A cohesive, 'tight' film, funny even into the maw of Hell, THIS IS THE END comes long after 12/21/12, late to the apocalypse party, which is of course in character considering the cast of stoner royalty. Unlike 95% of its ilk, END skips the zombies and chainsaws and instead starts mixing heavenly ascension, Emerson's self reliance, an actual bible, LA vs. NYC rivalry, demons, ethical dilemmas and lots of weed.  I would love to party with these guys, but might want to kill them all too, once the booze and weed ran out. And that all comes from the heart, bro. The genius touch is to have them all play themselves and bring a lot of brutal self honesty to their turns: Jonah Hill acts like Oscar's A-list sycophant; New Yorker Jay Baruchel overthinks and blames his own paralyzing social shyness of hating LA; Michael Cera snorts coke and bullies groupies in fits of drunken reptillian overlordsmanship; Daniel McBride ramps up his dirtbag edition of Frank from BLUE VELVET; James Franco is more or less the same; Rhianna, Aziz Anzari, and countless others disappear down a giant blast furnace hole in the ground. Being a star guarantees nothing as the flame pit widens and the damned are left to die. While the demons howl outside and devour the unlucky stragglers without solid concrete bunker walls, these hearty dudes, including THE OFFICE's Craig Robinson, settle in, duct tape the cracks in the concrete of Franco's party fortress, and wait for the cable to come back on.

When I was counting days inside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, I used to like to imagine Armageddon as a great excuse to relapse on whiskey, and hoped one day I would get the chance, for whiskey is so so good. But if an alcoholic vows to drink again only when hell froze over, sooner or later he's going to be driving down into the molten flames on a stolen Zamboni. Still, knowing this doesn't always help. I don't get very far in the fantasy after the first drink, because I know that once the whiskey ran out I'd not only be stuck in the apocalypse hungover, which would be like bringing a hearing aid to a Metallica concert. I'd be seeing demons too, regardless of whether or not they were there. That's fact. That's in the bible... if you know which bible I mean.


In other words, I would be the first to volunteer to leave the compound and forage, because maybe somewhere in the hellish mist of the Hollywood Hills, there might be unbroken bottles of bourbon. That's the comfort for an alcoholic in the apocalypse. No demon can compare with that one, no scare or threat can stay the thirsty drunk. Without that carrot lure I can't see ever stirring from my bunker. But I am alcoholic. I am the thing in the black crib with the upside cross baby mobile in ROSEMARY'S BABY. I am the third heat, the eternal thirst carved large as Asmodeus' initials into the EQUINOX oak tree soul. I guess we all have our reasons for wanting this damned parade to finally end, in a blaze of glory.


Big mistake, it turns out. If I had known nerds would conquer the world, that the "Comic Con" would one day be a prestigious event, I would be king! I'm funny! Why did I give it all up for a life of hipness, boozy abandon, and relationship-attempting? None of the dudes who wind up at Franco's seem to have any long term relationship, or kids, to worry about, and it's damned refreshing. At no point does any character say, "I can't leave without my children!" or "If Kathy's back there, I'm going to get her!" These guys don't give a shit! Man, we need more of that.


The main star of THIS IS THE END though is the raw kinetic energy and flow of weird ideas that doesn't stop, just snakes forward from LAX to chillin' with buds to a party at James Franco's house all the way to....  The big budget CGI isn't used in toss away guns and nonsense. There's only one gun in the whole damned movie! Why would there be? These are the Hills, Manson Family-free since '69! Instead there's great demons that rival PUMPKINHEAD and The Night on Bald Mountain sequence in FANTASIA, and Jonah Hell spewing green bile like a portly fey Linda Blair, but no monster is quite as scary as Emma Watson with an axe.


The apocalypse turns out to be the ultimate challenge to being decent, but what about those terrifyingly charismatic if hollow-pointed dirtbags like McBride's screen personae? Most of the characters here find the apocalypse a struggle, but when McBride's masks are ripped off his true wild side animal persona is unveiled in all its mounting a boar's head on a pole and piercing a bone through his nose savagery. I've always admired--from a distance--this sort of animal man, having known a few in my time. You never invite them to your parties but they always show up, draining your bottle but bringing you awful weird new drugs like angel dust and crank and introducing you to carnivorous thieving whores. You can't get rid of them, so you may as well enjoy them as they sit on the couch playing your guitar, performing their godawful raps, and ranting about all the fights they've been in (but never started). I have issues, with them, still, clearly, and I apologize.


I don't want to spoil what may be my favorite movie so far this year, but if you haven't seen it yet, you can still take a page from its bible and start to be nicer to people. Even if there is no one true god it couldn't hurt your chances for ascension. I've written extensively on my arcane beliefs regarding soul density (the more self-centered and hateful you are, the more dense your soul gets, allowing demons to capture it when you try to ascend, which is why they fill the news with horrors; more positive and selfless you are, the lighter and more expanded your soul gets, so demons can't capture it anymore than one can catch smoke in a butterfly net. Just a theory, based on a mix of Thaddeus Golas, Egyptian mythology, and David Icke.



If only life were just bros, buds, and booze, how simple and joyous we'd be. In real life, though, once you're over 30 the amount of dudes from your crew who can still hang dwindle down fast - one by one they're married with kids and you never see them again... unless you get kids too, and join their creepy 'kids' cult. Maybe that's the real fantasy here... that the world will end before this true bropocalypse wipes out your network.. join them and be 'continued' forth through generations! It's just like falling asleep.

And that brings me to the stifled world of the couple's brunch, where the dudes in END would be going on Sunday afternoon instead of to Franco's on Saturday night (or if I was there and still partying, both) if they had girlfriends with bourgeois hipster tastes. I'm of course referring to the 2012 disaster comedy currently streaming on a Netflix near you, IT'S A DISASTER (2012).

David Cross is the nominal star as the stranger being vetted by the posse of his online date Julia Stile's. He moseys around the nice house, drinks some Scotch with the boys, but they got problems of their own, blah blah. Suddenly, a neighbor comes in decked out in a hazmat suit, moping he wasn't invited to the brunch. Commence duct taping! And then the couple who are always super late try to come in, coughing and hacking and begging to be let it in. But the duct tape is on. What do you do?


That kind of satiric moral querying is welcome, and the swinger couple (Rachel Boston and Kevin Brennan) slipping a subtle menage a trois come-on to Cross are hilarious; America Ferrara mixing all the drugs in the house together to create some homemade ecstasy, determined to get super high to face the end, is my hero. While her beau seems to think ranting about conspiracies will turn the deadly real situation abstract enough to deal with, i.e. what you can deconstruct can't kill you, she's doing the right thing. Overall it's some good ensemble work, giving off the impression these people all know each other and respect one another's comedic rhythms, and if it all seems over before you can really get a bead on it, so what? What it lacks in fire and brimstone it makes up with in the kind of inner hell only the relationship-encumbered truly know.


So what in the end is the right scenario for you? A lot of us were hoping the world would end last December 21st, so we wouldn't have to finally go get that root canal, or deal with our credit card debt. Now here is a year later and we know we're saddled with seemingly immortal life, forced to watch as our car goes over the cliff because our parents can't stop fighting over which way to turn. So pick your poison and live to die another day: going out with the bros is of course the more fun option, but the less sane. The couples thing seems to be the more mature idea but the deeper you look the crazier it seems. It's so hard to mature as a person when you can blame your significant other for holding you back. Unfortunately real personal growth only seems to come with pain, fear, and trauma. With the boys up in the Hills of THIS IS THE END, though, there's no one else to blame, and so, convexly, no escape from the awfulness of one's own true self. Either way, 'The End.'

Oh how time flies / with crystal clear eyes

Ah 1966, what an excellent year for an exorcism. Flip the 9 and you got the beast's number. Still two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY, '66 contains INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL instead, one similar to Rosemary's daily life and the other one to her dream, if it as in Esperanto. I can only imagine how much better each would be had they been made in 1969 instead, when the fangs were properly installed in the balls of horror cinema, and reality. Of course by then the ingenue of EYE couldn't have been in it, and she's the only thing worth watching for. There are those who say it was Roman's getting wife Sharon Tate the EYE role that caused the devil to stir from his liquid slumber and languorously stretched through time to snatch her at the prime two-souls-in-one moment. But they're crazy, right?

The many weird rumors of strange accidents and Satanic coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originated, some say, with ballyhoo maestro William Castle. Some say he took his gimmickry to a whole new level, way way past chair buzzers and skeletons on strings. Too far, perhaps, because when the subject is Satan, our mostly Christian nation's water cooler gossip heats to boiling. As John Ford or Sutter Kane would say, when everyone believes the legend, the truth... warps to accommodate.

That's where it gets super tricky, these pagan devil movies, as black magic and Satanism work in a much more fatalistic way than the sacrifice-free Christianity. With Satan there's a gruesome payoff where the subject learns he's "always been the caretaker," and that "out of all the women who ever lived on earth, he chose you! Hail Satan!" and so forth. Is there free will, Father? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy plays straight, i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let the Satan's magnet pull him inexorably towards his unholy destiny.  If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, Tate is doomed the moment husband Polanski helps her get the part in EYE, just the way Rosemary is doomed when Roman (!) Castavet helps her husband get his part. And Polanski is doomed the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. And we're doomed (to have the resurgence of the Salem mindset, ala The 'Satanic panic' of the early 80s) the moment we believe all this nonsense. That's fuzzy logic, what Stephen Colbert would call "truthiness" but anyone who denies it completely, is 100% sure, is just asking for trouble.

I mention all this because without Sharon Tate EYE OF THE DEVIL is a bore. It draws you in tight like that beetle tied to a string in the middle of the school desk in WICKER MAN, but then lets you go home uncrushed. But Tate's fate-and-sorrow drenched story lends it the same eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity echo ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST have, so in its way EYE OF THE DEVIL is the Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread ouija board abuse. So EYE could be said then, to be an evil influence.


It's still a bore though, with Deborah Kerr's nosey parker chasing after stricken marquis David Niven whose being prepared for some diabolical festival. He says please, babe, stop crowding me!


She won't, and so his desire for the black abyss is made understandable. A typical moment is when she's outraged over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. Then she spies on him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Sharon Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony. Kerr orders them off the property, like she's Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here), going into weird backwaters uninvited to harass the locals like a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order. And she's like my mom forcing me to hide all my insidious soul-killing vices from her over the holidays, because she doesn't understand why anyone would do anything bad for their health. Or why I need to just sleep the day away. And to worship Satan is I see fit.

So while Niven lurches around like a post-bones-tossed Queequeg, and wicked blondes Sharon Tate and Hemmings loiter languorously in black turtlenecks, turning toads into doves, and Flora Robson chokes back tears that it's all happening again, we're forced to spend the bulk of the film with the boring mom who's doing all in her power to stop the one interesting thing that might happen in this nowhere town.

Even with all that, is there any more boring sacrificial murder weapon than a bow and arrow? Do British schoolchildren stay up at night listening to tales of haunted archery teacher? Nein!
Luckily that old devil ballyhoo seems to foreshadow future classics. The music played during the 13 Days Festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." nd after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY might be like if Rosemary started the film far too old to be the parent of her two shockingly young children --only one of whom seems possessed by a Damien Thorn.

Rosemary Woodhouse was a real cool chick, a little naive maybe but it was the style of the time. Deborah Kerr's character in EYE is a stone bummer. And that is the difference.

Playing a kind of unwittingly dosed Mary Poppins struggling through the shadows for a ghost Marlon Brando in THE INNOCENTS, Kerr carried the horror of that film on her shoulders, while in DEVIL she drops it on the floor and starts lecturing. The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white, upstanding Buddha' in THE INNOCENTS, driving her like a hearse into the heart of their young charge. In EYE there can be no psychosexual kinks because all she wants to do is rescue her husband and bring him back to her tedious harp performances. We have no choice but to wish we could ditch her  and ride with the Rochesters, but our director follows her everywhere.


She could fathom the ghosts in INNOCENTS because there was no living man to defer to, but here she's like IMITATION OF LIFE's Annie Johnson trying to grab her Sarah Jane from trying to pass in death's cold marble nightclub. Everyone else but her wants whatever is going to happen to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr swamp the whole film playing a buzz-kill. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what. And it doesn't take long before we're fully invested in whatever evil is going on, hoping the devil gets the job done before Kerr comes barging in like mom tromping down to the basement to complain about the noise you kids are making and what's that smell? Smoke? Let me see your eyes!

Mom, go back to bed!


EYES thinks, or was forced to think by the censors, that the camera should do what's right and follow mom back upstairs. Tt's very British to think that censorial inhibitions are the stuff riveting devil movies are made of. They probably would have loved ALMOST FAMOUS and hated OVER THE EDGE.


It's hard to believe that this weird little Satan's Little Helper edition of BONJOUR TRISTESSE came out two years before the relatively old school DEVIL RIDE'S OUT (AKA BRIDE OF THE DEVIL), a rousing, full-blooded Hammer film that seems decades younger than the new wavy EYE. There's no occult real life ballyhoo associated with RIDES, and it doesn't needy any, because it has at least one person who's got a dashing air of wit and sparkle in Christopher Lee as the Van Helsing / Quatermass / Sherlock Holmes- type Devil hunter (Dennis Wheatley's original novel was set in the South of France, too, I think). It understands the way few devil movies do that the trick to defeating pure evil is not to confront it with pure good, but with balance.

Onwards then to the other Satanic offering of 1966 which I watched last night: INCUBUS.

INCUBUS.... the only film ever shot in Esperanto.... the language of the Satanic mass! Invented by the UN coven to bedevil the globe!


Wondrously pretentious, like a beatnik open mike jazz dance performance if it was shot by Dennis Hopper as an ONIBABA-style timeless psychosexual folk tale for Roger Corman, INCBUS would make a good double bill with NIGHT TIDE. The Esperanto angle adds just the right final dash of weirdness to the story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring in Big Sur, driving men to their deaths for big daddy Satan. She longs to corrupt a good pure soul instead of just offing the perverse and corrupted, but her older sister advises against it. She's right. But they have a back-up plan unleash the Incubus of the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!


This would actually make a good double bill with the 1961 Liz-and-Dick semi-camp classic, THE SANDPIPER. Both concern a mythic 'impossible love' story between a paragon of virtue and a slutty mankiller lolling in the Big Sur surf and spouting beatnik profundities. One is a studio-backed Vincente Minnelli opus, the other a low budget concoction from the "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Ingmar Bergman," Leslie Stevens. But INCUBUS has everything: blondes in black turtlenecks but with South American public school girl smocks, William Shatner playing a variation of Jack Nicholson's Napoleonic solider sick of war and wandering the Big Sur coast in THE TERROR, refracted through the love of Richard Burton's priest in SANDPIPER if he was played by Eva Marie Saint. Sure it sounds overbaked... but a Satanic blonde feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her to church? Senpreza!


In the end, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL have a lot in common, fault-wise: EYE is way too dry, with way too much Kerr and not nearly enough Tate (she looks amazing, takes a whipping in stride, and delivers some great wicked lines with the sex-ice authority of an evil Emma Peel); INCUBUS is way too much the other way around, it's too eager to be Bergman and not eager enough to be Corman, which is what it is, so it should appreciate that and just go for it, and the print they show on TCM is far too blurry for any scintillation off Big Sur's dramatic coastline.

But both also share a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on. There's an association of good with boring and safe. In ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST the heroines--Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are hip enough, and the evil men--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we're rooting for the right team. But we're rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE, why else would we be watching if not to see Tate do evil stuff? And thanks to Kerr's tired grandstanding, Tate has barely any time to really radiate. And ditto INCUBUS: do we really need to see some old church / patriarchy win out for nth time against the feminine darkness? No one goes to a devil movie to root for the very thing they went to the movies to escape from, mom!

Lou died today. He was 71, the same age my dad would be (had he not died two years ago this very week). Hearing about my dad's death made feel a crack in my heart for the first time ever, a thunderous splintering snap. I still haven't recovered. I then lost my dog Inga a few months ago, that brought some tears, but losing Lou isn't a cry-worthy thing. I didn't know him personally. But it is like losing the smooth relaxed but dangerous bass line that's been underwriting my soul since I first heard"I Love You Suzanne" on MTV in the early 80s. Lou's deadpan serpentine bass vibration held us suspended above the dismal American abyss for so long we forgot we were still being lifted by it; now that it's gone, the silence is deafening, and it's a long way to fall.


When I first started hunting down his canon in local used punk rock record shops as a snotty 17 year-old I didn't even know we had the same birthday (March 2nd), we both wear glasses and we both majored in English Lit and Syracuse University. He supposedly stayed in my same dorm (Flint Hall), and like him I moved off campus soon after and formed a band. It was before the internet, or any bio on him, so one couldn't just know all these things. All I knew is, I had been adrift in a myopic solipsistic tweenage alienation for years, and Lou came along and said, "hey kid, don't settle for walking." He didn't lead me out of the abyss, but he helped me contextualize the pain into a grand artistic persona, a blue mask to reflect the glare of a hostile world back into its own eyes. He wasn't singing about love me do / you know I love you, he was singing about the agonizing pain of coming home from a dark and dirty fun party and instantly feeling paralyzingly lonely.


I saw him play, twice, at the Ritz, in '85, at the start of, and end of, his tour supporting Mistrial. Disappointing, since Robert Quine wasn't there, but Fernando Saunders was on fretless bass and I knew then I had to become a bassist. I finally joined a band sophomore year, when I was already on my way to becoming an acid rock hippie freak, but I still sang "Sweet Jane" and "I'm Waiting for My Man" and sometimes "Heroin" during the third set, and I was already making token struggles against my burgeoning alcoholism, again not knowing Lou was a drunk, too, and wrote "The Power of Positive Drinking," the sweetest justification for not getting sober when you know you need to, and then "Underneath the Bottle" an album or so later when he realized hey, sooner or later you're going to have terrible DTs, so why not get out in front of that, too?

In my late 20s living in a midtown loft with my lead guitarist, I would spent hours and hours hyperventilating over the toilet from 2-6 AM, nonstop, trying to keep down enough vodka to stop dry heaving. I was so sick from alcohol poisoning I couldn't hold down the liquor I needed to not suffer the horrors of alcoholic convulsions. I was caught in a vicious circle. My only company were Lou Reed in everything and Nic Cage in LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Sometimes I had a stolen-from-my-girlfriend Librium to help me come down but more often than not I'd drop it and be crawling around for hours in panicked desperation. But Lou had a song for that too: "Waves of fear, squat on the floor looking for some pill, the liquor is gone... " My decision to be so open about all my drug and alcohol use, to be blunt about my divorce, band difficulties, emotional rises and falls, losses and regrets, and ambivalence, the courage to let it all hang the stuff most people hide come out in the open, crafting art (or art criticism) from the medium of my own guts, it all comes from him.

None of that means I knew him personally, but I felt like I did. A lot of us did, it was a personal thing. We didn't even mind he could be a total shit some of the time, to his fans, to his world. He never tried to hide his venom, if he had he wouldn't have been him anymore. "Give me an issue, I'll give you a tissue," Lou snarls on Take No Prisoners. "And you can wipe my ass with it."


Sometimes, like after I read one of his unauthorized bios, I began to hate him, but I always came back, because he never sold out or got repetitive. Suddenly after a slump or two there was New York, a new classic, and one of my favorites, the Warhol eulogy record with John Cale Songs for Drella -so perfect and simple with Lou's guitar and Cale's viola never sounding clearer or better together, as if Warhol's spirit buried the hatchet and brought out a playful reverence that they never seemed to share before or since.

But he could be a shit. Maybe it was because he let us all feel like we knew him, and that level of broad openness in one's art is always going to have drawbacks, like finding out the most fun and awesome guy you ever dated is a thief and junkie, and so what, are you going to walk out on him? Lou never stole from us, and he gave so so much of himself that a lot of us freaks, who have never felt this way about any other artist before or since, could forgive his insecure lash-outs. He was the cool older brother who brought us to all the dangerous places most young suburban kids never see. He didn't leave us at home with mom, afraid we'd cramp his style. He didn't abandon us.


