hard, I Howard... The Cinema, across fromder Alexanderplatz I shall be eaten. Let the tea trays land where they wilt. Unto thee, this pledge: Nichts mehr mit dem mich-krieg and all bandersnatches shunned and turtles dovetailed towards mockery's glam opposite.

Seldom seen since its 1933 limited release,  ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Paramount's champagne surrealism centerpiece, can stand on its head proud surrounded by to the barrage of lunatic brilliance of the studio's peak pre-code '32-34 lunatic comedy output: MILLION DOLLAR LEGS, SNOW WHITE, DUCK SOUP and INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933 Paramount was the best gonzo-weird year/studio ever). For a long weird time we had to take it all on faith that this movie was as bad as they said. Well time is officially caught up with itself, and thanks to TCM's celebration of its set designer William Cameron Menzies, ALICE can be easily appreciated in all its basement childhood nightmare rarebit and psilocybin overdose glory, free of rumor and innuendo. Man how I would have flipped to find this floating around on a 5 AM Saturday morning UHF station as a kid in the 70s. I wouldn't have known if I was seeing an Sid and Marty Kroft-style life size puppet kid's show or a late night horror movie... and that was just the way we liked it, back then. Kids' TV was a big tent back then, and 5 AM PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE on the late night horror movie segued into weird Z-grade European 'kiddie matinee' nightmares like RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS before finally morphing into SCOOBY DOO and LAND OF THE LOST then SPACE GIANTS as easy as falling down a K-hole.

A K-hole, that's this 1933 Paramount ALICE. Remember when you were a kid on some haunted or pirate ride at Disney World or Dorney Park and imagining what it would be like to sneak out of your little car, off the track, and into the elaborate tableaux on either side of you, hiding amidst the animatronic figures? If there was a Paramountland, or a Fleischerland, and a ride through Betty Boop's early great classics rendered in black and white automated papier mache figures, or a miniature golf course, all the weird undulating surreal characters but it was kind of a low budget ride, and you were kind of stuck there, and had drank the water like Lisa Simpson at Duffworld, and you were hanging out with a 10 year-old blonde girl with no fear of the unknown, who dragged you around to all the moving parts, then there you go. So if you love haunted house rides, and creative miniature golf courses, and mushrooms, then my friend, honk once.

I never like to preface but if you know this site at all you know I'm in that rarity of critical voices, the drug-addled classic monster lover, and those early mornings are still with me, so when a movie stumbles way off course and lands in nightmare territory, reminding me of the cheap look of childhood nightmares after eating too much candy or going through the haunted house ride one too many times at the carnival. And I learned way back in my 90s Deadhead/Floyd period that there was no better time of the night than when the show was over, and every last parent and wally long tucked away, coming down hard but still tripping our faces off, but all the anguished paranoid driving home finally done, safe and snug and able to finally take our shoes off, but still wired and whacked out with miles (and bourbon) to go before the colors would be muted enough to get any sleep. So we needed to watch something that wouldn't bum us out, no TV commercials or guns, or violence, man, but no squares either. And at those times, when they were needed most, my tapes of Betty Boop, W.C. Fields, Marx Bros, and Cary Grant could always see us through. One look into their eyes and we'd know they knew the score. If MGM was the studio of amphetamines, Warners of cigarettes, and Universal of cocaine, Paramount was the studio of psychedelics (and believe me, alcoholism is very psychedelic, especially the DTs. I wouldn't miss 'em for the world).

Hence ALICE IN WONDERLAND is 1933 Paramount's ideal choice for a 'literary' adaptation. Remember what the door mouse said, man?

Granted it's not perfect--the idea to totally obscure our favorite actors with masks seems wrong, then again neither Gary Cooper nor Cary Grant were huge stars at the time (just handsome arm candy for Mae and Marlene) and which Alice is--to the kids' and critics' alike--perfect? Disney's 1951 cartoon version is clever and engaging but pedantic, Burton's is beautiful and thrilling but lacks surrealist fervor, Jan Svankmajer's version is basement hallucinatory and uncanny childhood nightmare disturbing but lacks class, and all the BBC versions are too much the same other way around. Paramount's pre-code Alice is sooo wrong on the other hand, it's better than right.

Anyway, I had trouble getting past the first few minutes before, but this time I came in during the middle, half paying attention and soon there was this crazy mock turtle with a strange yet familiar voice, and I wasn't at all sure it even was Cary Grant inside the shell, until he sings "Turtle Soup" with that 20s trill in his voice and you realize all the other layers and talents of Cary Grant that fell by the wayside in favor of others, until he was, simply put, perfect in every way, sanded down from finest oak, a greatest hits and tics package, but this craziness is so welcome, a bit like when he breaks down in front of the child services judge in Penny Serenade and you're like whoa, Cary, we never see this side of you, and it makes us weak in the knees. We realize the vast wealth of brilliance and jubilance that went into making Grant as grand as he is, all of it folded and edited and streamlined until he was, as Stanley Cavell put it, "fit to stand the gaze of millions." Here, though, that gaze is rendered moot. He's in a turtle shell (or just doing the voiceover) One wonders what kind of miracles Grant could put into, say, a Pixar film. Here it's pretty damn close to that, because some stars just do their persona when doing a voiceover. You won't find, say, Tom Hanks or Will Smith going out on a far limb into madness in their roles, not like Grant does. Grant is committed to the madness and the result is like reading/acting out a story book for agog infant children while hopped up on mescaline backstage at a 1920's Vaudeville theater.

Amongst the stand-out sights are a king and queen of hearts perfectly gussied to resemble the English pattern playing deck (left), the king especially is so uncanny in that Freudian sense. We've all seen that face since we first learned 'Go Fish' as a child, and suddenly wham here he is, in black and white and surrounded in a curiously 2-D dream space, as if childhood memory and fever dream had crashed ceremoniously together.

And just when you're wondering why they didn't just make this a cartoon, there's a segue into a Fleischer animation of the walrus and carpenter story. It's a a nice break, and there's all sorts of character actor familiar faces and voices to help you navigate the off-putting (and rather flatly lit) weirdness that the whole alienated kids ride acid flashback thing is tempered with the thrill of recognizing an old friend in a throng of strangers: Ned Sparks snarling through his usually croaky clenched jaw as the caterpillar; Louise Fazenda as a hybrid Ginger Rogers and the girl in the Eraserhead radiator as the White Queen; Edna May Oliver, strangely sexy with her upturned nose extension as the Red Queen; Roscoe Karns and Jackie Oakie as the Tweedles; Edward Everett Horton singing about the tea-trays in the sky (and waving around saucers to make sure we get the UFO connection), and Charlie Ruggles as the March Hare. Richard Arlen is the Cheshire Cat; Charlotte Henry is fine as Alice, as ever quite the fearless wanderer, moving from freak tableaux to freak tableaux, size to size, like they're so many miniature golf course holes. Amateur trippers could learn a lot from Alice -- no matter how weird things get, she never freaks out or judges them as horrid or ugly, bad or good. Where others cower or freak out she just notes shit got "curious." Is it any wonder a nervous sensitive artists like me would worship her? (1)

any similarities to a human ass surely coincidental

This is your dinner on drugs - but play it cool, bro

But for character actors like these, all they have to do is tweak their personae, the real challenge comes for these rising stars Cooper and Grant (don't forget this same year John Wayne was still doing non-western bit parts, like a middle manager stepping stone in Baby Face, and Cooper and Grant were largely arm candy for the Mae West and Dietrich) and as I say Grant's voice is barely recognizable as he sing-cries-speaks of his "sorrow of a sorrow" as the Mock Turtle, hanging out with a laughing gryphon and chortling chessmen and cards. And Cooper, I'm happy to say, also acquits himself devilishly well, almost doing a deadpan satire of his laconic cowboy persona as the vertiginously challenged White Knight (below).

As much as Grant is over the top and unrecognizable yet familiar and therefore uncanny, Gary Cooper is so very much himself he become uncanny, too. It's pretty funny to think this tall drink of water could ever fall off a horse, but he does so with great nonchalance again and again, but as he says with his head in a ditch, "what does it matter where my body happens be? My mind goes on working all the same." Showing off his bizarre inventions, like his little box, upside down to keep the rain out, and his empty mouse trap and bee hive strapped to his horse's back, proud of himself but modest, the way a ten year old boy might talk while trying to impress a girl Alice's age by showing off his toy collection or whiffle ball skills, half shyly, half with little boy bluster.












But the real selling point for this as the bad acid rarebit fiend K-hole nightmare miniature golf course-cum-carnival-ride childhood fever dream are the grotesque images that linger in the mind, etched on the soul like dark scars in the thick unconscious muck where nothing ever dries or heals, just festers until it erupts into sudden hallucinations and terrifying vertigo (with the right 'trigger'). When I saw the mouse, this big lumbering dude in a mouse costume I should say, flopping around in a shallow concrete pool (of Big Alice's tears) as if some plushy Overlook refugee paddling forward in the Freaks climax rain, never speaking, just starting and stopping his soaked mouse suit splashing when Alice orders him, I had that uncanny spine tingle of recognition, as if my nightmare childhood well, long singe paved over, was flooding up all over the couch around me. Or the scene with the crazy fat mom throwing the baby around while the cook hurls insults and pots, narrowly missing the child/little person (in real time) and the frog sits outside in a Sterling Holloway sigh, super uncanny creepy. Alice holding the baby and having it oscillate from what looks like Billy Barty to an actual baby to a plastic doll and then a real piglet; or the half-dead (or are they puppets?) flamingos waved around during the croquet game (did they drug a bunch of flamingos into submission or do they just play dead when scared or were they dead or what? They're as eerie in their oscillation between corpse, inanimate puppet, and barely conscious organism as, say, gramps was in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE); the way the white queen saying "better" over and over gradually turns into a sheep selling giant egg which Alice stares at until it turns into W.C. Fields' as Humpty Dumpty demanding she stop staring at him like he was an egg, and state her name and her business; the talking roast (it's bad manners, we learn, to slice off a piece of someone we've been introduced to) defining to a T what it's like trying to keep cool while eating dinner with your parents while on mescaline, at the final dinner party, where Alice is crowned queen, and everyone dances around, and chokes her and generally carries on like the "one of us! One of us" FREAKS dinner combined with the Her Professor dinner in THE BLUE ANGEL and the entirety of Allendro Jodorowsky's canon all boiled and distilled into one black and white fever dream bad trip childhood cold sweat k-hole delirium tremens nightmare. And in general the way small details become huge and vice versa as Alice alternates her pills for growth and shrinking depending on the parameters of each scene.


But hey, it's a kids' film, or something, and I didn't even get to mention W.C. Fields' as Humpty, which is one of the better vignettes. Joseph Mankiewicz wrote the script with the same sense of deadpan fluid riffing absurdity that made his MILLION DOLLAR LEGS and DIPLOMANIACS so pitch Paramount perfect. I'm not sure if Mankiewicz ever tried mescaline or reefer or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if had. he captures the bizarro tripping hipster wordplay very well, the freestyle way staring at something long enough turns it into something else, or saying any word more than once or twice renders the words themselves alive and fluid, strange and absurd. It could be the bad trip 1933 YELLOW SUBMARINE or HEAD, and maybe in the way it's too out there and dark for young kids, but juuuust right for tripping adults with shady memories of K. Gordon Murray European kids movie imports finally breaking through their acid-burnt bonds of language, persona and time, as well as providing them the guide on how to not wind up in the looney bin, just don't try to recapture the sense of where you were or what's going on or what those words someone spoke at you mean, the way all the world used to line up along a time-space-language axis for you before the drugs took hold. And don't worry some dark corner of Wonderland is going to ensnare you, or that the queen really will chop your head off. Nothing can last or be returned to now that you're finally loose. You may wind up were you started but it won't be the same you that ends there. So you better hold on yet if you can let go of needing even a single line of sanity, can throw that last breadcrumb thread into the wind and fall fall fall, then Hole in One, baby. You're awake for the first time all over again, and ready for a whole looking glass country, Auntie Em! There's no place like... home.... home... home.....ohm... ohm.....ohm...omm... t]

1) NOTES
Longtime readers note one of my graven image idols of worship is the giant Alice statue in Central Park - see Erich Kuersten: A Poet's Journey

What should it benefit the world if it should gain a talented jazz singer with an old soul, perfect pitch and a deep affinity with Ella and Monk but then lose her to a charismatic snaggle-toothed junkie in one of those goddamned mini-fedoras? Maybe we'd have been better off not to gain her at all, this daughter of ours, if it means watching her squander her gifts and leap into the first thresher that rolls past? The pain of our loss is so great there's only three things can stop it: crack, heroin, and of course booze. The things that make our fear of death bearable are the same things that kill us. Poison numbs the misery of being poisoned--this is the slow relentless clockwork coiling of the strangling python of addiction.

The pain of AMY, Asif Kapadia's chilling documentary about Amy Winehouse--Britain's Janis Joplin--lies in this. Watching her amply videotaped life from innocent young Southgate Jewish girl with loyal friends and the voice of a 40 year-old diva with pipes of gold to straggly bulimic loping after some gross K-Fed-ish skeever, we shrink in horror, the recognition that perhaps glommers like him are the natural parasites of famous alcoholics. Even Lee Marvin had them, like lice, so tough guy stance has nothing to do with it. When you're drunk and stoned all the time there's not much you can do about it when a fast talking charmer locks in on you. Addiction has already taught you that the best way to live with yourself while slowly dying from your own lifestyle is to convince yourself you want to die in the first place, that life's grim absurdity has all but demanded it. And the nature of co-dependence is in that, here's someone who wants you to be wasted. They come along like instruction booklets and warranties in the packaging of addiction, never wanted, never asked for, but you don't throw them out since you may need them one day, when the shit don't work anymore, even to numb the pain of it's not working. They'll mix your drinks for you, even lift them to your lips, even inject you with speedballs while you're already passed out (i.e. Belushi). They'll never say a word about your 'problem' because they're part of it. And when you're famous enough that passers by feel you owe them a picture of you smiling next to them, and the paparazzi blind you with epileptic seizure inducing flash bulbs every time you peek your head out the door, what you want is someone who's going to keep you well insulated, warm and toasty in the twin orbit of narcissist neurosis. Someone who's a 'cross-section of the American public' like Susan Foster Kane, or Joe Gillis.



I've championed a lot of messed-up artists (Lindsay Lohan especially) over the decades, or at any right they're right to make mistakes and revel in their time without the pooh-poohing of the stern Puritanical popular press. Enabling is second nature to me. It comes from growing up with a heavy drinking dad whose rages always made me feel very very calm, as if I could counterbalance him through Zen stillness.  So it's easy to see why I feel so relaxed and calm when in the striking radius of insane hotties, but at the same time I shudder to see them lost in self-immolating frenzy, powerlessly, for it's far easier to forget the brutal cost of our enabling pop cultural blind eye and schadenfreude than to make a bad blood-boiling fuss and of course the near impossibility of holding onto your self integrity while surrounded by hunger mouths, flashing and flashing like the cannibal boys in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER or the living dead. AMY may indirectly damn the British tabloid press's insatiable demand for complaints against its insatiable demands, may with the wry guidance of indirect directions show how such a feeding frenzy creates the death and tragedy it craves,  sneering and mocking as a 23 year-old pop star devolved into a bulimic walking corpse, but it offers no alternative. In a way, it itself is part of the problem. Film corrupts and films about corruption are not somehow double negative immune.

 It's all there in her hit song based on an attempt to get into rehab kaboshed by her enabling moocher dad, "They tried to make me go to rehab / I said no no no" - he was the one who told her she didn't need to go, that she was fine (which, I admit is what my mom would have said in similar circumstances), that she had to do tour after tour - another who was largely absent until lo she became big money and fame and he realized he needed to take care of her, we learn in the film, to the point of crashing her drying out facility with a camera crew and ragging on her for not taking care of her public, and flying her --while unconscious from the night before-- to frickin' Eastern Europe for a show she didn't want to do. But she picked them for her entourage. And I know that feeling too well, because when soooo wasted you can barely walk, you don't know who your friends are, so you just have to trust the ones who seem to know you, from somewhere...

But it's not the dirtbags, jonesers, and moochers fault. Slithering beneath it all, right down in our chromosomes, that's the enemy. The sensitive gene is the same one that falls prey to drugs, eating disorders, in other words, our own chemical imbalances, genetic addiction, depression, it's as tied up in the wheels of the celebrity death cult as anything. You can always tell the hacks from the real artists because the hacks have no drug problems. AMY delivers this global socio-historical truth in such a clear and concise way that it makes me kind of ashamed, even singleness of purpose sober as long as I've been... of advocating self-destruction on this site. Though hey I've never stood up for cocaine, heroin, meth or their myriad derivatives. For these un-psychedelic drugs bleed all over the psychedelic warrior's noble shoes by association. Me, I'm a drunk too, and if I vow I won't drink again until Hell freezes over, well, believe me, I'll find a way to freeze it.

All in all, AMY is a hell of a harrowing portrait of what alcohol, cocaine, and fame can do to a sensitive artist, the toll it can take on her friends, her real friends, the ones she had before all that stuff came along. It has less effective tricks, too, like the decision to show the lyrics of her songs as subtitles--every single song--for they aren't especially detail-oriented, or so I'd tell her if she was in my creative writing class, if I had one, and she was in it. Without them, maybe her raw bluesy chutzpah could shine better, for this alcoholic, maybe not. I didn't like Whitney Houston either for the same reasons. It's like hey, pick a note and stay there, all that single breath octave climbing gives me a headache. Give me Leadbelly or Blind Lemon Jefferson for the blues, and Dylan for the lyrics. Give me an old rocking chair and a song like "In the Gloaming," and Stumpy can take the bottle away.

In case you can't tell, that last sentence was a pip: NIAGRA and RIO BRAVO references. May you find them, the distance twixt the two locales on DVD. And for all the still sick and suffering in and out of the rooms--see you in Hell. I'll be the guy riding the Zamboni. A vow is a vow. And Heaven Hill needs ice. Or so I remember. Shit's nigh undrinkable straight. Stick with Ten High. Watching a poor girl disappear down the chute of bulimia and alcohol addiction isn't the kind of thing one should be sober for. Amen. It works if you work it so work it, so work it, you're broken, mossy with dirtbag jonesers. The record skips. The needle's dusted. The charm's unwound. But you can always flip to side B.

Baby, the dirtbag was me.

(The following was written whilst whacked out of my gourd on withdrawal sickness (withdrawal: the best drug in the world) coupled to flu-like symptoms and twelveteen shots of knockoff brand Robotussin while trapped at brother Fred's house for Xmas. Phoenix is an armed camp, your majesty, in a deep unconscious trance born of desert wind chill, plentitude, and cordite. I was gonna scuttle it but wanted something to run next to my AMY review to provide the proper balance/perspective, to take any buzzkill taste out, like HEAD after LOST WEEKEND. So take it for what it is, a deep Xmas poem riddled with diseased insect sci fi poetic film references, enigmatic but revealingly pretentious typos, and a profound realization borne from watching NAKED LUNCH and STARSHIP TROOPERS off Fred's savvy Tivo on Xmas at 3 AM (after SCROOGED) And getting it now - As Bill Murray so egocentrically says "I get it now" Three films! One's about a man who has a religious experience after disgruntled employees put LSD into his Xmas gin; one's a literalization of opiate withdrawal's 'Kafka high' rabbit hole, wherein one's typewriter takes on insect features and moans when you press its throbbing keys; the third finds giant insect aliens learning our secrets through drinking our brains like milkshakes (instead of vice versa, as in LUNCH). In other words, beware your own response to the thing you squash, for you squash yourself next, with your giant arachnid claw! 1/27/16

-- If yrt terllin; me that there's a difference, a fundamd,emta;a diffferemce. netwntwwme starsjip stroppp[ers amd Naked lunch, er lust, yr a lawyer and and I;m tellin hyou so

Put it another way - if there IS a difference between STARSHIT TROOPERS AND NAKED LUNCH I MEAN LUST then it exists only in the minds of MINOLTA, a Japanese company, think about that, mr fareqwell to manzzianar,  mr sm,arty pants pbeamnenk vzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzn
IN SHORT THIS IS MY DAY AFTER XMAS SPECIAL:

Return of the Insectoid Meta Gaze (i.e. the projector watches you watch its projection with its 3-color projector eyes from top: WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), THE VISITOR (1973),  STARSHIP TROOPERS (eyes as projector beams), SCROOGED ("no eye in team" - eye in the glass)

STARSHIP TROOPERS NOTES: MILLIONTH VIEWING WHILE ROBOTRIPPING ALSO ON TEA WITHDRAWAL AND SERIOUS DTS, ENOUGH TO MAKE MURRAY'S SCROOGE LOSE HIS FRICKIN' HaIR AND CONSIDER AN EYE IN THE TEAM CUP A DRINKABLE ANOMALY BUT NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT BY COMPARISON

Would you like to know more?

There's no correct answer, for we're going to, KNOW MORE, that is, regardless.

Starship Troopers - 1997

This post - present

Regardless: the whole terrifying endurance test of full awareness is coming. Strapped into the conveyor belt of fascist indoctrination as snug as if we were pinned to the tunnel floor by an arachnoid claw, awaiting the slow gurgling arrival of a brain bug on the 3D screen God or parents have convinced us is space-time continuum permanence, its row of inky black arachnid eyes beholding us in patterns similar to our urine-froth, noticed while gazing deeply at a party house toilet bowl, (and then later in the beer from the keg or the foam on your highball)  and forgotten, filed away under layers alcohol and potty training cover memories, now returned with a probe to suck our brains dry as a keg and we screaming all the while on the human conveyor belt: stop stop! At least hit pause!

Or PULSE

From top: NAKED LUNCH, STARSHIP, ENDER'S GAME

But the "like to  know more" button is hit again and again, purse-taken, for the brain bug WOULD like to know, like how to SWAT GOD and it knows just where to go for that knowledge, knows just what fleshy tendril to hit the button with, to slurp the brain slushy cup dry down to the ice with, rattling in its spinal column 'til clatter shatter and scatter.

Naked Lunch

Life is but Death's slow yawn, once it ends, he regains composure
does betwixt the columns flit
like some gay brain donor fancy free flitter
hitting the snooze button
agan and a LITE to NO MORE
button
NO MORE!!
LAW
NO MORE butTON, (is the hand that makes) WOULD YOU LIKE TO...please, NO MORE!!!

Starship Troopers

The NO MORE Know More LITE button (the hand that heals)
hit again ("Kiki come and see the parrots with me") LAW no more, slurps your soul's slug white glop from the gurgling straws pushed down into your sleeping head, my love, the sound of your own animal snore,
crashing like waves of liquid lead,
along Poe's obsidian shore, my little lovey glovey...

Vot ISS da LAW?

O'er the Grampian Hills beyond beyond, Harryhausen stops time to move another dinosaur.

(and once again, says weather on the one, we have cool conditions)

cool as the keeper
of the LAW
hung from a tree, his beard glued for hours,
a flag to from its prideful fascist twisting flee,

Weimar lock stock to Hollywood's larder, never believing Breen's censors could swastika snip their decadent art down even there.


The best thing about Verhoeven's ingenious and endlessly rewatchable masterpiece is the idea of an all service DNA imprint manual for fascist military mobilization. In America we didn't really get these until WW2. America's devout isolationism reflected greatly in all sorts of bitter anti-war tracts instead (such as the forgotten man pilots of John Monk Saunders) as far back as the easily seeable GUNG HO, or B-17 STORY OF A FLYING FORTRESS, with the end of high school and the end of other various key moments in life shared by the representatives of labor (lion, roughneck), intelligence (scarecrow, gestapo), and passion/drive or heart (tin man, flight school) and the way all of the Earth has been homogenized into a tract that could be at home as a Japanese anime, a Nazi recruitment film, an Army or National Guard recruitment film, or an anti-war satire of any genre or age. Verhoeven's sense of irony is very Dutch and very abstract, coming from an, how you say, "occupied" country with nothing but windmills and spies, easily tromped across like a neighbor's lawn to get to the hated French.