So I'm not going to cry this time. I'm just going to make a spotify mix and take a look back at the 30 odd years I've been a Lou Reed disciple, and realize if I'm anything, or anyone, or have any sense of belonging to the gritty New York streets I haunted for the past 20 years (before moving to goddamned Brooklyn) it's because of Lou. Lou, I swear I'd give the whole thing up for you. And I did.

"When Lou sang of the “whiplash girl-child in the dark” who said things like “taste the whip, / now bleed for me,” suddenly I could take the violent reproach of my aching hormones and twist it like a sword until I disemboweled the old me. The result was like dropping nitroglycerin on an oil fire, an alchemical reaction that set me free. I knew that I was, at heart, a sadomasochist."

"Death has brought you close to art as we know it today," says Lou, to Max Wolf, ailing manager of the film's equivalent of Bill Graham's Fillmore East. The film starts rough but develops a sweaty-palmed rock intensity that might recall the best rock movies and rock shows and flashbacks of any drug-fueled moments of transcendental pagan abandon, the wild fury of the mosh pit, and onwards.

King Blues sings "Mannish Boy!" Malcolm McDowell plays a T. Rex / Mick Jagger hybrid. There's a great Iggy Pop-ish animal man, a scabby punk rock poetess, a flooded bathroom with a shark swimming around it, a giant hypo, and Daniel Stern pausing to inhale some smoke from a $1 hookah hit-sellin' Rastafarian in one of the stalls... Iggy prompting people to jump off the balcony, including Paul Bartel. There's a Satanic pimp alien coke dealer, magical LSD in the water cooler, a crowd-surfing refrigerator, acid rock hippy freaks, a twitchy fire inspector, and that's just the tip of Malcolm's talking penis. It's the beginning / of a new age.

Here's my Lou Reed Spotify Mix, adjusted to reflect a tribute / eulogy / farewell / ode I think Lou would like. He loved assembling new CDs from his old catalog, and he has a flock of cool Spotify mixes himself, that he made, of other musicians he likes. My Lou Mix has no "Sweet Jane" or "Walk on the Wild Side." Too easy. This is the stuff I loved at the time, me alone, in my room, with headphones, blotting out the parents and the world outside the New York Streets. This is the weird stuff no one else would know, lada lie... RIP Lou Reed. xo




And lastly, his Warhol "Screen Test." Goodnight, ladies

If it didn't have such an overly familiar name (the 1950 Hitchcock film, a 2013 Minnie Driver horror musical, a 1980 film AKA NIGHTMARES), I believe STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS (1987) would be a renowned horror classic, instead of a juicy secret. A saga of death imitating art self-reflexivity (ala EYES OF LAURA MARS) was originally called DELIRIA but that's a girl's name, or looks like one from far away (or else a comedy). Call it OWL WITH A CHAINSAW and the above image might be as iconic as it deserves. That would dampen its uncanniness, though. And for an Italian horror enthusiast like myself (and so many worthy others).

Directed by Michel Soavi (the Argento mentee behind CEMETERY MAN), with mouth of the actor lip sync matching and recording so good as to be invisible, this HALLOWEEN meets 42ND STREET 80s slasher film is riveting, scary, funny, catty and post-modern without being tedious or sadistic. See it alone in the dead of night, with headphones blocking all outside noise, and all the lights off, tune body and soul to the "tick-tock momentum" (as discussed in PHANTASM,HOUSE OF THE DEVIL) and thrill to one of the best WTF moments of metatextuality since the first Jet fell out of rank in a sudden graceful ballet move, Action.


So it's a dark and rainy night. An old rehearsal space way outside of the city is preparing a sleazy pre-Giuliani Times Square-style Abel Ferrara-ish dancetacular: A fire in a trash can blazes center stage for crazy flickering shadows, graffiti adorns the fake alleyway walls, second floor windows hold agape witnesses, a subway-skirted Marilyn blasts her saxophone on the balcony, and then a crazy killer in an owl head comes diving out in a swirl of dance, the mob of angry citizens catch him like Sharks on Baby John, and take his trousers off for some payback forced faux fellatio? Wait, what? The director, Peter (David Brandon), gets angry because star Alicia (Barbara Cupisti) doesn't quite get it either, but he thinks the public will line up. The suit-wearing producer civilian worries they'll get closed down by the cops (Italy has a long history of 'regional' censorship). When, in a classic move right out of pre-code Warner Brothers, Alicia sprains her ankle, Peter doesn't believe her, won't let her leave, and is a dick about it.

The deliberately artificial performances of some of the actors are meant to heighten their stock theatrical 'types': temper tantrum-tossing director, lecher producer, bitchy but nurturing gay dancer (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), catty slut-and-comer (Mary Sellers), and a black cat (Lucifer) crossing the superstitious wardrobe mistress's path. Turns out Peter was right not wanting to let her leave, as the hospital she goes to turns out to be a mental institution, and a notorious axe murderer has just been admitted, tied to a stretcher... and he doesn't intend to stay long. He and Alicia share one of those uncanny 'see you soon, Clarice' glances as they pass each other in the hallway, like they get a weird glimmer of their own killer-final girl pair bonding to come.


This all may smack of ROTM slasher antics, but as soon as the killer first appears in the giant owl's head, walks nervously on stage and actually strangles and stabs his victim in the show, while Peter yells encouragement and applauds her realistic dying noises, any planned pause for a bathroom trip and drink refill is forgotten. It's a funny but scary moment that has real world echoes where I can imagine seeing this in a theater might make one worry the dude behind you is going to lean forward and slit your throat in order to add an extra layer of meta refraction. When what's on stage is so close to what's going on behind you that you can't tell if you're acting or really dying then you know it's going to be a bumpy ride, and there's no seat belt left to fasten..

And I know the feeling. True story: Years ago I was studying to be a drug and alcohol counselor and was interning at Bellevue, and smitten by the drama therapist. I dislocated my kneecap playing a Jim Morrison-esque drunk rock star on the crumbling Bellevue theater stage. None of the fellow actors--all residents of the alcohol clinic-- thought I was really hurt as I screamed in the worst pain of my life. They only feigned calling an ambulance and feigned concern until finally I got them to stop feigning and follow my pointing finger down to where my knee cap was hanging down to the side, leaving my thigh and shin bone without proper capping. No joke. The pain was so bad I couldn't scream it justice, but lord I tried. There was nothing to do but laugh at how inauthentic my screams sounded, a grim horrifying laugh, like John Barrymore cackling at the irony that he couldn't act 'real' pain when it struck him. In its utter realness my pain had stylized itself into a burlesque of pain. Meanwhile the emergency room of Bellevue was literally right next door but they wouldn't just wheel me over. The ambulance had to drive me around the block and rattle off my other options. Sure it was 14 years ago, but Obamacare, am I right?

That's why there should always be a safe word. And a contingency plan. If you're going to get hurt while uninsured, do it on hospital grounds. I still got bills and threats from collection agencies long afterwards, even though the billing dept. waived all fees.  Thrice. If I hadn't finally just left, I'd still be in the waiting area of the physical therapy dept. Whoa, way off topic... back to the show.


Soavi uses every opportunity to fuck with the fourth wall in ways not seen since the musical numbers of Busby Berkeley spilled off the stage and into the dilated pupil of a twirling dancing girl-cello hybrid. The only key out of the building begins to loom overhead like a giant mirage, running killer POVs following electrical cord paths as if on wings of a dream, weird mannequins gawk idly and you don't put it past Soavi to substitute real actresses in mannequin poses in some shots and not even call attention to it; a reel-to-reel tape of the Bernard Herrmann-ish musical score that the killer blasts at inopportune times makes Peter's determined vengeance seem like a Warner Brothers cartoon turned opera; a broken bottle of stage blood that looks exactly like the fake-ish 'real' blood, run together.

There is no safe word and yet on some level it's already been said.


The initial effect of all this, at the start, is giddy confusion, with actors and set and costume designers scurrying all over the place and the genres and layers of textuality muddled but that is just what made SCREAM scary, because horror movie trivia and overlapping confusion was such an integral part of our heritage that we felt vulnerable watching, out of our safe zone of set responses. Where did the VCR playing HALLOWEEN in the climactic party end and ours playing SCREAM begin? HALLOWEEN's is spent watching THE THING, and FORBIDDEN PLANET (see my analysis here), just like we would be doing. That kind of intertextual realism is still underused in horror cinema, as if its so obvious it slips their minds. Soavi doesn't name check, he's way too subtle. I'm not even sure some of the brilliance I glean in his films is intentional, and that only adds to the luster.


The only way it could be better is if it ended at dawn. The awesome first rays of dawn ending always bumps a film up a star for me. (that made THE WARRIORS and SCREAM's endings so awesome), but other than that there's little fault to find, especially not in the amazing performance of Barbara Cupisti. We can read her thoughts as they flicker across her face as easily as if it they're in an old lady font, yet she's never overacting. She's a frickin' genius.

Just when you think it can't get any weirder or cooler, the killer, thinking everyone is dead, takes the stage. Man, oh man. I like that he treats Lucifer nicely, and the cat rewards him by... well I wouldn't spoil the tale but anyone who likes their post-modernism rich in bright reds, purples and dark grays, and doesn't mind their soul becoming temporarily stained and bent out of shape like the first time they saw DEEP RED, then Soavi's StageFright (the title's actual spelling) is the girl for you. There's even a great little wink trick ending that's just enough weird to blow your mind figuratively, diegetically, and metatextually, leaving you with shaky hands eager to applaud... even though you're all alone and it's three AM, and you don't want to arouse the attention of whatever's flapping outside your chamber door... maybe it'll just go away... but you know how we night owls love a receptive audience.

Say what you want about this film, like BOMB (Maltin), ** (imb), or 13% (rottentomatoes), my girl and I think Streetfighter is delightful, hilarious, and a merry romp. You might think it falls into some grim basement endless first person shooter nonsense, like JCVD trapped in a maze of drippy subterranean tunnels and breaking bones one after the other, but that's Doom you're thinking of! Different game altogether. This one is pretty sunny and merry, especially with those divine powder blue outfits. It's got that international style, the Jackie Chan film aesthetic, but populated with crazy villains and so much beefcake you wonder if it's approved by the WWF.


And o, what stunning portfolio of a cast: Kylie Minogue and, wait for it, in a florid red gestapo cap, black cape and silver gloves, Raul Julia! In addition to ransoming a bin full of hostages, Gomez here is making a monster in the basement and his evil fortress is full of high places and chain pulleys to swing down from in steroidal derring do. In some ways it reminds me of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China only not as good. What is? Countless dumber, worser action films escape the critical hostility lauded on poor Street Fighter. Why? Is it a global conspiracy? Every evil critic in the world, I challenge you! Vivat gloria stupiditatem!

This film shuffles around an all-star Brit cast and a lovingly restored bundle of German Heinkels, Stukas and Messerschmidts tangling with the Brits' beloved Spitfires, which were light enough to bounce like rubber balls on the landing fields but had great speed and maneuverability, including absurdly strong climbing rates thanks to the Rolls Royce Merlin Engines. We see Spitfires polishing off Heinkels by the dozen, occasionally getting nicked by a turret gunner or fighter escort, bailing out over the Thames, or whatever.


The thing is, has England ever really had so much clear weather, ever? There's no more than a handful of clouds in the whole film, and no anti-aircraft guns are ever seen and only two barrage balloons show up. Across the channel, Goering rants and raves and struts while an invading army of about three guys in a raft stand around waiting to invade.

Still, this was the age before CGI and while the explosions as planes are shot out of the sky are clearly superimposed, the planes are all real, and one gets a surprisingly clear idea of how it all worked. Though it's odd that after a few months of preparation the Germans bomb airfields that are a) undefended, not even with an alarm sounding, b) totally free of ack ack, anti-aircraft guns, c) even the sound of approaching bombers or the sounds of bombs dropping don't seem to rouse the crew; they shuffle around in search of an unbroken tea cup while the hangers burn, perhaps lacking a clear direction cue from the otherwise engaged director, Guy Hamilton.


Of the woman in the cast, Susannah York fares well as a high ranking air traffic officer who continually denies her pesky husband's insistence she transfer out to safer Scotland. Good for her! And what's up with her mod hair cut? No time to find out! Here comes the Heinkels for yet another round of battle, so similar to the ones that came before they might be just reusing whole sequences.

After enough dogfight scenes and ground support chatter have been contrasted, Goering calls it off, takes a train back to Berlin from the Pais de Calais, and the film ends.

We win!

I meant to see Seven Psychopaths (2012), forgot I saw it, re-Netflixed it, and only remembered I'd seen it halfway through. I know what it says about me, unless I write about it, I don't remember it. What does that say about its writer-director, the "Irish Tarantino," Martin McDonagh? His play, TheLieutenant of Inishmore was bloody funny, I saw it on Broadway totally by chance via a relative of my last AA lesbian sponsee got us tickets, uh, seven years ago? McDonagh's first big film In Bruges was hilarious, and didn't need a point. But Psychopaths, McDonagh's tale of a drunk Irish writer (modeled no doubt after himself) who has come to Hollywood as Barton Fink once did, high on Hollywood's reverence for successful cutting edge playwrights, is worse than some Vancouver-shot made-for-Cinemax After Dark crime sex thriller which at least would have the integrity of sucking. This has too many stars for that. They make it worth not turning off within 20 minutes, which I did the first time (I think, I still don't remember if I ever made it to the ending. Curse ye whiskey!) I mean Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, and Woody Harrelson have never done a day's bad work.... not even here.

As an alcoholic writer though, I might be prejudiced to hate any film about a well-to-do dissolute drunk ex-pat who thinks the name Seven Psychopaths is such a good title he can just let everyone else do their own lifting, including his Boondock Saint of a broheim, played by the ever-jiving Sam Rockwell. Dude, even for self-reflexive blocked writer movies, doing the whole blocked and/or hack writer thing with a twin crazy horse muse is really played out, and was even when Charlie Kaufman's script for Adaptation (2002), which blew up the bridge behind itself as far as writing about how hard it is to write scripts, and I don't mean that as a terrible compliment.

The title is so good, this sad cipher thinks. "So far I've got the name," he tells Rockwell's sun-dappled buddy Johnny Boy over poolside drinks, like that's enough to prove he deserves to be there, instead of dry heaving the day away in the cold comfort of his own bathroom floor like a real writer would (ala William Faulkner in Barton Fink). He thinks it's enough. Struggling screenwriters around the world, some of whom might even be talented, would blah blah okay I mean ME. I've always thought about one day writing a feature length script, and am sure it would be a smash hit, and plan to write it one day, maybe, don't rush me, goddamn it... Meanwhile I know a screenwriter who wrote lots of them, makes a decent amount of money, and lost some of it to me at poker, and from around 1997-2003 I heard of his first film to actually get made's gestation from deals to rewrites to scouting locales, working out this and that, getting Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon aboard, and then having the whole thing dump right to video, after sinking years and years of his life into it, countless rewrites and sweat and compromises.... and it was called Elvis Has Left the Building, the "other" Elvis impersonator crime spree movie besides 2000 Miles to Graceland.

And even now nothing gets me more pissed than hearing a screenwriter on easy street trying to pass his writer's block off as entertainment via sly post-modern mirror effect, and writing his characters into thinking it's a kick-ass idea.

So.. Colin Farrell... he's got the title... so great. Why wouldn't it be great? He was so good in In Bruges he would seem a no-brainer as McDonagh's drunk Irish screenwriter stand-in. He's got it all: a bitchy American girlfriend (the perennially indignant Abbie Cornish from Limitless), a two-bit charismatic hustler leading him into scrapes, and... what else... oh yeah, a pen. Y'know... ferwritin'.  Yet he's barely trying. I refuse to believe the man who gave us one of the most climactic cat entrances in the history of the legitimate theater is so shallow. It would have been a great story if Farrell had brought some real intensity to the role, been acting a Wellesian uber-serious MacBeth in a room full of vapid scenesters, but instead he's a lot more LA vapid than drunken gravitas. Waits and Walken and a little bit of Harrelson are the only gravitas. It may have helped if we'd seen in the film some of this character's earlier work (as in Adaptation when we see Charlie on the set of Malkovich), how great it would have been had we seen him in Belgium giving script notes? Then Farrell could have played the crazy projection of the author's unconscious ego and probably cut loose a little more, recognized the need for some Bogey (as in Play it Again Sam) or darkness, ala John Goodman in Barton Fink, or the bunny rabbit in Donnie Darko. Instead he's more like the rabbit in Harvey.

So you've seen enough of these films to write it yourself: Christopher Walken shows up as a dognapper and man, he's gotten old. and he has a dying black wife who may or may not be a younger black wife of Tom Waits in flashback, both of whom have been unfairly perhaps left off all the Seven Psychopath posters and publicity tours. If that didn't sting, to be in a movie about vengeance and being maligned by society and in turn spurned by even that very movie, left off all the advertising for the crime of being.... what? B-list?


Plus Farrell is not convincing as either a drunk or a writer. He's too kinetic and cocky, he has no shakes, no quivers, he is just barely hungover and even at the height of his abusive cups he never slurs a syllable. Imagine if he did, or if his Irish accent got more pronounced, blacker, more violent as he drank, something to go with his sudden outbursts? Instead he just turns into a dickwad.

You know what was funny In Bruges!? Everything was funny in In Bruges! But especially Farrell.

Amanda Warren, vengeance shall be thine!

I'm no social activist, usually, but it's also quite galling in this day and age that a black woman plays a key psychopath role here and deserves to be one of the seven alleged psychos above, yet is not mentioned or seen. #1 Olga Kurylenko has little more than a cameo, or #5 'the passive-aggressive girlfriend" who is a bit of a bitch but should be as she's dating an abusive Irish hack. She's just dumb with her choices, and like so many girls likes to start fights and bitch and moan, which is like adopting a mangy black mutt and then kicking it when you get home because you expected it to be a golden retriever. But the biggest psychopath is the self-defeating racist PR people who thought that a black character shouldn't be visible on the posters, but rather 'hidden' deep in the basements of the film's memory. Has Pam Grier's fro been for nothing? Coffey could kick the asses of everyone in this film. Meanwhile it tries so hard to play like Elmore Leonard or Tarantino (or even Charlie Kaufman) that it sounds desperate and all those folks are smart enough to keep a few genuine rough edges on a film about rough edges, and that you always put the cool black lady up front. Does McDonagh really not know how sick we are of the whole quipping hitman lad thing? Trends die much more slowly outside the US. I lost interest in Brit "Lad" movies after Snatch, which was great don't get me wrong, and that old guy in the thick glasses made for the most terrifying gangster villain since Peter Brandt in The Song Remains the Same.



Martin McDonagh, is a good looking lad, with a Sting-esque jaw and crystal blue eyes. I haven't given up on him. He should have played the Farrell character and left the directing to someone else who might have hipped him to the fact that unironic post-modern self-reflexivity has become banal. It's not McDonagh's fault, coming up as he has in the very very different world of theater, such as The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which rocked a similar tack, only with the psychopath having a cat instead of a little dog, and a girl psychopath with some actual dialogue, a lot more blood and guts. If we bear this past triumph in mind, the desperation of Farrell's character is understandable, when operating farther from Irish minutiae he's like a panicked bronco, flaring up in all directions in the chance Hollywood will just at some point rise to its feet, cry bravo, and grant him a green card.


Theater has always been self- reflexive to the point its vanity mirror shatters into the audience's eyes like Fulci splinters. Half the early Hollywood pre-code sound films, if not all, were written by Broadway wits lured west by big money who loved to write about Broadway wits being lured west by big money. Show/movies like A Chorus Line and Chicago and even Phantom are ingrained in the celluloid conscience as suitable for framing and all are about razzle dazzle and the great White Way in one way or the other. Gotta dance Gotta dance God... ta...   dannnse.. But what works in the theater doesn't play in action movies all a-stud with stars playing halfway ass up into Entourage-ville.