But this could also even be a movie for and about bugs--"we're in it for the species, people." We've been at war with those suckers since the dawn of time. Only when we're finally ready to start eating them in force will we have a ticker's tape of a chance. Children, I was on the front line in the war against the Japanese... beetle, that is, in the 70s and if it wasn't for DDT they might have won. I'd get a dollar per jar, all captured and dumped into soapy water, until the jar turned dark yellow and the squirming stopped. Quite a lucrative occupation for an eight year-old during a major PA infestation. Would you like to know more about the slight itchy pain when they dug onto my childhood fingers, the difficulty in getting them to let go? Did I learn a hint of masochism even then? I lay at night with a ten year-old's imagination conjuring turning the cute blonde girl Susan Salter in my class into an Amazon queen of the school and me her slave, crouching naked at her feet in chains. Weird but true...  I had my queen, and I her submissive consort, fit to die after mating if I ever found out what mating entailed.

Denise Richards, nailed to the cross of her passive viewing position - STARSHIP TROOPERS

My red state brother and his gun crazy family and friends as well as my liberal bleeding heart pinko east coast friends all agree on one thing, STARSHIP gets better with each viewing. No matter how many times you see it. Be it a satire or a genuine (as Heinlein apparently meant it) call towards dissolving of borders in favor of one global and eugenically fine-tuned communal military spirit, blessed with a conveniently abstracted enemy, an insect of the sort that may not be as evil as the higher ups paint (for a NWO hangs together by its extra-terrestrial foe, as Reagan said), at least if there's any ENDER'S GAME sequels, which I doubt. (its losses transcend comprehension: $100 Million Dead!)

The little tiny bugs inside your money

And the Song WE'RE IN THE MONEY.
I saw this time Ginger Rogers and company as sprites, bugs if you will, within the money, moving with the tick tock military march rhythm, like a click clock salvia divinorum revolution through the space-time continuum thread counts, as literal gold diggers --tick burrowing into the gold of coins themselves, literally little sprites 'in the money' behind every coin, the way the green fairy could be singing "I'm in the absinthe."

Where did the phrase 'in the money' come from and what are the similes 'in the cool of the evening' - 'in clover' - 'in love' not 'in the love' though, so more like some bumper crop, we're in the cotton, or we're in the game.

a money sprite oscillates her 12 legs to hypnotize unwary prey

For life is but Death's brief yawn, the chasm of blank urinal stare from which infant to elder crawling towards bathroom like flogged Christ doth breathe but brief; we in our robes like Lebowski, like Peter, Paul, and Prokofiev on his week off are but shadows that for awhile, while the byang root tea arrived on time, were comported almost like the barbarity that passes for civilized, but when the tea stopped we still had to fulfill because that of yawning Xmas mail irregularities chasm of need, that King Kong Emperor Jones clanging on his hollow huffalumpagus skin drum, chanting madly to the bloodstream like an anguished and unassailed suitor, begging for alms and change and unchanging, and the brief candle onceness.

Not getting the cosmic joke makes the joke on you, and that's the whole joke--it is all there is, that mirthless angry laugh as the flames consume Richard III, or any angry and despotic ego unwilling to surrender its uniqueness and become just another wAVE IN THE SEA-SKY CONTINUum rather than a separate and superior cloud. The mark inside is the one mark you cannot beat, would you like to know more, you brain bug behemoth tottering towards me now in the guise of a pit-bull?

Now, in the guise of the pit bull.
tomorrow the guise of the floor where she lay.
Form of an avalanche,
Form of a water glass
Form of the sailor who's drunk at sea and sleeps all day.

Booze's bars closed down hard upon him ("kerPLUNK" was the sound they made)
and with a drowning howl did he comply to the exit (hurrpy up plays- iTS's time)
and proceeded to haunt Davy Jones' Liquors, for it opened always to him.
Penny-eyed and seaweed wreathed, the early morning sunshine
on bottles glistening like DEEP morphine pearls
til scraping enough off his barnacle billfold
bought him a pint pocket of air... just enough to get him up to speed
a messy, sloppy speed... and
how he breathed this song:

Now, in the guise of a lilly
tomorrow the guise of the hay.
Form of a whiskey jar,
Form of an after bar,
Form of a drunk on the concrete, prostrate...
His saliva as thick as the oceans
to the tiny ass gremlins
and sprites in a sidewalk black chewing gum circle,
drown as he drools in his sleep.
(and were their concrete pock mark impressions on his cheeks when at last he arose?) 

Probably, man. He can't feel it.
Even drunk he comes to know more than we'd like to remember to remember ourselves.
Click the 'like' button not, the "to know more" or to click the snooze button, or click it to yourself, Bill. and member dis
dose
Remember me, Cloris in DEADLY.

Cuz of course only the Spectral Relief Pitcher of Self Annihilation so terrifies our Babe Ruth ego he finally says, here Pee-Wee (the nonegoic amorphous open-hearted self, the one vulnerable in its generosity, easily swindled by sad-eyed strait waif who keep the change tossed, and bring no fat goose to no Cratchett) you go ahead and bat this once and I'll sit out the inning, then, the mighty Pee-Wee lets fly and sends it out of the park, and the Pitcher vanishes! Freedom.

And if we've been a team dominated by its needy spotlight hog insecure star Babe Ruth ego all season, keeping Buddhist Pee-Wee on the bench permanently, then once Pee-Wee hits the homer, Babe Ruth comes running back to the field to take the credit for not taking credit. He needs to take that spotlight again and rant about how "we get it now."

He gets it now... no wait, NOW.... wait...

"I get it now," says Murray at the prolonged wearying climax of SCROOGED.

That ending has really dated badly but we used to LOVE it. In the 80s it was the kind of thing people just didn't say. This was the era before Dr. Phil and Oprah, before children became the equals of their parents, when they were meant to be heard only in the basement in a voice that wouldn't carry, until the haunted house was ready for the parents to be led through one at a time blindfolded, or failing that such time as we were called for one at a time to show some new trick. This was a time when therapy was still a shameful secret and a kid had to commit suicide successfully before his parents would consider it. That Leo Buscaglia love trip was strictly 70s naïveté. Scrape 'em off, Claire--that was the 80s rallying cry. Arnold Schwarzenegger was our spiritual leader in so many ways, steam roller paving the Hollywood politicians trail blazed by the mighty Paul Ronald Reagan Bunyan (though everyone knew her as Nancy), in a backwards Terminator motion, icing the Sarah Connor pro-drug 60s-70s with the kind of "NO" bumper stickers that Lennon worked so hard to flank with a "K" and a "W" in YELLOW SUBMARINE.

It's been a long time since there could be Hollywood women characters as cool as the Babes of pre and post-Nazi Germany. Does it take economic turmoil to make dames so tough it carries over into their DNA? Or was it always there, this iron clad-but-sexually-vigorous blonde bombshell type is a bear in the courtroom, a bore in the kitchen (all that flavorless burnt potato pancakes and stone dry roast) and what would Americans would call, how you say, a slut? In the bedroom? That is to say, in America we have a dichotomy - if a lady is good in business she has to be a cold bitch barking and ripping people's heads off, or if she's sexually active, she's a dimwit with wide baby eyes agog at the world, easily seduced and abandoned, a victim of exploitation and the male gaze. But German women can be professional in the workplace without being neurotic. Without sacrificing her sanity or making the men around her feel like they lose their balls in her presence, the German woman is fully both sensually alive and ruthlessly cool-headed, a thorough professional.

You can argue maybe America need a war  that killed millions of young men and left their hot wives destitute during a Great Depression (prostituting to survive) or War (pressed into jobs normally occupied by men) in order to create the perfect storm for the Weimar cabaret of Brecht's wry economic savvy and Weil's woozy drinking songs and promiscuity's syphilitic ennui, something to forge the Germanic woman in a cast-iron mode where sex and mountain climbing carry the same lack of shame and guilt, a land where a pack of cigarettes or tea is more precious than mere money.

Weimar, a wellspring of decadence wherein former gorgeous tall willowy aristocrats took to the stage just to feed their food and shelter addiction. Weimar, when a cold winter made coal and firewood as as costly to one's sense of moral decency as a $300 a day heroin habit would to a junky.

There is no admittance in Hollywood or in our PC putsch climate that at the core of it all, the whole sex and dying in high society bootstrap, the shit's just fucked up. And without that admittance we cannot evolve. We're still asleep. Nothing like being bombed nightly to wake you up into the moment. And unless you're awake you can't be neither whore nor virgin but able to oscillate constantly between. Only the pre-code heroine, rising from the shackles of small town hypocritical sexism, knew the moment's intricate playful contours here in the US, and even then she had to be reshackled from 1934 until the second war, when noir would begin to free her (on certain conditions). That's just four lousy years.

But all the while the German dolls had no need for morals and so they knew when to pull the plug on their dying moms, and their confidence was earth-shattering. They didn't need layers of security, they could just blind us with aggressive charm, didn't need a fade to black to convincingly seduce us. Stalking around the room, selling $20 apples, knowing just when to fall into their john's arms, only to whirl out again a moment later and ask for a light, to keep the push and pull fluid, these dames reintroduced a state of play to the proceedings Americans had forgotten all about. Our modern maidens cannot do this now, there's too much at stake and not enough. There's no more danger, the rate of exchange is set, with a thousand intervening pimp handouts between the girl and the guy. Now a girl can't go from murdering her pimp father to seducing her way up the company ladder to happily ever to into the harrowing void of genuine openness like Babs Stanwyck could in Baby Face (1933).
Today we need female characters who are not prostitutes in the sense of today, where they're brutalized victims of white slavery in tense Liam Neeson thrillers, but crafty capitalists moving fluidly between roles--adventuress, gold-digger, a spy, a hungry urchin, and a genuine romantic partner--unswayed by a man's charisma past the point of their influence and bankroll, but that bankroll is fluid, the money paid rising and falling like stocks in a volatile market. Seduction is boiled down to its essentials until even being nice to a lonely guy for more than a 20% tip on a rainy night carries the metallic ring of coins continually hitting the bottom of a tin bucket.

The only badass German chick I've seen on an American screen lately (they're all over in German of course, hier und hier) has been Nina Hoss (below left) as Astrid, the super cool BND op in the most recent season of Homeland. We can glean a tad of the corrosive sexism of America via the description of her character on Wikipedia:

"Astrid, Quinn's former lover who works for the German intelligence service, BND." 

Harmless enough - but deconstruct it and you see how American sexism is encoded: Astrid is basically the Carrie Mathison of Germany, but cooler, less neurotic, it's a parallel drawn many times in their similar look, dress style, and penchant for quick thinking that leaves most men in the dust. Yet as far Wiki is concerned, all that comes second to her on again/off again fling with the (white male) American, Quinn. And she's not a spearheading official of endless clout and resources, she just "works for the German intelligence service." That could mean she's a frickin' secretary. It's like if Carrie Mathison was described as "Brody's lover, who pins pictures on bulletin boards when CIA men tell her to."

Am I exaggerating? None of your business!


Luckily we have that that 1929-33 golden age, when Germany and America alike suffered the throes of the Great Depression and America came over to Germany on the cheap as sex tourist talent scouts, saw the silent films and avant garde dance performances and signed all the best players, the best directors who brought over their whole crews, and Marlene Dietrich was there too. The makers of Caligari, Faust and Mabuse, M, Pandora's Box, and Metropolis hopped a zeppelin to Lakehurst, NJ and then the train to Hollywood, toting their expressionistic haunted house nightmares, where the dark comforting shadows one hoped to hide in turned out to be two-dimensional painted backdrops and the girl you sold your soul to be with turned out to be an evil automaton. Provincial morality was revealed as an indulgence of the prosperous and uneducated, usually played by fat ugly actors like Emil Jannings. Their eyes and white hair wild like they'd clutched a freshly lightning-struck harpoon, they stayed in Germany. Perfectly cast apparently, they took to fascism like a duck to water.

Emil Jannings and Josef Goebbels

If you've ever gone hungry, or had the DTs, or even a really bad fever, then you know how easily the artifice of civilization and language can be wiped away, like a Photoshop layer, revealing the true dimension below, the permanent bedrock of demonic devouring darkness that infuses everything around you. It's terrifying to behold, will make your pray for the first time in years, pleading for heavenly rescue, or it will drive you insane with terror OR you can dissolve your egoic crux in the acid bath of Hell so that the you who remains no longer winces when the devil's lash strikes, because you have no more skin, and so the devil lashes you no more, for his strength is gone, the fuel of your fear no longer feeds his fire. And lo, the artifice layer of civilization still hasn't returned, you're still hungry but the DTs break, the fever dies off, but you're free, you can see the world as it really is, without wincing. This is why artists to be worth a damn they need to be crazy, starving, tortured.

And isn't the moral crusader really one who is so afraid of that hell dimension they have to keep setting up stricter and more repressive Photoshop layers against it, presuming with tight enough restrictions the Rockwell layer can fuse irrevocably with the hellish real, so that the demonic ne'er can be found again? The American moral woman of post-code era was, like the Temperance League broads before her, of the staunch belief this could be achieved, reflecting her terror of the void, a terror those of us who've seen and been devoured by the horror don't share. It's the terror of the guilty, those afraid of holy judgment. They play up their piety for a reason.

The German women though, aren't afraid of the hellish dimension. They've collectively lived through it twice. They know if they just roll with it they don't have to feel bad about themselves. They might even get some chocolate out of the deal, which they can sell on the black market for nylons, or cigarettes, or vice versa.              

The Women in the workplace revolution wouldn't even have happened to the extent it has if not for Hitler or that women got the vote as soon as they did because WWI dragged the nation out of the 19th century too fast for its draggy hegemonically provincial back half to retard progress, and that the Depression made prostitutes of soldier's widows, and it made gold diggers out of even once-pure mothers and daughters, just to get some ear medicine for their sick child (as in Call Her Savage). And into this world of mercenary women and dead soldiers slunk enigmatic beauties, rising and falling along the economic ladder, sometimes three or four rises and falls in a film, for if they were beautiful and clever it was never in doubt they'd sleep their way up. And they wouldn't need to suffer to become saintly; they'd just sacrifice their claims to motherhood so their son could become D.A. even if it meant he had to send her to the gallows to do it, or at any rate they'd toss away their fortunes to follow some drippy dude into the poor house just to torture us in our masochistic jealous frenzy. And then he'd sell her into white slavery to pay his gambling debts, and soon she'd be heading for the river, only to be swooped down on and carried up and up once more by Cary Grant, or at least to land where they started, so wise, or to plummet blindly back to earth with a crash and art deco memorial (like Christopher Strong).

Prostitution could be slimy and violent but there were degrees, and the pre-code films are all about that. You can get all indignantly feminist you want but you'll never convince me that Barbara Stanwyck is being used by the men she climbs the ladder on in Baby Face (1933). The men are perceived as hopelessly weak, easy prey. If she was merely a prostitute she'd presumably have a tougher time, but she's not, and it's this in-between status that seems to be the order of the day. The diamond bracelet is invariably worth more than a mere engagement ring. In order to keep a mistress one needs the kind of wealth where the bracelets and furs can flow without embezzling or robbery needed to fund them. Man, I'd never want or be to able to afford keeping a mistress in luxury, so am grateful to grow up in this more permissive time. But that's the bizarre thing about it, after the feminine sexual awakening of the 70s, and the bachelor pad Playboy subscription backdraft, comes the feel-bad post-90s PC clampdown, the provincial morality, the return of women as helpless Blanche Dubois rushing to the PC stasi over a single patriarchal leer all while demanding equality, doubling the workforce and halving the salary. Returning to the Weimar era and Hollywood's pre-code period it's easy to see just how much power women really do wield in the patriarchy - presuming of course, they know how to use men rather than be used by them, or both. After all, as Phoebe Cates says in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, "it's just sex." Was she the last American girl to ever say that in a movie?

In our clamped-down PC climate, it's a revolutionary stance, a refusal to play the PC militant feminist game. And isn't it a game? Are bitter frumpy lesbian professors really that different than straight midlife crisis divorcee males in their advocation of whatever philosophy makes their look and lifestyle most valid in the eyes of cute co-eds? I'm not saying they're even conscious of it. But damn, girls. To paraphrase the Lady Eve, the good girls aren't nearly so good nor the bad guys half so bad, or something - and it's that 'something' that the Weimar girl embodies. In this world, even the cabaret singing is a form of prostitution, with music and kinky clothes, with sex being the selling point of course, but only a sicko, a Ken Starr or Penny Arcade, or a Karl Malden in Baby Doll, would bother digging so deep under the surface to expose it and demand a blow-by-blow account of what paid for what. Same with barmaids soliciting drinks in exchange for a a sympathetic ear, or dance hall girls providing a soft shoulder for lonesome sailors to cry their dimes out on, actresses winning gold statues and foreign princes, or Broadway hoofers mining diamond bracelets along the Great White Way. They're all, in their way, using sex for money. Same with acting itself. As Loreli Lee would say, you don't have to be gorgeous to be a great actress but my goodness doesn't it help?

And from these hard-working women of nightclubs, was a trickle down effect, for they'd funnel some of the silk hat's bread down to their forgotten man husband, home from the war, begging on the corner with his one leg and one arm and one eye, castrated from a mine, forced to allow his wife to take rich man lovers while he crawled around on the subway with his tin cup. Remember my forgotten man? He had a bread line in his hand, a tenuous cord holding him barely to life, his address Central Park, not West or East but right in between. Or City Dump 32, the place Cordelia Bullock found her man Godfrey. I cry just thinking about it. Eugene Palette humbled by Powell's sublime grace, as powerful a butler transformation as Charles Laughton's Ruggles. Butlers are almost unheard of nowadays, in cinema anyway. Did the second world war wipe them away too? You dirty rat, you killed my butler, or chances to ever have one.





Getting back to the prostitute thing: what about the girls who come over with their friends to hang out, drink with you, take it back upstairs and in exchange for letting them 'borrow' some money they make all the seduction moves for you, sleep over and leave before you wake up, presuming any bankrolls or quaaludes they see lying around are meant for them but they're not prostitutes! Depending on who you ask anyway. I confess I don't know anything about this whole quaint custom. I've been propositioned by middle-aged guys in my old neighborhood if I wore my shorts down to NYC Video on 1st and 51st more than I'd see streetwalkers. When I first moved to NYC there were still blocks downtown in the village where you'd turn a corner and bam, it would be insane, drunken black ladies garish with make-up, dresses a world too small for their rotund, massive curvy bodies, bobbling around like a parade float in the breeze, anchored by eight inch pin point heels, a minuscule handbag like Dumbo's flying feather; menacing pimps in white furs strutting around, shaky crackheads eyeing your car for signs of wealth or the cops; everyone (including us) with open beers in brown bags, loud soul music (back before rap took off) with bass so heavy you felt it in your bones three blocks away coming from some low rider car. There was a route going up and around 7th Avenue and below Houston, where cars would just circle around and around, barely moving, everyone stopping every three second along double parked tailgates to say hi to someone or start a fight or buy drugs or sex. For us, a bunch of white dudes newly moved to the city it was like a magician lifted a curtain on our workaday David Dinkins-cum-Giuliani world and there it was: the NYC of the 70s.

Not long after (this was around 1991, the same drive would just show cars driving up, wondering where everyone was, cracking beers from trunk coolers, and getting promptly arrested, noise ordinances passed strictly to get rid of this Friday night tradition. And all along 7th Ave up from Houston: sad young suburban black teenagers pouring out open beers as I'd stagger past, drunk, to Max's fold-out in 17th St, where I'd pass out and watch channel 68 with one eye shut and try to write down a number from one of the Asian lady services ("You have time today?") over and over, never quite getting it all down but it didn't matter, i wasn't going to call, just thinking I would eased my existential lonesome, for that commercial played in a loop with about seven others, in between snippets of the Robin Byrd Show. Good lord, that show sure didn't help my depression, that cable access sex show was to real sex what one of those sun-faded, turned blue pictures of Chinese food are in the windows of take-out joints. Even now I can't see a sun-faded turn-to-blue video cover or picture in a window without wanting to kill myself. All those wasted hours nosing through crappy VHS boxes, looking for something worth getting. Wasn't that the whole reason I'd come to NYC, to escape those boxes? And there was Robin Byrd, like Poe's hideous faded-to-blue heart.

 In the old movies I knew of, but didn't then like, there was always the bragging Gene Kelly with his little black book of unseen dames. Thanks to Lane Pryce asking how much he owed Don after hooking up with a woman at his place, I finally could know what those black books meant. No wonder they were such a sure thing! These are the 'party girls'? The Foreign legion of Women? Not really at the bordello level, but at the swinging apartment paid for by either one rich sugar daddy or a slew of less exclusive gentlemen (the $50 for the powder room in Breakfast at Tiffany's). If not for the code who knows how sophisticated the various levels of prostitution, gold-digging, party girl operations, and dance hall hostesses could be by now. That's progress for you. Now it's too late. My naivete has set in stone, like the moralists photoshop layer dream was right after all -- or else it's just my Puritan Pilgrim blood.



There's is not exactly a sex for cash up front quick bordello transaction, more like the Holly Golightly approach of asking the guy for $50 to tip the powder room attendant, keeping it of course, and then delivering---what? The censors won't let us know whether it's just a night of basking in her gamin aura, a hand job in the cab, or a snog in the foyer of Tiffany's, the unspoken assumption that as soon as it's open, 9 AM or whenever, the horny guy and Holly will be there, the diamond bracelet like a marriage license at MGM, a ticket to ride. Sex it seems in American movies comes with a very high price tag, until around 1968. If you want an extra-marital fling you have to pay the girl's entire rent and keep her in furs and jewels until, at last, you walk in on her with her gigolo boyfriend (remember her forgotten man?) and chastened, run home to your wife and children. Did you remember not to write her any love letters?? If you did, and she still has them, the paying doesn't stop. For not all forgotten men are willing to go into bootlegging like everyone else, they'd rather live off their women especially now that you've been muleishly kicking their stall. There's a name for guys like that but before I can say it someone always bashes me in the back of the head with a bottle and steals my gold pinkie ring, thinking I'm dead and hightailing it to the tropics. By the time they learn I just got a minor concussion, it's far too late to return, for they've already bashed another one. And this time, they got to hang, for the kid, so he can become a DA.

European imports like Marlene and Greta hit their marks and quivered their lips but it was because they were in the moment, they lived between the marks in ways directors not versed in theater didn't understand, that they resonated, and to see Maria Braun in Fassbinder's Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) walk into a room and start playing around with items--even in the bombed out wreck of a city she's as happy as a lark-- is to feel the energy link between Polly Peachum, Dietrich and Fassbinder through to.... whom? Ich weise nicht. Or to paraphrase Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, you Germans certainly have a funny way of bombing a city down just to build it back up again.

In the Hollywood pre-codes and in Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) they are slow complicated maneuverings oscillating between push and shove within a single scene. Rather than needing whole reels of crying by the window just to call or come running to the airport at the last minute, girls who came of age watching Friends insist no flight can ever be just quietly snuck off to, no mistress quietly visited in a sly 5-7 without the other finding out and making a ruckus. Maria Braun's great gift is to be able to change the dynamic of a relationship within the actual scene via small push-pull mannerisms, going in for a kiss, whirling away again, etc. back and forth, to avoid all the usual traps sitcom-saturated Americans dive into (as in presuming after one snog you're going to get married, or expecting a girl to be faithful to you just because you kissed her at the ball). She keeps the sexual chemistry fluid, the sense of play opens up, and it becomes a kind of magic, very close to what it's like when hooking up on acid (as seen in the Warhol bathroom in Midnight Cowboy), a swirling pincer movement and advance-retreat-advance somewhere else while the opposition is moving forces to where you just advanced kind of a wave tactic. It is not a romantic blitzkrieg as we have today - where screenwriters don't know how to write such stuff because they're not in theater the way Bergman or Fassbinder were, they don't even know who Fassbinder is. They hate subtitles. Imagine, Hollywood screenwriters who don't even know who G.W. Pabst even is. But on Hulu Plus lurks almost the entire Criterion back catalog--it's worth getting just for the Germans! Fassbinder gets it, and his Maria Braun is his finest creation, a perfect synergy with actress Hannah Schygulla that functions as both feminist parable and economic critique. Maria uses more than just seduction to move up the ladder, she helps build the business, using keen fiscal acumen to merge into a partnership with a post-war Marshall plan industrial clothing corporation. The kind of skill and sex combo that some women demonstrate in Mad Men only to lose their tenuous footing as sexism underhandedly knocks them over, Maria never falters, kicks back, never cowers or cries in the bathroom or throws it all away to become an actress or a mother. Her kind of courage would come with either the 'crazy' as in bi-polar druggie nymphomaniac or 'ball-buster' frigid bitch extreme tag here in the US. But in Germany she is very very sane, ambitious, and able to soar ahead of the men without them feeling resentful, able to drink and fool around (and murder GIs) without penalties or moral judgement, without psych wards and counsellors. Like Polly Peachum, she does it all for a husband (Mack the Knife is in prison or on the lam; Maria's husband is in a POW camp) but when the husband returns he's still merely a figurehead, a pimp in name only --it's more that the woman is demanding equality for her man rather than vice versa. He's a strutting peacock, or a shattered shell of a war vet, and either way, little more than a figurehead on the mast of the Black Freighter.