All that said, I really loved In Bruges (above) once, but even that would have been impossible outside of its situation, what worked there was a horror and fascination with the beery surrealism of Belgium, and the way what we consider enchanting and old school is just icky in the eyes of Brits; and all they can agree on is that Yank tourists need a good thrashing.  And the filmmakers-within-the-film shooting a scene with baller little person extras and fog machines was a great back-drop for the action. It was original, ballsy, clever, but not at all full of itself. Here, alas, every self-effacing moment in our drunk screenwriter's odyssey carries a coded message of self-aggrandizement that sticks in the craw almost to Shyamalanian toxicity.

I usually don't bother with negative reviews. Life is too short and I'm too marginal and outsider to afford alienating anyone, but if I don't this time, I'll probably forget I saw it and watch it again in a few years. And that I cannot allow. So forgive me, Woody Harrelson, as I forgive those directors who trespass on your unique comedic brilliance like drunken burglars.

Next time, a speaking role!

November.

If the 12 month cycle was The Island of Lost Souls, November would be the house of pain. Darkness's early onset and the hushed chill of dying leaves rustling around the street like packs of shuffling Bed Stuy crackheads brings a special kind of shoulder ache. The New York marathon ends, you stand at the finish line watching your wobbly friends in their reflecting mylar disposable ponchos, and your body shivers on their behalf. Going out to a bar, sitting at a long table of celebrants with pitchers and drams of Wild Turkey, none of which you can have as you're on the wagon. Daylight savings has already begun, and suddenly the couch is extra cozy, every fibre of your being says "let's not go out tonight. Or this weekend. Or ever. Goodbye." With each missed party, another nail in the social coffin. But are you trembling? No. Why? SHARKNADO.

Apparently it was all the rage in "twitterverse" of which I was ignorant and for that I am truly grateful. I saw it later, on Netflix. After work. Alone. Needed it. Didn't want no boring bits or glum nonsense. Lots of Brooklyn stress was released as the sight of L.A. being flooded with CGI sharks, snapping up spoiled Beverly Hills brats and swimming along the freeway or raining from the sky.


What else do you need to say? The bitterest, crushingest month, when family obligations rise like a prematurely buried Usher to wrest even the highest of kites back down to the beige carpets of a vacuumed earth, football on TV, turkey and boiling rutabaga condensation to come but for now  darkness creeps up towards the end of lunch time and by the walk home you're snared in the trawling net of cold autumnal night.

Sure, it's glamorous. It's also depressing. Relationships crumble, jobs melt away, the windows are shuttered, the air conditioner taken hurriedly from the window like a burglar.

And then, SHARKNADO comes along, bathed in crisp CGI sunshine, a ferris wheel rolls into the side of a swanky hotel on the crest of a massive incoming wave and wipes the cares away.


Previous films from 'The Asylum' have sucked pretty bad, but this works because it has the balls to stay loose, clever, surefooted along the straight razor of deadpan between intentionally trying to be so bad it's good and straight-up self-aware camp, which is never as fun. There's been a ton of similar bad films from the new AIP, the Syfy-Asylym food chain, with pay channel youtube the new independent drive-in. The films nod vaguely towards third generation Italian ripoffs of Jaws' rip-offs, which in turn reach back through cocktopus tentacles deep up into the era of the 50s bug movie. Most of them suck. Not SHARKNADO.

 Face it, we all love Shark Week for the name, those hard K's are so badass. It's like a running joke, "but I can't go, it'll cut into shark week!" It it was called Whale Week, who would care? L's are never funny. And it's not just that sharks are badass killers, it's that all these decades later and we're still afraid of the water after JAWS, but we like it. The water is still mysterious. We can project our darkest unconscious fears right into the murky dark, the ocean takes it all and hides dark secrets. It's the last great expanse of territory wherein man is not the boss. Sure fishing boats may murder countless of them for their fins to please the impotent Asian businessman. How we would love to throw all those damned shark fin harvesters into the water for a nice feeding frenzy. And hey! SHARKNADO does just that.



THE REEF (2010) however has two problems, one is that we love Australians and hate to see them eaten, something in their accents and cheery disposition makes it hard to distance ourselves from their pain, and man they express terror and pain and forlorn misery like they're going for an Oscar rather than a November diversion. The money shots are not the attacks so much as the sight of great whites slowly materializing out of the crystal blue below the surface, like a distant rider in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. They circle and you can't tell if they see you or not, their dead eyes betray no sudden interest, they just orbit lazily, then BAM! But there's only so many times you can do that and have the same groovy effect. After awhile all you have is a lot of anxiety even if you're glad to be relatively dry.


The other problem is the sheer stupidity of the outdoorsman boat dude, why didn't this genius survivalist (similar in ways to the dude in SHARKNADO) pack any lifejackets? Why if you're sailing in a really remote area wouldn't you have some kind of radio or distress signal? Or goddamned lifejackets! Why if Australia is crawling with sharks wouldn't you have shark repellent? Life vests!! Why if you are all in the water and completely vulnerable would you swim towards the friend of yours being eaten? What are you going to do to help? Of the two shark films discussed here it's certainly 'better' - I doubt even SHARKNADO would argue that, but it's not a blast. Aside from the stark natural beauty scenery, it's a wee bit of a bummer, with wayyyyy too much acting. Do we see shark movies to get bummed out? No, SHARKNADO understands this. Your actors need to be either good enough to understand that too much screaming and hyperventilating in irrational panic can sink a shark film, but just the right amount of ballsy courage (ala the awesome Liam Neeson in THE GREY) can turn a grim situation into something like Howard Hawks.. or they just have to be bad actors, but game for a good time. The Aussies have a great advantage when it comes to monster movies as their country is lousy with great white sharks and giant crocodiles. There's a great ballsy Aussie croc film called ROGUE (2007) with the new queen of B-movie monsterdom, Rhada Mitchell, for example, that works a similar territory to THE REEF and THE GREY. REEF is just screaming. SHARKNADO, on the other hand, is made for you and me, the types who know the difference, and don't give a fuck. In November there's no such thing as too bad, only too real.

Lately when I meditate all that happens is my unconscious/anima rummages through forbidden memory drawers, exposing afresh long-buried shames as far back as ninth grade gym class. I'm all cool about it, of course, oh thank you ma'am, for saving these precious memories, and I believe once I accept them she's going to just toss 'em out. But I doubt she will, cuz my unconscious is a bitch, yo. Still, nothing like the one pulling Julian (Ryan Gosling) apart in Nicolas Winding Refn's career-sabotaging follow-up to his career-making DRIVE.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES! Yeah, but he doesn't, Blanche! The tale of an Oedipus complex writ large by white people across the dirty expanses of Bangkok, it's almost more of a Jim Jarmusch-meets-David Lynch on an Argento film set horror film than a revenge thriller.
Then again, everything is a horror film for Sweden's dark lord of the Seijun Suzuki-esque macho melt-down post-modernist gangster genre, Nicolas Winding Refn, and GOD is his special love letter to those Angelica film snobs who saw his earlier films DRIVE and VALHALLA RISING and said very good, Sven, but maybe slow it down a bit. Maybe don't have a protagonist who's such a chatterbox.There has to be one such film snob... somewhere. Maybe it's even me, for I'm keenly aware (since I'm Swedish) that to stand out from the legions of 'corrupt but honorable cop vs. redeemable but doomed gangster' Asian vengeance-athons currently idling along the blighted "Dark Foreign Revenge Thriller" avenues of Netflix, Refn has to import his own brand of ice and snow onto the eternally wet floors of the Bangkok Dangereuse. Swedes know that Thai swordsman cops can out swing us, so we have to out-stare them and more importantly be willing to die without a sigh, to stand firm against the dying flesh without a flinch.

No, please, don't get up

Critics haven't been kind to ONLY GOD FORGIVES, though some have bee maybe too kind, and maybe they shouldn't be. It practically begs for a beat-down, craves it like William Devane's masochistic ex-POW in ROLLING THUNDER. It promises to not even fight back, just proffer its hands for good severing. But for a film with such ornate and original visual style it sure is shy about saying anything or making a move, unless it's to judge misogynist ex-pats for slapping frightened little Bangkok sex workers. There's some bizarre sinthom going with hands, and the fear of losing them, as in, if I stick my hand into this stripper's inner gates of paradise, will I ever get it back, or just pull out a stump? Shit be Freudian phallus anxiety up the anal phase yin-yang. And the big climax seems to presume it's shocking Oedipal perversion is worth the wait, and maybe it is. In a land of bare knuckle boxing and grim black dragon wallpaper, Gosling's hand bravely goes where only Jessica Harper doesn't fear to tread.

From Top: Suspiria / Only God Forgives

And a thing with brother Billy who is so mad about Bangkok dads pimping their daughters he kills one, or something, and some weird karaoke-singing cop lets the dad kill Billy, then cuts off the guy's hand right to punish him for that right when Julian (Ryan Gosling, apparently now the Michael Fassbender to Refn's Steve McQueen) is getting his hands tied in a lap dance, and imagining his hand cut off by the same guy about to do the same to the guy who killed his bro bro. Dude, it's all connected. So the next week (or hour- there's no sense of time on the Bangkok streets) the brassy Clytemnestra of a devouring Mother with a typically Lady McBeth-ish streak of not thinking her vengeance through to the end (brilliantly ashayed by Kristen Scott Thomas), who has an incestuous love-hate bond with Julian, and who we learn eventually if our TV is on loud enough and there's no traffic outside our window to mask their fetid whispers, ordered her boy to beat his father to death with his bare hands, presumably. Oh those hands, they're so dangerous, apparently.


But all that stuff is minor. It reminds me of my own small short films in a way, because there's no time for a plot so it all has to be delivered on the sly in expository fragments. No one leaves or arrives, they just appear in one of the many dark red-lit Chinese serpent dragon wallpapered rooms, like clients at some 90's Lynch-meets-70's Argento bordello of the unconscious. When the mom lets down her hair she has a silk dress that both blends and stands out against the wallpaper. It's presumably a rose on the front but looks more like a bullet hole showing the place Julian burst out of (and where we will rather grotesquely return in the final act). She demands to know why her son hasn't killed the guy who killed his brother, when he mentions he killed a sixteen year old girl she snaps "well I'm sure he had his reasons."

This old broad is a real pisser.


The film's been compared to the westerns of Sergio Leone, but in Leone all those long stares were connected to hands hovering over holsters. Clint Eastwood and his confederates didn't look at their gun or even aim it, or even blink, just stared then WHAM, one or more guys died. Hitchcock had that line about how the only difference between a comedy and suspense at breakfast is that only we know a bomb's under the table in the latter, but in Leone everyone knows everyone else has a bomb under the table, and that gives their every move meaning; they don't take their eyes off each other even as they pour the coffee, with one hand, super..... slowly. for GOD, Refn takes the coffee away, the table, the eyes, even. If it's not suspense at least it's weird. It's the first violent masculine deconstruction to feminize the macho staring contest, and dissociate vengeance from the minds of tortured heroes. Now instead of being about facing death it's about Sleeping Beauty, with Gosling spending the whole movie in a glass case, waiting for god's samurai sword to cleave him free of both that shell, and the inner, so he can regress to the womb and beyond.


There's a great piece comparing the film with Lynch's FIRE WALK WITH ME over on Very Aware, with a Refn interview, wherein he says: the original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God."

Note the austere white Great Wall image behind him, a more logocentric version of Julian's twisted dark red wallpaper, setting off a contrast that's about far more than good vs. evil, or right vs. wrong

Hey, I know about that! That's why I love Ahab so much, and all my college poetry was about it, like my classic "The Bug that Would Swat God" - but in my case it was drunken bravado and feeling inspired by Gregory Peck's twisted oratory; in this case it's less about wanting to fight god and more about doing it just to get your awful mother off your back.

And then there's the "villain," the cop in the white collar doesn't just kill people without a show first, torture, hand slicing offery, etc. And for all his swift brutal gestures Julian is not much of a fighter. The mom, and our own action film expectations, lead us to believe that once he's given the signal, Julian is going to be as lethal as Clint Eastwood in the climax of UNFORGIVEN. He's going to be like Popeye given the 101 proof spinach. But instead he gets beaten down... by a middle-aged balding Thai cop! That's like Sly Stallone losing a fight to Burgess Meredith, and Refn knows we'll feel that way and Julian's losing seems somehow losing on purpose, to piss off his mom, and us by extension, to subvert our expectations. Of course Ahab is going to lose in his battle with the white whale. That's kind of the whole point. The only time we can control our destiny is when we deliberately pick a fight with something we know will destroy us.


It seems absurd that she should be so eager for vengeance that she'd go up against a supernatural cop like this, but without her around to shake things up everyone would still be sitting where we left them, motionless, like a flock of ventriloquist dummies after their owners have all gone to bed. Refn's out to do more with his dolly than deliver a mere Asian revenge thriller; he's gone way past a Seijun Suzuki deconstruction like BRANDED TO KILL and exposed the hideous mom-hating apron string hacker inner child of Ryan Gosling's new Action Figure persona.

It helps to learn that Refn shot in chronological order and kind of winged it for large stretches, with Ryan Gosling and Thomas both having lots of input and collaboration in their characters outcomes, and genius DP Larry Smith (who worked with Refn on BRONSON) had a hand in things, too. There's a feeling that comes across when submitting to that kind of spontaneity, Godardesque perhaps, but more open-ended. In the moment, from second to second, but not going anywhere. It's like that stare of the Leone gunfighter with his hand over his gun has widened and lasts the entire film, and then no gun is drawn. And there are no hands to pull zee string trigger. The first credit at the end is to announce the film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is pretty steep company. The man is a god, and tellingly has much armless and/or handless characters, especially in Santa Sangre.

from top: Only God Forgives, Santa Sangre

All we know is Julian was pretty twisted before all this revenge got started but he quickly loses it thereafter, while watching his stripper cry jeweled tears behind the strings of a crystal bird house corner he hears some laughter at the other end of the club. They could be laughing at anything but Julian thinks they're laughing at him. next thing you know he's smashing a glass in one of their faces and dragging him around by his upper palette. Dude, that's paranoid!

From top: Only God Forgives,The Fighter, Only God Forgives, Buffalo 66, The Fighter

So paranoid in fact it reminds me of two other movies about bruised masculinity:BUFFALO 66, THE FIGHTER, and Refn's best movie so far, VALHALLA RISING (very similar ending).  Gosling's cobra stillness isn't as strange as it was in DRIVE, since everyone else is on the same slow down drug (that stuff they sell in DREDD, maybe), since everyone suffers from it, a Sergio Leone-like slow-mo Xanax meltdown ensues. The great music by Cliff Martinez even becomes Angelo Badalamenti at times (the music from TWIN PEAKS was supposedly what Refn cut the film too), linking it as a kind of sequel to THE FIGHTER if Mickey Ward and his ma set up shop down managing a fight club down in HK, and she left to do various deals, but flies in like an avenging angel when Dicky the crackhead is killed; meanwhile there's some BUFFALO 66 meets THE WRESTLER nonsense as Julian's favorite crying stripper, who gives the drowsiest lap dances in history, is supposed to dress and meet the mom. Interesting too that the dead son is named Billy, and as mom said had a huge, enormous cock, as we all know Vince Gallo does (see THE BROWN BUNNY, but feel free to FF through the middle hour),


And it's clear he and his brother both have some seriously warped misogyny going on with women as a result of the mom and as in BUFFALO 66, the tableaux like setups inside the strip club run by the former member of the Buffalo Bills, which is like a beautiful Lynchian circle of Hell where no one seems to move, anchored by a grotesque shirtless fat guy with a bow tie on, swilling booze and flanked by bouncing strippers. The Billy in both films skulks around the periphery of these slow motion druggy sex dens, forever denied the presumed pleasures of full psychic abandon, getting mad drunk and bouncing endless giggling ladies on your knee. Both have way too many mother issues to permit anything approaching even a feint at that sort of enjoyment. They can only abduct, kill, and be cruel to, women who seem weaker and more submissive somehow, to vicariously relive their primal scene in an attempt to rewritezzzzzz --eh? I nodded off.... or did I? Did I miss anything? No --still just staring into space.

But yeah, ONLY GOD is bound to disturb you if you have a bitchy withholding mom, or an incestuous one, a witch or a bitch, and if not, well, you're lying!

And as Freud would say, "I'm afraid we're out of time."

Ah laddies and lassies faire, are you going to be home with the folks, or someone else's? Will they be looking to you, the film guy or girl, to pick a film of Netflix once all the football and parades and food is done, and the young (under-7) children and pious old folks are safe in bed, and only the serious drinkers left coherent (read "serious" in that beautiful accent Claire Florani uses in those "All Hail the Drinkin' Man" commercials for Johnny Walker Black, the only reason to watch TV anymore - my praise here)?

Well, of course I got you covered. I had to keep my dad and brother stocked far into the night once upon a time, so I know the needed ingredients, such as fast pace, cheap shocks, fun attitude and no dull moments. You know, the type of stuff to keep them awake, and wherein if they drift off they can snap back because of an ensuing loud noise or mention of cocaine.

PS - These are all in linear order of drunkenness... so if you watch all ten in a row you may not understand what's going on by the end, aye, wait and grandmom will be up and about and giving you evil glances, aye, but there'll be enough strange violence to have ye covered.

(11/25) - Shoot - No time for ten
(11/27) - No time for two even... just...


GRABBERS (2012)
***1/3
It's an Irish horror-monster-comedy hybrid, a kind of LOCAL HERO / TIGHT LITTLE ISLAND / I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING bit of island whimsy. Drunker family members might scoff in the first bits, but the scenery is gorgeous and the leads most attractive and there's a great hook: the sea monsters that attack residents can't digest alcohol, 'tis toxic to their strange systems. So to avoid being eaten all the residents must drink, a lot. 

Dig that caption!

Dig that H.R. Giger-esque but not too much industrio-tentacledness

There's an adorable little lady tea-totaler ball-busting cop (Ruth Bradley), similar to how Holly Hunter used to be, pre-PIANO, but cuter even, and it's a rewarding watching her character get drunk for the first time, like a little two-fisted Gallic faerie, falling for the officer who decides to stay relatively sober just this once, even though it means having to stall the first kiss with this firebrand. Bradley is a wet-eyed mussy haired miracle in a big jeep stakeout, which is also craftily lit to make every rain drop in the deluge glisten with pregnant menace and/or romance. There's some taking time to capture lovely sunsets and the stark treeless beauty of the coastline. There's perhaps a few too many green and azure filters, overdoing it just a dram like we're watching the film through green sunglasses. But the whole third act is over one long night, filters gone, so 'tis no burden. And like all my favorite films, it ends at dawn.


AGE GROUPS: Unlike most monster films, the American ones for example, there's no guns on the island, so when monsters come they have to improvise with various devices of a non gunpowder-related nature. There's a knowing way of indulging and subverting monster movie cliches at the same time. Violence is mostly of the squishing and severed head variety, nothing the hip kids haven't seen in frog-cutting class, nothing sexual or traumatizing. And even old grandma can respect the chaste Fordian romance and Emerald hue.

A sub-phyla of both the Hanged Man and the Holy Fool, the Stoner is both wasting their life and found nirvana. As holy as the Dali Lama, as singular of purpose in their mission as the Pope, and as frozen at the yellow wood road's fork as Travis Bickle or the Scarecrow, cometh, in his fashion, the Stoner. As lost as their or any generation will allow, if we liberal arts undergraduated within the prescribed four years at college, we weren't one of them. Somehow that's the only marker I can find to determine the stoner vs. the merely stoned, because I of course made it out in four.

The stoner in Cabin in the Woods was our confirmation that this character was ready to step into the fray, to get a spotlight of his or her own, inspiring my 2012 thesis "A Stoner Shall Rise."