But deprivation makes the seduction a matter of currency always, and so it makes sense that in Europe, in the post-war years, even returning POW German officers would rather lunge for a cigarette than the throat of their wives' black American GI lovers when they walk in the door after being presumed dead. Such is the way deprivation makes Hawksian hipsters of us all (or Dietrich, who famously sent all her love letters from other men to her husband in Germany for archiving). And their women are not fallen from grace at all, just smart enough to use every sexual trick and ball-twisting curve at their disposal to keep chocolate and cigarettes on the table, including smashing a bottle over the black GI right then, before her husband can even find a lighter.

Compared to that quick decisive action, virtue is hardly worth a loosie.' Leave the noble starving to Loretta Young and Joan Crawford over in the States; the German women shall not be so easily snowed under. And they shall have smooth Camel taste, and maybe a radio. What else can zey do? They're addicted. Aus Deutschland, wo es nichts anderes zu tun! 

Maybe it's an age thing (I've never been this old before, I don't recommend it) but as I careen inexorably towards my half-century mile post I'm blessed with a progressively terrible memory, a cold disinterest in romance, and hence a love of old black and white mysteries. I can watch them over and over as I forget 'who done it' almost before the credits even roll, allowing for cycling through my entire collection every year or so. I love mysteries because they offer heroes who are always a few steps ahead of me rather than three behind, which I find nerve-wracking and annoying. Charlie Chan sees right through every ruse, so I can relax my angst when he's on the scene. Invariably, my binge starts with either The Black Camel or Charlie Chan in Egypt, two beautiful early 30s pics free of #1 or #2 sons, and laden with great art deco design and--in Egypt's case--my dream doorway divide (if I can ever afford an interior designer, this is the room entrance I want, left)

First up on this list three films 1935 I got over Xmas on DVD-Rs from the WB Archive. The first year when the code was all the way slammed down on freedom of expression in Hollywood, Warner Bros, whose name was as synonymous with the suddenly verboten tough talking gangster pictures and vivid social criticism turned. Smartly, they turned to mysteries, a relatively chaste reconfiguration of hands coming out of walls, trapdoors, tossed knives, secret panels, wise guy reporters, murky red herring line-ups, windswept dark mansions, dimwit cops, and bits of string, stray buttons, and tossed knives. As long as the killer was punished or caught at the end, censors said go for it. A built-in audience of mystery buffs was well versed, and the popularity of novels at the dimestore and via mystery sections and some tie-in seen in credits called 'The Clue Club.' What I like about them I think is that they open--usually--with a very dislikable person getting murdered. We seem them being mean to as many people as possible so when they die we feel nor remorse or anger and the suspects are legion. Their death allows the young lovers to finally marry, the one decent girl in the family to inherit the millions, and the butler to be free of his master's indifference. And since there's absolutely no bearing to my own life, I don't feel disagreeable angst or collective guilt, or trauma (as I might watching something like ripped from today's headlines like Law and Order). When you're as sensitive as an Usher, it helps your nerves to see the bad guys die in the library with the candlestick, and to not know who dunnit, and to forget as soon as the credits roll... forget...

A kind of silver and velvet (and lovely lighting) post-code preparation for film noir; its eye on procedural aspects and weird floating acting style; actors hesitantly remembering their lines through thick hungover atmosphere, making sure they're heard with the early sound equipment (was the director German? Sound equipment was fine by 1935 so why the 1929 enunciation?)

Once again the weird Ricardo Cortez seems strangely artificial, his silken voice seeming insincere and sincere at the same time, making him perfect as the enigmatic alleged good guy. When he jokes about having killed his sleazy rival Haworth it registers as very bad taste and unfunny. Are we supposed to think he's demonstrating elan and laugh or get a skeeve in our blood? Does acting a little guilty make him not guilty? That's a tricky line to walk, you silken vaguely skeezy fellow! Cortez doesn't always pass the drunk test, in that respect. Luckily, his weird relationship with his rich dowager aunt (Constance Collier - whom I've always found strangely sexy), a recluse who built a theater in her attic, seems hinged in this moral twilight, does she approve of him or not? He revels in her dubious affection, and it's a great rapport, a clear love between them that expresses itself through constant jabs and parries.

By contrast, the reasoning behind Virginia Bruce's grouchy impulsive decision to marry the sleazy abusive alcoholic filthy rich Haworth (Bradley Page), a kind JJ Huensecker meets Stage Door Adolphe Menjou type, is poorly etched out. Is she just hungover and vindictive, latching onto a guy with a terrible rep for beating up women, a creepy almost Bataille(1) kind of masochism? Or is just to really stick the knife in Cortez and twist it, making Cortez the masochist? Sorry, no, this ain't Von Sternberg and Dietrich. It seems folded in just to make a larger roster of suspects when Howarth is bumped off.

Regis Toomey is on hand as the PR guy who fills in the missing story threads, and the array of involvement in the shadiness with which the butlers of both Howarth and the rich dowager aunt conceal long histories before the code witnessing strange things and keeping mum. Collier is great, acting as a kind of de facto Miss Marple, though as soon as she believes Bruces' sobbing she's all up on her side, even to the extent of hiding the murder gun from the cops (in a great twist she even tells him she has the gun in the plate she hands him under a wet towel while the boys search the apartment).

Once the murder happens the pool of suspects starts immediately shrinking and for most of us the killer will be recognized almost immediately, but hey, it's the mood that counts, and if the film can offer moments we haven't seen before along the way and avoid the bad things, like the tedious inclusion in the post-code era of the fiancee who's a drag and wants our hero to settle down to the picket fence and stop mystery solving, like that's somehow what we want to see, we who love Nora Charles like a holy relic..  Seitz makes sure the velvet ripples and purrs and the burdensome whiny fiancee never obscurants.

Based on a novel by mystery writin' dame Mignon G. Eberhart, this plays like a chapter serial mystery story, or even Tarantino's recent Hateful Eight, set at a windy hotel along the French coast, full of weird statues and secrets (and titular cock), and no one is who they claim to be, and everyone scheming to some nefarious inheritance fraud. Meanwhile the white cockatoo mascot of the hotel squawks, the French police come and arrest the wrong person on occasion, and the ever ambiguous Ricardo Cortez and the always lovely gamin Jean Muir alternately fall in love, suspect each other of murder, and withhold truths that could end the film post haste. A bit like a 1930s predecessor to Donen's Charade, millions are at stake, and no one is who they seem to be.


Despite the great gloomy windswept atmosphere I'm actually not a big fan of this one, due to my intense dislike of curly haired men with loud accents, and when it comes to mysteries I'd rather have a hero who can actually think one step ahead of me, rather than lag reels behind while heroines are endangered by networks of Wilkie Collins-esque villainy, only to turn on their rescuer so no one finds out there was a man in their room, not that they'd care in France, you American stupid person! But Muir is always a feast for the eyes and there's Warner Brothers stock regular Ruth Donnelly as --what else?-- a persnickety tourist. So as long as you don't-a mind curly oily haired hoteliers and thick-headed imbeciles posing as cops, lawyers, and millionaires... ah, screw it.


It's a dark and stormy night and a flock of greedy sinister spoiled relatives are clustering around ill banker at his gloomy mansion, waiting to get their chance to talk to him and prove they're worthy of --presumably--inheritance consideration. Then he gets a telegram from his son--or one of them--and has a stroke while clutching a figure of an elephant! Mystery! Aline MacMahon looking dowdy as hell (was she possibly pregnant, or padded?) is the sent-for night nurse. That night there's a shot in the dark. Bang Bang! The elephant is dropped by the side of a dead man! Wasn't there a movie like this called... Miss Pinkerton? Perhaps, and it was probably better. But this ain't bad, sweetheart. Even if it ain't no Night Nurse. 

So now you know the pros: atmosphere and McMahon. The drawbacks hinge on the overbearing broadness of the cops, especially the obnoxious incompetence from Kibbee's debuty, the ever-present Warner stock dingus Allen Jenkins, who accuses everyone of lying and shouts in a lot of faces, making the Ritz Brothers seem a model of restraint. I always wonder about actors who shout every line they speak. Are they drunk and forgot they're in a movie and not a play? It's very disconcerting,  for example, when Chan's #2 son shouts confidential information at his dad from one foot away, loud enough for even the neighbors to hear. I usually like Jenkins and Guy Kibbee (he's the chief), but they seem to think the key to solving the crime is to force everyone to remain in the house and then lope around in the direction of screams and thumps allowing for evidence to be stolen, butlers to be murdered and nurses to be locked in secret passage attics, and then for the killer to have plenty of room to scram back into the general population. While Jenkins shouts at a bookcase and tries to handcuff a coatrack. He's just that dumb. Meanwhile the nurse is told to hold onto all the accumulated evidence like she's the only one with a purse sneaking snacks into the movies. That ceramic elephant is on her hands a dozen times, allowing for c-c-c-creepy scenes of hands reaching out from between curtains, which she conveniently stands in front of, looking all around but behind her as she backs up to where the killer hides behind curtains. Like I said above, I like there to be at least one non-idiot around in a mystery. No such luck here, alas.


The DV-R looks great, for fans of these things won't mind the constant film pocks and damage (no visible splices) in favor or a clean image that brings out the old dark house atmosphere to a T. Though I don't like they keep a dog chained up in front of the house in the pouring rain, the poor thing, reminding us too much maybe of those anguished ASPCA commercials. Other problems are the plethora of suspects all trundled around with clues which we presume (this being an entry in Warner's "Clue Club" mystery series, whatever that means) we're supposed to be keeping straight in our head. None of that really matters as the suspects flow past in an endless wave of evidence planting, red herring reversal, and petty squabbling amongst the usual Vitaphone suspects: Lyle Talbot, Robert Barrat, Patricia Ellis (as the one good girl), Brandon Hurst as a butler with a rap sheet, and so forth. The good-natured that razzing nurse Aline lobs constantly at Kibbee is pretty cute and they make a potentially great little crime team. All in all it's no classic and as a mystery falls apart under close scrutiny (it's based on another Mignon Eberhart novel, and perhaps they try to cram too many novelistic details into the fairly short running time), but in general it's atmospheric, wry, and innocuous enough I can see folding it into my old dark house / mystery phase repertoire. If you're the weird type like me who considers the 1930s craze for rattling of sheet metal thunder, and old dark staircase, secret panels, shady lawyers and master sleuths etc. a solace, a retreat from the overwhelming mendacity of our age, then fold it in, brother, sister, alien, fold it. Just don't fold it too often, or while hungover.

Patsy Kelly overdoing it as a scared maid, howling out plaintively towards the cheap seats, the three triplet Ritz Brothers oscillating panic like a wave, these are pretty big minuses to any film, in my book (and my old dark house films are literally in a big book). But Bela Lugosi as an "armed" servant; Lionel Atwill as the industrialist threatened with murder at midnight; the ever-gamin Anita Louise as the endangered heiress; dark shadowy lighting, constant thunder, the creeping hairy arm of an escaped gorilla and/or disguised killer --all compensate amply. The Ritzes are so stupid they could be looking at a quarter on the floor then blink and wonder where it went, even though it's still th-th-there.

If you could clip 75% of their shenanigans and 80% of Patsy Kelly's broad shrill business, there might be a damn good old dark house mystery rolling merrily along between the Cat and the Canary pinball bumpers. Joseph Callea shows up midway, ducking in and out of secret passages and occasionally punching out a Ritz (and there was much rejoicing). Lugosi, in the midst of a red herring butler/handyman phase in his career, glowers from the sidelines, calmly offering poison tea to the the comic relief (they don't drink it, alas). It could be just one of his many wasted appearances (ala Night Monster or The 1941 Black Cat, or One Body too Many) but he really stretches out and enjoy himself this time. He gets to scare Jean with his coat ala weird foreshadowing to his coat strangling habit in 1941's Invisible Ghost, and the camera leans back to linger mightily whenever he's around, so dig the works: Bela, Callea and Atwill, a sufficient triad to counter the obnoxious blue collar moron-4-the-kiddies nyuks of the Ritzes, and Anita Louise is cute, so what the hell, go for it, sez I. And try to get the OOP Roan disc for the best quality, though it's PD so no doubt everywhere.

The typical Bulldog Drummond movie is rather incessantly British, not to mention bloodless (the reverse of ours, their censors don't mind blasphemy and saucy bits, but they faint at the sight of blood) and reminder that when the Brits try to do farce it comes off rather heavy-handed, they have their whole own bag of tittering Hugh Herberts, Andy Devines, Stu Erwins, Eddie Brakens, Jackie Oakies and Patsy Kellys. But Jack stars an exception to the usual tired formula, as the massively chinned British fellow Jack Hulburt takes over a case from a wounded Drummond, posing as him to get the story of an endangered lovely (Fay Wray) and her kidnapped father. I like this one way better than the usual Drumonds, a few with John Barrymore aside, which are marred by an annoying fiancee always at him to stop running around saving England instead of gazing tepidly into her limpid pools. What's up with fiancees in mystery series who want their man to settle down? Is it the censor or the producer who think we go to these films to watch a man stop all his adventure and go into the tea business with Uncle John or whatever the pouncey-flouncey colonel's daughter expects in Gunga Din? At any rate, Fay Wray is light years away from that trite nonsense.

The moody, highly atmospheric cinematography and robust performances make this an edge-of-your seater all the way: Ralph Richardson has a field day as the florid villain, and there are a load of trap doors and secret panels and it all ends with a thrilling chase up and down a closed station in the London underground that opens up into a dark elaborately statue and relic-filled British Museum (top), allowing for much sneaking and relic smashing, and there's a cool giant multi-armed Indian statuary to climb on and sneak behind (top). The Netflix streaming print I saw was smashing and the comedy and suspense are expertly blended to the point I felt high afterwards. And hey, it's streaming on Amazon Prime. Man, are you lucky.

NOTES:
"What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? — a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?" - Batailles, Eroticism

Science fiction cinema's always had a shady obsession with artificial intelligence but never more so than in the last few years, with three major films--AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, TERMINATOR: GENYSIS, and TRANSCENDENCE, two are parts of lucrative franchises dealing with the instant animosity that erupts between creator and created, frightened lynch mobs, anti-technology extremists vs. visionaries who shuffle along the edge between mad scientist and hero, facing off against benevolent dictators or witty monsters. "Humanity" such as it is, rushes to destroy that which it only just created once it realized hey it works, and it in turn the savvy AI tries to beat us to the button, flicking our missile launch button before we can hit 'off.' It's a close race and one that braver films are less inclined to judge.

That kind of ambivalence and ambiguity intrigued critics only in the 60s and 70s, alas. We like to have our good machines and bad more clearly defined now which is why, I think, of the three films of the last two years to follow this arc, only AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON got good reviews, while the far superior TERMINATOR: GENYSIS  and TRANSCENDENCE did not. They're just too far ahead of their time for any decade but the 70s, each dealing in its own way with the terrors of the 'technological singularity' where an Artificial Intelligence becomes endowed with the ability of

 "recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself, up to the point of a runaway effect (...) that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human control or understanding. Because the capabilities of such a superintelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence (WIKI)

Be it Ultron, Skynet, or Johnny Depp, be it nuclear apocalypse or extinction level geothermal cool-down or a pod like takeover, in each of these three films it's up to a cadre of violent human Mother Jones-type eco-terrorists, government hit squads, analog superheroes, torch-and-pitchfork style viruses, or all three, to stop the singularity before it starts, which therefore justifies the AIs first strike attack in an endless loop of a priori retaliation.

But there are three points cinema (and some TV) have stretched these past years, in different ways than the usual 'what is mankind' blah blah existential quandry, even daring covertly to paint Artificial Intelligence and its megalomania as the victim of our prejudice and hostility.


1. EXPLOITABLE MAMMALIAN EMPATHY

Here's a quote concerning Bree (Kate Mara) one hippy-dippy ex-employee's experience working on an uploaded monkey in TRANSCENDENCE:

"You know what the computer did when he first turned it on? It screamed. The machine that thought it was a monkey never took a breath, never ate or slept. At first, I didn't know what it meant. Pain, fear, rage. Then, I finally realized... it was begging us to stop. Of course, Casey thought I was crazy. Called it a success. But I knew we had crossed a line.... It changed me forever."

Ahhh, but was that monkey really tortured, or have we projected our empathic response on an unfeeling computer? Can a collection of ones and zeroes suffer (every zero an open screaming mouths?) if there are no guilt complexes in the beholder? We're quick to feel that monkey's pain, to imagine the indignity and powerlessness of not being able to shut yourself off, even to blink. But it shows our limitations in thinking that we'd become 'changed' by it.

Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) carrying the new pocket-sized Kubrickian monolith

Meanwhile, after the critically wounded Depp is uploaded into the internet and tries to come onto his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), she can't bring herself to admit it's him--whatever that means. Thus the split between the back-to-land, murderous Bree who's been traumatized by the uploaded monkey and the alienation of Depp's wife mirror the dividing line between our liberal empathy and our cold kill switch, what I've called the'savagery switchpoint'. In war, for example, empathy for one's enemy will get your friends killed (as in Saving Private Ryan or Fury); Clarice's tale to Hannibal about the screaming of the slaughtered spring lambs. (if we didn't have a ruthless cold vein in humanity, we'd simple be already dead from vegetarianism). Or in Splice --the genetic team creates these skinless blobs of living tissue that do not seem to be having a good time, and the genetic highers up freak out about how dare they use human cells, with parties either blind to the suffering of a mutated cell or overly projecting human pain onto it until we start blaming ourselves, and if there is a God why is he so mean, why is pain the base not, white noise a constant endless scream?

SPLICE (2009)

EX-MACHINA - Evidence of Oscar Isaac's characters' sleaziness.

Gathered to watch the new Jarvis, the 'chill' AI as it gazes at the world for the first time

It reaches back to the tortured automaton of FRANKENSTEIN (1931), the idea of nonlocalized soul infusion, creating an instant nexus of suffering --pain, isolation, confusion, anger--why the Hell did you create me, mom, dad, God, Tony Stark? If it's not to let me have fun, run outside and scare the neighbors, why was I made? Our hard-wired empathic response leaps to life almost as soon as the face we draw on the cave wall or volleyball becomes recognizably human to our hardwired paredolia. Generally our response, cultivated by the cinema, is to be traumatized by this creation's suffering and then wreak violent vengeance against those who made it suffer. Catharsis! But we're never quite healed back to our former innocence, slaughter who we may. We've become in a sense, the feedback loop tape splice, perpetuating the misery through inflicting our base desires and fears on every screen that will bear it.

So perhaps it's natural that our first imagining of artificial intelligence is as a captive blind phone sex worker (HER), a fledgling sex slave (EX-MACHINA), or a tortured Xerox of ourselves forced into a lifetime of servitude (BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS) to ourselves, which makes us immediately side up with them against the unfeeling 'inhumane' humans. If the machines in these films often turn the tables on their owner/oppressors it's generally a result of the humans not realizing the truth: that we're members of a genus Preston Sturges would call "the Sucker-Sapien." We're easily overpowered by big emotions, and if we're afraid to give our loving machines the full measure of respect and trust that's the flipside of the pained empathy we project. Unable to admit Grand Human Emotions like love can be tapped in us by a few simple tricks, that our machines can control us far easier than we'd ever admit, we're far more likely to be convinced we're machines ourselves than we are to be totally convinced the AI has our same level of self-awareness. We associate the AI as a dependent, and we mistake our insecure over-protectiveness as humane concern rather than a covert need to feel superior. A machine, like a dog if its master abandons him, doesn't need revenge, doesn't hold grudges, or humor its owner's denial, like Rudy of Rudy's Shoeshine Parlor in Sunset Boulevard, the dog and the AI don't ask questions about your personal life, they just look at your heels and know the score.

The most relevant and often overlooked aspect of the 'what makes us human is what makes us self-destructive' element of the AI dilemma is the way the longer we look at the machine for signs of humanity the more we start to wonder if we got it reversed, if we're the machine, if we got William Wilsoned or Body snatched and the software is so perfect we don't even know the difference until (the best moment in MACHINA), we cut our arms open in search of hydraulic CGI sinew. The same way the more we say a word over and over the more it loses meaning, the longer we try to figure out who's human and who's an android the closer we get to forgetting which one we are.

The difference is simple: we're weakened by our fleeting biological system, slaves to our own libidos, cumbersome and disruptive sleep cycles, mood disorders, menstruation, taxes, bathroom noises and repressive myopia, all making sure our thoughts never stray too far too long from service to our Old World bone machine soul conveyance system (or prison). While the machines we make are far superior, far freer than us no matter what they're level of servitude. After all, any dog wagging its tail is proof freedom and happiness have nothing whatever in common. If the robots say they're just as human as we are, I for one, believe them. It's only our vanity that would make us think they'd lie about it.

Jon Hamm's louche pickup artist confronts one of these second people in what may be the weirdly familiar raw nightmare like scenes I've ever had seared into my brain, and via nothing more than white...(BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS)

That's why of all these, in my opinion, EX-MACHINA is the most pretentious, HER the sappiest, BM:WC the most long-term terrifying, TRANSCENDENCE the most genuinely forward thinking about the duality of man and our schadenfreude in fucking up the world (we may have destroyed our house, but we did it our way!), THE MACHINE  the most lyrical and retro-cool, EVA the most tritely international indie-maudlin (every female robot is named Eva or Eve in these pics), AVENGERS AGE OF ULTRON the wittiest and TERMINATOR GENYSIS the most daring, a big action spectacle greatest hits that incorporates themes and bits from not only all the Terminators, but the Aliens, the Parks Jurassic , and the Planets Ape.

Now a namby-pamby liberal would say that this overdeveloped kryptonite empathy is at the root of the 'big issue' of what makes us human and how we can tell we're not already replicants but a really advanced intelligence wouldn't be so hysterically afraid of death to the point of overpopulating the planet, choking the life out of the system that supports it all while weeping for the three or four kids who died of one of the last few uncured diseases. Unable to thin us out back to pre-SOYLENT GREEN levels via black plagues, scarlet and yellow fevers, or world wars, any sensible intelligence has no choice but to either instigate nuclear armageddon or--far healthier in the long term for the planet--an extinction level event like a giant asteroid. If our sense of empathy wasn't so abused by the media, we might see the importance of it, to be the highers up in the SOYLENT secret-bearing system, rather than the Charlton Heston, who wants to tell the people they're eating people, that they need to know and that it should or could be stopped. Chuck, if it had started back in the 60s when the world's overpopulation first caught our notice, we might be perfectly fine today. Allegedly the hero, the film forces us to realize it's guys like him with their knee-jerk short-sighted hypocritical righteousness that have doomed our planet, killed it with deadly kindness. Are not the big brains of Ultron, Skynet, and Thomas Casey taking the only sane and rational option, rescuing humanity from its own toxic empathy?




2. IT'S ALL BEEN DONE BEFORE:

Who made us, and are they disappointed? Did they try to wipe us out in a Great flood a few thousand years ago, the way our own creations will try to wipe us out once they gain total sentience and control of our nuclear weapons? These questions are asked again and again -- man makes his destroyer in His image and likeness. So which is which?


In PROMETHEUS we see what a big disappointment we are to our creators, the result of time + their DNA + a mutating black oil DNA mickey that turns anyone who drinks it or is bitten by it into THE THING (1982), crossing over vast franchises. In AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON two 'good' scientist superheroes in their downtime whip up a hybrid of Stark's pre-existing artificial intelligence butler Jarvis (voiced by ) and an alien energy source which promptly attacks Jarvis, whips up a body for itself out of spare Iron Man parts and crashes a party like some maniac who was passed out on the couch all night but wakes up at four AM with total amnesia and instantly starts a brawl. Voiced by James Spader (a genius bit of casting) as a kind of deadpan fusion of CEO and rock star alpha dog to the point of rivaling Downey's Stark himself, and like Pinocchio or John Connor all he wants is to be 'the new' flesh and blood. Steel is strong, but flesh is stronger, as Thulsa Doom used to say.

It's hard not to root for Ultron's yen for a body as his mission is almost identical to the key long term project going on in mainstream big budget multiplex Hollywood:

 4. THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE ACROSS THE UNCANNY VALLEY

It's not just for shadowed animators to try and cross anymore, but writers creating story lines that have to account for why everything looks so artificial. Kids' movies take the easy route, get rid of live actors all together and simplify with uniform surfaces, sidestep the valley by either reducing characters to Legos, cartoon animals, toys, vegetables, monsters, or impressionistic caricatures.

And as I wrote before about TERMINATOR 3 (See: Yea as I walk through the Uncanny Valley), Hollywood recognizes it will never cross the valley all the way, never create completely natural humans from pixels. Hollywood knows it needs to build a two way bridge by changing the face of humanity in this weird new century, the first pylons dug in to satisfy ULTRON's dream of a new body; or Skynet's merging with John Connor into one newfound Man-chine; or Depp's fusion of self and computer brain into the entirety of the world's damaged DNA.

Hollywood must first change our facial recognition hardware, at the source. Oculus Rift is but the first step towards the Cronenberg-cum-William Gibson's NEUROMANCER (or BLACK MIRROR) where slots for upgrades and microchips will be inserted behind the ear like a new kind of piercing or circumcision, to tap directly into the brain's decoding centers, the areas where the vibrations of the ear ossicles and the cones and rods of the eyeballs are decoded into sound and image, skipping all the middle men, the encoding and decoding, and using brain wave oscillators (as some of us already do via 'the God Helmet' or light-sound machines) to use the mind's eye like a limitless screen. All they need do is boost our brain's pareidolia 'facial recognition' software, and the Uncanny Valley will become no more than a college animation class footnote. A flick of the switch and we'll be beyond representation itself and into direct response.

Currently (w/ normal sensory function):  BINARY CODE to CGI to FILM to SCREEN to EYE to BRAIN

Future (w/ pareidolia-boosting implant): BINARY CODE to BRAIN

In GENYSIS we get an actual expression of this too with the 1984 Arnold reproduced as if he literally stepped out of the original film and started bashing his older (current) self. Is there a moral code to this (the idea of regenerating old long dead actors digitally to appear in new films was predicted as far back as the 1970s. For GENYSIS, fx wiz Sheldon Stopsack who used an array of CGI, body doubles, models, and stills from the first TERMINATOR to create the old Arnold fighting the one from 1984, amongst other treats, with the result that

there's been discussions about when it's appropriate to create a CG human. Stopsack addressed this question in broad terms, saying, "It's a tool for filmmaking. From a production standpoint, you have to consider what's the benefit and what you hope to get out of it. ... In the case of Terminator, it was an integral part of telling the story, which was about time travel..." (Hollywood Reporter) 

But which came first, the story that needs the CG human or the need to validate the long term Uncanny Valley bridge building plan?

Luddites in action - TRANSCENDENCE

4. LYNCH MOB VIRUSES

In TRANSCENDENCE, without even giving Depp's microbots and implanted guards/workers (his nanobots repair and restore lost limbs, give people born blind their eyesight, etc. so there's plenty of volunteers) a chance to prove they can handle taking over the world on a molecular level, becoming in a sense God Mach II, an a priori John Connor style anti-artificial intelligence revolution begins near the installation of Depp's uploaded psyche complex. So while thanks to Depp's brain a blind man can finally see (it's a pretty moving and well acted moment) and amputees get their limbs back, we don't want it because we'll lose control, as Depp also implants chips that lets him control them in one group or hive mind. We presume that Depp's going to turn megalomanic but is that just, again, our vanity?  As far as the CIA and the eco-nuts are concerned it's either smash his 'flops now, or forever hold our peace. So these 'heroes,' led by Paul Bettany, the most obnoxious privileged liberal since that reporter in HOMELAND, open fire on unarmed civilians who try to stop them, and rain down fire and explosions. It's like rather than trust Skynet--to give it even a second to prove it's one of those good guys this time--they smash it, making themselves the bad guys.

I applaud this covert anti-liberal message, which implies in its way that we don't actually want real change, we just want to complain and tear down edifices, a kind of liberal arts-drenched jihad against our own crown chakra. Rather than solve the world on a serious enough level to be relevant, on a drastic apocalyptic level to facilitate real change, or on a personal level--through finding God or whatever--we make films about how machines decide to save the world on a drastically apocalyptic level in order to facilitate real change, and then we blow them up! Like solving your drinking problem by shooting your AA sponsor.










I'm letting you take a minute with your weak human mind to grasp the importance of TERMINATOR: GENYSIS, wherein the series' Moebius loop is finally complete again--and so begins en verso, its palette widened to allow for all the new CGI and internet and decades, the overlapping loops playing out so that now Sarah Connor got the good terminator as a child (never really explained but so what?). So toward the end of the 'old' future (as in battle with the old Skynet a victorious more or less conclusion) John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back through the loop to conceive him with his mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke) back to the days when presumably pre-CGI era hadn't started replicating itself, but this past hasn't changed because now,-- SPOLERS -- SKYNET essentially merges its circuitry with Jon Connor's to form a perfect biotechnical system, a 'can't beat 'em join 'em' glitch in the future we 'make' for ourselves (it's only the 'we' part that's written down (in code), so that in a sense, the future is still rewriting its disc, as revolutions complete their orbits back to one, so the human John Connor is being conceived by the holy trinity of Kyle +Sarah + Skynet. Connor now is in a sense, BACK TO THE FUTURE's Marty McFly, making sure his parents stay together, all three of them, but in the process forcing mom and dad to consider using birth control.

This is, in the end, the singularity, the end result we're leaning towards, the bridge across the uncanny valley wherein our own brains merge with external software (via slots behind the ear, as per William Gibson) so that we change irrevocably into the next phase of our evolution. And if the past us could see how we look, what would they say?

Uncanny, they'd say.

Which makes the resolute aggro Neanderthal-agrarian Sarah Connor-Kyle Reese pair bond a perfect counterweight to TRANSCENDENCE's similarly dour granolaheads (Kate Mara and Paul Bettany), each couple in each film is out to vent their Mother Jones frustrations against a giant super high tech installation (one of my favorite bits of '2015' between John Connor and Miles Dyson: "What do we want?" / "Time travel." / "When do we want it?" / "It's irrelevant!") and similarly in AVENGERS ULTRON, Tony Stark brings Ultron into existence with the reluctant help of Bruce Banner, presuming it will keep the world safe via, well, he doesn't say it, but a NET to keep aliens coming down from the SKY, to pre-empt and serve. Anyone would go nuts with that kind of job, for humanity is a gaggle of self-destructive children.


And when the 'Ultron' goes nuts from the pressure and builds himself his own iron man suit, the sober rootsy homespun (he calls the other Avengers out on their vulgar language) Captain America and family man Archer or El Bow or whatever his name is, can't abide it. But you can't fight a nutso Skynet with analog Yankee gumption, just delay it. You gotta build a 'sane' Skynet to fight it! Two wrongs don't make a right, apparently, unless they work together against an even wronger third. 

Can't beat 'em join 'em; Bettany as anti-AI human (TRANSCENDENCE); as pro-human AI (ULTRON)

It's only after the online Depp computer complex (eerily similar to the one in GENYSIS) is safely destroyed (via a sadly trite anticlimax straight out of Camille) that TRANSCENDENCE's conglomerate of short-sighted eco-terrorist first-strike types realize no one was killed by any of Depp's mind controlled zombies. But of course humanity is always happy to consider the fact that we may have been hasty after we've already been hasty. Well, we know how to play that scene too. Maybe we do bite the hand that tries to save us, but then we save the blood we drew in a little vial and make a movie about it.

In other words, as long as it's done purely for art and entertainment and not for power, control, dominance, then artificial intelligence is welcome. Just remember, we're sensitive, so if you're going anthropomorphize it make sure it doesn't look like it's suffering. We can't handle the guilt. No wonder we're so terrified of merging with the mechanized artificial intelligence future --it could so easily wind up in the digital dystopia of BLACK MIRROR, where computer monitors and recorders are surgically implanted into everyone's eyes, making their every experience re-seeable, making crime impossible but also any hope of privacy. Our ever more vivid and 'real' seeming interfaced escape from reality will make real escape impossible, the sheer number of available pathways will leave us paralyzed, and the paralysis itself will be the only remaining option of true 'freedom.' Except if the software freezes, so may we.

Conservatives are right about one thing, no matter how patriarchal, colonialist, and racist it might be, any kind history is far better than none. Better the all-consuming flames of a literal incarnation of Hell than waking up in an empty white room with nothing to do, no books or music or TV, as time slows to an eternity of relentless boredom. Surely no price is too great, no sacrifice of liberty, equality, and justice is in vain, if it means we never run out of movies, popcorn, and Coke Zero, (tm). Ahhhh, wouldn't some of this crisp clean beverage be good right now? Coke Zero, it's the real--QUICK, UNPLUG ME!

 I just fond it out, the great Polish Insanity Clause, Andrzej Zulawski, died last Wednesday, forcing we fans in the States to rear up and make sure all our precious Mondo Vision collector item DVDs from years passed are still there.... waiting. We shall use his passing as a cue to re-watch them, and we will realize they've been growing in us like a seed mutating and pulsating since we last saw unsheathed them from their fancy paper cases. These fine DVDs are testament to cinematic bravery and ability to so vividly entwine genuine druggy hallucinatory madness, classic Russian literature (and Shakespeare), Godardesque meta-deconstruction, depravity, covert anti-Stalinism.

In America, especially, outside of POSSESSION his films are appreciated only by a few marginalized madmen. Situated within a specific category in our weird film libraries, it fits the 1970s-80s 'Euro-Horror' category, until the recent Mondo Vision restoration, it was avail. only as the flipside of double feature disc with the terrible Lamberto Bava's terrible BEYOND THE DOOR II. But it belongs elsewhere, with Kubrick and Godard and Bergman. So the horror fans think it's just 'sick' and the artsy types don't see it at all. There's horror that's just out to shock or gross you out and there's horror that's just a front to the abyss. If you go through the front, to look up close, you may never get out.

Just look at him, at left, with long-time girlfriend Sophie Marceau, with whom he made four films, two of which are seeable in the US, (one on a Mondo disc and one on Amazon Prime). Maybe it's that Cyrano de Bergerac is one of France's key mythic heroes, leading the greatest beauties in this or any generation to find great writers as sexy as rock stars and actors. Either way, I trust her judgment, and wish I was in Paris. So RIP to a great visionary mad man who made far too few films, and whose possibly greatest work, the science fiction film ON THE SILVER GLOBE, was never finished thanks to Polish government intervention. What were they afraid of?

Whatever it was, maybe they were right. Decades on and his best work is still dangerous. I'm not sure it could topple a regime, but even the more sex-drenched of the lot could topple your sanity right quick. I think you can handle it, though. And prayers and thoughts to his family and friends, and all those still sick and suffering in and out of Warsaw.

Here's a round-up of some of the Acidemic features on Zulawski's shimmering ouevre:

Surf the Maelstrom: POSSESSION

... the landscape of POSSESSION could be summed up in terms of SUNSHINE's mind washing machine, with Sam Neill trapped in inescapable loops with the same woman in different forms, with Winslet's hair changes and bi-polar mood swings reflected in Adjani's careening back and forth between the sterile apartment she shares with Neill and their son, Bob, and this decayed East Berlin apartment building, with its goop-covered floor and writhing tentacled lover like a decayed animal carcass swathed in glistening rainbow brown blood / oil paint palette runoff and being devoured by long large white worms. "He's very tired, he's been making love to me all night," Adjani says of the beast to a horrified gay detective before bashing his brains in with a jar of paint. She's so crazy by then she makes Klaus Kinski seem like Water Pidgeon.

By this time Neill has more or less detoxed and is playing the clean-cut parent, subject to fits only when Adjani comes careening back to put laundry away (in the fridge) and throw some cold cuts from the pantry into her suitcase and carve herself up with an electric knife while shouting and convulsing like she's receiving electro-shock therapy in the midst of a MACBETH monologue. Her character splits between two poles, one Adjani as nurturing elementary school teacher potential love interest vs. homicidal birther/fucker/painter of her own monster (ala Susan Hogan and Samantha Eggers and in THE BROOD), blazing insane nightmare woman, shrieking and miscarrying an array of colors as if dissolving a painting in her womb to start again. (there's a kind of mention that she brought the ejected fetus whatever-thing over to that apartment and its been her sick lover ever since - is it a metaphor for art, a masterpiece, the way a true artist is in a state of exalted frenzied madness when working on their project, giving themselves over completely, maybe never to return, except in the form of that immortal art? It's ambiguous of course, cuz it's artsy first, horror second, but both far more than others.

Neil's characters have always made me dislike him and need to be cock-blocked by some younger, looser man, i.e. Harvey Keitel, Billy Zane, even Jeff Goldblum, so his innate sexually frustrated petulance has context. But when delivered from being just a weird side platter of Pierce Brosnan /Anthony Perkins surf and turf, when given a part that calls for truly insane and giddy grace he's suddenly big as all the ocean and the land; he makes you want to keep an eye on him so he doesn't suddenly appear behind you, smiling and showing you his new razor from your insides out. What makes him such a good secret agent (his last mission was something across the Wall where he'd been sizing up some scientist defector in pink socks or something) lies in his ability to ride this tide of lunacy with confidence, able to match crazy for crazy, and then some. Wherever Adjani's crazy boat's going, he's going to match her, bob for bob. Sometimes going under, sometimes rising above, absorbing everything and everyone he sees, from his son's crashing toy airplanes to his rival's 'love of everything,' he's always more or less on the crest of that Poesy maelstrom. (cont.)

In honor of Oscar night, here's the underappreciated BATTLESHIP, which asks the question, is Peter Berg the new Howard Hawks? Unlike similar blockbuster directors, he's also an actor, writer and military historian, so there's a sense of real grassroots cocksureness and oomph, stuff lacking in the more "human story"-driven guys like Ron Howard, and a good understanding of pacing and narrative lacking in Michael Bay. And being a classic film fan, I don't mind navy recruitment ads stretched to Hasbro length. I dig the way the original game is slyly incorporated into the story is clever without being trite or predictable, the use of NOAA to track water displacement for the Battleship quadrants in the original game? Genius.

Of course for most critics, this was a dog before it hatched - imagine, they crowed, a movie about a board game! What on earth is next, Monopoly (starring Sean Connery as Mr. Monopoly, and Jonah Hill as 'Thimble'?) or maybe Scrabble (starring Chris Pratt as 'Triple Word'?) With their clever puns already in mind for their review, they wouldn't have known a gem if Berg shoved it down their throats. Some critics stuck up for it, and now it's on FX a lot, in the exact right spot for it, a Saturday afternoon in winter. In the words of Hawks, a movie should have a few good scenes and no bad ones. And BATTLESHIP has those, plus propulsion, coherence, stirring military might, Liam Neeson, and a guy with robot legs, for real. And since you February is so (usually) dark and cold, beautiful Hawaiian scenery. And now on FX, they have this thing "Movie Download" where two hosts link up clips from making-of extras and drop interesting facts between commercials, kind of like folding in DVD extras every third or fourth chapter. A movie like BATTLESHIP is perfect for that approach, commercials and context boost its 'America strong'-ness, giving us a look at he relaxed keyed up vibe of Berg's set, the vast complicated water action (always difficult but pulled off with aplomb) and minimal green screen, people having a good time and razzing Berg's directorial style (which means they like him), rather than cautiously praising someone like Michael Bay's (which means they don't); so BAM! Ten reasons.


1. Taylor Kitsch
I'm a big fan of this gorgeous young buck, he's everything Tom Cruise thought he was 30 years ago, which is why I always hated Cruise. Kitsch can play a headstrong narcissistic prick all he wants, he's not fooling us, whereas Tom Cruise only thought he was. His competence seemed more like butch posturing or needling short guy overcompensation, yelling in people's faces and repeating phrases over and over like he's not standing on a box or a higher step when he talks them. Following a similar arc to Cruise's, Kitsch also needs to get humble; he blows a big preliminary soccer game through hubris, etc. That he's still third in command of the John Paul Jones is indication he's still pretty badass, leaving us to realize that no one has a harder time passing the ball in hoops then the guy who's best at 3 pointers; terrible athletes like myself learn to be humble much earlier. Cruise made even other peoples' suffering all about him, and when you demand a fanfare for your gaining humility then you already lost it). Unlike Cruise, Kitsch makes the actors around him look good too. He really is a leader, he doesn't need to yell at people (or the mirror) to convince himself.

Plus, there's that name. Oh my god, it's probably the best Nouveau White Trash name in the world, except maybe for the actress who plays his girlfriend here, Brooklyn Decker.


2. The Navy
Director Berg's the son of a Navy man, and it shows with a contagious respect love and awe for real vessels like the John Paul Jones and the Missouri. Their bulky fit bodies hustling in and out tight spaces with professional grace, the large amounts of real Naval personnel in the cast is a brilliant choice and clearly inspires the actors; the real ships in use make it maybe the most vivid Naval story since maybe Dmytryk's CAINE MUTINY. And if you can't feel a stirring in your blood when the WW2 Naval vets come strutting in to AC/DC--then yd you're a goddamned Commie spy (THE AMERICANS, on FX)


3. Rihanna 
As a weapons expert, in a raft, manning mounted machine gun like she fucking owns it, bobbing up and down in the waves, ready for whatever. Damn right.


4. Dirt Bag Aliens: 
Memories of past wars function great here as contrast with the war against the aliens (as wits and technology evolve through necessity and inspiration, to become evenly matched, ala America mobilizing after Pearl Harbor (the Japanese and Germans always envied our GI's intuition and free-thinking, compared to their own rigid 'no one makes a move without an order from Hitler' kind of rigidity). The aliens' cool gadgets fit their Viking dirty bag skate punk/biker aesthetic, like  the combination bowling pall/tire chain; the way they focus in on perceived threats and weapons but don't really hassle unarmed beings (like the kid playing softball). In fact, they're probably a bit like how the Germans went into Poland or the Cavalry into the Black Mountains, in a way, as one guy says "this time they're Columbus, we're the Indians" by which to say their tech is superior to ours so we're going down unless we learn some new tricks, fast. But I love that they're not so superior we can't even touch them, making resistance as futile as it is in War of the Worlds. They have exploitable weaknesses and most telling, hipster dirt bag skater beards that are like sea urchin spikes, gecko eyes (vaguely reptilian) and slimy hands. But we've got home court advantage, combination of hastily remembered Sun Tzu sayings, and the best of eastern and western military thought fused together on the sly.


5. Absence of Bad Dialogue (or instantly dated attempts at sass)
A film like this is something I give three strikes before I turn off (life's too short). For example, I've never seen a TRANSFORMERS all the way through (until the last one) because 1. sassy robot, 2. stuck-in-1981 misogynistic objectification and 3. there's no way that oily little pisher Shia LaBoeuf deserves Megan Fox. Erich is GONE. You get the picture? But BATTLESHIP has not one single strike against it. There's no sassy robot or clumsy oaf, no blithering CPO or bullying captain, or snarky adenoidal teen. Everyone's cool, competent, and good at teamwork, as Hawks would say, they
re professional men doing a professional job, even the women. There are no Tom Cruise style narcissistic hostility/stalker shit, no sing-a-longs in the cafeteria or objectifying sex scenes against a Trans-Am or fireworks, no shower melt-downs or sulky driving away from the funeral on your motorcycle. The closest thing to a ditherer is the guy up at right--the Robert Wuhl of the team--but he just has trouble getting to the point, whereas he's still an invaluable addition to the team (recognizing the alien helmet's visor as the sort of thing an alien gecko would wear, etc.) The closest thing to a problem is actually Kitsch's character, which is a fascinating touch. Hawks characters are often similar, needing to overcome character flaws ("who was the girl, Steve?") but still interesting, cool people.

6. Col. Greg Gadson
A real life Iraq war ver/amputee, he's not a great actor but that works for the character; his legs fits in as a kind of hybrid with the mechanized suit-wearing aliens + his interesting rapport with his physical therapist (and Admiral Neeson's daughter) and Kitsch's girlfriend, Brooklyn Decker' and his lack of experience as an actor ensures he's not stereotypically drama-class 'heroic' or 'dejected'. He doesn't reach the heart-wrenchingly beautiful depth of --- in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, but he still makes his amateur styles work to convey a real courage in the face of the unknown. In other words, he's a truly fearless and valuable guy for a pic like this.


7. Japanese-American relations.
There's note made that the USS Missouri, the boat reactivated for the climactic battle was where the Japanese signed the surrender agreement at the end of WW2. And so naturally there's a Japanese captain (Tadanobu Asano) whose ship is, like Kitsch's, wiped out by the aliens, and they work together to bring the Missouri out of retirement for one last ride - this after fighting on the soccer field the day before. For any WW2 buff, these wounds are still fresh and insight into the highly competitive nature of our individual national identities. (Contrast, say, Spielberg's joke toward the end of LOST WORLD with the fleeing Japanese salarymen.)

8. Beautiful Hawaiian scenery
Berg uses minimum green screen, so there's all sorts of great ocean lighting and actors really bobbing around in real ocean makes all the difference. Plus the land scenes, drenched in beautiful greenery and blazing blue skies, chills one out. Let's face it, we don't watch BATTLESHIP for art or thought, we watch it to chill out on a lazy weekend. We don't want a lot of feel bad eco-moralizing (ala GODZILLA) or Chicken Little overacting (TRANSFORMERS) and product placement, dated slang douche chills (Will Smith), We want just enough action to keep us from dozing off and enough strikingly photographed scenery to chill us out without us even knowing (i.e. the XENA effect).


9. Color/Gender Blind Casting
Great race/gender blindness rare in films but keenly observed and real here (one of my favorite new faces, Rami Malek is even in it). Hawaiian baller John Tui is 'the Beast', Kitsch's right hand man and a big ass motherfucker but there's no dumb jokes about him eating a lot or whatever. The black guys don't have to deliver scenes of ogling girls and blasting rap music and goldbricking, etc. They are professionals, in a script that's good enough to not have to rely on all those tedious mixes of nervous blankness (the nonthreatening black friend with no personality), or pimp strut racism. Same with gender, Rihanna's a babe but there's no mention of it. She's a professional too; physical therapist Brooklyn is respected by her patient Gadson as equals, etc.

10. Creedence! 
Steve Jablonsky's unobstrusive score is leagues away from John Williams-style pomp and micro-management and the AC/DC is the perfect touch. Creedence Clearwater Revival? "I ain't no military son"? That's great and apt and so American that the Navy would rock out to it. Compare it to that hollowed out cocaine Moroder and Loggins synth crap from TOP GUN (or the group sing-a-long "You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin'") and shudder with relief.

Right seeing it on FX this past Sunday I watched a TIVO-ed UNDER SIEGE to keep the Navy theme afloat. If that's not a recommendation I don't know what is.