1. Shaggy-- Dude in Cabin in The Woods (2010)

The signifiers and signs of horror (masks, knives, corridors, POV steadicams, phone calls, Martin Balsam in PSYCHO-style unmaskings) are now so beyond cliche they don't even need to be tied to anything substantial having a stoned hipster gesture towards them with his thumb is enough. The hipster's thumb is the new black. CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012) has taken this idea farther than anyone yet this year, metatexually refracting the cliche of attractive high school seniors heading off to the woods for the weekend into Lovecraftian abstraction. And stoners are the inevitable fifth or seventh wheel in such youthful crews, and have been since obnoxious brother in the wheelchair in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1977) first appeared. But he was a goner, always a periphery, but now one shall rise among them. A stoner... shall rise... man and survive, or the past tense, survave, man. And instead of a fifth wheel, lo! The unicyclist.

Yes, horror has recognized in its target audience a common thread that runs counter to general programming, the insider realization that pot protects you from evil. All along we were right to be paranoid, man, and we need Mary Jane's plant power on our side. And as so often happens, this concept is literally true as recent studies show.

What is even more troubling is that the United States Government actually did a secret follow up-study on the Virginia findings, in the mid '90's. When it only served to confirm the results of the 1974 research, and showed that THC (one of the main active ingredient in cannabis – and the one the government loves to hate), when administered to mice, protected them against malignancy, true to form, our government attempted to bury the results. Fortunately, a draft copy of the study was leaked to the journal, AIDS Treatment News, and the media covered the story. An excellent article by Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of NORML, covers this part of our shameful history. (more)

I can't really reveal what happens in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS since 'holy shit! no way! Really? O man!' reactions are so essential, but I will quote Gregory Cwik's article on it in the current issue ofAcidemic's Journal of Film and Media: "..after Halloween was labeled a morality play, its character's seemingly punished for acting immorally, smoking became a death sentence for horror characters. Instead, Whedon's pothead uses his bong as a weapon against the enemy. Maybe its a sign of changes to come." Maybe it is, if we kill enough old people first. You know the types: maybe the pot ban is good for that as so many of them die from being unable to keep food down after chemo. They refuse to smoke the pot that might help with that since it's 'the devil's weed' when all along it was their only true cure. Who's the real devil here, pops? Part of growing up should be the realization you can't believe a word Uncle Sam tells you. If you refused to read that memo, well, Darwinian nature shall take its course. Win-win. If you can't agree maybe you could stand to be higher.

2. Brigitte Fonda - Jackie Brown (1997)
When Sam Jackson's indelible character Ordell Robie in JACKIE BROWN critiques his little surfer girl's habit of being high, he says that shit fucks with your ambition, sitting around smoking pot and watching TV weakens your ambition, she says "Not if your ambition is to smoke pot and watch TV" absolutely goddamn right, sister. I sympathize with a poor recently paroled ex-con Robert De Niro in the film, caught up in her surfer girl stoner orbit, languidly staying super baked, unable to think clearly through a golden calf and green herb combo. I say this because I too have been caught up in such orbits, and Ordell too reminds me of her boyfriend (the chick I'm referring to). Damn man, writing sloppy, it's soo nice, and I can because, dig, you know, the topic.

3. Cheech and Chong, of course
I've never been a big fan, for their humor is way too dumb for me, but it is of its era. They are the groundbreakers, for the likes of Harold and Kumar, films like Half-Baked and How High? And on and on. I'm trying to remember where I know the girl above on the far right from, what other movie where I totally fell in love with her, back in the 70s. Man, brain cells, am I right?

4. Reincarnated (2012) Snoop Lion
(top 3 pictures are also from this film)
A mind that is at once endearingly straight-forward and fathomlessly guiling, it takes a certain forceful naivete to decide to convert to Rastafarianism and drop the dog in your name, switching whole phyla of the kingdom, dig, from a dog to a cat, the sphynx, the smiling sphynx. He hard a childhood, and it's toughened him like teflon; he's split the atomic difference between the clown/serious guy dichotomoy; he's both Chuck D. and Flava, if you will (I'm old school to the point I stopped listening to rap when Dre's "Chronic" dropped. Course by then I'd even graduated from boomerang academy, if you feel me, "fam.'") The funniest part is that during his holy pilgrimage he goes to record in Jamaica's legendary Trojan studios and it's all white hipsters!

5. James Franco as Saul Silver in Pineapple Express
Right?

Saul: I wish I had a job like that. Where I could just sit around and smoke weed all day
Dale Denton: Hey you do have that job. You do sit around and smoke weed all day.
Saul: Hey you're right. Hey thanks man.


6. Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin - Flirting with Disaster
So much...

Mel: You made LSD? Is that what you're saying?
Richard Schlichting: We made LSD.
Mary Schlichting: Yes, yes. We made acid.
Richard Schlichting: And we gave it out to people who needed it. You know that there are hundreds of pharmaceutical executives in this country... that are selling drugs, FDA approved drugs.
Mary Schlichting: On the open market.
Richard Schlichting: Over the counter with incredible side...
Mary Schlichting: Horrible side effects.
Richard Schlichting: Terrible side effects. And these people are not in jail.
Mary Schlichting: They're not in prison anywhere.
Richard Schlichting: They're, they're, they're in country clubs or playing golf. They're having drinks.
Mary Schlichting: They're running the country, Mel.

Mainstream movies have become mash-ups now, the big budgets making an original thought too risky to have except in the abstract. So THE PURGE is HUNGER GAMES meets FUNNY GAMES divided by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT + HOSTEL, imagining a grim dystopian future that uses a mischief night-style no rules (no cops) bloody free-for-all as an excuse for wiping out the homeless, bringing population levels under control and boosting sales of home security systems. The annual Purge is a chance for all people to settle old grudges and/or kill for sport, reflecting a grim nihilistic world view that presumes all humans are really homicidal sadists at heart, and only the rich get to sit it out behind steel shutters. So far s good, but like so many good ideas before, the premise is all that's refreshing --it just boils down to a rich white yuppie family with a poor sweaty black man duct taped to a chair as their family conversation boils down to  bleeding heart idiot liberal kid lifting up the iron shutters (what idiot dad would even give him the password?), letting that sweat-glazed black man into their house to hide from a gaggle of masked preppie kids for whom the Purge is a chance for EYES WIDE SHUT-style maskies and lashings of the old ultra-violent. This explains why this black dude was in their tony neighborhood but rather than just ride off in search of other prey the masked kids lay siege to the house, wasting hours wandering around outside like a mix of Whit Stillman preppies, the British drunks in STRAW DOGS. And finally you're like oh brother, can't we FF to the final bloodletting? (We did).


In other words, despite a novel premise it all boils down to bleeding heart liberal arts majors reciting their theses to one another, the kind of stereotypically WASP bourgeois family that drinks red wine in fancy yuppie stemware for dinner, and the wife is a hot, willowy thing (Leana Headey) in perfectly-fitting white slacks, and there's always Ethan Hawke, desperate in his fashion to escape the gravitas-snatching banshees of his past indiscretion against Uma Thurman. And an interesting idea like this "Purge" - clearly well thought out in the beginning, right down to the nice touch of people putting blue flowers on their porches, the wise use of 'tick-tock momentum,' and shots of masked figures standing silently in the dark backgrounds stolen deftly from THE STRANGERS (without actually picking up on what made them work), are frittered away on Civics 101 Voight-Kampf empathy tests. In the similar and better FEAR, of course the house had steel shutters for no discernible reason (storms, I think, were cited) and that movie was ten times better for the presence of Mark Wahlberg (below, top) playing up the animus core of it all, rather than playing up the Marx 101. FEAR knew how to appeal to a girl audience one way and a boy audience the other, and never the two to cross except for bloodlust feuerwerken!


 It would have been lots better if, for example, one of the liberal family members had been all keen to do some killing of their own. We never even get a sense of any of them being at all bloodlust-ish even while killing in self defense. Instead the only character I found myself respecting was this kid above, played with eerie grace by a dude name of the above pictured Rhys Wakefield (he's Australian, no surprise considering his Heath Ledger-ish psycho flair). It all comes tumbling together in one of those besieged home invasion things that someone like Peckinpah, Hawks, or Carpenter could make sing. Ethan Hawke and writer-director James DeMonaco are probably trying to make an EL DORADO to go with their RIO BRAVO - ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake. Dude, you ain't never gonna touch the Carpenter, which means no Hawks neither! That 1978 original film was made on no money but oh, that awesome electronic score. Dududadah DUHdududadah Dududdadah DaDududaha.

THE PURGE is made on no money, too - made for three million it's earned 64 so far, and a sequel is naturally in the works. The only reason I even rented it was I'd gotten it mixed up with YOU'RE NEXT, but I didn't even like it when it was called THE STRANGERS, on which both films are roughly based (see "A Couple of Bagheads") and that's why you never let a stranger in your house, without first looking it up on imdb.


Then there's the thing with the new THOR movie, THE DARK WORLD (2013). I was excited to see Natalie Portman again as she and Chris Hemsworth had great chemistry in the first film, but now both seem coated in a CGI airbrushed patina and a veil of hangover, as if all the special Fx swamped their fire, leaving it up to Kat Dennings to supply all the human interest and witty patter. She steals all her scenes and thank god because otherwise this THOR would be as cold and inhuman as a RESIDENT EVIL joint. The other saving grace is the complex  currents of fraternal bonding and jealousy between trickster archetype Loki (Tom Hiddleston, who brings a dash of Sex Pistol snarl to his impeccably droll sarcasm) and Thor. Matching Loki's sulky snark with love, fraternal affection, and outright bullying, Hemsworth wakes up in their shared scenes and so does the movie.


Alas, Dennings and Hiddleston aren't around nearly enough, there's way too many other Snapple bottles in the air. Acting in all that blue screen must be like wading through a swamp to try and get at any real characterization. In the first film (it made my top ten!), director Kenneth Branagh kept the Shakespeare underpinnings alive and resonant below the CGI, but Alan Taylor-James Gunn bury it deep. I may have felt this way because I was seeing it in a Harrisburg multiplex over the break, my girl next to me sighing in disgust every time a cliche passed the screen, and the theater too hot for comfort, and it started after being beaten to death with sublimated US Army recruitment ads buried in the onslaught of action previews, including Branagh's new directorial job, JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT.


I'll confess I've been a big fan of these Marvel films overall: they reward multiple viewings and never take themselves too seriously, unlike, say, Batman and Superman over at DC. Marvel scripts are often things of beauty, boiling vast prequels of exposition down to a few smatterings of hipster dialogue and the heroes have flaws like narcissism, drinking, insecurity, anger issues. That said, THOR: THE DARK WORLD lapses at times into DC self-importance and oh man are those bad guys, the s -- familiar. Not only do they look like tie-fighters and storm troopers with masks that make them look like Elvin Orc Klingon Mordor Palpatine Voldemorts, they drive zippy tie-fighters and wear masks that make them seem straight of some J-Horror like ONE MISSED CALL. Asgard meanwhile looks so much like Mongo in the 1980 FLASH GORDON that when it's zippy force field goes up you think damn, shit must be intentional. These "Dark Elves" only have one saving grace, their total devotion to wiping out all life in all seven dimensions, reminding me a lot of me when I'm super cranky and hung over and trying to take a nap while kids scream outside my window and trucks back up beep beep beep beep and car alarms go off all up and down 7th Avenue for no reason.

From top: Emerald City, Asgard, Mongo

Continuing the been-there-done-that, a big green-tinted scene on a dark ashen planet similarly recalls PROMETHEUS and the later POTTER films, but the finale, which involves a big battle that rages across numerous dimensions and planets via holes in the aligned realms, is so great that I was, for a moment, brought giddily back to the Jack Kirby drawn and Stan Lee scripted heights of Marvel's great early era!

Another Green World: from top: Prometheus, Dark World, Potter, Absentia

Speaking of dark worlds, ABSENTIA (2010). Katie Parker and Courtney Bell are two sisters, one of whom is in the process of declaring her husband dead after seven long years in the titular legal limbo; the younger one (Parker) comes to help with the pregnancy, this after some trouble with drugs and now she's allegedly clean. She jogs in the morning and goes through a mysterious tunnel right next to the house where weird things keep happening. Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, but the movie gets the monster right, as in we barely ever see it. So the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on while I was writing the first part of this post, and just listening to the great rapport between the sisters lured me in. I was alone and it was getting dark, and the film ingeniously taps into the fear of both, for me, the way only BLAIR WITCH has done before.


There are a certain type of person who sees a ghost and thinks they saw a ghost and there's a type of person who, like me, sees a ghost and figures he's hallucinating. I might have seen a dozen real ghosts by now and just cited flashbacks and/or a bad flu or lack of sleep or too much of it, and this girl's therapist has her believing she's just stressed so seeing her missing husband everywhere. Maybe he is. Maybe there's some interdimensional portal that troll insect monsters are coming through, abducting humans for whatever reason, and occasionally returning but the cops can't write that up in their report.

The fear of the unknown plus the sisterly rapport missing from most interactions in THE PURGE or other horror films, combines to deliver a slow simmer anxiety. Bell has ingenious ways with seeing her missing husband and passing it off as a hallucination which makes for some interesting moments, and Parker has this real life body language and slow simmering beauty - you barely notice her at first and then suddenly wham, you're in love with her. ABSENTIA is the same way. It doesn't really ape any horror movie that came before it. If anything it reminded me SEX LIES AND VIDEOTAPE, they have a similar small human scale, naturalistic low-key lighting and actorly rapport, a story that snaps shut behind you, trips to lawyer offices that underscore the legal system's inability to protect the present from the darkness, and vaguely ominous two chord score making the less-is-more argument so intensely it gave me a chill right down to the bone.


 I was so unnerved actually, after the end, the I had to fall back on my DVD of the 1957 classic, THE BEGINNING OF THE END right afterwards, to get some grounding. Nothing says you're safe and sound quite like watching Peter Graves shooting a machine gun at rear projected grasshopper. In 50's monster movies, at least, seeing is never the same as believing, and thank gods.

Perhaps its forgotten status is due to only one dog-eared 16 mm source print seemingly in circulation, from which all the public domain DVDs doth spring, or from the stodgy pacing and oversize performances, or maybe it’s just the highly unusual mixture of comic and dramatic/horror elements in the film. Directed by Archie Mayo, the 1931 SVENGALI seems right at home alongside similar early sound horror classics like FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA and THE BAT WHISPERS, even though it’s horror elements come and go in the midst of romance, drama, and comedy. The plot involves hand-out hungry, pointy-bearded, uber-manipulative music teacher of the title (John Barrymore) discovering a “mouth with a roof like the dome of the Parthenon” in Trilby (Marian Marsh), a model who hangs out at the expressionistic garret of artists Taffy (Lumsden Hare), the Laird (Donald Crisp) and naïve young Billie (Bramwell Fletcher). Finding out his would-be protégé suffers from headaches, Svengali “cures” her using hypnotism, ensnaring her to his will in the process. The naive Billie thinks he'd rather have her suffer the headaches than be cured that way --what a patriarchal little jackass! It's not up to him whether or not Trilby should suffer from headaches or be permitted respite. No wonder he couldn't handle more than a few scenes in THE MUMMY (1932) before turning into a blubbering neurotic pool of nerves. He seems to be cast in things mainly so David Manners seem earthy and robust.


Based on 1894 George L. Dumaurier novel, Trilby, the film contains a subtext of anti-semitism: Barrymore is in his “dirty Jew” makeup, and tattered rags for clothes; he avoids water and never bathes, so Taffy and company feel it necessary to force him, fully clothed, into a bath. Soon he's stealing food, money, women, and whatever else he can from the good-natured artists and when the radiant, blonde Marian Marsh drops by their pad he answers the door in Taffy's finest duds, falling for her instantly. Who could resist? Wearing a man's army coat, with epaulets, she looks like she just snuck out of bed with one of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts club band and stole his jacket, just as Svengali has stolen Taffy's. Their rapport is great because there's more than just hypnotist and subject, lecher and sweet young thing (Marsh was 17 at the time).


Soon he's held under his lustful, lovelorn sway can seem like some then-still-budding Nazi movement propaganda dream come true, but there is also a touching, weird chemistry between them. Marsh (then just 18-years old) radiates modern cool in all her non-trance scenes and her initial appearance, with her sexy demure aura, those epaulets and long straight blonde hair with bangs, makes her seem like the source for all the Marianne Faithfuls, Nicos, and Francoise Hardys of the mod world to come. Barrymore brings his own bag of comic tics, swaggers and pauses to his strange role, and together the pair seem light years beyond the wooden and/or one-dimensional characters that surround them. Taffy, the Laird, and Bille live comfortably and pursue art more as a hobby, as the hip thing to do in Paris. But Trilby and Svengali don't have trust funds. They depend on their respective charms, one literal in the sense of spells. Certainly Svengali is much more sympathetic than prudish Billie, who wins Trilby’s love only to flee in horror when he stumbles on her modeling nude.


The real show-stealer here, however, is not Barrymore or Marsh, but art director Anton Grot, whose expressionistic sets and impossibly wide doors linger in the mind like a dream. The big horror highlight of the film is all his, an incredible tracking shot that starts with the white glow of Svengali’s eyes and then backs out over the roofs of a crazy miniature Paris and slowly makes its way into Trilby’s boudoir. Occurring about halfway through the film, it signifies a drastic dip from the relatively innocuous stuff that has gone on before. Hypnotism is one thing but this is remote viewing, telepathy, a whole new ballgame, and there's not another shot like it anywhere.



From then on things pick up for this rough and tumble pair. Trilby heads to the Seine to throw herself in as was the style of the time for fallen, broke women, all because of Billie (Svengali happens to know all the guys she's slept with in the past, too) and his prudish rejection. This is the part that gets me madder than anything else. Fuck Billee and his judgmental scowl. Even so, Svengali rescues her and just fakes her Seine jump (the way he didn't with his previous "student") and the next time we see them she's adorned in furs and jewels and he's got a dandy white tux. But she's a zombie by this point, and all his seductions end up being just "old Svengali talking to himself again." It's sad, it's the crushing reality at the core of May-December relationships; for the older person every new day brings a wider gulf as death roars up to claim you and meanwhile young Turks skulk around in the periphery of your territory, sizing you up and waiting for their chance to strike. Fuck 'em , I say! I made it, ma! Top of the Parthenon! But now nowhere to go but up in smoke.

-------------------

There seems to be only one existing print of this film. The best transfer I've seen so far is the old Roan DVD, with deep blacks, and more detail visible in the sets than I saw in my old VHS dupe, but also a fine layer of grain, and lots of film blemishes, lines, acid marks visible throughout, which to me is part of the charm. It's a constant companion in my little go bag of emergency DVDs, all that great Anton Grot expressionism, the unusual tone (is Svengali a bad guy ala Dracula, just a romantic clown ala Lon Chaney or comic relief ala Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY? There is no answer... only the lovely hiss of the film going through the sprockets and the gorgeous playful innocence--and occasionally lustful knowingness of Marian Marsh adding an ephemeral ache we wouldn't really experience for another actress until maybe... Heather Graham?



(this is expanded from an old review I wrote for Scarlet Street magazine back in 2002)

When it comes to holiday entertainment, nothing tops the "heroin-smuggling nuns" episode of the BIONIC WOMAN that played Xmas eve back in the 70s and has never been seen again. But we must settle. Mom settles for CHRISTMAS STORY marathon on TNT ("you kids loved that movie as kids, remember?" My brother and I roll our eyes since we endured high school with co-star Scottie Schwartz). My brother Fred likes BADDER SANTA but that kid grosses me out. I vote for pagan solstice celebration of THE WICKER MAN! There's no kid at all in that, until the end and her name's Rowan, which is badass. We settle, always, for them all...