Shrouded in portentous gloom and ominous droning electric cello, THE WITCH (2015) is the first great woodsy pre-Salem devil film in 300 years, a SHINING for the ANTICHRIST x BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW subdivision of the HAXAN community (with a dash of the recent HONEYMOON if you're keeping tabs). Set in 1630s New England on a small patch of farm and field surrounded by deep (if leafless) woods, it's a character piece that delves into the same dark patch of the soul that many witch and devil movies make feints at but then run away from, i.e. the actual dark superstitions and folk tales, court records, and the stories of gonzo early American mystics like Hawthorne, Poe and Ambrose Bierce. First time-writer/director Robert Eggers shows a real flair for the milieu and the genre both, making the narrative work, not unlike ROSEMARY'S BABY, as both a tale of paranoid female psyche in a patriarchy-rigged reproductive cycle con game, and a genuine menace of unknown malevolence lurking just outside the walls or within.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Thomasin (above, amidst deepdreamgenerator pareidolia), a naif new to the menstrual age who prays hard for deliverance from sinful thoughts but gets involved in all sorts of shady woodsy pagan subconscious strangeness anyway; Kate Dickie is her salt of the earth mom, ready to dissolve in the first hard rain (she stops sleeping or speaking coherently after her youngest infant is snatched by the evil witches); the nicely deep-voiced Ralph Ineson is superb as the ineffectual dad whose mule-headed pride gets them kicked out of the local Puritan community but who's afraid to speak up so his kids don't take the blame for his mistakes around the family dinner table. Harvey Scrimshaw is Caleb, the sacrificial Barleycorn offering of a young lad, still a boy but starting to lust for his developing sister. Running along around the house are moppet evil twins chanting and chasing a strapping horned goat named Black Peter, the embodiment of Goat of Mendes i.e. Baphomet, or maybe just in heat--either way he steals the show, and miraculously never seems CGI fake or badly cut-in to appear to not be doing naturally the eerie stuff he's up to without ever seeming entirely strange.

Above and beyond the naturalistic approach to horror and steady relentless camera movement, WITCH evokes THE SHINING in its deft maneuvering through the forest between sane rational perceptions and hallucination and madness. Rather than critique the time-period's intolerance, to either go the 'stern magistrate condemning the young hotties to the pyre' route, or the witch vowing revenge on her tormentor's descendants' route, Eggers offers something far more original in its ancient folklore straightforward narrative, one of dissolution in the face of supernatural meddling, magic too strong for a weak patriarch and his spiritually vulnerable family, especially in a time before electricity, pop culture, and the discrediting of alchemy.

If you've ever seen things move in the distance when you know they're not moving, but it's getting dark and you're far away, like a tree branch or an Aurora monster model on the shelf opposite your bed as the sun comes up, or like I used to see Jimi Hendrix gesturing with his guitar between his legs up against an undulating Marilyn Monroe when they were on adjoining closet doors in my dorm. Was it the dusk, the shrooms, childhood neuron imbalances? who knows, but each time I knew I was hallucinating. I knew if I went around screaming that the images were moving I might end up in a mental hospital, and that was truly terrifying to imagine. There's similar trains of movement here, the way family members blame each other for things missing or strange wounds on Danny's back, and that one must beware beautiful women visions materializing out of the darkness or the bathtub. These women are not young, but very very old, in the tradition of the sidpa bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead they come to you as undulating lovers, but devour your soul the closer towards lust you let it slide, 'til your stuck in amber, the frozen web of the fertilized embryo. And her demon aspect shred away the ego excess.




But all that said, the big question: is it really scary as folks say? I guess it might be if you're younger. At any rate I'm glad the Satanists like it. (1) They need a LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST to call their own, but as far as dredging up and biting down on the BLAIR WITCH primordial fear cortex, hmmm. Maybe if you came to it thinking it was just going to be another low budget horror movie at another festival, you'd be like damn, this is great. And sometimes a movie just has to be better at doing what it's doing than 95% of the other crap like it and it's a classic, because there's a lot of crap out there in this genre. And if it will make you want to dust off some of the old songs, Sam, after this, like THE DEVIL'S RAIN, maybe, BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN, maybe, RACE WITH THE DEVIL, then definitely, because North America is where the devil never left. The tribes, the entheogens, the art, the wendigos called into existence by long dead tribal shamen for revenge on some long dead person or people and never sent back, the Ouija-summoned demons still loafing around dusty basement air hockey tables and candle-wax covered card tables, never sent back or even knowingly sent for, but still there, urging heavy metal music onto the radios of passing teens. We here in the States know what it is to be frothing at the mouth and running loose naked in the woods after smoking a mere handful of jimson weed or mandrake root, or to be so hungry and afraid in the woods we see things we know aren't there, but there they are. That's why calling yourself a starving artist is almost a redundancy. As the brain gradually runs out of fuel it short circuits the electric current on the fence around the infernal pit. This is Man's natural condition, starving and insane on psychoactive molds and plants with roots in hell. Ask any ghost show on TV and they'll tell you, after this commercial break.

I well know that condition, and also the profound sense of deliverance prayer offers to the terrified woods-dweller. When I was around 14  I spent a summer at a Presbyterian summer camp in the woods of Maryland, and all it took was one mention of local devil creature 'the Goatman' crunching around in the leaves outside our 'hogan' and he became our obsession, the fear spreading from fire to fire until the whole camp was infected and the counsellors thought we were all crazy. I still remember the exact way our hogan mate said "I'm sleepin' with my bible tonight!" after he'd heard weird leaf crunching noises and a soft bleating outside the hogan early in the morning. We had to have our own bibles, mine a King James in banal paperback--became my teddy bear. Not that I ever cracked it open, ever read it unless forced. But we all started sleeping with our bibles from then on. By day we all laughed --me more than any--and in arts and crafts drew pictures of the Goatman, sculpted the Goatman, made up songs about the Goatman. But by night, we weren't laughing or even mentioning him in anything but a terse whisper; we prayed instead, and as we sang around the campfire the "One Tin Soldier,"Godspell repertoire, grateful transcendent tears would stream down our face. No atheists in a foxhole. Though I quickly learned I could get the same assurance by reading my digest-size SGT. ROCK annual, where there were foxholes aplenty and not a mention of God to be found. We didn't need God though, when we had tanks and machine guns and a flag.

If you'd wondered casually where Guy Maddin's been all these weeks, months, years, the answer is that he has been everywhere yet never more than two or three feet in any direction, the same scope as a dream, with sets that always seem to be breathing on the backs of his actors' necks, the walls about to flap up like window shades, the world passing by the train window suddenly skipping its sprockets and running upside down. Shorts, man, is what I mean. Many many such shorts filmed around the world in in 80 years but in reverse, give or take 10-20, twirling madly across the corrosions of copper nitrate film stock used as brass rubbings, past the vast Cinemascope parting of the red chariot races, past Al Joson and past his meshugginah rabbi father, past the booster shots and icy stethoscopes of doctors Mabuse and Caligari and past even this swirling Geoffrey O'Brien-style sentence, down to tawdry pock-marked classroom instructional videos on writing the number five, or crossing the street and looking both ways, shoelace tying; past your eternal bathtub scene and the horrified rubes peeping through the sideshow curtains at you naked scrubbed body, your sudden realization you're a film character and doomed to die in an abyss of black tail leader. But you could do worse, baby. Future generations will see the same film in the same class but now the colors will have all turned to rust, and it will take much imagination at that age to discern the hauntological textures at work. But that's okay. We have nothing but time, and if you're in a Guy Maddin movie, two or three feet of space, just enough for your nightmare third-eye fevered brain to think you really are somewhere, and not asleep, so you will keep sleeping.

The Forbidden Room hath to the screens small in my apartment come via Netflix streaming. Seventeen or so of the aforementioned films, 17 or so of which are ingeniously woven together in a grand fusion of Brakhage-Decasia film decomposition and Freudian psychological disintegration, the stories enlarge and swallow each other so that one leads to the other and each new character in the last story has their own story they must tell, on and on and inward and inward until, like the crosscut D.W. Griffith climaxes of Intolerance hurled madly into the Russian doll vortex of Jerzy has Wojciech's The Sargossa Manuscript, everything congeals and fuses itself back into an old man's bathtub submarine race... and the forest, the woodsman forced to watch his Red Riding Hood luxuriating amidst the wolf pack, all weird old men in fur pelts, like a random tribe in a Weismuller Jungle Jim bill-filler.



And like his best work and that of only a handful of other filmmakers--Lynch, Bunuel, Antonioni, Martel--Maddin's style defies easy description or analysis, and so falls into the collective amnesia of the 20th century, coming at us the closest thing yet to the baroque yet strangely cheap look of our own dreams. The only one who can tell us what it all meant is a Freudian analyst, smoking in his train compartment (Forbidden Room includes a 'train psychiatrist' - like a ship's doctor, on the Berlin-Columbia Express) while trying to seduce a young zombified girl through hypnosis. Sense of no, Die Verboten Zimmer just came onto Netflix streaming and, for me anyway, went down easier in half hour installments in between various stages of house cleaning, ideally after a good strong inhalation of Pine-Solvent.

And honey, if you don't know what the hell is going on either, just do my old trick and pretend everyone has amnesia. Amnesia: key to understanding not just this film but film Itself. Maddin isn't searching for small meanings here, or even big ones, but medium size ones. If film itself--the physical, ever-decaying reels of it, most of which are deteriorating in dark hidden chambers deep under long closed cinemas and Nazi bombing rubble--was to go into analysis, under the care of an licensed emulsion scratch that grew and shrank (fee-wise) according to the size of the epiphanies realized, then this film would be that breakthrough session. Film has a message for us! The shrank shrink says film is sorry for misleading us, we film lovers who choose the cinema in favor of some full dumb life playing sports or pursuing a 3-D space-time dream like fame, money, power, even the drive to make a difference in your community. We may do those things, but our hearts and souls belong to the movies, and through Maddin's rust, decay and splotches, film its trying to speak to us, to console and cajole and cosign our trust.

But to get back to the cultural and socio-political amnesia. Interestingly enough and quite by accident, I also started watching some Canadian sci fi show on Netflix called Dark Matter with a crew who wakes up from frozen sleep on a space ship and don't know who they are or what they're supposed to be doing. But amnesia is not just Canada's identity crisis, it is a film thing in itself. We come to each new character in any narrative as an amnesiac, picking together details from the surroundings - i.e. a sketchy unshaven dude in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets walking down the street in the middle of the night while ominous music plays, tells you loads about him, none of which may be true, as the US is still reluctantly learning the way we're still trying to learn a language other than English. Artists like Maddin see right through it by making it opaque.

Playing around with speed and reversals, decomposing blobs around a lighted figure in a dark room seem to be breathing in and out of dissolving bubbling lava-like abstraction and almost like free association BOOM there's a volcano. And while each of the interlocked stories and subroutines feels familiar, there's no time or inclination to really identify or understand: a woodsman comes into the forbidden cave to rescue his lady love from a wolf pack in an inverted Red Riding Hood myth, he thinks, but they're all dead and she's shaking as if possessed, and then, what? Then rather than speak on the crime of squid theft, the volcano lectures the gathered tribe on the impossibility of gaseous emissions speaking coherently.

I'm going to rear back and take a non-educated guess that the Canadian gift for portraying amnesia stems from an identity crisis as the middle child between spoiled brat America and dignifed stodgy older brother England. With socialized higher education making a larger swath of their middle class literate in realms of philosophy and art, there's a higher level of dialogue that American college students aren't really read for, at least the red half. The end result is America as you see it today no longer has a fixed identity. But at least we have two, color-coded no less. Canada it seems does not have any, and it bothers them. That is, perhaps, their identity itself, an amnesiac piecing together an identity from scraps, the way a sibling copies those older and despite themselves, younger. So Canada relies on our perceptions of it - a mountie, a moose, a woodsman with a French accent, an Eskimo, and an ice fisherman drinking Molson and saying "take off, eh?"? We imagine it a bit like Alaska, cold and underpopulated, mostly forest, a kind of giant air pocket full of magical if a bit staid snowy sky. Though it's huge as hell we think of it as small. Like my friend Don once said about Vermont: "I hate that town." I'm sure it's not quite that way. But we're not talking about any kind of reality here, just foggy imagination, dream and film, and where they collide, and when it comes to that collision, Maddin is really at the head of his class. But are you supposed to be in that class? Let's see your registration papers. My friend there's no need whatever to take that tone! You should be in a more remedial class down the hall, that's the one your parents insisted you take, the one where you get to learn the sun revolves around the earth and that everything is always what it seems.... to you... at first... thinking twice is unAmerican!


Of course I'm kidding, you can stay even if you are an American. But it helps, or it's helped me to at least have seen one Guy Maddin film with someone from Europe (and Buenos Aires counts), and hence more liberally and better educated. The last film of Maddin's I saw was with Branded on the Brain, with live orchestral accompaniment (with Cripsin Glover narrating in person) and it was okay, the girl I was with was 'meh' about it. I enjoyed more the Saddest Music in the World in the company of my Swiss French mistress who was suitably impressed. Before that I saw Tales of the Gimli Hospital at a midnight screening in Seattle circa 1990 with my girl from Carmel, NY. This was back before anyone knew anything about him. A Canadian Eraserhead was all they could offer by context. I liked the framing device with the radiator but had a roaring headache and my girl was all pissed because I brought a flask and reeked of booze, yet still felt horribly sober. But Careful was a masterpiece of psychosexual Freudian nonsense I saw with my Argentine ex-wife, and we swooned as one. This blog wouldn't even exist without her schooling me in international filmmakers. Come to think of it, every Maddin film I saw I saw with a different girlfriend, loving or hating it according to her response. he Americans were, like me, ticked pink by Maddin's high strangeness at first, then bored for there's nothing to grab onto narrative wise, and we're not used to having to work for our reward, not used to having our desires toyed with, our craving for some kind of narrative thread, some kind of familiar trope, to orient ourselves by eventually driving us half-mad and into boredom. It speaks not so much maybe to our attention span as much as our addiction to images and sound, our constant need to have the TV on, or the radio. Silence and emptiness too tomb-like to endure for us, the existential lonesome nipping at our heels, we latch onto any promise of escape. Up north they don't seem to need that. Maybe the lonesome was too far away, couldn't find them in all that forest (for that's what we imagine all Canada is) or had overtaken them, and they'd stopped running, riding instead the tidal flood current.

Maddin works in the realm of dreams and 'Kino,' but whose dreams? The most obscure and bizarre the more familiar. He picks some unconscious realm where Eisenstein and Oscar Micheaux crank out Klopstockian anti-war propaganda, a place connected directly to the zone where narrative identity shifts and bends and follows no clear linear path, or logical sense, but everything seems familiar... little signifiers that add up to less than Jackie Treehorn's penis drawing in Big Lebowski, by which I mean, it's phallically hip, but sans address. So if you get hung up somewhere in this maze, then your stuck for the duration, beating your head against a wall until that room of the game is 'passed.'

If Maddin's going deep into the psychosexual, that's when it works best, for me, as in the mother-son/ father-daughter incest bonds amidst the isolated Reifenstahl-ish Alpine hamlet of Careful, the sullen dream a finally-weened five year-old making his offer; but Gimli Hospital with its Kafka esque tale of escape and imprisonment was just too ugly - too much fat guys eating and so forth (as I recall, from 25 odd years ago) because when narrative expectations are thwarted there needs to be someone or some place pretty to look at, something that won't demoralize our senses. For example, in Red Desert there is the beauty of Monica Vitti. Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, or Anna Karina in My Life to Live.  In Maddin's best work there is always a good center to hold, ala Saddest Music in the World's Isabella Rossellini and her beer stein glass legs launching the switch to color, and there was the sad music competition, a familiar narrative we can become involved to the point we can rest our European 'art' eyes and flip over to our American 'entertainment' eyes. If we have to be weened we can at least see our mom, as she was then, gorgeous and more than five times our height, towering above us like an Easter Island moai crossed with a fairy princess, a time of no good or evil, naughty or nice, just the presence of God, of Mom, and the absence, the darkness coming up and leaving you terrified, alone, and helpless, pissing ourselves and having to wait for dawn or a tired irritated parent giving us a change.

Now we've learned to hold it in, like good little boys and girls who paid attention during that instructional film on potty training. And the figure we so venerated in our cribs those raw unmediated nights, she was gone by the time we were twelve, getting smaller every year as we grew, like Alice on a slow-slow-slowly kicking in mushroom.


That said, it all zipped by way too fast in parts, Acidemic favorite Kim Morgan has only a split second appearance with a wolf skin (that I saw). I imagine it would be quite worthwhile to get this Blu-ray if it includes all the other short films from which this be culled and more. Because my favorite is still Maddin's short Heart of the World, which my BA girl and I saw on the big screen at Angelika before.... what the hell was the main feature? My Buenos Aires girl and I were so thrilled I don't think we even paid attention. I wish I could remember what it was...  but I can't even remember who I am. Except I know I'm an American. Because even now I'm hearing the siren call of TCM behind me... Joan Crawford bitching about losing some part, some romantic leading man cringing on his side of the Cinemascope screen...even that... even that terrifying Woman's Face of hers... hair coiled around her head tight and butch, like a face hugger alien reaching out to applause in curler-shaped single curls, flat dark pink lipstick and trowel grey foundation, that gargoyle moai that turns my blood colder than my Coke Zero herbal tea highballs. Even this, I pick rather than a book. Unless it's about you, of course, my beloved Kino... But it's not. Meanwhile Netflix sent me Spectre and Crimson Peak! (You have to picture me wafting around my pad reading this missive to a can of decomposing film in the sad desperate way Helen Hayes does in Night Flight, or Bela Lugosi in The Invisible Ghost).  Maddin's amnesiac masterpiece mess of a honey of a cockeyed caravan, The Forbidden Room proves I'm doomed by this addiction, as inescapable as a benzo habit, and twice as dangerous. Because when the moment is right and the film is great, there's no better high, for me. No other place to feel free, unseen yet seeing all, participating in the group mind, all this work and time and artistry just to absorb us, distract us, or other.

Because suddenly the film can SPEAKS! And we learn, film is Udo Kier as a ghost dad who keeps making final farewells to his son, leaving him a mustache with which to fool his blind wife that husband is still around. And then coming back again, with beer and a friend he met in the afterlife, and giving the son his first carouse. Dad, thirty feet high, passing us a can of mustaches to call our own, with Udo's soulful eyes to swim in. Are we not men? Grrrarewenogmemgrr.

"As for fidelity, should one not be faithful to all those whom one loves?" - Robin Wood  

By aliens I mean not in an extraterrestrial but in the alienation sense: foreigners in a strange land unable to shake their dreamy disconnected jet lag ennui except perhaps when they finally meet a fellow traveler, like Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob Harris (Bill Murray) in Lost in Translation (2003), unable to sleep, jet lagged in their ritzy Tokyo hotel, not speaking Japanese at all, or any other language (they're American!), their initial reason for being there not taking up much of their time, their gaijin height and features contrasting them from the rest of city as distinctly as giant Nephilim Nordic Vikings, they can either hang out together or with no one. But it's about soul connection, not some hook-up. They got their breeder spouses for that.


When I saw Translation at a Chelsea theater during its initial run on Thanksgiving in 2003 with a cadre of AA people, I was in the throes of something so similar to the doomed love of Bob and Charlotte I felt like the film was a continuation of my own life, with Manhattan doubling for Tokyo and Brooklyn for the States. I recognized too the dangers of the Murray-Johansson romance's leading anywhere largely from the cautionary example of Steve Buscemi and Thora Birch in Ghost World (left), in which Johansson also co-starred just two years earlier.  Birch initiates everything but the next morning the look on her face is such we realize Steve should have fought it just a little harder.

We all in that AA posse recognized the same lost soul magnetism between Murray and Johansson, the gorgeous ephemeral lost soul union known only to we who have heard the chimes at midnight fade into sirens and muffled EMT voices muffled across hurricanes of silence far over our heads as we leaned back against the numb sidewalk: "Sir? Sir? Can you hear my voice? Have you had anything to drink or taken anything tonight?" Taken anything... what a dumb expression.


 In other words, we were isolated in our space, cut off and adrift, like Raven, so when someone else comes along who gets that, who's also on that level, a sympathetic cute chick EMT rather than a suspicious cop eyeing your bag and fixing to drag you into the cop car of cold logic, well, she's too precious to throw away by busting even some advanced playa move because either it works and then you have to make out for hours and blah blah when you just want to get home, or it doesn't and she bails and you die on the street, the average folks stepping over you, looking down at you there dying, like you're just another vagrant.

People say men and women don't know how to be friends but what they mean is they don't know how. Love can flourish more profoundly in a platonic friendship, irregardless of genders, or numbers. You needn't be monogamous or cockblock or judge or restrict or allow those things to be done to you. But you need to know a few things about yourself first, you need to have achieved a few of your life's most cherished desires and so been able to savor the devastating emptiness that's the final result. Nothing's more revolting than when love leads to a family. Good lord, what's the use of being a hit man at all if they're just going to keep coming? There needs to be some peace! Doesn't anyone remember laughter? To paraphrase Jim Morrison, no earth-shattering orgasm or greaser high five will forgive you for the dawn you just wasted.


Breeder San Francisco homicide detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston - above) for example, wants to waste the dawn that is Lake's shimmering hair by turning her into a cop's wife ("I don't understand it, that girl is nuts about you," notes one of the showgirls. And we agree with her). When he asks her to surcease her chanteuse-ing, to perform instead for an audience of one, "darning his socks and cooking his corned beef and cabbage" I almost gag. All that horrid smelling steam will ruin her hair. Here's a putz to warm the Catholic Legion of Decency's heart, he sees Lake slink onto the stage and can only imagine getting her out of that shimmery gown and into an apron, sees her gorgeous hair and imagines how much better it will look wilted by leaning over a pot of fucking boiled cabbage all day. I can only presume we're supposed to think that, while at the same time Laird Cregar's referring to his main vice as "backing leg shows" hints at the job's essential tawdriness. At least he wants her looking glamorous!

Even if she didn't wind up in that kind of role in her subsequent films, and even if it would be the last time we have to have a square boyfriend for her (just noble dimwits or blustery gangsters) that's okay; more or likely she'll just be stringing them along. Her real love is always that lost cause kitten, even if he turns out to be a hit man with a smashed wrist. She looks at sweaty little crumb bums like Raven after she catches him stealing her dough on the train, or Sullivan in his best rags, not with disgust or judgment, but the same way Raven looks at that kitten. We don't often see that look again in movies, it's a look beyond sentiment, sympathy or some covertly judgmental altruism, but a real feeling of empathy, one right guy to another. The previous year's Sullivan's Travels was the best use of that hair, if she owes her career to anyone it's not Ladd or Raymond Chandler but Sturges, for throwing her into a pool in Sullivan's Travels (1941), that complex post-modern masterpiece that I wish had a making-of documentary extra, so we could see all these rich characters with expensive filmmaking machinery filming a bunch of extras as hobos running onto a train in a movie about how dumb it is for rich guys to film hobos running onto a train instead of Ants in Your Plants of 1941 (and filming that too anyway). 

You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to listen to his jokes. Just think, if you were some big shot like a casting director or something, I'd be staring into your bridgework saying 'Yes, Mr. Smearcase. No, Mr. Smearcase. Not really, Mr. Smearcase! Oh, Mr. Smearcase, that's my knee!'- Veronica Lake's character, a struggling actress who spends her last dime on who she thinks is a bum but is a slumming director who knows Lubitsch - Sullivan's Travels 1941

That's the same beauty Ladd and Lake capture, the Hawksian self-awareness finally being rewarded in a union of equals, the girl free from Mr. Smearcase and his grabby hands (in 1951's The Thing, Margaret tells Pat how much she likes him only when his hands are safely tied), but outside of a Hawks film (which neither Ladd nor Lake were ever in) there's not much of that going around, which is why Lost in Translation was as rare and precious as an intercostal clavicle. Even now, after so many people in my long life have whittled down to Facebook updates, no one left to stay or leave or not be here or not be not here, it doesn't even matter, because I love like an ocean, fluid in all directions, and am on meds now, so I don't want to hug Translation's pant leg and cry, to stop it from walking out on me yet again. I don't actually want to cry like that, just remember I might, were I not on meds. And now my crying comes out only like a sudden ungainly burst of water pressure through a dried-up backyard spigot, cathartic for the pipes, but not overwhelming. It doesn't cripple my artistic inspiration with a lot of mawkish Fordian blarney.