Bridgewater-Raritan HS's Scourge

We always also wind up seeing SCROOGED and just stop watching once Bill Murray starts his lengthy rant about how we should all sing soul music together because he's finally learned the meaning of Christmas. And in the film I'm going to recommend this year, we have a dad who gives Bill Murray's self-righteous Scrooge a run for his abundance of money as far as Münchausen-by-proxy syndrome, the Xmas version, which I call Coal and Switches Syndrome: it's that thing where an egotistical workaholic dad proceeds to create pointless disasters wherein Xmas is almost canceled, all so he can race in at the 11th hour and save it. Beside Murray's Scrooge, there's Nic Cage in The FAMILY MAN (2000) and Arnold Schwarzenegger in JINGLE ALL DER WAY (1996).


And here's a thing about Hollywood's insistence on putting kids in the center of kids' movies:  I've never known a kid who likes seeing other kids in movies. As kids we want to see adults doing the things we imagine ourselves doing as adults, that's why we loved STAR WARS and JAWS. If kids could be anything they wanted, more than anything they'd want to be old enough to move out. They don't ever imagine themselves as kids. There wasn't a single kid in STAR WARS because Lucas understood this (but then forgot it).  Boys especially want to see themselves as men, not as children, misunderstanding this fundamental rule of viewer identification processes led to the idiotic decision to create sidekicks like Robin and Superboy and all those movies where we don't just see what a kid would imagine, but a kid imagining it.

I mention all this because Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of those men children like to identify themselves as. His overly muscular body is almost a burlesque of how we confused muscles with fighting ability. We love his accent and his straightforward way with a catch phrase. Here Arnold is just an ordinary gym owner/personal trainer and largely absentee father, avoiding his son's karate performance subconsciously or not it would mean some other athlete getting the applause. His playing an average suburban dad in JINGLE ALL THE WAY (1996) makes him suspect, he's like a superhero alter-ego with no superhero to turn into. Arnold needs to realize he is not, and has never been, an average dad, not in our minds. In the symbolic structure of the film, though, this is a crime tantamount to neglect and he must atone by finding an unavailable/sold out super hero action figure, which is itself a burlesque of his impotent male (child) rage. Arnold wants to be the action figure, the superhero, but such a character is defined by his absence and in the guilt trip nanny state PC 90's this is tantamount to neglect, so he has to bow down to a plastic imitation because his son prefers the totemic phallic signifier. It's a bit like Jesus being told he's not a good messiah unless he buys all his disciples Christmas presents, on his own birthday.  

There are hints of turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself here (which Guy Debord dubbed détournement - often expressed via subversive graffiti on advertising or re-word ballooning comic strips), the film digs a canal into the rotting roots of the American Xmas tooth, only to fill it at the last minute with items available for purchase in the lobby. Like any good capitalist product, JINGLE knows how to incorporate its critique against itself within itself.

One way Arnold tries to become the action figure is through this CSS I've mentioned. He ignores his secretary's notes that he needs to go to his kid's karate practice, so that he can speed down the emergency lane to get there late through a terrible traffic jam; he combs through every toy story in town on Xmas Eve only to be laughed out of the stores. Before it's all over he will trash a department store, throw a fellow dad into a toy display, smash up the DJ booth of an innocent local radio station, push and shove old ladies and children, resist arrest, trash a kid's jungle gym in the mall, willfully commit various traffic violations, impersonate an officer, terrify innocent pedestrians, break into his neighbor's house, punch out his neighbor's reindeer and inadvertently interfere with a bust on a bootleg toy factory (run by schemers dressed as elves and Santas in the film's funniest bit).  In short he is the worst thing about American foreign policy, the idea that America's needs and anxieties are every other country's responsibility and that normal rules don't apply to it when its emotions are aroused. It's the kind of willing myopia we first saw first perhaps in ALLY MCBEAL and global warming summits and though Clinton was in office at the time JINGLE came out, it's very very George Bush Sr. It was the era of drowning men, Michael Douglas in FALLING DOWN (1993) and so forth.


I imagine we're supposed to sympathize with this amok dad, but the only ones who could possibly relate are the Hollywood elite who aren't off their cell phones more than a few minutes a year, and would be as dumbstruck as Arnold if they suddenly had to do their own Christmas shopping. It would be believable if Arnold was a toy come to life, fresh out of the box, believing his own cover story, like a Buzz Lightyear or post-Recall Quaid, but he's supposed to have been present at this family suburban house since you know, before his kid was even born.


When all his feigned ignorance and willful bull-in-a-china-shop methods fail, Arnold eventually solves it all by becoming the real life version of toy, by positing himself as the kind of father who's not afraid to use a jet pack to trash an African American family's living room as they're sitting down for Xmas eve dinner, praying, Arnold missing their heads for their heads are lowered in prayer, the only mention of God or Jesus anywhere in the film. All this to prevent another African American from stealing the toy he's (unfairly) awarded to his own son by taking over a costume he's not been authorized to wear, and endangering the lives of pedestrians through unauthorized jet pack usage. Needless to say, this was before 9/11 and now seems less comical and more unnerving. We don't need satires and jet packs any more to point out the monstrosity of consumer-driven Xmas, just look at this:


Who is to blame for this madness?

1) TOY MARKETING STRATEGIES: Perhaps it makes sense from a PR standpoint for toy companies to deliberately limit production on certain popular toys to drive the demand up, but in the scheme of consumerist reality there's a real harm done in a country like America where everyone's self-worth as a parent hinges on providing their child with whatever they 'wish' for. There's no reason that in the most productive country in the world (China) any demand for a molded piece of plastic shouldn't be met. (in America). Movies themselves do this all the time. Disney lets their classic titles go "into the vault" to drive up resale value and ensure higher sales during releases / promotions, and certain rarefied cult director iconoclasts insist on releasing their own films on their own label, like David Lynch, Russ Meyer, ensuring the price never gets too low and avoiding middleman and PR fees. But kids don't understand supply and demand, they only know that if they don't get the toy they want, there is no Santa, and so end up a derelict drug addict.

2) MEASURING UP ANXIETIES: I don't have kids so I don't quite understand, but from movies like JINGLE I glean a certain fear of measuring up to some paternal ideal that, to be honest, I don't remember seeing when I was a kid in the 70's. Parents looked after their own good time first (as on MAD MEN) and got us some, not all, presents we wanted. In general we were much more bored than kids today, we had no internet or cell phones, etc, but in knowing our father didn't need us to feel validated we at least felt secure. We could hate him with all our might for not giving us a certain toy, but he made sure the electricity stayed on, and our beds were warm and there, ready for sleeping in, right where we last left them. Arnold's kid might get the toy he wanted but pays for the luxury with a great deal of collateral anxiety. That toy might have cost him his bed, or college fund. If the son says he wants a jet ski, the next day one might be waiting in the driveway, but then the kid feels guilty because he sees dad's car is missing, sold to pay for the jet ski. It's a "be careful what you wish for" scenario. The indulgent yet largely absent father figure granting consumer good wishes at the cost of security and genuine nurturing, using money the way moviegoers use their coats to hold their place while they go get popcorn. What the kid needs is a good pack leader, what he gets is a needy space cadet.


3) CAESAR MILAN: The "pack leader," is a Dog Whisperer term. If you don't assert your dominance your dog assumes you are weak and thus takes over as pack leader, which makes it a nervous wreck. Kids with needy parents wind up in the same position. Adults are able to navigate the social order and assess dangers far better than dogs or children. But if they are too weak-willed to be stern and authoritarian when need be, then the children or dogs feel, however unconsciously, that they have to step in. This is why the red states are so unnerved when Obama bows and scrapes before other dignitaries; they feel they have to be America's pack leader. They know that if a leader is too skittish to make big tough unpopular decisions, if he is dependent on constant validation and says anything that will win him popularity even if its at the cost of bankrupting the country, then we all become as nervous as that skittish dog pack leader.

Arnold is just such a weak leader, illustrated perfectly when he calls his wife to tell her his car is totaled in pursuit of the doll, and Hartman answers the phone saying he's eating Arnold's wife's cookies while she takes a shower. Arnold shouts into the phone: "Put that cookie down! Now!" It's gone on to become quite the meme and gives Arnold the quid pro quo revenge excuse he needs to Grinch up Phil's tree :


While we're expected to root for Arnold it's actually Sinbad who is the most complex and the only one worthy of sympathy: first he's the only one at the store who doesn't sneer at Arnold's confusion over the absence of Turbo Men, and he offers to join forces, an offer which Arnold coldly rejects. As we're treated to then-relatively unusual sights like people macing and tazing each other over X-Boxes at the department store, what's most amazing and sad is how completely oblivious Arnold is to the idea that he is not the only dad in the world who waited too long and is now paying capitalism's harshest price for tardiness. He genuinely believes it's his right as an American dad to use excessive force in pursuit of his individual needs. Even having a coffee with Sinbad, his only friend, Arnold shoves him aside to be the first caller into a radio station then seems genuinely shocked and hurt when Sinbad does the same to him.


But I adore that Arnold shares a beer with the reindeer he knocked out the previous shot, his moment of alleged redemption, making up for decades of bad blood between him and the animal kingdom from when he drunkenly punched out a camel in CONAN. And even if it skirts around being a total anticonsumerist parable, the film brutally satirizes the consumer mindset and the father-in-crisis while endorsing them completely, that's the unique problem only noticeable in a land like the US, which has thrived on its shockingly free press, namely that once an institution incorporates its own critique, nulling all criticism by depicting the critic criticizing it, of having the thing itself critique its own thinghood. There's nothing left to say because it's already been said, like the kid who punches himself out so the bully doesn't get him first. Arnold wouldn't know about that, because he can only fight big guys and have it be fair....just like Rock Hudson has to wait until the end of GIANT before he finally finds someone in his same height and weight class.


The point is, fatherhood's integrity takes a bullet in the name of commercial fetishization and makes us wonder: who is it that thinks kids most want to see parents suffering indignities on their behalf? Arnold's kid is an emotional blackmailer. He NEEDS to have his father not get him the action figure, to feel that terrible sting and get over it. But this is a kid's movie, a rampant unrestrained Id, and kids don't understand that since America consumes 95% of the world's resources we shouldn't whine like Oliver if we can't have some more. And we shouldn't condone emotional blackmail. In JINGLE, adults like Arnold are not avatars of how boys want to imagine themselves. They are stooges, cautionary tales, figures of revenge. Comical, neutered, pleading, desperate, pissing themselves in vain attempts to win their children's fickle favor. Ideally, these kids should be sickened by this horrible reversal. A kid trying to impress his father is natural and helps his growth. A father trying to impress a kid is unnatural and stunts the world. But this is the new world, a new man. This is what feminism, the nanny state, equal rights, maternity leave, and anti-smoking legislation hath wrought. A very handicapped man once said "we let 'em smoke, vote and drive, even put 'em in pants! And what do ya get? Russian roulette on the highway, a Democrat in the White House, you can't even tell male from female.... unless you meet 'em head on." That old man was played by Stuart Lancaster, and the movie was the Russ Meyer's 1965's FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL! It's currently out of print, but if ever there was an Xmas movie worth running someone over for... RIP Haji... you were some kind of a woman.

Everyone heaped so much abuse on Jan de Bont's HAUNTING remake when it first came out that I held off seeing it... until now... that's on Netflix... streaming in glorious color, widescreen and HD. And boy am I mad. I could have been watching this film every day for years! Is it terrible? Lil bit. But it's also just what I need, what America needs, what the world needs, on a cold rainy December Monday night after work when you kind of hate life for making you so cranky and your feet hurt and the heater's spewing out weird mold smells, and the cat's harassing you for more food when you just fed her. You need to take a shower but the thought of touching a faucet handle makes you recoil as if its initial coldness will burn you skin. On and on, with no end in sight. But then... HAUNTING. Life is good again.

Sure the CGI is super uncool, but so what? It was 1999 and the ghosts are all, uh, supposed to look like Han Solo in a deep freeze, or the POLAR EXPRESS passengers in a melting heat. They're part of the CGI-rococo conceptual design, sculptures come to life, like clay Orson Welles in HEAVENLY CREATURES (left). It's not supposed to a turgid white elephant downer... it's supposed to reverse your downward spiral through camera trickery... it's not great, and I don't want it to be. And that's why it's better than the original, because it's not trying to be. It's not even trying to be better than the original HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. It's just trying to make it to 90 minutes so it can roll credits before some new seismic shift of tone takes place.

So I guess that's what I mean by "better." I can admire the 1963 HAUNTING only from behind a velvet rope but its bid for artistic credence makes it painfully dry in spots. The remake is a vibrant good-bad ghost film with a beautiful sprawling, dark-colored sets, an attractive cast in dark-colored clothes who decide (most of them) to try and play off each other in cute little bits of darkly scanned business, and then Lili Taylor clobbers a griffin with a shovel. Life can be beautiful.


In the end of course it's taste preference in cast and color schemes, here the entire look of the film seems created to bring out the dark lushness of Catherine Zeta Jones and haunting limpid pool peepers and alabaster face of Lili Taylor. As with the original however, the women are great and the men are barely adequate: Owen Wilson tries to pass his weak Reid Fleming World's Toughest Milkman-esque smile off as genuine and though Jones sees right through it, she doesn't snap his head off but treats him like her younger brother's puberty-hitting friend who keeps trying to find excuses to hang out in her room. I felt Manny Farber termites n sme of their nervous politeness and campfire bonding, the way the huge spaces of the house make them value each other as proof the scenery hasn't swallowed them rather than vice versa.


Believe it or not it's actually Liam Neeson who comes off the worst, like he's never worked with CGI before! Bitch, what about Star Wars? Oh yeah, he sleep-acted through that too. Don't get me wrong, I feel bad for actors forced to pretend with all their might that a ping-pong ball-covered boom stand is a lizard mutant or whatever, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. There's a typically hilarious CGI moment near the end when Liam has a giant canopy bed mouth hovering over his back fixing to stab him with its poles and his reaction is more like a man hearing the phone ring and getting up to go answer it. I remember the moment I knew the PHANTOM MENACE was going to suck was when he has his first conversation with Jar-Jar and he's just staring blankly over at this bizarre ridiculous muppet - a Rastafarian muppet version of my old accident prone disaster of a roommate Neil - like he's standing in line at a post office. Oh Liam, is that your "I am listening" face?


No matter: the three other actors actually make the most of their scenes of interaction, especially early on in the film. Once the dismal opening scenes of greedy relatives are over and Taylor is off in the crazy Bell Jar / Hill House on Haunted Hill or whatever, she comes alive, and the house itself is a five alarm pisser. Floor to ceiling, soup to knots, the ornate architectural style is so vividly and gorgeously unified that I was totally turned on and totally creeped out at the same time. I generally hate that kind of rococo style, cherubs don't creep me out in a good way but in a suffocating grandma doily under the candy dish way, but I loved the look of this house, the black and blood is my whole color scheme and the way it beautifully compliments whatever (Jones especially) happens to be wearing.


Robert Wise, director of the original is, let's face it, a talented journeyman who can direct anything well, and occasionally he gets inspired, as in parts of WEST SIDE STORY. But he can also get so wrapped up in keeping things classy he forgets to be exciting. I love 50s sci fi and have seen Hawks' original THING a hundred times but have only seen Wise's DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL twice. Sure it's well crafted and intellectual but damn is it preachy. I'd rather ride with the wrong side that stand around arguing with the right. Unless you're a nuclear disarmament specialist, watching it is like getting yelled at for a crime you didn't commit. But oh it's iconic, Gort and all that. Yeah, what does Gort do, just stop other people from doing things. He's strictly  reactive. That's kind of Wise's style (most of the time, not all the time). Like DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, his HAUNTING is considered one of the definitive classics of the genre. Yeah but maybe it's not a ghost story at all and is just in Julie Harris's mind, and she's a great actress but I never much cared about what's going on in her mind. She was so miscast in EAST OF EDEN I still bear a grudge, and she seems to be a compendium of asexual old maid neuroses to the point she seldom comes alive, for me. I love Lili Taylor though and Jan de Bont gives her eyes a steady twinkle - her emotions are always so on her sleeve that we're never sure just how much of what's going on in our minds is due to her own psychic projection or ours. Not only do I want to know what's on Taylor's mind, I feel like I do - the window is wide open. Even when she's holding back she's like a cat that just swallowed a canary of a role and isn't afraid to let a few feathers fall out of her mouth... Harris would just waft in with one of the feathers in her arms, cradling it like she thinks its her child, the one who drowned as an infant in the bath and everyone said was her fault but you don't find that out until the "shocking" tea time denouement.


Winning an Oscar for her work in CHICAGO perhaps took her above consideration for tossaway matinee nonsense like THE HAUNTING, but here is Catherine Zeta at her sexy best, showing why an old reprobate Mike Douglas would drop everything he was doing to carry her away like an ADVENTURELAND Ice King. Her mind-bending hotness includes: a face born to wear make-up, great taste in color schemes to bring out that raven hair, and a habit of slinking around in her body like a luxuriant demon on a 24 hour pass. And she's a great scene player, she needs good actors to be good herself, but she's also fun riding up on mediocre ones, like when she connects with Owen Wilson, imitating his every last note with wry eye rolls, like he's a little brother type she knows just how to tease into a Renfield. With sweet and sacred Lili, though, she connects in a kind of patient slow burn lesbian faux-outing that doesn't have to go anywhere to be foxy.

And Owen Wilson is so much better than Russ Tamblyn in the original, who's such a one-note greedhead it gets on my nerves. If you listen closely  you'll realize the screenwriter wanted to make sure we knew Tamblyn's rich scion is only here to check the place out as haunted or not before he sells it (he's the heir).  Everything he says has to do with how much he could get for this or that as if everyone around him is all excited for him to be richer than he already is. Yo, Tamblyn! We get it, you're a whiny little Bowery Boyish pisher determined to play a character even more one-track greedy than old Walt in CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Now let it go, bro. Maybe think of something else, just once.


No there's only one reason to watch the 1963 HAUNTING and its foxy lesbian psychic Claire Bloom, especially in the sexy bed scene with Harris. But there are three reasons to see the 1999 edition: the gorgeous interior sets (the unique attempts to make the house seem alive are very Lacanian, Zizek would approve), and the two ladies. The two men are annoyingly smug in both, though Richard Johnson as the doctor isn't quite as dry and condescending as Neeson, he's also less complex. Sure sure sure, who am I to dare declare the 1963 HAUNTING overrated and as drab as a sunny afternoon wasted watching SOUND OF MUSIC in the school auditorium on the last day of class? I'm just a man who escaped that auditorium. Who went to the bathroom and never came back. And now I'm standing before Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lili Taylor as they run hand-in-hand through wild dark sets, and feeling the grueling slog of that escape finally melt off me, as if from a slug of laudanum with a Jaeger chaser. mmmmm--dark.

The things that win Oscars checklist:

1. Jews / Nazi persecutors

2. Old people with a kooky twinkle in their eye but a sadness too for their lost spouses.

3. A meticulous recreation of an old movie studio (c. 20's-50's).


4. A-list actor/s playing an iconic movie maker, star, or author from an earlier era.


5. An oppressed person with a love of reading or being read to, a reverence for the printed word.


6. Someone (a child or man-child) letting their imagination soar - so we see them imagining as well as what they imagine or dream.

7. Movie-making equated with some sort of divine gift from talented dreamers to a humbled, grateful world.

8. Decades-spanning historical sweep (with stars in old age make-up)


9.  Historical detail/ specific moment in history / injustice: political or social


10. Humble black folks caring/guiding white people


11. Unrequited / doomed love / reticent moping / guilt - one person lost in their alienated mindset

12. Bourgeois memoir / adaptation of classic novel with literary pedigree


13. Eccentric family memoir / celebration of the "little" people (homecomings - holidays, funerals)

AND THE NOMINEES WILL BE:

Saving Mr. Banks - 2,3,4,5,7,9,11,12
The Book Thief - 1, 2, 5, 11
American Hustle - 9, 12
Secret Life of Walter Mitty - 5, 6, 11
The Butler - 8, 9, 10, 11
Wolf of Wall Street -9, 11
Great Gatsby - 9, 11, 12
Inside Llewyn Davis - 9, 8, 7, 11,12
Gravity - 11, 6, 7
August: Osage County - 13, 12, 11, 8, 5
Nebraska - 13, 11, 2, 6
12 Years a Slave - 12, 5, 8
Blue Jasmine - 13, 12 (all Woody is #12), 11, 2
Labor Day - 11, 13, 9, 6, 5, 2, 1
The Invisible Woman - 13, 12, 11, 8, 6, 5, 2
------------------------- --------------------
Predicted Winner: Llewellyn Davis, Gravity or 12 Years a Slave

PS - I haven't seen very many of these, so I may be off in some of the elements. Forgive me... And of course, forgive me if I sound jaded. I'm sure most of these films are very well made, have something deep to say, and court Oscar only as an afterthought. Why not?

As I wrote back in Feb (Salieri Shades), the Oscar usually goes to a cool, termite art film after two bourgeois self-congratulatory "you artists of Hollywood deserve a hand" style prestige pics. The last non-bourgeois winner was The Hurt Locker in 2009, so Oscar is overdue. Hence I predict Gravity, 12 Years a Slave or Inside Llewyn Davis - which are all excused from directly courting Oscar via their auteurs' outsider statuses.

Not to be toooo cynical but I think the Village Voice film critics poll fits into this as well - albeit en verso:

Things that win Village Voice Critics Poll:

1. Youth, disaffected, alienated, mumbling, unemployed - in NYC or LA
2. By an Indie Auteur, established (in the last 20 years)
3. Groundbreaking something or other
4. Experimental edge, editing or film stock
5. Social issues: abortion, divorce, street hustling
6. Contempt for first world society
7. Death
8. Kitchen Sink Realism / Socialism

Her - 1,2,3,4,6
Frances Ha  - 1,2,4,6,7, 8
Inside Llewyn Davis  1,2,5,6,8
Gravity - 3, 4, 7
Before Midnight - 2,3,4, 5,6
Don Jon - 1,2,4,8,5
Upstream Color  - 8,7,6,5,4,
Blue is the Warmest Color -1,2,3,4,6
The Act of Killing -3,4,5,7, 8

Blue is the Warmest Color will never be nominated for Oscar, though. The Academy is notoriously unkind towards the female orgasm

Trying to tell you of this year's favorites, mine, you understand, has nearly destroyed me but here it is, subject to never change. It's not some other guy's list, one that dutifully lauds INSIDE LLEWYN as a masterpiece. Not that I'm not glad the brothers Coen have found a muse in T-Bone Burnett and made themselves a NashvilleSkyline of a MacDougal Street freak-out but I liked it better when it was called O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU and everyone hated it. And 12 YEARS A SLAVE is I'm sure really great, but I'm still recovering from DJANGO and that at least had catharsis and so forth. Forget about that stuff. Films in this list fit the acidemic parameter: horror, comedy, subversion. Films in this list resolve lingering burdens on my cinematic, some are nowhere near in the same league as HER or SLAVE or GRAVITY or even CAPTAIN PHILLIPS. But this site isn't Leonard Maltin. Why would it want to be? Do you know he only gave DJANGO a **1/2? As the Young Ones would say, what a complete bastard.


Oh and FRANCES HA... I love the director and the star, and I love black and white, so why is this movie so unbearable? Is it that the writer doesn't know his subject or that the subject doesn't know itself? There's no reason to believe girls in the city are this air headed and vapid. I've met them and some are vapid as hell but most of them are total sharpies, not these crumpled bags blowing in the leafless trees. Why make a movie about such unrealistic idlers? They would never last a month in NYC. And the black and white photography looks for the most part godawful though the photos like the one above are gorgeous so it might be the transfer. But I saw it on Criterion blu-ray so that can't be it.  Maybe I'm wrong about FRANCES HA. People loved JUNO and I hate that film too, yet love Ellen Page and love JENNIFER'S BODY. Go figure. But as one critic who hates piety and second thought morality in otherwise badass films, a genuine subversive influence like Harmony Korine or David Lynch is an automatic in. They are the sole chroniclers of the myriad ways drugs and dreams and reality can collapse into one another to create cinema, and that dreams of drugs and violence can collapse into abstract video imagery, such the way Marion Crane collapses down the drain, or Bill Pullman collapses into the son of a Nolte in LOST HIGHWAY.


I focused as much as I could on films that aren't on anyone else's list, rescuing my personal favorites without regard to 'importance.' I am taking a cue from Danny McBride's burn-the-money performance of the year as himself in THIS IS THE END and just telling the truth about what I enjoyed the most. Rather than some good safe white elephant of a film or a smutty feel-bad historical repressionist masterpiece, these are films that have escaped the maze of cliché with moxy, wit, and nutz. They all deliver something that makes me feel about movies like I used to feel, all wild-eyed and inspired watching OVER THE EDGE or THE BIG SLEEP over and over again with a drink in one hand and the other hand over my right eye to stop seeing double, and with faith restored as if wading in the sludge of an overflowing holy fountain.

Two "end" comedies came out the same year, one in the UK, one here. Ours is better, though both are great and sorely needed in horror's now hopelessly overly zombied landscape. END delivers on all the sodomy-phobic joking these clowns have been doing since the dawns of their careers. But Danny McBride, in his turn from genial dirtbag to gonzo post-apocalyptic cannibal chieftain, is amazing like Maceo. He's one ferocious guy and THIS IS THE END is his WRESTLER, his BLACK SWAN, his Heath Ledger joker, his Jason Robards in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, his Colonel Hans Landa, his Daniel Plainview, his Angelina Jolie in GIRL INTERRUPTED, his Johnny Boy AND his Travis Bickle rolled up in one. If Seth Rogen wasn't in it I'd say it's his Seth Rogen in OBSERVE AND REPORT! May we all be so lucky one day to have our own grim chance to break through into dance-in-the-flames insanity before it's all stacked, and canned.
 (more)


ROOM 237 is a lightning crack to the head. All is illuminated, and terrifying: first because paranoid psychosis is very contagious, two because the film is terrifying in and of itself, three because it mirrors all our film deconstruction / analysis, from the ur-dry Bordwellian breakdowns (as in "before getting started, we all have to agree what we mean by a film") to the ultimately meaningless doctoral theses of nonwriters in a publish-or-perish deadlock, all the way to the gonzo freaks like me who see what we want to see through magic glasses; four because we tend to forget that since we're a nation conditioned to 'recall' movies with an ever-dwindling series of studio-sanctioned iconic images--which in THE SHINING's case means the "Heee-rree's Johnny!" grinning Jack Torrance peering through his bathroom axe crack-- the SHINING's power is that it's just crazy enough to survive and resist any chance to dumb it down, to reduce it to a few fun quotes ("and a nice chianti"). The more we try to reduce it to grinning Jack T-shirts the less we remember the actual details of a film that seems to lose all contact with the outside world. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective. (more on "Lick Danny's Dopey Decal Off, Baby)

I might be prejudiced because Delpy's strident and-a-little fed-up mother of gorgeous-haired twins reminds me a bit of my Argentine filmmaker ex-wife and her twins, same age, not mine but visible in occasional Facebook updates and I certainly had more than a few of Hawke's satyric problems, some of which I've only recently cured myself of in a jolt of 2012 alchemical pre-apocalyptic awakening. But what I loved most was that this was a film that was alive, fluid, in ways the other eurotrip sensual awakening family dysfunction wine-appreciating movies are not. There's no up-the-dress-of-the-virgin-camera-peering of a Bertolucci, nor the food porn of so many Sony Classics films, no Brit actors getting grooves back and hunky waiters bringing them little coffees before jetting off on their red scooters, a gloriously braless and tan Ludivine Sagnier in tow. Instead Delpy does a spot-on impression of a "bimbo," floored that she's talking to a man who writes books. That's perhaps the one fatal flaw of these films is that Hawke is not a believable writer. He's a believable actor though, and he seems genuinely turned on and worn down by Delpy in all the right places. Her problems with him are ours, and his hers and hers and his.

Maybe Linklater is still working on his masterpiece. Maybe it was DAZED AND CONFUSED. Maybe it is this film. The comfort it brings me to know that in Linklater we have a stealth auteur who can deliver the kind of thing we all thought only Rohmer or sometimes Antonioni could do, where huge gobs of unpretentious art and stuff almost happening sail by and you can't grab any one moment, but you feel the actors grabbing them all, and creating magic in a free flow spin on the ball of reality, and here this once, and maybe the next, a moment has landed. "I've been sleeping with a 41 year-old man, it's so gross, so obscene," Delpy says during a long Steadicam take around the village. Maybe it's the most stunningly detailed and fluid depiction of a romance in its ebbs and flows, as it sets out to sea, tide receding, that I, at least, have ever seen, and it is gross.

Certainly also - the sight of Delpy's middle aged body gone slightly to frumpy but still comfortable and flowing and sexy packs such a punch when they finally start making love (they don't get far) it's a tonic to the other big sexy actress flesh display of the artsy year, Lohan's in THE CANYONS (See "Lost Without Yr Text"), a joyless chronicle of compulsive sexual distraction, vanity, aloneness in the exhausting need to be perfect, even in the midst of an orgy. In MIDNIGHT at least is something like genuine connection, hope that sex in the cinema might still mean something other than titillation or distraction. It's painful without them but it's truth pain. It's a gift, from Linklater and his actors to us. They don't seem to be doing this for awards, it seems impossible to single out individual accomplishment vs the collective whole. Instead it masters the art of refusing to follow one's inclination to run away from a burning car.

 Of the reigning images of 2013, two involve James Franco ascending to heaven, both times he fails to make it all the way. Harmony Korine however makes it, shooting a Florida spring break under black light starring three girls wearing matching pink ski masks and sporting machine pistols, with Franco and a silver grill on his outdoor piano singing a Britney Spears song and melting one and all's hearts. Mine too. Damn. Spring break...


BREAKERS molds film noirs like GUN CRAZY or THE BIG SLEEP halfway into a PIERROT LE FOU crescent and doses it with delirious contagious psychedelic shivering like ENTER THE VOID, a day-glo nite brite money chute that's intoxicatingly dangerous. I haven't had drugs on my person in years but suddenly I feel the cops are coming in through the window. Man, they're coming in through my skin! Tiny cops in my pores! This movie reminds me why I never liked cocaine -- I'll gladly sacrifice the sexual gyrating moment by moment heavy breathing tactile intensity to not feel the blood run cold pit of the stomach disappearing empathy response. Coke turns me into a reptilian or reminds me I am one. In other words, SPRING BREAKERS is better than the real thing. Even when the characters walk into GUMMO-style abstraction, the film never loses its beauty. This is Korine's best, he's finally fusing his subversion to sex and violence, and setting both of them free from tedious morality. Haji Lives!


I saw this the first time and hated it but tonight, alone on a grim Monday evening before New Years Eve day, it pulses and glows like the secret chamber in that Twin Peaks bordello, only on really strong STP. Once the Jesus freak girl goes home, this shit really gets good, turning into a badass bizarro version of Charlie's Angels, with James Franco inhabiting the role of a southern fried gangsta rapper squabblin' with his childhood buddy, the reigning (black) king of the druggy St. Pete strips. The music and sound editing are the real scene stealer here - it made my blood run cold, enough that I finally figured out what that even means. Some of the end shots, wherein the three survivors walk into an infinite pinks sidewalk point are like a reverse of the climax of THE RING, they're merging into the infinite "Pretend it's just a video game" indeed. Reptilian --you are one!


It hopes nakedly and unafraid that America's doomsday prepper mentality might one day be exchanged for a more inclusive optimism, ala the end of THE ROAD, and that a budding teen romance can infect the whole world as quickly as AIDs. Maybe love is more than anything else a kind of anti-virus, a collective warm fusion, deliberately reaching across lines not only of gender, but class, race, dimensions, and now living/dead status. Like me you may have scratched the entry wound on your forehead at the glowing reviews. I grudgingly rented it. Lo! I was a crying mess by the end. Is it the most beautiful film I've seen all year? I'm afraid... (more)

Looking to get some of that PARANORMAL ACTIVITY opening weekend box office (the scary film thanks to that series is now understood as best seen with a late night opening weekend audience, ideally filled with keyed-up nervous young couples on dates), this film really didn't get perceived as it should. It's a first class true story ghost picture starring one of my favorite actresses playing one of my favorite paranormal researchers. I'm fascinated by the real life Lorraine Warren, who appears here in a cameo. She's psychic, alive and going boldly where no one else can go and has since the 70s, which is wherein this place is set, with enough attention to lived-in detail I feel like it psychically read all my complaints with 99% of this sort of film (i.e. any of the AMITYVILLEs) and made a film without any of them.

 A lot of care went into this film, from the homey, live-in set design, the believable rapport within the family, Lili Taylor's marvelously over-the-top possession and homey vibe, and Vera Farmiga's very real embodiment of demonologist-clairvoyant Lorraine Warren. Sure it's not the best movie ever, or the scariest, but I admire its chutzpah even if it denigrates one of my relatives, the real-life Mary Easty, who here is reimagined as a real witch who hung herself after sacrificing her young daughter to the dark lord. The real Easty was hung all right, in the Salem witch trials, an innocent victim in a land dispute with her false witness neighbors. Whatever, you can spot the real Lorraine in the audience at one of the Warren's slideshow lectures. Some critics are including STOKER as one of the best of the year, but I'll take this. For life!


Hard to believe that the most disturbing image of 2013 is a little British sound engineer breaking up lettuce heads while staring in dismay off camera, towards some unseen screen, from whence issues agonized female screams. Sure it can be hard to stick with this enigmatic fusion of Antonioni-esque ambiguity, Argento stylistic anti-misogyny, Bergmanesque post-modern meltdowns and Lynchian "no hay banda"-ism. But it's on streaming so you can take your time over several sittings. Sooner or later all elements merge in a deeply unsettling visually (and most importantly aurally) seductive post-structuralist fantasia wherein a reserved Brit sound mixer is hired for some reason to work on a horror film in 70s Rome. BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO!

We never actually see the film they're working on, which just adds to the unsettling frisson. No visual violence can really match our sickening imagination, aptly mirrored in the sickening dead-inside feeling overtaking Toby Jones as he rattles the chains and drenches the bone crunches in echo (from the fractions of script and scenes the film seems one part Argento's SUSPIRIA, one part Soavi's THE CHURCH, and one part Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD). Director Peter Strickland trusts his expert blocking and cagey actors and actresses in and around the studio's tight places, and though the rudeness and misogyny of some of the male filmmakers got on my nerves this is a masterpiece of enigmatic self-reflexive horror, with all the ingredients of an average Italian trash classic reassembled like a collage into a making-of fantasia that puts broader stuff like SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE or A BLADE IN THE DARK to shame.


The tale of an Oedipus complex writ large by white people across the dirty expanses of Bangkok, it's almost more of a Jim Jarmusch-meets-David Lynch on an Argento film set horror film than a revenge thriller. Then again, everything is a horror film for Sweden's dark lord of the Seijun Suzuki-esque macho melt-down post-modernist gangster genre, Nicolas Winding Refn, and GOD is his special love letter to those Angelica film snobs who saw his earlier films DRIVE and VALHALLA RISING and said very good, Sven, but maybe slow it down a bit. Maybe don't have a protagonist who's such a chatterbox. There has to be one such film snob... somewhere. Maybe it's even me, for I'm keenly aware (since I'm Swedish) that to stand out from the legions of 'corrupt but honorable cop vs. redeemable but doomed gangster' Asian vengeance pics currently idling along the blighted "Dark Foreign Revenge Thriller" avenues of Netflix, Refn has to import his own brand of ice and snow onto the eternally wet floors of the Bangkok Dangereuse. We Swedes know that Thai swordsman cops can out swing us, so we have to out-stare them and more importantly be willing to die without a sigh, to stand firm against the dying flesh without a flinch, without a care, with no betrayal of despiar. That's from NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. Like that film, GOD lives in the moment, you feel almost like the actors are making it up, moment to moment, and trusting somehow it will mean something. We have a hero who might not even survive one fight, the way real fights end far faster than one of them thinks - one good shot to the head and you punch like a girl... (Suspiria for Men)

Director Neil Jordan loves film, beautiful girls, and the coastlines of the Ireland and Britain, in that order, and here delivers the existential women's picture (ala Suzuki not Cukor) yoked sublimely to the Anne Rice-readymade tale of a 200 year old vampire and her equally ageless daughter. The film has a rare style, so sure and gorgeous it seems unfixed to any one century, moving across spans of time with ease to create a darkly poetic mood of the sort that would enrapture both Edgar Allen Poe or a 12 year-old Twilight fan. Gemma Arterton continually astounds as the woman tossed by an uncaring captain into prostitution back in the 1800s. Saoirse Ronan is the daughter, an angel of mercy by only drinking old folks, who all recognize her and proclaim one way or another their readiness to go. Jordan's style is all about dark beauty and how beautiful deep red scarfs and hoods look wreathing these ghostly beauties with the foggy English seaside dissolving around them. If you can imagine the scenes with Methuselah-syndrome afflicted J.F. Sebastian shacking up with Pris but with Sean Young in the Roy Batty role in BLADERUNNER stretched out over a postcard shop full of gorgeous shots, Jean Rollin-with-a-budget poeticism and Assayas-style postmodern go-for-brokerage, well, it's better.


Redresses a gaping hole in my heart's that been there since I shined the rooftop Bushwick loft barbecue of the season to drag my sneering prominent grunge band bassist girlfriend to the Emmerich Godzilla on a sunny summer Saturday in 1998, and having it suck and hearing her hiss and sneer under her breath the whole way through, and reproach me forever after. So that's 15 years it's been there, that hole. Every time Godzilla comes on cable I watch it and feel her chiding resentment and my own shamefaced disappointment in Broderick, Emmerich, and myself, and especially Hank Azaria. Now that the hole is closed, the resentment is canceled, because for the first time someone's bothered to capture the draggy feel of the actual gigantic size in question. The Japanese with their Kaiju monster suit fights in old shows like ULTRAMAN, JOHNNY SOCKO, SPACE GIANTS and the later POWER RANGERS all had a gonzo greatness but could only use slow motion and landscape miniatures to create the feeling of behemoth size. And that sense of size is totally lost with the live action pro-wrestling meets-cardboard sets grandeur of KAIJU BIG BATTEL. So I love that this film kept the name Kaiju for the monsters and for the robots came out with the "Jaegers" - hand-crafted in a green bottle the size of 20 story office buildings, their every rippling metallic joint step creating huge gravitic pulls in the soundtrack, the titanic Kaiju creating huge thudding steps and extraordinarily detailed gushes of ocean and urban destruction. You really, literally, feel some sense of how big these fuckers are, and if, like me, you had some doubts about Guillermo del Toro as being little more than a Tim Burton with a better sense of narrative, wit, and darkness, then those doubts are as squashed as Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay trapped in a city bus underneath a Jaeger-Kaiju slapdown.




As John Carpenter ages into his RED LINE 700 phase, a horror genius named Don Coscarelli has quietly stolen the title of the neo-Hawksian maestro de drive-in. A little bit early Sam Raimi, some Cronenberg, John Carpenter til he started doing cable TV, Quentin Tarantino if he ever made a horror movie, all rolled into one half-kidding half legit creepy all weird voyage deeper than most gone afore. It's a loosey goosey termite art digging and goofing around - simultaneously mind-expanding and brain-addling. It never has to rely on vicious sexual violence, it understands normal healthy adult sex is the creepiest most uncanny thing ever, once you can finally see it clearly for what it is, stripped of all its alluring-in-the-heat-of-the-moment bark. (more: Pharamageddon!)