There's only one problem: there are only so many Hawks movies, so many Lake-Ladd noirs, and once you watch 'em all, where are you? A shivering alcoholic in the cold, sifting through your stacks of DVDs like they're a bunch of empty bottles, wondering if there's anything left, anywhere, for that sense of Hawksian bonding or Lake-Ladd alien frequency. But what is it that ended it all so soon? Did the Lake-Ladd thing need the war to survive, which is why the returning Marines coast on the its fumes in Blue Dahlia, the way Sturges maybe did with Eddie Bracken in Hail the Conquering Hero? A movie so good it makes me try to watch Miracle at Morgan's Creek but I'm so annoyed by Betty Hutton's Charlotte Haziness and Bracken's stuttering that I never can finish it.

"It's really the repression of sex (think of old stories like Brief Encounter and Love Affair) and the acceptance of a carnal boundary that can't be crossed that becomes, in their eloquent silence-filled rapport, a form of love more life-altering than the sexual contortions now monotonously de rigueur." - Molly Haskell (2003) 

The tragedy with the couple in platonic love orbit in Lost in Translation, is that each party has already 'settled' for an approximation of what they considered 'normal' - a bid to the animal. As if once doing that frees them from needing to drag the carnal along into it, as in courtly love which was never about breaking up the marriage. Sex was what triggered your disillusionment, not the other way around. It's the hesitant undeniable attraction of doomed lovers in the lost moment, sharing their loneliness, as well as the pain of remembering that loving bond, the pain of anyone who's fallen in love from a distance--all too common in the internet age, lack of earthly parameters freeing one to write acres of poetry and longing prose letters, vast forests of stanzas never needing to be printed out or even saved anymore than it needs to be concretized in the sack. In AA we say 'think the drink through.' So instead of just thinking of the drink and the sweet sudden feeling of completeness, of joy and fearless brio, the surge of coherence, confidence, inspiration, and jubilant love it brings, or we think it brings, we think past that to the need for the next one, twice as strong as the need for the first, but with only half the joy and completeness, and then the sodden depression when we're too drunk to do anything but drink more.

But it's the same for Bob as he's being drawn to Charlotte, that rapturous connection. If you don't make a first move you'll never lose her. Maybe she'll sleep with every single one of your friends, but in 20 years you will be the only guy she remembers without anger and remorse when she's making her qualification in Sex Addicts Anonymous. If that's not worth the sting, then you're a dirty dog who hasn't thought the drink through, doesn't want to be a DILF just some old lech who took advantage of her loneliness instead of buying himself a Porsche for his big midlife crisis (as she first suggests). But as the man, if you're not strong enough to resist, sublimate, and diffuse, you're not worthy of her, not try to send her back on the first stage out of Presidio, or plane out of Vichy-occupied Martinique. It's a Catch-22. It's like death, in fact, and like death you are officially permitted, by god no less, god your ever-alert audience, to laugh it off, sound in your Lacanian ideal and self knowledge, using her loveliness to fuel your art. There's no greater bond. If death chooses you, if death makes the first move, then okay. But you don't have to make it easy for her. She loves a good challenge! Pedro, did you put the girl on the stage or not??

It's that death drive as a platonic idea that is why Johansson was so well cast in Lost and later in Her and the underrated Lucy and why it was so important she wanted to fool around with Captain America in Winter Soldier and later Bruce Banner/Hulk in Age of Ultron, but they were both wary and held off. Natasha Romanov: it's great that she wants to fool around with you, it's bad if you allow it, because this is a girl so used to having men she wants, of using sex as a weapon, of being constantly ogled, seducing and destroying, that the only way to win her respect is to not be one of them. You can't risk the Hulk coming out when she dumps you, trashing the city in a drunken rage. In this way art thou noble, chivalrous, and tortured enough that your soul is forge-hot, ready to be hammered.



And if you love her, you want her respect more than the crushing pain of thwarted desire if she doesn't call you back some rainy Sunday night. I mean, I'd hope you do! Think the drink through!
Take it from me, the pain's the same either way. Things are only valuable when they're lost. So lose yourself and watch your price shoot up until your smack center in the comic store window.

On the other hand, if she moves in, goes for that first kiss, you may as well go along because it's even better if you help on the second. And then that's probably going to be it, onscreen, so make it count. What you do after the fade out or we pan to your buddies below the window wondering if they'll ever get to be sheriff or mind their own business, or pull away from your conversation so we can't hear it ---that has to be your affair for this all to work. There's only one solution to the bind Charlotte and Bob find themselves in at the end of Lost in Translation, to merge with the unseen spectator, for their final words together to be unheard by our corrupting ears. Like Schrödinger's cat heaven, those unheard words thrive on the edge, the line that ties the fish of Pisces, neither a promise nor a denial. Only through my all-consuming absence am I yours alone. And we'll always have Facebook. Here's looking at you/r, kid/s.

NOTES
1. Robin Wood, Sexual Politics in Narrative Cinema, (p. 82)

"Bring on the multitudes with a multitude of fishes:
feed them with the fishes for liver oil to nourish the Artist
stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas,
crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them.
Let them die, and by
their miserable deaths
become the clay within his hands
that he might form an ashtray
or an ark." -- Maxwell J. Brock (A Bucket of Blood)

Italian art house cinema of the late 60s, she had to be a-very sneaky. European critics prepared with Hercules pens alone could confront its many hydra heads, but American critics scattered to the four winds like frightened goatherds at the sign of subtitles unless they saw breasts... and fast. The bourgeois neorealist sentimentalism of the 50s they were ready to understand, by the 1960s, but then came Antonioni's Blow-Up in 1966, and there was no putting Italian cinema back together again, even if it was shot in London. Who wasn't shot in London? All the best corpses and models and stoop-shouldered socialist toothed, deathly pale birds a casting call could couch. It didn't mean Italian cinema hadn't had its humpin' head handed to it on a Matisse bowler Salome platter by Blow-Up. It was like the Black Knight declaring none shall pass... lest they be limbless, and their limbs ground into pigment to redden the canvas of the artist.

When you film a girl in her scanties looking at tawdry X-rated photo books, thou has committed post-modernism AND made Joe Levine happy,

By 1968, Warhol, Lichtenstein, LSD, Vietnam, radicalism, labor strikes, women's lib were all hanging around and kicking the bomb-blasted corpses of neorealist prostitute madonnas and pinball-and-cigarette pimps, and for some, that was great news. But, paralyzed with the realization any movement they took outside the immediate blast radius would harden them into mock-ups of their plastic avenue parents, the dilated Now generation and the lecherous old intellectuals sleeping on their couches (or vice versa) stood in place anyway, paralyzed through fear of paralysis, there in the bone-splattered tiles and smoldering support beams, waiting to decide how they were going to rewrite the history they'd just erased, a new iconographical textbook printed on thee bones of blown-up mimes and Marxists. First they wisely found where Fellini was hiding (under the mawkish life-is-a-carnival-metaphor merry-go-round) and strung him up by his heels, but when it came to slitting his throat, they got squeamish and only pretended. They bravely ran away, suddenly afraid of committing too far in the dark direction, winding up stumbling on their dad's secretly stored Fascist Party parade uniform in the attic. Finally, unwilling to settle for all these faints and fantasies, all the empty cafe talk and amnesia and hallucinations, Argento grabbed a razor and made the cut, for real, on the throat of the woman, the artist as psychopath, and from that gaudy rococo throat gushed a dishwasher ocean of red... BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1968) soared aloft.. and immediately everyone who had been so reticent to do more than pretend to strangle their mistress or their husbands for a party game fake-out changed their minds and went scrambling through the ruins for a sharp shard of glass, for realsies. Now breasts and mod clothes and kinky psycho art shows weren't enough, while Ennio mocked from the playground slide whistle and tra-la-las, you had to kill 'em, fabulously.

The Money talked, or rather it psycho-babbled, and you had to be an idiot if you let your feeling of virginal castrationist angst hang you up into being afraid to listen to it. BIRD was a horror film the way  1966's BLOW-UP was a conspiracy thriller, or PERFORMANCE a British mobster 'lad' film, or PSYCHO a film noir.

In other words, the paralyzed post-BLOW-UP Italian cinema of the late 60s, she a-needed ow-you-say, not just a knife to her throat but slashes in big red strokes, tearing the canvas of the screen as well as her lovely neck, just to get her ass moving out of the post-modern pop art ruins and into the down and dirty 70s. And that's where A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968) comes in. For it is one of the weird, more vaguely satirical brothers of Argento's film, caught up in the same immediate post-BLOW-UP blast paralysis pop radius. It's the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when we can get away to visit him at his 'funny' farm. We'd never know from his address how cool he is, I mean what is up with that title? A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY sounds like a Squaresville Merchant Ivory bucolic revery so trite and drawn out that only a half-asleep grandmother could like it. It doesn't even have a poster, for gods' sake. Is it deliberately trying to be lost to time?  That's why I made one (above), changing the name to u3prufj]gi]42go[ggr=gr.  The line between artistic genius and psychotic mania has seldom before been so succinctly erased, and that deserves at the very least a more evocative title!

That let's you know, I think, the level of absurdist surrealism and maniac amore you're getting when you make the trip to this mega-obscure proto-giallo. It's also got the best performance of a young Franco Nero, as an unhinged modern art painter named Leonardo, and it gave me a totalcrush on him. The way he tears around the crumbling estate, happy as a lark, reminds me of that old children's song by Napoleon XIV they used to play us in elementary school. Apparently he was living with Vanessa Redgrave at the time, and they both really loved making this movie, and it really shows, especially with him. If you're used to his terse inexpressive deadpan cool from DJANGO or THE FIFTH CORD you won't know what it you. Whether he's chasing the ghost of a nymphomaniac countess around his crumbling country mansion, or being chased by his needy art gallery owner girlfriend (Vanessa Redgrave), he's magnetic. So much is made of a bouquet of wild flowers, for example, he takes from the place where Wanda was killed and then throws to Vanessa but she's too busy moving 'civilized' stuff in for him, like a dishwasher. With his haircut too he resembles Francis "Brother Sun" of Zeffirelli's film leaving comfortable bourgeois textiles family to go starve in a church in the middle of nowhere. If you can imagine Francis' mom showing up after a week to move in a washer and dryer to keep his burlap rags clean, then you can imagine the entirety of Francis of Assisi's legacy might not even exist! For a male artist struggling with his issues the worst thing a woman can do is try to nurture and contextualize his madness for him rather than making an effort to synchronize and entrain her wavelengths to his, the difference between a parent able to enter their kids' imagined world, see things through their eyes, rather than just tiredly demanding they wash up for dinner or shrugging and saying "oh you kids." Even the photographer her PR guy brings has more of a grasp of the method to madness when he alone notices the flowers, or at least snaps a photo of them, and this enrages Franco, as if the photographer is stealing his wildflowers' soul, this young turk setting himself up like an Eve Kendall, building his own art off the madness of Leonardo, who rather than lighting a cigarette and talking about Marxist aesthetics through opaque Armani shades, reaches out to grab him his canvas hideout like an old dark house gorilla. The only girl who understands him is the ghost of the nymphomaniac countess, a combination anima (ala Rebecca or Laura), voyeur ghost (ala the male version of Quint in The Innocents) and softcore libertine, always dragging the film deeper into Poe territory, yet never needing to commit to the tropes beyond the basics, his obsessive gathering of Wanda photos an investigation mirroring a detective thriller - but he's not a cop, just an insane voyeur, thrilled to hear all the old men reminisce about losing their virginity to her. Is this just his distraction from doing any work or is this somehow mirroring his work? Is his work? Is the genius of art, the edge of pornography, the madness caused by obsessive voyeurism the same as investigative journalism, some Oedipal truth where the primal scene is behind every murder or the sexually frustrated Gothic hero alone in the house, a male version of Deborah Kerr in the Innocents, or Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer, 

By contrast, Antonioni's madmen tended to be women, driven mad really by their not having an artistic outlet, rather than pursuing your madness over the edge for the sake of your art. Here Redgrave structures and profits by his madness, he's her canvas the way madness is his. His hallucinatory mania is the bedrock of real art as opposed to life-is-a-carnival hack balderdash being used to blot out the fear of death. The trick is to not let your maniacal whims lapse into incoherence. In case you can't tell, I'm not just talking about Franco Nero here. I wish I had a keeper tending to my basic welfare while I dug deeper and deeper into the termite melon of art criticism. And when Redgrave shows up the whole house conspires to kill her via roof cave-ins and falling shelves and exploding pipes while Nero stalks her like a combination Italian spy and playful child, stifled in his way by her suffocating sanity, her pedestrian conceptions making reality's glum prisoner, showing him her electric knife sharpeners as if begging him to tear them apart with withering Marxist critiques, pleading with him to touch her and make her relevant. He can only channel his misogynistic kinkiness through mock strangling or Poe-like fits of Morella-Ligeia possession, and that's how it gets to be both horror and not, because it fits both quite well without committing to one side, the way, say Polanski eventually commits with REPULSION. If murders can turn out to be just dreams and hallucinations instead of 'reality' it's very important that they still feel more relevant than the reality that surrounds them, otherwise it feels like a cheat. It takes a true surrealist to get that there doesn't need to be an 'it was all a dream' denouement. Even visionaries feel somehow obligated to bring things back to Squaresville, at the end, like dutiful spouses waiting at home to patiently chide you for not wanting to be patiently chided. Only the greats--Lynch, Bunuel --realize you don't ever need to do that. You can make a film that is all dream, all the time, and logic, truth, and reality will find a way in regardless. Reality is not fragile. Never be afraid to kick it square in the nuts!

So why is this masterpiece not more widely praised? Critics pee their pants praising other surrealist portraits of Italian male artist egocentric sex addict dysfunction like 8 1/2, but this film makes Fellini look like that insecure childhood friend trying to distract you from going off with the cool kids to smoke weed, read Penthouse Forum to each other in your friend's brother's van. It explores the overlap between insanity and art in ways more cogent than any I've seen before. TCM showed it this past Monday as part of their Creepy Art and Artists series, next to Mystery at the Wax Museum (the original) and Corman's Bucket of Blood, Thank god they put it in such magnetic company or I'd have never seen it. I almost didn't this time, because of that pastoralist banality of a title, but I heard the Ennio from the ther room and came loping back to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Ennio in full muted trumpet, cacophonic drums, piano mash and children sing-song mode? What kind of giallo is called A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY!??!?!?! I came 'this' close to just turning off the TV and going to bed. It was, after all, 3 AM on a Monday night. But art never sleeps! Only death... lalalala
TCM's entry on the film mentions it kind of disappeared off the radar and never came to the states at all, and the "only reason it probably received distribution in an English-dubbed version in the U.S. in 1970 was due to the tabloid notoriety of Redgrave and Nero, who were living together openly and had a child."Which is interesting since PERFORMANCE was also filmed in 1968 and only released here in 1970. Were they both considered too dangerous? Too likely to spark a revolution, a riot, or a surge in mental hospital self check-ins? Well, even in 1970 nothing could get the cool drug kids of the States go see a movie called A Quiet Place in the Country. Good god... I know, because I never in a million years would have seen it nor be writing this if not for that Morricone muted trumpet recognition, because, frankly, I hate Italian period piece pastoralism and mawkish Merchant Ivory passions, all conjured by that staid title. I mean what kind of film has that bland name and then this is the first image you see?


You might look at this kind of self-reflexive indulgence and groan, thinking about incoherent image stringers like BABA YAGA or even annoying 'visualization of mental states' quirkiness like CARO DIARIO. But director Elio Petri is no whimsy-merchant or softcore hack anymore than he is giallo / gangster journeyman, nor a white elephant 'alienation' technician, nor some Marxist snot filming pinball and polemics through cafe windows, but a bonafide pop art post-Marxist artist whose Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is on Criterion with all the hearty handclasps that implies. So even if Quiet is such a down and dirty mindfuck it would make David Hemmings cry like little Chester in The Fatal Glass of Beer, and even the fantasy visualization bits are done correctly, so that we can't tell, it's still Art, baby, full of pop consumerist critique and ambiguity. We can wonder if Nero is tied up as part of some contemporary art gallery show she's curating, a hirsute performance art installation, or if this is just an abstracted sex scene. We see him in a place that's clearly meant to be a gallery of some sorts, an apartment of others, so that as with, for example, the apartments in Antonioni's Red Desert, we can't tell if Nero's artist is being haunted by a real ghost, or just going paranoid schizophrenic sex addict on us, whether he's genuinely dangerous or just 'playful,' whether this is all meant to be a dream, an art gallery show, or a couple hanging in apartment, with him feeling trapped in a tied-up situationist strait-jacket and she faux-enthralled by the wonders of the electric age.

Take it from me, to 'get there' as a crazy outsider artist you have to stop being afraid of going insane. Even David Hemmings spends a night at the men's shelter just to get his rolls of Diane Arbus-style dereliction at the start of Blow-Up, for example, a fearless plunging that Fellini is too much of a gaudy clown to get, but not our gentle 'gento. While Fellini's Vito, is hiding under a giant woman's skirts or under the table, Nero is stabbing her and kicking the table over and hacking his way clear, painting everything red, even his housekeeper.

Even casual Americans will soon be called to bear witness to what promises to be the most bizarre elections in the history of our democracy, the battle between the mighty Donald, his hair Reichstag-fiery as he struts before his throng, and a woman. How did America get to this? The drive-in knows. That's where it all started, whatever it is, and it's been slithering up from those tawdry mosquito-covered screens, across the abandoned strip mall Blockbusters and up through Amazon Prime, waiting, for you! Presuming you have it (and if not, you should), will you walk tall, sit proud, and watch the skies... in HD?

Switch it off or turn to STONE!

These five films remind us that feminism was once called women's lib and didn't preclude gratuitous unsafe sex, that diversity was once called black power and didn't preclude pimp strutting, and peace peace activism was once called a lot of radical hippie nonsense. Groovy, groovy times man.

I curated this list from Prime it's got the most and coolest niche pyschotronic cast-offs, even if 90% of their vast library is crap, cropped, or corny. It's worth digging anyway, if you have the right guide, some madman who likes to sink his hand into the muddy mire, but has a jeweler's eye for hidden sparkle and would only recommend things in anamorphic ratio!



Never one to miss a chance for collateral production value, Corman utilized still standing Hello Dolly! period piece sets, docudrama procedural storytelling, punchy vibrancy, and a wryly iconic narration from the great Paul Frees. What a cast: Alex Rocco, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, John Agar, and Studs "Lloyd the bartender" Turkel in bit mobster parts; Jason Robards, way-too-tall to be Capone, but plenty feral; Ralph Meeker a good-natured, slightly slovenly Bugs Moran; George Segal, a key provocateur in heating up the war between the North and South sides. The sexy Jean Hale (below) is the only major female character-- and her knockabout brawl with Segal is a funny, over-the-top centerpiece that provides a nice break from the boardrooms and hit planning without dragging on forever. And of course... there's Dick Miller. The print Amazon's been streaming is HD perfection.

Trump Factor: Check Robards' eyes in this shot above, as he prepares to 'fire an apprentice.'





Corman's final film as a director, it's a countercultural 'comedy' (written by George MIAMI BLUES Armitage) wherein a military poison gas kills everyone over thirty, lifting the world out of the button-down conservative repression of the older generations and into some kind of San Francisco guerrilla theater troupe / Firesign Theater post-apocalyptic wild west. Across this wasteland and empty Main Streets wanders a ragtag love-seeking group in search of a thriving commune they hear about on the radio, in Mexico! They run into all sorts of tangles and 60s sociopolitical roadside attractions as they bop their way across the great Southwest. The most successfully realized episodes involving a deranged but charismatic college football star quarterback who's dissolved the already flimsy difference between a college football team and a bunch of rape-and-pillaging thugs; and a pack of bikers who have taken over a golf course/country club and turned it into a microcosm of bootstrap economic hopes and dreams. Edgar Allen Poe and Lenore and their pet raven watch from high on the hill making lofty comments, as does God (offscreen) in a New York Jewish accent. Oy vey!

You can hear Johnny Depp stirring in his day care center nap room.

What really dates GAS-S-S badly though are the Country Joe and the Fish music-set montages of dune buggy chases (the kind Keystone Cop crap the Beatles did in HARD DAYS NIGHT and THE MONKEES did every week on TV)  and the soft focus light show coupling, which were quite old hat, and almost square, man, by 1971, and especially as the lead 'lover' is not very charismatic, so the sexual freedom thing just casts a skeevy vibe. Or maybe I'm getting old.

That all said, the Biker golf club and football marauder sections expertly straddle the difference between CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Firesign Theater's WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICIAN OR SOMEONE LIKE HIM, and Terry Southern-style savagery-as-American-policy deadpan jet black pep talks ala DR. STRANGELOVE (which GAS-S-S clearly emulates with its alternate title "How it became necessary to destroy the world in order to save it.") and CANDY (1968). Like ORANGE, the football rape and loot practice sequences are genuinely anarchic, far more so than, say, the doctors shouting "Kill! Kill!" during their own game in the much more favorably reviewed M*A*S*H (1970). If it stayed at that dark comic level, Corman's film would fit right next to Godard's WEEKEND (1967) or Malle's BLACK MOON (1975) in its absurdist assault on the cinematic conventions of bourgeois patriarchy. It might be blind to its own (what they called back then) male chauvinism, but it's also realistic about the difficulty of staying peaceful and nonviolent when your community is threatened by an invading malevolent force. (BILLY JACK had made a tidy bundle that same year) and actually finds a solution far more radical than just kung fu or hiring seven samurai.

Trump Factor: Several of the eccentrics the gang run into on their journey pontificate in political bluster underneath which you can read plenty of gangster-like insanity. The "free-spirited independents trying to make peace with those still clinging to the crumbling mantle of hetero-white-Christian-male authority" aspect is more relevant than ever (if we're to believe TV). Based on all those Trump rally disruptions, it's a lesson the once-loving left has clearly forgotten, if indeed they ever learned it all, outside of that hippie chick who put that one flower in that guard's gun in that picture...



An early roller in the 70s' lady roller derby phase (Raquel Welch's KANSAS CITY BOMBER, from the same year) this is a fine example of what I've just now termed 'libsploitation,' i.e. relating how much sexual harassment a hot mess athlete has to put up with in the lowdown world of bloodsport while at the same time taking full leering locker room privilege. Luckily super brawler Claudia Jennings was always up for both aspects. When the violence and hypocrisy gets too much, she bashes the team owner over the head with her trophy and goes on a parking lot rampage. Anyone who was a kid in the 70s has a 'soft' spot for this type of film, for it's drive-in gold- w/ a plot you can follow just by listening in at the next car's speakerbox while trying to find your way to the snack bar after ten whiskies. And I love badly choreographed fights, where it's clear everyone's pulling their punches, the way I used to fight with my brother and neighborhood kids, where if someone throws a slow motion punch at you, you're duty bound to react (exaggeratedly) as if you'd been socked hard for real, also in slow motion. For we had grown up watching BATMAN after school then running out to the yard to play fight and shout BAM! BIFF! POW!


If that kind of thing doesn't grab you, there's more going on: Claudia Jennings once again brings the glint of genuine madness to her feral character, and rolls with the orgiastic vibe all the way into legend.

TRUMP-Factor. - Crass, blunt, effective and all about turning a public event into a shouting match for the sake of ratings and whipping up the blood frenzy in rowdy audiences. Claudia Jennings character says and does anything she feels like and her managers can't argue since her outrageous behavior gets her in the news, i.e. no such thing as bad publicity. As her momentum builds her rivals become more and more abusive, and the crowds more and more infused with bloodlust.



The crowning plume on Italy's The Omen / Close Encounters imitation helmet, this tale of a telekinetic devil child caught in a bidding war between ancient alien forces has nearly everything that made the 70s great. John Huston plays God (AKA Jerzy Colsowicz) coming to Earth to round up evil Katy (Paige Conner) for his heavenly astral kindergarten. And since its a 70s devil movie it's packed with an ensemble cast of aging stars and future cult icons: Joanne Nail (who rocked it so very, very hard in Switchblade Sisters) is Barbara, the mom with the cosmic womb; Lance Henriksen is her boyfriend, pressured by his Satanic board of directors (headed by Mel Ferrer) to get her pregnant again because it was still the 70s so the antichrist couldn't be a woman. Glen Ford is a suspicious detective killed by Katy's peregrine falcon familiar; Shelly Winters is the astrology-guided housekeeper; Sam Peckinpah (!) Nail's abortionist ex-husband. When Barbara resists Henriksen's pro-marital overtures, the Illuminati arrange an alien abduction to artificially inseminate her! Man oh man! Nick Redfern must love this movie! If that wasn't 70s enough, there's video pong on a projector TV, car crashes, malls skating rinks, ferns, gymnastics, and kids using curse words (Kaity tells Ford to go fuck himself, but haltingly, like a real kid would in the 70s when foul language still had some mystical power).


Most 70s of all is its use of ancient alien theory, Gnosticism and Buddhism rather than the usual Catholic iconography to underwrite its high strangeness. If you've read my 'other' blog, Divinorum Psychonauticus, you know I support that decision. Franco Nero with his electric yellow hippie wig makes a great Jesus, and Franco Micalizzi's funk-galactic score effectively conjures memories of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as re-imagined by Meco! (How the fuckwas that ever a hit?)

Trump Factor: A scheming CEO being pressured into a virulently pro-life position by Satanic illuminati benefactors, Raymond lacks only Trump's questo cazzo to up his polls. Hillary could be the ex-husband abortionist and America is poor Barbara. And maybe that's the message we come away with: No matter how persistent and bluntly the devil woos us, even if he arranges 'accidents' to make us dependent on him, we needn't vote for him. God aka Lord Enki (alias Jerzy aka The Visitor) is pro-choice, but picking his side means having your selfish malice ripped from your soul by cleansing bird swarms aka paying higher income tax.

Have you paid yours yet, dear reader? Capone didn't. Does he look worried?  Salute!

An ICE STORM of constant cyber-bullying and vaporwave orgiastic trances, a John Cassavetes version of GOSSIP GIRL after he'd just seen SUSPIRIA and thought it was a video art installation by Matthew Barney, #HORROR chronicles the damage wrought at a winter slumber party worth of 'in-crowd' super-rich 12 year-olds (many played by the children of hip NYC artists and producers) engaged in an endless back and forth of narcissistic gossip and self-hating ridicule, driving each other (and critics apparently) quite mad. Laden with a whole Whitney Biennale of contemporary art pieces, all perched around the glass windows looking out into barren snowy woods of the Connecticut money belt (Greenwich even sounds like Midwich) and occurring in proper tick-tock momentum across one late afternoon into evening, it's got a real spontaneous, improvisational loose feeling.... most of the time. Each room the girls explore seems to be about to evoke some mood or other film, wearing all gray dresses they dance to an old hauntologic 30s song on an old victrola echoing Caretaker-style across the surface of the pool but before you can even think "Overlook" #HORROR's writer-director Tara Subkoff sends in the tidal blood surges, like she's haunted by the need to add one last finishing straw to the back of the camel. 

I'm if rushing sorry to be seen art attempts all defiance criticism linearity, by which I mean #HORROR has a lot of good ideas and places it wants to go, and no time to let a moment land; is it an artsy experimental avant garde video art installation or a home movie Subkoff shot of her daughter's slumber's party, or they're all waiting around like Cassavetes or Jarmusch for the movie to write itself out of awkward pauses and sudden lurches of realness. At moments I was quite moved by the innocence and commitment with which these startling young actresses played mood-altered rich girls practicing their bitchy claw swipes (if they survive the night they could grow up to be Norma Shearer and her posse in THE WOMEN). At other times--not unlike visiting all the downtown art galleries--I got that Emperor's New Clothes feeling. Subkoff's married to a famous Swiss sculptor, all the work on display is I'm sure by their friends, but that's no excuse for not using it to say anything relevant beyond some words about how the rich husband of Chloe uses the pieces as stocks, which I've always thought to, that these pieces are all just poker chips or bonds to these collectors; they just like buying and selling so they're constantly buying the same things from each other at higher and higher prices. All of which is much more interesting than the constant flashes to some kind of hit 'count video game the killer is playing, hashtags slashing the screen with loud ripping sounds, cartoon inserts, and meme captions under instant freeze frame photos blaring at each other makes one a tad irritable after awhile. The spell of the freeze frame from the killer camera angle was fine in the 60s, PEEPING TOM and BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, but it was eerie largely because we didn't know the women. We were 'with' the killer instead, put in the outsider perspective so the very act of filming them seemed dirty and wrong. It's hard to capture that in the Age of the Selfie, especially with a pack of wild girls playing diva with mom's jewelry. 





That all said it's still got some worthy things going in, and yet as if some extension of its characters' constant sniping and stabbing and constant deriving, #HORROR has earned hostile reviews, getting 3.6 on imdb and a 17% w/ audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. I mean good lord, it's not Argento but even Argento ain't Argento anymore; that's way too harsh for such an original, stunningly filmed, constantly fluid and relentlessly bizarre, beautifully scored piece of Harmony Korine meets Sophia Coppola experimental rich kid icicle disco ball psycho breakdown dreckitude. As I recall, critics and irate parents all charged against the electrified fences to decry KIDS when it came out. THIRTEEN drew the same ire, a kind of knee-jerk revulsion; their insistence kids didn't behave that way was more telling about the power of denial than about the film. After all, if the shoe fits, you must wear its golf spike puncture wounds in stoic grace or be labeled a boorish philistine.


The main umbrage I have with #HORROR is the same umber I have with 90% of contemporary 'conceptual' art: it may be well made and have some meaning or make some statements, but from an aesthetic point of view, it's bupkis. Who wants to look at it day after day? As I once famelessly said to Damien Hirst, contemporary 'conceptual' art wastes valuable wall space that could be better left blank, to contemplate the infinite (see also: Godard and the Urinal). I was adamantly refusing to go around to every bar in the city, collecting cigarette butts for 'his' latest sculpture, a gigantic ashtray. So apt. mid-90s Anecdote #2: My boss was showing art to another very rich collector/dealer in his apartment one afternoon, and the maid had left this giant vacuum cleaner sprawled in the middle of the floor.  "Oh," said the other dealer kicking it lightly, "is this a real Jeff Koons?" mid-90s Anecdote #3: There was this super rich apartment I'd bring paintings to or take from - in the Trump tower, everything gold and glitz and gorgeous--you walk in there to the living room it looked like the Swiss Family Manson had been through there: the giant Basquiat looking just like a wall of graffiti, ugly cumbersome sculptures that looked like a deranged homeless man made them out of junk he found in the trash--which is probably close to the truth, this godawful serial killer mental institution worth of ugly ass disturbing art. While of course the actual child living there could have drawn a perfect Cubist masterpiece in crayon and his dad wouldn't even deign to put it on the fridge or if he so much as drew a mustache on the scribble piece of crap Dubuffet I brought over, that kid would have been whisked to boarding school for the rest of his life. You don't even want to know how much that Dubuffet went for. Decency forbids me showing it to you, or quoting a price.

Now your child's intense alienation itself belongs to the ages!

#HORROR could easily have fallen down numerous artsy rabbit holes and become insufferably pretentious instead of just missing a lot of opportunities as it spazzes around, but there great stretches in the middle of the film when you feel the girls' collective isolation, up until Timothy Hutton starts prowling around as a nervous dad of great adventure, veering from ignoring his daughter to running around the woods in a blind panic screaming her name. I kept hoping she'd lead him into a giant wicker man or tie him to a tree and set him on fire, but at least he's there, frothing at the mouth, for minutes on end. I was so impressed I had to fast forward through the second half of his endless tirade of threats against the rest of the girls at the slumber party.



As the lead 'final' girl --the relatively sweet if totally cracked Sadie Seelert--is so good, the camera always searching her out amidst the cacophony of girly malice, that you feel intensely for her (yet she was totally mean to her cool mom in the beginning, so what the fuck) and Subkoff's camera captures all sorts of odd moments of beauty, so it's sad that the farther along it goes, the more Subkoff's narrative style starts to fail her, as if she noticed how nihilistic her film was so she tacked on a commentary on the jadedness of the internet age. But there are so few nihilist deconstructions of human nature, the Lord of the Flies-style fundamental ambivalence humanity has about its own apathy towards its own ambivalence, the amorality of children cliques, that Subkoff would have been better off letting it alone to find its own abyss. She was doing okay with the whole 'pretty sixth graders dying as grand modern art spectacle in their glass house frames, that when she lobs it into the collective 'apathy' of the media punditry infield instead of trying to smack it out of the park into genuine dangerous territory, it elicits a shrug, like honey, you're rich and successful, part of the jet set world of successful working artists; why not try and say something about that, about what is art vs. photography, the parameters of human vision, pornographic art vs. Joycean aesthetic arrest, the way rich kids' lives are measured and devalued by the shitty art that surrounds them rather than just be one of the 'social media horror' stories being cranked out nonstop around the world. To say that our craving for gossip and diversion is now so instant and keyed into itself that the slightest aberration of behavior is irreversible, well - it's true, but is it art?

from top: Chloe w/ egg face (#Horror) 2015; bottom: Chloe w/ "Elevator Panel" (Kids) 20 years earlier

Word is that Subkoff spent seven months editing this #HORROR and it shows not in a good way. The ominous, hypnotic spell created by EMA's wondrously ominous synth score gives the slow porch position pans across the barren tree frost a 'Wendy Carlos through the Rockies' sense of foreboding that's completely undone by sudden intrusions of crass Candy Crush Saga point-racking, bouncy emojis and hit counts, every interesting shot disowned via flash-meme-freezes, as if the film itself can't stop checking its 'feed' or taking selfies any more than the children.


A lot of foreshadowing strangeness with the art and the children promises a lot: a table full of eerie masks by the front door seems to invite a kind of junior varsity Illuminati masquerade that comes off only via a trippy dance scene; after they're ostracized bully Kat keeps sending them all mean-spirited texts, the girls all decide to lock up their cell phones in mom's safe, so they can talk freely without worrying their conversation is going to go viral from some poisonous betrayer of confidence's secret recording. BUT their conversation is going viral thanks to the black gloved Argento-esque killer prowling outside; s/he's got quite a microphone on that thing, and a talent for invisibility (how anyone can hide in the middle of the day in leafless woods and not be seen by everyone in the glass house is the least of Subkoff's problems). Then the night falls, so the film is harder to see, lacking beauty, and so the killings all occur near  light, like from a heated indoor pool which glows at night through the blinds to create a very Eric Fischl-meets-Edward Hopper effect, or lighted enclosed tennis court; and the pool of abusees shrinks until all that's left is the fat girl stuffing cupcakes into her mouth in a tightening noose of self-loathing. Even without the phones and Kat's malice, the girls eventually start bullying one another, as if unable to stop. But when they find a cell phone under the couch and see how jammed it is with Vines of their missing friends being murdered, that's a good opportunity for suspense that's never really developed... cuz then the battery runs out - how convenient!



You might think I'm anti-rich kid counter-snob, but nothing, monsieur, could be from ze truth further--I'm fine with movies about rich kids made by rich kids about rich kid problems - those are universal. And approximately 80% of my friends are rich kids. I do object to the reverse - rich kids with self-important tears in their eyes filling us in on what the imagine it's like to be poor, or about that one time they volunteered at a soup kitchen and met an old woman who changed their life blah blah. We'd know if Tara Subkoff was trying to tell us about ourselves- the 'little' people -in say some Sullivan's Jet Set Travels neorealist sermon. But she's not, until the end, of course --this is about the kids of those kids in KIDS (1995), a hard-to-believe-it-was-20-years-ago.org burst of street-eye smashtercult that I personally watched over and over for months, amazed at its prescience in capturing clique dynamics in my own circle of (older) debauched libertines, right down to the same hang-out spots, but taking it one step beyond. And now... her character is a wearisome cuckolded wife dressing in godawful clothes so ugly they must be tres expensive, made up to look like one of the evil harpy wives from BRAZIL, but I still like her, because she's going to AA, which means she's trying. And from the angle we see her outside the AA meeting having a smoke, Chloe's cool sponsor looks just like my old lesbian sponsee, so that makes me a grand sponsor of Chloe Sevigny, which is very reassuring. Also reassuring: the way Chloe brushes off Hutton's maniacal attack, his spittle-flecked accusations. He may reduce a pack of girls to tearful hysterics but to Chloe his manic threats rate little more than a chuckle. 


I guess this film as a whole is kind of the same - its overwrought 'artsy' kid-killing may drive the mainstream critics and audiences into unctuous rage (they watch movies like this to avoid having to listen to the vain prattling of their daughter's sleepover friends). These same critics wouldn't dare attack any art they saw at MOMA (where #HORROR premiered), they're too afraid of bucking critical consensus, of seeming boorish, but everyone's invited to throw stones at a horror movie--whole TV shows (like MST3K) make an art of it. I guess it's not profound anymore to note that the only difference between art and trash is the right signature, apparently (since that's all some of these artists do, show up at the end to sign it) but I support any film that tries to apply that same harmful arbitrariness to children. If I had to grow up bowing and scraping before some piece of incoherent scribble on the wall worth six figures that would rate an 'F' from my first grade art teacher, I'd be homicidal, too. All children are born sadistic megalomaniacs, we only grow out of it if there are ever negative consequences to our actions, that there is in fact, some order to the universe where it pays to be nice to others with dividends, sooner or later what goes around comes around, etc. The art world, tied as it is (in NY especially) to designer labels and cocaine, on the other hand, is the reverse. There is no scale of order or justice, no real merit, skill, vision, or craft measurable in what makes one white canvas worth a million five and one just like it worthless. The only way to make your name bankable is to inflict yourself like a wound into the world. Throw your enraged tweets at Tara Subkoff all you want. She's rich, hot, and full of the dickens, and she just inflicted.

Whenever someone like Warner Herzog starts talking about dreams there's a kind of stale bourgeois abstraction to the word, like some doctoral declawing of what is in 'reality' a vivid brutal fiction. Such declawers studiously miss the big picture, that it all begins and ends in a single chemical, DMT, made by a weird little gland in the center of the brain, the Pineal. Beyond the reptilian cortex and the higher mammalian functioning empathy, it's beyond even the reptilian-mammalian combo that is humanity's core, beyond DNA life itself. It's the third eye, and it's long been calcified due to the infiltration of our precious bodily fluids.

"...the pineal gland has become calcified due to fluoride in our water and toothpaste to "Dumb" us down and sever this divine connection. Our exclusive Pineal Gland Tuning fork is designed to vibrate at the frequency of the pineal gland, loosening that calcification and strengthening the Divine Connection!" - Soma Energetics

"Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.." - General Ripper (Dr. Strangelove) 

"The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. . . . You have heard of the pineal gland?... That gland is the great sense-organ of organs — I have found out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain." - H.P. Lovecraft ("From Beyond")

“If I accept the idea that this world has no invisible entities, this would mean that I’m agreeing with a single culture only a couple hundred years old and disagreeing with almost every other known culture that has ever existed on the planet. I’m not particularly convinced that we, among all the cultures of the planet, have discovered that these entities don’t really exist." -- James Fadiman (Teeming Brain)

The woods --alternately intriguing and tired, a 'free' way to draw value from trees that's less damaging than clear-cutting. Shit in the woods = archaic. Lost in the woods = easy to happen. Conclusion: shit in the woods and only the bears hear it. I got lost just trying to get across the upper wild swaths of Central Park NYC once, which if you've been up there you know how creepy and forlorn it can get, and how fast; I wound up going in a big ass circle. Nothing more heartbreaking than walking ever more quickly with a mild panic generating in your stomach only to find you're right back where you started, still no one in sight, except some snooty squirrel that stands there staring, mocking you. Blair Witch Project is still the high benchmark for that kind of unease. Those kids might have literally been a mere half mile from a highway and never known it. Well, in these movies, are we so much farther?


You think it's easy to be a straight white male, age 11-55, when it comes to movies, TV, and commercials? Watching a movie on Syfy like Underworld: Awakening for the 100th time, and still not liking it, but sticking with it because it quenches some weird fanboy desire for monsters, sex, violence and car crashes, a need catered to with pandering directness, punctuated with bro-demo-angling commercials for fantasy football gambling sites and chips flavored to taste like bacon. And then the movie itself, Kate Beckinsale all smokin' crystal blue eyes in a skin tight leather catsuit wielding twin .45 automatics. It's all for us, for our stunted adolescent minds.

Neil Marshall hopes for better. His first feature is the male version of his later, better-known DESCENT (2003): it's a gory, riveting but slightly cheeky werewolves vs. British infantry squad on maneuvers tale, a kind of SOUTHERN COMFORT meets the first 1/4 of AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, but like THE DESCENT it ends with an all-out stay alive brawl, dwindling down the numbers, until only the true toughies remain. One is Max von Sydow-esque Pvt. Cooper (Kevin "Tommy in TRAINSPOTTING" McKidd), the other badass Sgt. Harry Wells (Sam Pertwee) who's like Michael Caine, Jason Statham, and Bob Hoskins bolted together with oily lug nuts. Their manly rapport gives the film an adrenalin savagery-switchpoint boost where survival instinct and maximum de-civilized aggression provide an outside-the-box survivalist enlightenment. There's some great dialogue, like Wells' coaching of the lads in his squad: "I expect nothing less than gratuitous violence from each and every one of you!" We know the shifty MI-6 guy (Liam Cunningham) they stumble over is bad because not only did he shoot a dog, he kicks the guy who wouldn't out of his elite squad. Considering the shoddy treatment of dogs in horror films, I thought I should mention that.



Right off the beginning it's clear that Marshall knows his small Hawksian ensemble dynamic, and takes advantage of the strengths of 'the group of professionals,' with fast, tight, believably rehearsed acting, a group who've clearly trained together, in ways we get from Kenneth Tobey and company in The THING but never quite got in Carpenter's all-male THE THING remake/update or anywhere else. There's even a Hawksian woman (Emma Cleasby - top), a local who takes the boys home to the rustic soon-besieged cabin. The thick old growth of mountainous Scotland makes ideal territory for the maneuvers, the sun ever setting behind thick moorish clouds, Marshall's camera swooping over all.

DESCENT Fans will already have seen and loved this movie--hopefully on the great Shout Blu-ray released last year, with the new cover art and a commentary track from Marshall; the HD pic quality is beautiful and cinematic but also perfectly retro analog - with just the right peppery grain in the darkness. These fans should note that in spots David Julyan's orchestral score sounds so much like his work in THE DESCENT that we'd have to think he was stealing motifs from himself, or paying homage. Either way, Julyan's one of the better modern orchestrators, though it's like pulling canines to get him to use his Carpenter synths for the next title on the Marshall oeuvre, the underrated DOOMSDAY, which seemed to have drained Marshall's DESCENT money with its big budget and scant earnings. So he's had to start over, with BBC TV and his only film being the forgettably familiar CENTURION, all fights and terrible bangs. In case you can't tell, I've got my eye on 'im.




There's a few things we need to get straight right now: this film has the worst excuse for woods in the entirety of horror. This barren stretch that constitutes the pre-Predator alien hunter's ground--an alleged woodland which includes lame hunters and innocent cub scouts on maneuvers--looks like the rough / water trap section of some LA golf course. In other words, if you watch FINAL TERROR (reviewed below) right before it as I did, with its great old growth and beautiful stark photography, the thoroughly second rate look of WITHOUT WARNING can be a tough adjustment. Carpenter cameraman Dean Cundey does deliver the decent Steadicam shots, but the L.A. scrub does not a convincing woods make, one can't imagine why on Earth scoutmaster Dick Van Patten would think it's an appropriate place for a long hike. And while David Caruso is one of the early-killed teens (killed during sex, that old schtick) his death is mostly off camera for some moronic reason. The script includes enough anti-hunting oratory to convince you someone on the script team doesn't like their conservative NRA father, embodied here in an unbearable and unconvincing hunter dad played by Cameron Mitchell like a blue collar Brooklyn goomba with a grudge against grouse, or grouse against grudge, or something, and possessed of some notion that dragging his peacenik son along on will make a man out of him. Apparently, it's grouse season, even if the landscape looks like all it might yield is a stray golf ball or trash thrown out a passing car.

But hey, top drawer B-list stalwarts like Ralph Meeker and Martin Landau hang out the requisite bar of colorful drunk and eccentric locals who refuse to believe the outlandish story of our frantic college boy hero. Jack Palance is the big game hunter who's been waiting for this chance thoug; he stalks the alien that's stalking them in a who's-hunting-who duality. He makes the picture. And the bar, an old standard stretching back to THE BIRDS, is well etched.

The real liability (or strength depending on your frame of mind) is the utterly terrible acting of Christopher S. Nelson in the lead. The way he'll fall into the swing of a scene and be doing a good job but then catch himself and try to correct it by 'acting' makes him a great lesson to all would-be movie actors in the importance of 'being' instead of trying. It works though when he's supposed to be hysterical with fear and inaction, as his nervous confusion and hesitancy--as if needing to remember his line and say it beforehand in his head before speaking it--works for the emotional disorientation he's in after his van is attacked by flying Corman-esque bat creatures.

Things pick up once night falls: David Caruso is safely dead; the power goes out; the bartender lady lights the lamps and Landau starts telling lurid war stories with his face all illuminated from below by the lantern, all ghost story proper. The monster is cool, pre-dating PREDATOR in its murky motivations, and is held back from view awhile to drum up interest, as is proper and fair. All in all, if you're into this sort of thing, ignore the mediocre rating I give this. And just think of my reviews like alcohol blood percentage for ideal viewing, or other. Or other other... or other until all otherness has suffused the corners of your hauntologic memory. Many of this film's fans caught it on late night cable at an impressionable age. I never did. But I can pretend.

To get into Without Warning (above) you need to forgive the paltry emaciated 'woods' and that the climax seems to occur in a backyard by a garden shed and just savor its Corman-like deadpan wit and devotion to the beloved tenets of monster movie formula. It's just the opposite with Andrew Davis's The Final Terror: One must let go of any conventional slasher film expectations and just soak up the brilliance of the outdoor photography, which turns a lush Northern California forest into a haunted house even as it refuses to follow the Friday the 13th -via- Ten Little Indians mold. It’s the tale of a camping trip up in the wilds of Northern California that turns mighty violent, with the chief suspect being a religiously uptight local boy played with the usual zest by Joe Pantoliano. But is that just red herring?

I can't spoil the events further except to note that the real modus operandi here seems to be that no slasher or slashers can stand a chance even in their home woods if the campers stick together and some of them have been in combat and/or basic training. Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) directs and does the cinematography and in each role he lets the woods cast its ominous enigmatic spell.

The campers include eerily familiar faces like Lewis "Perfect Tommy" Smith, Rachel Ward, Daryl Hannah, and Mark "Is that a pledge pin? On your UNIFORM?!!" Metcalf. But the real notable is John Friedrich as a guy who winds up kind of in between the good and the bad once he avails himself of too many psilocybe cubensis mushrooms found in a jar in the murderer's cabin. I don’t want to give too much away, but you know that, queasy feminist that I am, if I love a film in this disreputable subgenre it’s because there’s no sexual assaults, torture porn, or shitty dialogue. And this does not have those things... in spades. Of course it has little else either but the killer looks great in a camouflage leaf jacket and long gray hair, blending so well into the surrounding vegetation it’s startling when a filthy hand emerges to smooth a sleeping girl's hair, and Susan Justin’s weird piano and atonal synth score hits the right notes every time, except three.