... if at first this seems way too-dependent on CGI to create elaborate but cold, almost-SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW-style steampunk moonbase panoramae with Metal Hurlant style weaponry, stick it out. IRON SKY will take you some really bizarre places and in doing so eclipse nominal fuzzy sci fi cult-intended efforts like BUCKAROO BANZAI. Clearly a major labor of love for all involved, six years in the making, it's directed by Finnish industrial singer Tomo Vuorensola in a way that reminds me in a way of the Norwegian-directed prequel to THE THING (my praise here).

from top: "Autobiographical Nexusplation" (Erich collage), ROOM 237, THE SHINING.

ROOM 237 is a lightning crack to the head; all is illuminated, and terrifying: first because paranoid psychosis is very contagious; two because the film is terrifying in and of itself; three because it mirrors all our film deconstruction / analysis, from the ur-dry Bordwellian breakdowns (as in "before getting started, we all have to agree what we mean by a film") to the ultimately meaningless doctoral theses of nonwriters in a publish-or-perish deadlock, to the gonzo freaks like me who see what we want to see through magic glasses; four because we tend to forget that since we're a nation conditioned to 'recall' movies with an ever-dwindling series of studio-sanctioned iconic images--which in THE SHINING's case means the "Heee-rree's Johnny!" grinning Jack Torrance peering through his bathroom axe crack-- the SHINING's power is that it's just crazy enough to survive and resist any chance to dumb it down, to reduce it to a few fun quotes ("and a nice chianti"). The more we try to reduce it to grinning Jack T-shirts the less we remember the actual details of a film that seems to lose all contact with the outside world. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective.


In ROOM 237 however, we get as close as we are likely to in quantifying at least some aspects of ci madness, the madness of obsessive fans, likely loners with too much time on their hands and a good education who've read too much of the world. Filmmaker Rodney Ascher has taken the kind of patient intellectual time with their paranoiac collage that Kubrick did with the source material, and so the madness of cabin fever within Kubrick's film becomes refracted into a dozen different facets of meaning. These theories are gold, especially when far too crazy to take seriously (and the editing makes even Jack Torrance roll his eyes at some of the theories), but you have to wonder at touches like the decal of Dopey from SNOW WHITE on Danny's closet that is visible on his door before his first 'shine' of the bloody torrent (torrent-torrance) but gone afterwards, reflecting, perhaps, his getting wise to what horrors are in store and taking his first steps towards his inevitable survival.


Hey, if Kubrick did put that little touch in there intentionally, how nice that it was finally recognized. I like to imagine that one day my own weird details--even if they were put there purely by unconscious 'accident' (as in the Kubrick fashionista above, for whom I added an axe silver fox shawl)-- will also be recognized. Artists do these odd touches for just such a reason, like messages in a bottle tossed seaward. Maybe it will take a hundred years, but there's a strange satisfaction, a hope, that sooner or later even the most arcane and oblique subliminal touches we leave in our art or writing will be recognized by someone, or something, and that they will recognize they are not alone in being obsessive and reading way too much into everything they see.

But the really trippy moments come when one fan plays the film backwards over the film moving forward simultaneously, so they overlap over one another (below). The effect is so perfect  -- at least in the parts they show us --- that it seems intentional on Kubrick's part. Who knows, it might be, as we learn here Kubrick had a 200 IQ and was very well read on all sorts of horrors and sought to encode a lot of subliminal information. At any rate, Ascher clearly uses the idea of subliminal strange messages to heart, so I did too, as in the many collages on here (only the below is from the film).

Backwards and forwards - makes Wendy an alert girl

Even if it's not intentional, does it really matter? In the ingenious editing schemata of ROOM 237, images we forgot from the film are taken out of context and highlighted for their otherworldly brilliance - and they connect perfectly to shots for Kubrick's other masterpieces. 2001, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, even DR. STRANGELOVE all bring home the vibe of pure murderous madness that most war footage cannot capture (1). Hence as illustrations here, some of my own collages, mixing THE SHINING with the films 2001 and CLOCKWORK which were his preceding best films, and one can argue SHINING is his last great one, unless you dare to count EYES WIDE SHUT, which in my mind is the work of a man having a nervous breakdown from trying to crack open Tom Cruise's hard nut candy shell (PS - I recently reviewed EYES with the ROOM 237 mind control enhancement vision, and if I don't quite love it any more than I used to, I am now more unnerved by it, truly).

"Maisie Squared"

Hence I made the collages in this post from images taken not only from THE SHINING but 2001 and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, to tie them all in together the better perhaps to illuminate continuing themes on the nature of perception, the manipulation of consciousness for external purposes, and the dawning of madness almost as a stage of advanced hyper-evolution.

"He went and did a very silly thing"

Even ROOM 237 seems to be snickering at some of thsee more loco ideas, such as, the singing of The 3 Little Pigs wolf call as a link to the Holocaust. The Onion in its snarky surmise spoke to Kubrick's assistant on the film to see if the insane theories on the film were 'correct:'

"the suggestions that Kubrick was commenting on the Holocaust by having Jack Nicholson echo an old, anti-Semitic Disney cartoon by reciting “Three Little Pigs” (it was improvised in the moment) or do his writing on a German Adler typewriter (it was Kubrick’s and it looked good). Or the theory that briefly glimpsed cans of Calumet baking powder are supposed to be reminiscent of the Native American genocide (the cans had pretty colors). Or that Kubrick was actually retelling Greek myth by featuring a poster of a Minotaur (“It’s a downhill skier,” Vitali says. “It’s not a Minotaur”). Or that Kubrick was admitting complicity in faking the moon landing by having Danny wear an Apollo 11 sweater (a friend of the costume designer knitted it, and Kubrick wanted something handmade (more)

"A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second"

This is of course imbecilic When a baseball flies at your head out of nowhere do you call your assistant and let him know you plan to duck? No, then how can you say you really ducked the baseball? Our unconscious is where real art comes from, without it all you have is cold, dead craftsmanship. And, while the craft is solid in THE SHINING, if any film can be said to exist almost entirely in the unconscious it's this one. The Onion article backtracks on that to point out that Of course, all of Vitali’s protests ignore the separating of authorial intent that is key to any deconstruction of a work of art, as well as the fact that Nazis are still clearly watching Vitali from their secret, Indian blood-powered moon base. So take this all with a grain of salt. Yeah but which part? Using the phrase 'grain of salt' to describe both your inane moon vest anecdote AND Vitali's assertions is very slippery... in the end, the only one who looks untrustworthy is.... you, ONION!

That'll teach you to ignore my letters!

 Call the lunatic critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps paranoid schizophrenics on some level, but at least they know how to look properly, and the lunatic is, in the end, merely one who really sees just how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface at every given moment. He goes crazy because he can't shut it out of his mind, it doesn't go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper. Maybe our teeth really are used by someone as crystal sets to receive our thoughts... stranger things are used for stranger purposes every day. It's only madness when you lack the self awareness necessary to distrust your senses.


Shelly Duvall's face used to really bother me as Wendy, but seeing THE SHINING out of context in the film shows me just why she was so ideal, and Danny too, their faces are fleshy and almost elastic - when they scream their mouth gets as wide and long as the Munch figure, and THE SHINING itself shares a lot with that figure, the sheer overwhelming horror that is the only 'sane' response to an insane world. Apparently one of his quickest shoots, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which came out a mere four years after 2001, happened largely because of Malcolm McDowell, who once answered the question what was it like to work with Kubrick that it was great, "if he trusted you." If he doesn't trust you, as he didn't trust Shelly Duvall or Scatman Cruthers, it is a living hell, with torturous exercises like filming one walk from a car into a hotel like 40 times over and over, for no other real reason than to maybe to 'achieve madness" the hard way or maybe to just be a sadist or maybe because Kubrick actually was looking for something he couldn't explain. Hitchcock apparently did this when his hot ice queens invariably spurned his grubby advances, such as forcing Tippi Hedren into that bird-filled room over and over for two straight days, or making Kim Novak jump into the freezing San Francisco bay over and over after getting his take in the first shot.

The gold room in The Shining is where Jack experiences his relative distance even from the majority of ghosts, who ignore him, as he wanders around with his drink (which he doesn't ever sip from), and has the advocaat spilled on him. Nicole Kidman's immanent desirability means that she is never safe from being hit on the very minute she is alone and seems bored. This smooth talking yet vaguely sinister figure is her own private Lloyd the bartender, an animus of dark mystery and overt sexuality, providing the direct connection to the unconscious core of sexuality the Cruise's character lacks (i.e. her bourbon is named sex).

 Kubrick gets a clinical reputation but it's only because he is going places that would collapse into complete subjection without cold mathematical logic; all of his films are about the cold break of time when one is cut off, in effect, from a consensual reality and the inner and outer merge. Even BARRY LYNDON focuses on this, via the maze of presumed identities played by Ryan O'Neal, the blank canvas of a soul whose life is never the same after winning a duel and being robbed by a highwayman. PATHS OF GLORY and its endless trenches and the break with reality there occurring in the transitions between the ugly grim reality of the men suffering in the trenches and the pampered cluelessness of the generals in their lofty mansion toasting the glories of war amongst themselves. The generals essentially are like the ghosts of the Overlook, Grady's urging of Jack to 'deal with' his family mirrors General Ripper's unauthorized military air strike, or the two duels fought in LYNDON, the charge and subsequent summary execution in PATHS. Kubrick brings cold, clinical reason deep into that murky homicidal core of man's decision-making in these areas vs. the messiness of actual practice. Jack continually lets his family get away, the troops refuse to charge, HAL refuses to admit his mistake, and only our brave flying boys have what it takes to get the job done, Heee-Yawing all the way down to armageddon. This is because only Slim Pickens is high enough to see the ants.

Gearing up for some lashings of the old ultra violent, Wendy. Gimme the bat!

For LYNDON it's the duels that allow for the setting up of the precision into the madness. Kubrick takes ample time in reading the rules, obeying the formalities, and so forth; in CLOCKWORK there is the lengthy prison induction process, the guard snapping off each order, from receiving Alex's possessions and clothing to issuing his new gear similar to the dehumanizing of the troops in FULL METAL JACKET.
Kubrick became a recluse towards the end of his life, and its easy to read that his whole career was one long planning out of reclusiveness. The stress of 'faking the moon landings' and the idea that only in deep solitude can one's inner demons really manifest in the external, that reality is only as sick as your secrets, and that when your secrets come out its usually because everyone else has gone to bed.


Writing is like that, when you get deep into your work, time stands still and then vanishes, and the best work always occurs between four AM and dawn. The real genius fiction can only occur when this deep break with conventional sanity is possible and this deep break with conventional sanity can only occur when the cops, kids, and camels have all gone to bed, as it were, and the miasma of dream overtakes one's location, the tiresome curtain of tedious convention, the collective guise of sanity, or decency and normality. This sanity (such as it is) is borne bravely by such long-suffering foils as Peter Sellers' Captain Mandrake and the president in STRANGELOVE, Kirk Douglas in GLORY, Shelly Duvall in THE SHINING, Alex's parents in CLOCKWORK. They all vainly struggle to carry the torch of conventional reality into the deep troughs of true madness and are suddenly made into the thing that doesn't belong. For we who are truly mad, it is the ultimate revenge-served-cold satisfaction. The sane are now the insane ones, and oh how they danced... at Stonhenge.

NOTES:
1. As one of the theorists, a photojournalist, notes, most newsreel war footage is faked after the fact

As always, it seems, 2013 was a prolific year, if not as scintillating or apocalyptic as I initially hoped. If you're a casual follower of this site you may be flabbergasted, yes, flabbergasted, to realize Acidemic is closing in on 1000 posts. The cake is moldering in the razen sun in frozen preparation. I know, I know, you are busy, no time. So here's the top few pieces plus collected writing from other sites you may have missed. Dear one, don't miss a thing!

"Maybe the surest sign of alien intervention is the relentless sameness of our world, where a minor disaster here and there effects only one side of one country, one power grid here or tornado path there, never enough to bring our status quo to a halt, never enough to wipe away our credit card debt in a huge burst of magnetic energy, or enough to wipe out all life through a super volcano eruption or massive meteor strike. Someone is surely looking out for his investment."(more)

"He'd received shock treatments as a teenager to "cure" his bisexuality and found solace in narcotics, and if it left him divided against himself, such tortured transfiguration was also the stuff of great literature, a la Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, and he knew it. "I always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter," he told Rolling Stone in 1987. "They're all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there's my Great American Novel..."(more)

What is happening to our horror comedies? Are we finally attempting to solve our American issues, to answer the cryptic misanthropic riddle Romero first posed to us back in 1968? Having felt ostracized most of my life, even with no outward hostility on the part of anyone around me, I would love to create a witchy tornado and destroy the fearful mob mentality faux Christian dickheads who would still deny the benevolence of weed, who cry about freedom when they mean freedom to persecute others. How I would love to whisk them off to Hell in one grand witchy gesture. But... maybe ParaNorman and Warm Bodies are reminders that only forgiveness and unconditional love will ever change a mind. (more)

'....science can describe how DNA might unpack a seed so that it becomes a tree (a gradual fusion of photosynthesis, time, soil, water) but it can't explain why, or where it all comes from to begin with. They have no idea which came first, the chicken or the egg, or why either bothered to come at all. They don't know why sleep paralysis occurs in the way it does, only how it occurs. Why do we sense this evil presence in the room? We usually sense the presence before we realize we can't move, so which came first? Does the demon wait for the right situation --when we're conscious but still paralyzed by natural nervous system sleep cycles -- to pounce? It seems very inadequate to dismiss these apparitions as simply nightmares. We still don't quite know how third eye dreams / imaginings work. We can analyze the cones and rods of the eye, the pupil, the optical fluids, but what we sense in nightmares has no correlation to anything we can measure.." (more)

"What mainstream science still can't quite admit, but which leading edge scientists are realizing to their amazement, is that the universe is totally subjective. If we can move past notions of size, perspective, relation, and spatial relativity, then space/time travel is possible regardless of the distances between solar systems. As humans with limited ESP ability (or, as with most scientists, none at all) we can't imagine space travel any other way except by carting our bodies from point A to point B, in a vessel relative to own size, but that doesn't mean we all won't one day be long past that limited conception of ourselves. If space itself is a vacuum, the idea of needing to travel a certain amount of miles to get there is foolishly short-sighted. Why not just collapse the vacuum? Why not merely shrink the space? 

I have no choice, therefore--considering the film's avalanche of uncanny coincidence-- to believe the film was written by me in the future." (more)

"Awash in desolate suburban blight, dark, twisting woods, empty plains, fire-damaged barns, cobwebs trailing down from street signs, Phantasm leaves us with the feeling one has crossed somewhere back from banal day reality into unreal nightmare. These landscapes do exist, even more so now. I saw this desolation most in western Oregon. Every storefront along the road closed and boarded up and not a soul for miles and miles, yet you feel your car is being followed some tall shadow you try to tell yourself is only a tree in the dark of your rearview. Your tank's been on 'E' for an hour and when you see that white light in the distance you know it's a 24-hour Exxon station dropped from the sky by God's Jesus's own flying saucer. Every fellow traveler you meet smiles at you, for they too have survived the swallowed darkness of the empty expanses of highway and the feeling the world has ended and together you are grateful in a profound deep way only spooked lost travelers riding on empty through abandoned countryside know, or people leaving a very scary movie as one quivering mass edging towards their cars."(more)

"...So if you want a nice meta reflection moment, rent it off the box for $5.99 and then watch it on your computer while trolling through online dating sites from your phone, but then you're still going to want to get out of the house, walk around the block and then come home, just to feel you've been somewhere. My girl and I were going to go see The Conjuring up the street but we rented The Canyons instead. For it is the future of cinema, the future, where the cell phone is the weapon of choice as well as the entertainment. Everything else is just the distractions, what goes on between texts."(more)

"The only real separation between Italian-American gangster films and Italian horror perhaps is that death is where the gangster film stops, but horror has a few more places to go, and it's the brutal circumstances of that trip is everything. If you look at non-Italian American horror of the same approximate time, death doesn't dawdle. Even most slasher films, the American ones, like Halloween, are really about the stalking and POV camera: when death comes it's almost a relief. With Argento's murders, and De Palma's or Scorsese's or Coppola's, the moment of the first bullet, stab, or slash doesn't necessarily end the chance of survival, or mean a close to the episode. Death throes might go on for a full reel of near escapes, feeble cries for help, and forlorn looks up at the uncaring sky...." (more)

John Monk Saunders' Falling Circus: 

THE LAST FLIGHT, EAGLE AND THE HAWK, ACE OF ACES, DAWN PATROL (vs. DRACULA)

"Maybe that's what the real lure of war is for men at home, as an escapist grim fantasia where it's just buds against the world, fire arms instead of nagging wives, the chance to prove one's mettle when it's all stripped down to just you and the guys experiencing the same hell the next seat over. And Barthelmess--his usually impassive face contorting into a slow burn wide-eyed terror at being finally unable to save his gunner's life--cradles Manners as he dies like a lover. But when it comes to pitching confessional woo to Nikki in their private train car back to Paris he seems to doing some lipless burlesque of what having lips is like."(more)

Radium Girls Vs. the 1%: Eva Green in DARK SHADOWS, Carole Lombard in NOTHING SACRED

"A recent reviewing of the 1937 screwball classic NOTHING SACRED reminded me that my bitterness over the loss of the illusion that our half-strangled human culture was about to end makes me like Oliver Stone, furious that Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard, top) is not really dying of radium poisoning. Nowadays it may be hard to imagine such a un-fact-checked farce playing out in the local papers, but it happened, I think, a lot, or they wouldn't have this movie, or MEET JOHN DOE, or any of the other cynical newspaper man pictures. At any rate, the media circus surrounding young girls dying of radium poisoning was no fantasy, even if old news by '37: (more) 

Drown in a Vat of Whiskey - NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (1941)

"...there are people who aren't alcoholics, so they don't know the true joy of the terror of addiction, the horror of convulsions and D.T.s or the giddy ecstasy of waking up feeling like death, pouring a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice highball, pounding it down in a single gulp, repeating twice, and sitting down to watch your favorite bender movie, SPECIES or APOCALYPSE NOW, and realizing it's only six AM on a Sunday, not six PM, like you feared. You have the whole day. vast hours left to try and taper off. The agony and ache of your morning hangover vanishes and is replaced by ecstasy in a matter of minutes. Next thing it's six AM on a Monday, and you're thinking of reasons you can't come into work, putting that scratch in your voice for when you call your boss. Godfrey Daniel!"(more)

Flo, the Great and Powerful: THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936) and the Ludovico Flu

"David Lynch taught us that if you push normality to its extreme it becomes more surreal than your wildest imagination, and the "Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" sequence of this film finally illuminates the appeal of frills and fancy MGM foppery to a jaded, faded, junky nurse like myself by pushing it to an impossible extreme. The cumulative effect is beyond the usual sense of claustrophobia, of being like Sullivan sandwiched between the portly matrons at the movies during the first of his travels, and instead breaking through the roof and achieving a mythopoetic splume of transcendental connection, something even Willie Wonka as a child, trapped by his mom at a 1906 fashion show and looking up the skirts of the passing models could never imagine. He'd have to be reading Little Nemo at the same time, and strung out on Demerol." (more)

And that's why every demeaning expletive and subjugation and atrocity is necessary in Tarantino's last two films--BASTERDS and DJANGO. Because no amount of vengeance, of cathartic destruction can be truly cathartic without it; if it sickens you beyond measure than the film is only doing it's job and this bloody catharsis is for you. This is the kind of trauma we should be getting from our movies, not the casual torture of films like HOSTEL and WOLF CREEK. Serial killers and psychopaths are frightening but they're isolated individuals or groups whose actions are against the law. In Nazi Germany and the Antebellum South, casual torture, subjugation and atrocity are law; extreme racist barbarism is the societal norm. The idea of what's 'right' as far as bloody vengeance is muddied by our inability to see the forest for the trees as far as the social order we're living in, and that's the Quentin difference. (more)

O Love, thou coaxer of dopamine and norepinephrine through miserly neruological alleyways, you can cure illness, reduce obesity, turn blue meanies into pink happies, you sound and sport horns like Pan. You creat flashes of lightning in the mind, every song sounds written just for you and your beloved, you love it all, you are alive, it's sparkling, the night, alive, and then... did I say alive? Twice? Shit. Not even once.