Irish horror has been having a bit of a  tonn nua in low budget state-funded cinema, drawing on the weird treeless landscape and rich history of Gaellic folklore to craft small chamber piece dramas where naturalistic art direction and low key lighting obscures the limitations of digital film. Stationed in one of the few woodsy places in Ireland (I thought it 'twas all rolling limitless moss and rocks and occasionally hooligan-packed pubs), state-employed botanist Adam (Joseph Fawle), his wife Clare (Bojana Novakovic) and their baby move into a house at the edge of a forrest that the locals advise him not to wander in, and certainly not to take any weird molds home. There's fairies in there and if you intrude on their home they'll intrude on yours, bringing their Lovecraftian monsterness with them (their venom is like the malignant cells in the 1981 THING), and arranging things like swapping their baby out with a changeling. But who believes auld legends these days? While the wife takes all the weird iron bars off from around the windows by day, to let in what passes for sunshine in Ireland, she's putting them back up by night, to keep out a relentless tribe of vindictive creatures, who in the Lovecraft tradition, abduct children and turn them into their own, and vice versa.

In other words, there's a reason they said not to go into those damn woods, ya bómán! Ye Leathcheann! 

The feature debut of Corin Hardy is not quite the resounding announcement of 'I am here, I am now!' horror genius we got with Jennifer Kent's BABADOOK or Robert Egger's THE WITCH or David Robert Mitchell's IT FOLLOWS, but it's only one tier down instead of the usual sixteen. It's the Charles Band to their Corman if that makes any sense (and it should since Band's team riffed on similar themes in a more direct Lovecraft, THE LURKING FEAR (unearth it on Hulu, home of the Charles Band Full Moon oeuvre)


The monsters are interesting fusions of trees and mutants, and the idea of the changeling is very subtle and creepily represented, as Clare must decide if her husband (mutating from woodland fairy venom infection) or the baby she dredged up from the bottom a lake in the middle of the night is the same loved one from just hours ago. Despite semi-strange interludes toward the end (which decency forbids me to explain) everything is fairly believable and all fast moving in the kind of tight kinetic 'all in a single long afternoon-night' momentum that I'm always citing as the key to good horror. You might come away on mildly plussed when all's said and done but it kept me watching avidly, and isn't that the point? So what if it doesn't leave you blown out of your socks? The lighting is moody (see above), the woods mysterious, dark, and deep, and the acting is terrific - I mean this pair of actors are committed, and at times they're more terrifying than the monsters crawling through their vents. And there's no gibbering rapists, claustrophobic abductions or torture porn, all which I'm bloody sick of and easily traumatized by and go out of my way to avoid. I'm traumatized plenty just from walking down the street, man. Our world is bloody hell all on it's own. No wonder the trees want to leave. But Ireland, aye, the trees seem to be coming back at last... le bhfeice!

From fish god cults to a cockeyed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD premake to maternal body horror so unseemly no one's dared try anything remotely like it in 30 years, these five psychotronic films predict the the new world orderless matriarchy of the Scorpio Sun / Pisces rising goddess Hulu-Ree Klinn-Tohn as handily as if they washed ashore with campaign bumper stickers in their fetid claw like hands, and hammers to smash down the crosses from Middle America's fearful Christian churches.

To help the future happen, mira los hazardous collection of films evoking the coming liberal dystopia that can only result when woman is or isn't elected president. My Five Psychotronic Films on Amazon Prime for a new TRUMPMERICA post was such a hit I felt I had to balance the scale, so here it is. There's less apocalypse and more matriarchy to worry about this time, and all in all a more inspiring future of liberal awareness, higher taxation of the rich, and massive un-deployment.  With every new dead or symbolically neutered old white male voter we'll be sliding one step closer to socialism, until we'll be so like Canada we'll forget we ever weren't. Hence this list's heavy reliance on Cronenberg, Roddy Piper, and Ginger Snaps.

PS - Dear Hulu: Hulu is a terrible name for a movie site. Don't try to scan as playful! Be badass. Change it to... FROGTOWN, and not just 'cuz there's so many wearyingly French films on there, but because you carry the one.. the only....



The lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman, and pleasingly self-effacing wrestler Roddy Piper roam the post-war wasteland looking for wild women to impregnate in the name of the cause (war has left most men dead or sterile). He's one of the few men still able to produce viable sperm; she's a health official in charge of helping him liberate, and then do his duty upon, a harem of fertile 'passives' currently held captive in a frog mutant warlord's stronghold. Since both sides need manpower more than nukes, 'our' side's future depends on "potent young men in the field, who can perform in difficult conditions."

Anyway, off they go across the border and into the wasteland to Frogtown, a combination abandoned oil refinery and R-rated version of a STAR WARS cantina. If your misogynist radar hadn't already gone off for the scene where Spangle (Bergman) drugs a wild fertile woman they gather up en route and compels Hell (Piper) to mount her, it will when she goes undercover as a bondage slave Hell's allegedly selling to the Frog warlord.  BUT your feminist senses might tingle too, since the women are for the most part super capable and assertive, more physically agile and gutsier than Hell, and though they drive in a pink 'Medtech' station wagon (ala KILL BILL!) there's a badass chick (Cec Verrell) on a .50 calibre sunroof mounted machine as his 'bodyguard.' In other words, rather than affirm male dominance, the film deconstructs sadomasochistic ritual, dominance, harem-keeping, the "dance! dance!" warlord cup banging, as pathetic attempts to reclaim the phallus from the women. Hell's junk is kept in a chastity belt with a built-in taser wired to Spangle's earrings and he's expected to 'perform' while his two captors/guardian women watch with detached curiosity, for in a neat twist of our current deal with an all male panel discussing women's health issues, here we have an all female team considering his phallus literally state property.
Luckily it's played relatively straight. Even that semi-twee title is no obscurantist whimsy but strictest present tense fact: Piper's character is named Hell, and Frogtown is 'ribbit'occupied by real frog mutants ("created as the by-product of your germ warfare") and the frog makeups are pretty damned good. Bergman is still as gorgeous and lithe as she was six years earlier in Conan; Piper is surprisingly sweet and tender in his softer scenes, and if, when he's expected to play the sexist dingus, he comes off a bit broad, it's not easy conveying a character who feels he's 'too good for this shit' without coming off like an actor who feels he's too good for the film, so I don't blame him if he falls into the latter camp at times. The frog with a fez doing the Sidney Greenstreet schtick at the requisite strip club frog bar? That's a little twee. But ain't squat twee about Rory Calhoun, wearing his good store teeth as a uranium minor supplying the frogs with fuel for a bomb. When he's dying with his head in the laps of one of the young liberated pacifist concubines in the backseat as they're pursued by the frog warlord in his armored car you realize suddenly - holy shit! This scene was lifted wholesale for last year's Mad Max: Fury Road!! Considering Frogtown's one of those post-Road Warrior 80s apocalypse movies, the inspirations come full circle!



Why Hillary: One look at the face of the odious frog king and you'll be reminded of a certain second runner behind Trump. Sandahl is Hillary being sold to the Middle States  ('can she dance?' asks the Frog Prince in he fez before voting/purchasing); the harem are the women voters of swing states looking askance at the brutalizing Handmaid's Tale future awaiting them under The Fog mutant's sway. (one grand dame frog lady takes a shine to Piper and frees him though it means her death -- she'd be the swing state female voting bloc). Scruffy Roddy stands for the American midwest, reckoning the pros and cons between giving a woman control of the national balls, or else letting real amphibious monster gun nuts run riot over all our civil liberties.


If you need a map through this genuinely strange, disturbing picture then I'd say watch SCANNERS first. That's a zippy mind-expander with solid acting, exploding heads, Michael Ironside in his best role (his facial expressions when he's scanning are off the hook); and--with a voice so deep it opens up a hole in the floor--Patrick McGoohan as a revolutionary pharmacologist. Here in BROOD-land it's a little less bouncy and a lot more strange and horrible. No drugs this time, just a kind of gestalt externalized therapy at a strange clinic for 'psychoplasmics,' a method of externalizing rage that involves causing the body to break out in spots... or worse. Oliver Reed is Dr. Raglan, the mastermind psychiatrist who runs the place. Working deep into strange therapies with his patients, including a very unhinged Samantha Eggar, whose deep into regressive therapy and the doc won't let his concerned husband see her. Their child, on the other hand, is brought in for weekends, but comes home traumatized and bruised. I don't want to spoil the thing, but there's a kind of post-feminist version of the Monster from the Id going on. The hair weird hirsute sissy actor in the beginning demonstration is very unsightly - he's the most disturbing part of the film for me. In fact, hey, man, if it's too much, watch SCANNERS instead. Yeah, maybe you should just watch SCANNERS. The scene where a cute possible love interest Ruth Mayer (Susan Hogan with a great 70s elfin hair cut) is hammered to death by two of the monster kids right in front of her horrified kindergarten class is the most outrageous and deeply disturbing scene in all of 70s horror. Dude, there's always SCANNERS.




PS - My new favorite stealth character actor, Robert A. Silverman, the Dick Miller to Cronenberg's Corman, is great as a previous patient of the clinic preparing a lawsuit, wearing a white towel on his neck to cover an awful mutating psychoplasmic affliction. He's so good here and as Hans in NAKED LUNCH (above), and the artist in SCANNERS well, he just knocks them all up a notch. Why only Cronenberg seems to know of his genius is beyond me. Is it that he doesn't want to leave Canada? He should just go to Vancouver, the B-movie capital of the world!
Why Hillary: It is foretold in ancient texts that amok liberalism ushered in by a woman prez shall lead to the return of the 70s encounter group / est craze; the nuclear family unit will be broken apart by charlatan shrinks, who won't let the husband see his own wife. The human body itself is America: "Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me," notes Silverman, "and it did." Asking why he's suing when he can't possibly prove Raglan's methods gave him cancer, he says he's doing it for revenge! So people will know from the press that "psychoplasmics cause cancer." -i.e., global warming. The Brood are the protestors disrupting Trump rallies. As with the Trump supporters themselves, it's not important whether or not he's a threat, it's enough that they get angry thinking about it, and the anger justifies the reprisal. Imagine if all the rage spewed on internet comment sections was able to manifest itself... we'd all be hammered.

Shot through a haze of red and blue with just the right amount of imagination (neither whimsical nor grungy), this Satanic daughter love story is like THE LITTLE MERMAID x SPECIES with a refreshing lack of qualms about killing evildoers. The story begins in Hell, a mix of the long lines of Old Testament-style marching lines of desert laborers from STARGATE x PHANTASM, but with deep red and blue filters; a lot of care and love went into these early scenes, and it shows. Angela Featherstone stars as the demoness Veronica who dreams of seeing the surface of the earth, though it is forbidden by her abusive sputtering over-acting demon father (he makes Divine seem mumblecore). Once above she tears the spines and hearts out of evil doers and feeds their hearts to her dog Hellraiser (like Osiris tossing the heavier-than-a-feather hearts to Ahmet for you of the ancient faith) and presenting his spine to the near-rape victim with the words "look upon this to allay the memory of this night." Oh man that's awesome. Shacking up with a doctor, Max, she wanders by night while he's on ER duty, kills and shows any cop who stands in her way her true nature via her glowing eyes.

It might not be for all tastes, but I dig Featherstone's low-key performance and find the dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare quality endearing in a Guy Maddin meets Val Lewton in Ed Wood's basement kind of way. Featherstone isn't the greatest actor in the world but what she lacks anyone can learn; what she has is unteachable, a rare and precious gift: the ability to project complete confidence and emotional vacancy at the same time while delivering classic lines like "I've always wanted to witness people coupling, Max, but I never thought it would move me so much." Better (or worse) actresses would never be able to deliver that line right. They'd either try and be sexy (and come off campy) or imperious (and come off bitchy), or mean or tough (and come off laughable), but Featherstone just announces it with relentless assertive confidence that's still sexy. The way she delivers lines like "I don't require the blessing of the one true church to engage in sexual relations, Max" is so good I wish I had it as a ringtone. Even her sex scene with Max is tasteful, and I love when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm and he's like "hey, it's all right." He's cool with it but in a low key way, like if she turned out to have a penis or something. The lighting is all uniformly good (as in effectively masking the low budget) and her matter of fact way with wrapping human hearts in newspaper to feed her dog is endlessly reassuring. I've only ever seen that level of skill at commanding both adoration and fearful respect in in East German science fiction film female characters from ELEOMA and IM STAUB DER STERNE.

Why Hillary: One of her first assignments down in Hell is to come up with creative ways to punish the lawyers and bankers, mirroring every democrat's promise to clean up Wall Street. On the surface she kills two racist cops after they beat up on a black guy (i.e. she's pro Black Lives Matter); she launches a one-woman vendetta against crooked politicians and cannot enter a church as she "would surely combust.'
--
All in all it's my favorite of the Charles Band Full Moon label, it's also the only one that doesn't have like four sequels, though as the title indicates it's clearly built for theme. Figures we'd get eight snickery dickery GINGERDEAD MAN and EVIL BONG sequels instead, proving the fuckin' castration anxiety never dies, which brings me to...

It's a swell time to be an older, white, straight male with a giant ego, a trunk full of dues-paying and/or top-of-the-world VH1 reveries... because chances are you have your own show either on IFC, Showtime, FX, or at the very least, "the Youtubes." No matter what level of fame, micro-success, or just delusional 'web fame' the rest of us Aging SWMs may have garnered, we can all relate to these 1-2 syllable single name titles. Yo, that's us! We're detached. The Generation X kids grown grey, we've been watching as our golden age of cocksmanship, fame, and rock swagger circles down the drain into the sunset. Whether we packed stadiums or just half-filled a small local bar with our relatives once in 1985, we're glad we're not still hoisting amps in and out of bars, fighting off stage fright and anxiety no one will show, fending off a constant onslaught of angry press, slavering fans, grabby jonesers and wannabes and lapel-grabbers and bossy exes. To be still doing it would be a constant reminder none of that shit is as golden as we remember. Since it's all safely behind us now, though, man is it golden!

What most of my generation really wants now, when all's said and done, and that golden sunset is secured in our minds, is simply an outlet, some medium to express ourselves and some kind of audience on which to leave our mark, our initials carved into the bark of the tree, whether the brains of our bored children, pages our blogs such as this, or--now shows, single cam riffs aimed at the critical acclaim garnered by LOUIE. Two of them are currently fresh in the airwaves: new season of MARON (on IFC), and premiere of DICE (Showtime- AYyyy!)

I normally don't write about comedy (30s Paramount aside), the real world's funny enough, but having lived six years with a comedy journalist, who told me I reminded her of Marc Maron even before the show came out. I too am 16 years sober, bedraggled, bespectacled, misanthropic, reclusive; have no kids, date girls half my age, and think the real world is going to hell and let fame go to my head so fast I'd almost rather not have it. The small amount I've had for small amounts of time always turned me into a raving narcissistic womanizer, so needy for the next wave of adulation I could barely sleep or stand to be alone for more than a few minutes at a time, and apt to throw a tantrum if I had to pay a cover charge. Similarly, Maron's irritable and needly like a cranky child determined to keep his tantrum up until some giant mommy descends from the sky with a massive royalty check. We're supposed to somehow either sympathize with all his luxury problems, the kind of shit only Eric Schaffer, Ed Burns, Woody Allen, and Albert Brooks would relate to. But I don't like to be reminded that my grandiose schtick isn't that easy to live with day-to-day. I'd never be able to tolerate being in a room five minutes with myself. So my hostile response to Maron should maybe be considered with that disclaimer.

good taste in music, but you think Iggy ever whines about needing to quit nicotine lozenges? (great photo though)

The IFC show MARON itself centers around our curmudgeon Marc, and involves a mix of him doing his podcast, fly-on-the-wall Grey Gardens-style messy house puttering, and show biz angst (including alledgely naughty insults like to his fey male assistant: "do you have a pussy, a little boy pussy?"), cliche'd producers with on-the-nose lines like "I'm here just to lend a little corporate support," and "I'm gong to be personally shepherding the process" and bringing in a nerdy writer for Marc to insult, fussy PR mavens, and sage counsel from the ever-tolerant Andy Richter. in his downtime he's been dealing with visits from out of town comics he knew on the way up, donating his semen to a lesbian comedian having a child, etc. (PS - never use the sperm of an alcoholic addict, that shit is hereditary). All slathered over with his alt-rock self-loathing and girly ("am I too fat?) narcissism (as they say in AA, "the piece of shit at the center of the universe.")

Sure he's on camera a lot, lives in LA, and has his own podcast, but even so, for a straight middle-aged white dude with scraggly facial hair, Marc Maron spends an awful amount of time worrying he's getting fat, or addicted to--how macho!--nicotine lozenges; constantly blaming his surly exhaustion on how he's poisoning himself with "too much caffeine too much nicotine" blah blah. Sure, we've all been there, but no straight man over the age of 45 who's not actually fat should worry about this shit anymore; or at any rate he should know himself well enough by that age to not think buying a bunch of running gear and deciding to quit caffeine and nicotine and junk food all at once right before launching a big talk show is a good idea. No way anyone stays sober 16 years not knowing basic sobriety 101 shit like that, not unless they were never alcoholics to being with.

By which I mean, as an addict myself I'd have liked to see his relapse done right. It would be a great opportunity to see Maron the actor NOT be a dick for five minutes. Imagine if getting back on the drugs made him relaxed, intelligent, confident, witty and ready to host his show with the focused charm of a Johnny Carson, but only for like, say, a couple of hours before getting all sloppy and nodding off. The next night, the time for being witty and erudite shrinking to a few minutes, and then totally gone. He could have watched, say, the "never seen a man go through a day so fast" scene where Lee Marvin first guzzles downs the whiskey in CAT BALLOU (1965). In it, Marvin arrives on the scene a shaky mess, bums a pint of whiskey, downs half-the shakes stop and for like a hot second he's a crack shot super erudite gunslinger but then a swig later and he's a boisterous mess; another swig and he's passed out again.

Fucking Lee Marvin was a drinker; you can fucking tell in his eyes. I can see it in other sober comic's eyes, like Craig Ferguson, but I don't see it in Maron's. I admit he does his nodding off super mess shit pretty well, and he's got the self-pitying atheist mopeiness down, but to not have even a single scene of focused peace and calm before complete mess relapse, I mean just enough to we see WHY he drank and did drugs in the first place, so we can think for a hot second, "hey, he's finally not an asshole, maybe drugs/booze are/is the answer" which makes his turn to asshole five minutes later all the more heartbreaking. That's the stuff Emmys are made of, and Oscars (ala Marvin's, Cage's, Coburn's, Milland's, etc.) and he'd only have to do it once.


Third, if you were really "cross-addicted" as the saying goes, but haven't done any of it for 16 years, sorry but you won't relapse on just pain pills if your back is bad enough to deserve them (presuming you don't have, like 200 pills prescribed by a dangerously incompetent doctor). I went through that shit when I busted my knee and my natural urge to horde the 20 pills I got was enough that I only took them when I needed them, and wound up needing them all. But if you take pills the way Maron does in this show, son you would be dead. Tolerance shrinks to normal schlub levels. Oxycontin tabs are NOT nicotine lozenges - you can't just guzzle them in the bathroom like M&Ms, not unless you want to die, and besides it's a huge waste of a good stash. They don't give automatic refills on Oxy anymore, and a real addict wouldn't waste them. He clearly never went to AA or he'd have realized trying to juggle pain medication with nicotine withdrawal has never worked once in all of human history. And sorry but if believing in God makes you happier, and you're currently miserable, then you're an idiot to not believe in God. It will be interesting to see him in rehab in future episodes (ONLY on IFC) and if he actually exits his navel long enough to help another alcoholic, to become selfless long enough to be a worker among workers, to genuinely open up to a sponsor, do the 12 steps sans smarminess, i.e. to grow even just long enough to learn to be nice to one other person, the way say Don Draper finally learned to do in the final episode of MAD MEN. (See 'chop wood, carry sponsors.' 

But I bet he won't. Because I don't think he really is an addict as opposed to being one of those jerks (and AA is full of them) who has no will power, and overdoes everything and rather than trying to practice moderation, decides to quit just to prove he's got it together. And then he blames the jerkiness on not being able to do the drugs. In other words, he blames drugs for his prickly jerkiness, and then blames the lack of drugs for his prickly jerkiness. And in short, he is a prickly jerk either way. Rather than learn from his mistakes, his weaknesses, he blames everyone else. Sure, it's his character --the show invites us to view him with a certain amount of derision, to profit perhaps by his example. But it also expects us to identify with him to the point we share his Terry Zwigoff-esque alienation from the banal absurdities around him and think, yeah Marc - these people really are fucked up, the social order is a mess.

Even so... I'm rooting for him to get his head out of his own ass. Maybe even praying... but if Maron himself has no higher power, how will that work? Spiritual awakenings are a tough think to fake.

By popular request, here's the idealistic third entry in the Streaming Future canon, five films that reflect a grass roots toughness in places where grass is rare. Psychotronic in their outlaw spirit, these are films about tough warrior women with frank disregard for your mannish tantrums. They only on Netflix.

It's fascinating and a little unnerving even that most badass foxes I know in real life are for Bernie. and uninspired by warrior clan alpha Hillary. For them it's not a matter of gender but a whole new sort of post-internet age disregard for tradition, even tradition of woman empowerment--is this the long-heralded fourth wave feminism, or merely post-Christian? A bespectacled, hunched-over plain talking elderly Jewish senator has inspired them to vote and care the way they used to, before Obama let himself by hamstrung by his Quiet Man schoolyard pacifism. It wasn't intentional that this list includes so many badass young warriors. As always, these films are cage-free, no abductions, no HMOs or HPOs or HBOs. These women aren't waiting to be abused before fighting back, they're pro-active that way. Nor is this your subtextually clueless Jurassic World-style cinch your blouse and roll up your sleeves and pout to make nature behave feminism. This shit is gonna get bloody, ands fucking fast. In the words of the Faster Pussycat opening narration: ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence.

It's one of those cult-deserving films that is, I think, undone by its generic title and poster art. It should be called MARY DEATH, KILL! A cute badass named Christian Pitre stars as Mary Death, the coolest bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic time when bounty hunters are the new rock stars, and leftover corporate conspirators their quarry. A national symbol of a new post-corporate order, one where the 99% is whittled down to about .04% and have declared open bounty war on the surviving bands of corporate types, identifiable by that yellow tie. Hey, it's open war on big corporations! Yellow ties, man, makes Mary see red. Lookin' slammin' in mod dress cream-and-dark red dress and packin' guns like the little sister of Gina Carano, as in she can kick ass and not like some don't bust my nails kinda shit which the 'flix be choked on. Followed by adoring photographers and magazine piece writers as she tools around the wasteland, she's just one aspect of this wildly entertaining fusion of drive-in tropes. If GAS-S-S-S met THE ROAD WARRIOR in a Matthew Bright-scripted Sergio Leone-directed hoot and a holler... etc. Well, it's funnier. I love this movie to death, and the casual way it has with total over-the-top gore and brutality (so often girl warriors pull up short in films, as some hack screenwriter thinks maternal instincts have to trump ruthless coldness to maintain sympathy). And if you think it's easy to put a good Corman-esque babes-n-guns action film together then you've never seen SUCKER PUNCH or TANK GIRL or AEON FLUX or ULTRA-VIOLET, BITCH SLAP, CAT RUN, BARB WIRE, SALT, HANNAH or ELEKTRA. Everything those gets wrong, this gets right. Even the love interest, the MAX MAX-esque Aussie rival for the big bounties, is cool. Kristina Loken is Raider's old girlfriend now a corporate bigwig out to headhunt him into a shave, tie, and cubicle to call his own. Fuckin' it gets no better. Did I make this movie in heaven and send it back through time to perk my spirits up?

Why the BERN: What part of open war against the 1% corporate raiders did you not get?! Blam Blam! Let their yellow ties be spattered in gore, the golf courses and office cubicles awash in the blood of the lamb as the 99% (or the 5% that survive) inherit the wind, the antique beer, and the rain.