Not even the sound of a crash, just nothing, throwing you into anguished withdrawal. Where did that brain boost trigger go? Those norepinephrine juicings come few and far between so what is it, what trigger sets them off and why can't we just press a lever by our hamster wheel and feel that giddy rapture whenever we need artistic inspiration or to lose weight? Fuckin' Medical Association, man (and here I would sniffle and shudder like a junky if we were filming) they won't let us drill holes in our brain to let the air in, or let us insert electrodes into our pleasure centers. We have to wait, instead for the 'thunderbolt' (as Michael's bodyguards describe it in The Godfather). 

Her takes place in a Catfish future wherein everyone can be whomever else they want in virtual reality, and for some reason choose they selves. Love in the age of digital communication has led to something so instant it's impossible to internalize so no change in the persona is possible. We can't sit down at ye olde desk to write to our distant love with Ken Burns' fiddle music mournful in the backdrop because there's never a time when our lover's voice can't be there, here, wherever, Skype! Verizon... 4G. No distance is too great, no forest too remote, now your love is literally written on the wind, a billion cellular coded mash notes coursing through your atomic structure, a net of support so intimate not even the closest mask can keep it from exposing you.


Speaking of Barbara Streisand, Phoenix in Her and Robert Redford in The Way We Were (1973) make dependable bookends for displaying the spectrum of the masculine touchy feely love response. Like the less successful film Surrogates (see: The Wringer of Ringerhood), Her takes place in a Catfish future wherein everyone can be whomever else they want in virtual reality, and for some reason choose they selves. Meeting other 3-D real time people has lost much of its feigned jocularity in Spike Jonze's succinctly imagined future, no one smokes or makes wretched small talk or goes on benders and phone sex with strangers who want you to talk about strangling them dead cats as they come is as natural as Ambien. If Don Draper could see what his Madison Ave sincerity carousel would lead to, would he ever had turned against Lucky Strikes? Better to smoke indoors at the martini bar of masque-on-mask artificiality than be healthy in a bubble of self where a computer voice validates your every movement like a conductor on baby's first potty train. One ring to bind them all!

I'm more guilty than anyone when it comes to the crime of not being myself; I am the dude who went to the party dressed as someone else and came home and his old self was gone! I've had my soul shaved into infinity by transdimensional clockwork gorgons far too often to fall for the ego's hackneyed show and tell excuses why I continue to nurture antisocial attitudes and delusions of grandeur. I too, and hard, have for the phantom girls fallen, in 1997 enraptured by my love for someone who I hadn't met in person nor did even have a photo. No sort of real life love has ever compared to that delirious exaltation of me and my gray screen and then later a phone voice. After much nagging she sent me a photo but it was when she was a cute child with a cat. You can guess the rest. God was kind though, the Denver airport bar was serving doubles for the price of singles. I parked us there until she came out of focus. Nothing compares / 2U / screen at which now I stare.

Flash forward ten years, now sober, falling in love with a fellow writer on the phone from 3,000 miles away from me, who inspired a huge breakthrough in forging the style of writing here on this blog. I wrote this post on Coming Home(1979) for her.  Photos galore to vouchsafe mad hotness. Twelve hour stretches whisked, hardly daring to switch my phone to the other ear lest I miss a second of her thrilling voice. A bad cold brought my voice down an octave and the magic cough syrup I was on worked with the fever to make me sound sexy and assured, brilliant and able to modulate even casual out breaths into curlicue hissing perfection. Christmas came, dragging us apart, shouting into elderly phones just for our mundane pleasantries to be heard. No magic or immortality just the feeling of being chained to a lineage of death, most ancestors obscured by the cold dark sea and me second to next in line on the chain to be dragged deep deep down. I couldn't smoke in the O'Hare Airport hotel so my voice got smooth and the demons of despair that tobacco keeps at bay descended like a fog. My phone love didn't return my call for months, it seemed, or a few days in linear time. Finally, in despair, I called my real life lover back in New York. She picked up right away. Consolation prizes are the true prizes in this world, what you can touch, see, feel, the rough stuff of earth and matter, this, Her you can't trust.


Five years later, or rather last year--2012--during a three month flash of blissful enlightenment brought about by pre-apocalyptic euphoria and  galactic alignments, I figured out where 'everything looks rosy' or 'rose-colored glasses' comes from. I did see the rose-tint and everything seemed to be infused with a healthy crimson, a flush in the world's cheeks. The concept of being washed in the blood of the lamb truly does stand with this, as in this blissful state one sees other humans only as inherently beautiful, fear and desire slip away, one gets all Saint Francis-ish and has no desire except to bless those around them and celebrate the crazy moment-to-moment glory of living. I had forgotten about the rosiness, as one is apt to do, until today seeing Her. The whole damn film is rosy. But maybe that's the problem. Any acting teacher or therapist would surely weep with joy over Phoenix's sublime and constant state of emotional nakedness, his wrenching honesty. But that's all we really see of this guy - honesty. It's a such a lonely word and everyone is so / untrue for a reason. A man without a mask unnerves even his gooiest friends,


On the other hand: The Way We Were (1973). Robert Redford's final teary eye at the end--the first real emotion he has in the film and maybe in his whole career--is so powerful, I cry every time... or would if I had seen it more than once. I can't help but feel that a lot of this was improvised and paraphrased because how else could it be so natural and perfect? Redford can't act--at least not in the emotional naked Phoenix style --and that is his strength. When he finally does crack the mask,  the walls come down where you didn't even know walls were. His entire stone-faced oeuvre is worth enduring for this one crystal-like clear water fountain / to the sea tear moment. Is that one crack equivalent to or equal to all of Phoenix's performance in Her? At one point does a man being sensitive and loving go from touching to maudlin and even a little douche chill-icky? Answer: when he had no mask to shed in the first place. Men put these masks on for a reason, bro. Make 'em look good, look sharp, like the V for Vendetta mustache or the great Edward G. Robinson, who in 1931 once snarled, "Love?!! Women?? Gah, soft stuff. Joe, yer gettin' so ya can't take it no more." - That's Her all over.


But that's a different genre and TheWay We Were is a romance, a true story memoir about a beautiful golden WASP Adonis lured out of his quail and ale club by a bohemian Jewess intellectual socialist played by Barbara Streisand. He goes for it against all his better judgment, partially perhaps because girls in his circle don't take lovers, only husbands. But she's got such a light spirit you can see why he comes to see her as more than a round the 'way girl. There's a complex layer of completion-seeking added when a bronzed Adonis not in touch with his feelings melts for an Brooklyn motormouth. Opposites attract for a reason, it's a polarity thing. A north needs a south for a proper axis. That's why you can tell the love affair in Her isn't real, not that it matters, which is the point. Minds meet, excite each other, enrapture and engage and then they are no longer the same minds. You can't expect them to stay with the person their older, unchanged mind chose as a lover, that would be cruel. But TRUE love is just that cruel. Opposites can change all they want, there's no overlap. They can never make each other's input redundant.


Redford and Streisand's characters part, and only later, at the end of the film, when they run into each other on the street, all betrothed to proper class and religious affiliated spouses - and only then, after it all has happened - does Redford finally crack. And I, at least, cried like a motherfucker. It's so worth waiting for, that moment, because unless the guy has proven he's tough, that his facade is in place, who cares if it comes tumbling down? That's why, when Bill Holden breaks open into a child-like smile of rapture and awakening on the beach in Breezy, my shell, too, cracks to pieces. In the epiphany moment of the hopelessness of love, that impossible star-crossed fate where even if you shuck it all and together make your grab for it will never survive, just as it can never die, and at times you wonder if it even ever existed, just this moment stands tall as a reminder of all that you could have been, the vast acres of self you could have claimed that are now forever lost no matter which road you take. But in just that moment at least, you are high as a Georgia pine.


But in Her there is no mask to crack. Phoenix the actor stands naked before us, hitting these painful notes that are masterfully honest and hurt and Jones' script backs him up with eloquent moments like him crouched on the subway steps while a rush of commuters file around him, hearing of how his digital love has united and is haivng intimate conversations with thousands of other operating systems, juxtaposing how cut off we are from even the surface of our fellow man once he gets up and running. All we have maybe is the illusion of connection, and the hope of one day uniting with the machine reflection of the soul, our Frankenstein Skynet Robbie the Robot This is for Pris Cherry 2000 Absolut vodka love child.

Moseying along the crowded bubble boulevard

The woman looking outside the bubble / i.e. a communist

All alone together in the shipboard bubble

Then there's Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939). Now as a man who only cries when he passes a liquor store window display, I don't care for Irene Dunne in most things. Studs like Cary Grant and Charles Boyer are too good for her. I hate her trill-laden singing. But in Love Affair her prissy ball-busting schtick is needed because she is so unlike Charles Boyer, who is such a nostril-breathing sensualist. They're each alone on a trans-Atlantic cruise brought by tables for one into one another's sights, at first disliking each other for being so obstinately opposite. Director Leo McCarey is peerless at matchmaking, wooing them collectively with precision walk-ons: a talkative chipper landlady, a trio of weird little girl harmonizers (with Irene Dunne on ukulele), an endearing orphanage manager the kids call Picklepuss, a charming art gallery owner, a smitten club manager, a drunk guy carrying a Christmas tree all the way up to 182nd Street, a heavenly orphan choir singing not too loud there's a baby upstairs, gathered around Dunne's sick-bed, and the celestial Maria Ouspenskaya in her greatest role as Boyer's wizened Yoda on Owsley acid-style grandmother. Nor a single mean word or ill will in the whole film, just two people cautiously reading the signs fate's throwing at them and quietly slipping free from all their original plans. And we worry about the final big meeting like saps, because everyone else in the film is also aware of how vital these meetings are, not just for them but for the world. Without the reunion of meant-to-be lovers there is no hope, no reason to keep shambling through the desolate CGI airport. We need this one thing that can cut through all the crap and yank us right out of our lives, even if it's for the worst. Fortune favors the bold but love doesn't give a shit about fortune or anything else. Hawke misses his flight, doesn't cancel or change it, just outright misses it, because Delpy's smoldering to her tape of a live Nina Simone. Amy Jolly kicks off her thousand dollars shoes and barefoot marches off to follow the Legion. It's the grand gesture, so make it while your high enough on love to not think.


And over it all not just the lovers but the romance of light and shadow and sound caressing Boyer and Dunne together over glistening rear projection seas, the facts preventing them from being together like some poison chocolate pink champagne aphrodisiac. You know it's love when it wrecks your life. If your favorite thing was golf love will ensure you can never golf again; if you loved to touch, love makes sure your new lover hates being touched; if you like to ski your new lover stabs you in the kneecap. You must give up all the other precious thing you held dear for they are not just a friend and a lover but that thing - you are giving up the shiniest cheap car collection for one battered but sturdy BMW to last you the rest of your life.  Imagining being with other people loses all its lusty luster. Before in relationships you would just mark the hours 'til your escape even if they were perfect for you, but even a Boyer or Redford becomes just a smoov version of Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel! But dig, the trick is 'becomes.'Now crow! Crow into the empty screen for a chance to glimpse your soul's secret stash, just a glimpse before the charm's unwound.

Hey kid, want to get high? on art? so high you pass out? It happens. It's called Stendahl syndrome and it's a real thing and now I know because it happened to me with this experimental-narrative post-modernist hybrid fairy tale-erotic awakening-giallo bit of mind-melting genius, Amer (2009). Following the Camille Paglia-esque/Lynchian Italian horror 'accept the decomposition of your future dead body as an inevitablity and whoop there it is on the floor and now you're six other people at the same time' trip, I have fallen into this film like Alice into that K-rabbit hole down down down deep down. Thanks to these two kids who made this wild film, Stendahl syndrome's not just for Florentine tourists, or Asia Argento, anymore. This time it's poison L. This time they came for me. I fell. Down. Deep Deep Down. Cue Ennio Morricone Jew harp. BOINGGGGGGGGG..


Until mon Amer there's always been a weird dissonance, a grinding disagreement, between the iconography of experimental film and narrative film, even in Europe, where art doesn't have to be framed and velvet roped the way it does here. A mirror to this twin dissonance might be found between the Jungian anima and the Mulveyan male gaze, between Jess Franco's 1967 Succubus, let's say, and Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman. But Amer brings to this twin dissonance (experimental vs. narrative / male fantasies about what girls dream vs. female artist's impressions of girls dreaming about men) a twin serpent DNA lover's frequency that harmonizes all those dissonant tones, and the resulting unified field harmony that expands wider and wider until it envelops and entrains other dissonances, widening its wave arc until even the most ideal sympathetic response to the film is swamped like a beach house in a tidal wave

forward into an outright anxiety / panic attack as the construct of self within your mind shatters like a glass goblin.
The heavy stand body falls to the museum's dirty marble floor in Florence
but back at home watching your shards merely fall off the couch
and you swim

deep

deep down
a fella named Blue Boy delivers a
candy colored poke in the outcast cowboy mouth
burning constantly at stake

But what mouth?

what is the difference between faking not having amnesia
and just not having it but secretly pretending to (secret as in denying you don't know what's going on?)


Amer really can disintegrate the distance between the viewer's mind and the screen, can obliterate the last border between them all, and keep moving outward and outward in concentric razor swipes around the silver lip of the singing bowl if you've seen enough European erotic fairy tale horror films from the 60s-70s and read enough Freud and Jung. Only then you can experience the exquisite anxiety of passing out in a Florentine art museum from the safety of your own home.

It can do this because it's written and directed by a couple - Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani - and that is the harmonizing, entraining factor. "It’s because we are a couple that we can work together,"the couple noted in a 2010 desktop interview. "It would have been impossible to make the film with someone else. We trust in each other and we can speak honestly about intimate things. That’s why we can collaborate." Of course you can, you beautiful bitches!

Many have tried and a few have come close to this kind of alternating current: Debra Hill and John Carpenter came as close as anyone with Halloween (1978) but every film has to get up from the table and go pick a bathroom sooner or later, and Halloween eventually chooses the Men's, emerging with a trench coat and revolver and le bang bang. None have made it all the way -- made it past the border of gender, and the split subject, past nationality, temper and even age. Amer isn't male gaze or the female gaze; but both gazes sliced up in long celluloid pupil un chien andalou Laura Mars strips arranged in close-up as one breathing weird thing, as slick and enjoyable as any modern movie but deeply entrenched in the experimental and certain to confuse or irritate anyone expecting a conventional narrative.  Amer doesn't get up to go to the bathroom, the bathroom goes to Amer.

This male and female directing team were, I thought by their names and styles, French and Italian, but they are both Belgian, which makes me realize I don't know anything much about Belgium aside from the awesome frites and that Germany snuck around the Maginot Line through it. But now I want to retire there, and lay on the street having seizures as I stare up at the sky and whisper, Amer. Though their names--unless they've changed them--represent Italian males and French femaleness which makes sense because there are certainly strains of Catherine Breillat as well as Argento, Antonioni as well as Claire Denis.

Their male-female creative interaction is like a game of chess: move, countermove and so nothing is ever clear or unclear. Everything resists a concrete interpretation but beguiles: it doesn't charge ahead like a boy with an uzi and a hardon or merely masturbate with a crucifix like a performance art feminist. Yet if you don't run away in disgust, if you don't dismiss it all as girly stuff or misogynist or artsy and just ride with it, but remain alert and enthralled and ideally high on lack of sleep and Jung and art and Robitussin, then there it is, in its sublime perfection, the mind--both halves--inner and outer, conscious ego and unconscious animus beckoning you into itself, the unconscious's language signifiers reshuffled, the normal narrative progression cracked open like a nut, the inside goodness free falling in slow motion and for a moment you and the unconscious and the images onscreen are all one - the barrier of screen and speaker between you has evaporated.


When dealing with the giallo genre in the scope of female fairy tale icongraphy it's importaant to stress that the collective as well as personal unconscious does not recognize the border between life and death, between the alive and dead version of you, the ego/soul/body/consciousness.  The fear in the unconscious is never just death, it's a fear of violation, the knife, the castrating phallus, the razor in the hand of the man chasing you is never just a phallus, penetration anxiety or even fear of death. It's a fear of dissolving, a loss of self, the split - you are afraid to turn around and face the demon chasing you in your nightmare for a very good reason - once you turn around and face it the demon will merge with the 'you' who is running, both will cease to exist and a new life will begin.

The first such split occurs during childhood - the Freudian key that unlocks Bluebeard's secret dead bride storage, and does early Bava's Black Sabbath, Suspiria, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Brothers Grimm, and Valerie and her Week of Wonders. The second turns sunny and erotic with the girl on the cusp of sexual maturity--Rohmer, Betty Blue, Emmanuelle, Fellini, Antonioni, and Chabrol. The third and final turns to the dark again, to full-on Argento, later Bava plus Blood and Black Lace, Soavi, Fulci.. but with the jittery bipolar modern 'twang' of Antonioni's Red Desert, the eternal dance of metatexual refraction never ends.


The only way to describe what's going on is to give these kids a name, so I'm calling them the Darionioni Nuovo, a group of filmmakers who have melded the experimental and deeply psychoanalytical styles and substances of Argento and Antonioni into a modern new vision for cinema, one geared towards not just the moviegoer's eyeball but their pupil, not just their ear but their ossicles. (This isn't their official title as a group and I'm not even sure they know each other or ever will but they should have a group name so I made one up). This is a zone that we usually don't trust 'new' filmmakers with, especially not in America where everything has to be laid out with big yellow lines and breasts and 2.3 children and token minorities and police and moral lessons and zeitgeist-dictated products placed according to rating and market. But in Europe and places where socialized education and less hysterical reactions towards sex and cigarettes lets the youth get super intellectual for free here they are, in three films reachable via Netflix, Berberian Sound Studio, Only God Forgives, and Amer but mainly or totally in this instance, Amer. Maybe they can't be appreciated, or even endured, without familiarity with the 60s-70s European horror film canon, but if you haven't experienced any of it, then fuck you, NYU film snob poseur. Nick Ray WAS cinema, Argen t o y Antonioni esta, compli? Cahier of the Notebook! Double Posinegatron. Yeh-yeh boi!  



Now when a guy, a bro, a dude tries to make a female coming of age story, no matter artsy or 'feminist' she comes, it's still a male fantasy, in the end, am I right guys? And that's a shame, because on the one hand we're not allowed to get turned on by the Blue is the Warmest Color because it's still the leering male gaze, and on the other we can't enjoy Chris Lilley's HBO show Private School Girl because our anima gets jealous. And when a woman makes a coming of age film she either lets her animus, "her master's voice" lure her into a phallus-sacrificial circle in the forest, ala Thirteen, or projects said voice clear out of the room with the cricket bat-like swipe of a musketeer's sword (Breillat's Bluebeard). Amer rolls the length of the blade and into the 'win a free game' hole at the end.

When this happens/happening/happened, the unconscious anima/animus wakes up, as mine did with Amer, the result is that you, or the egoic conscious male side of you (if you're me) is utterly and completely bewitched, enthralled. The lights come in corners of your mental house that have been dark for years! You forgot the lights were even there, forgot the corners were even there. Machines start whirring and you don't even know what they do or where they came from. People are applauding you, Nina, you didn't even know you were onstage. Who are those people? You've moved from being just another American whining for his climax to a European calmly engaging the sensual. Now, Nina, Now, Now you really are the Black Swan. Wait, this film was first by a year. That's a little suspicious in some trick velvet light choker box snap shut behind you and all is clear in the hot second before it's lost. Thank inky deep down blackness of your pupils, Nina! Let me see them! The lion sleeps tonight with the immortal porpoise.