Crazy gorgeous, crazy for real, unstable, reckless, spontaneous, today they'd be called bi-polar, there's a lot going on with modernist European art cinema's women. We love them and they love us back, or are scared of us (by us I mean camera / viewer / audience) since they can't really see us. It's like they wake up to how trapped they are inside of a four-sided screen and we're the unseen child spirit trying whisper words of comfort across time and media platforms into their forlorn ossicles. Sometimes you'd swear as you gaze into their dilated pupils they can see you there, across time in the dark, hopefully enraptured or at least sympathetic to their cause, and not just leering down their dress.

Women like the one played by Yvonne Furneaux in La Dolce Vita (1960, below - right), or Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964 - above, below-left) are forever reaching for a 'real' connection with the men inside their film environments, and considering how bad Mad Men makes America look at the same approx time frame as far as pawing and male gazing and sexually harassing, I can only imagine how bad it was in Italia! These poor harassed, molested, grabbed-in-the-street, objectified and leered-at ladies need more than just assurances from some dimwit trying to get them into bed; in that nervous time after a man first sleeps with her but before he can turn her either into a whore or his mother, a woman  need to find his inner kernel of truth and pluck it out.

Sensitive intellectual Antonioni may show the woman settling down or splitting apart but we're all really hoping along with him that she can transcend the confines of the Mussolini-period architecture and minimalist gallery space and escape out the open corner of the screen, into his / our arms, someone mature, not like those other boys with their kickball and their obscene gestures. Alas, there is only one Marcello Mastroianni, and he spreads himself thin.

In the past Vitti's madwoman characters could find solace and escape from modern life via breathtaking mountain views (as in L'Aventura), in vacant lots (ala La Notte), or even the friendly solitude of the sky (L'Eclisse), but Red Desert these avenues are condemned, or soon will be. Yellow poisons are in the sky, the waters of the river are choked a dull coal black --almost Star Trek alien worldly. And even the interiors, no matter how pop art splendid, are post-modern enough to seem like just different wings of the same factory. This time Vitti needs a different avenue, this time she's got to go all the way through the looking glass, into post-modernism metatextual refraction, baby, until her persona finally shatters like a funhouse mirror in Lady from Shanghai.

Twelve years ago Dr. Paul Narkunas (the skeptical professor in The Lacan Hour if you're keeping score) lent me his copy of The Red Desert, painting it in my mind as a lurid desert odyssey that went dark places he knew I'd been to, neurochemically, and he said it was funny, too, if you got the signifier resonance.

But twelve years ago I was a different person--I didn't know spit from Shiteuxlle, a name I just made up in order to imply I've read such difficult philosophers that even you, learned reader, don't know their names. And the DVD was a far-off cry in the fog from the gorgeous Criterion blu-ray I have seen thricefold since -- weeping with joylessness as my throat pouch widens to encompass more and more hot, psychotropic gas each time. My TV was smaller too, too far away for letterboxing; even my socialist art filmmaker wife at the time was bored. The film's vagueness and incoherence and ugliness combined to gave me a headache and then I fell into a half-asleep, and coasted through to the end, unwilling to turn it off lest I have to admit defeat, and that I was not man enough or intellectual enough to 'get it.'

My problem was not uncommon for an American of my posture, sloth and limited education, an inability to realize that my initial response was intellectual. My torpor and indifference was the height of educated modernist ennui. French intellectuals labor for years to reach such complete disinterest! And how can a film that bores you stiff the first time get better with repeat viewings? That makes no sense, and again, no sense is very European. But Criterion's blu-ray is gorgeous and now my TV is larger and flat with deep blacks; the fog is 3-D now, pulsazione como veleno deliziosa, purple and dark blue flecks that taste like cotton candy. My outer life has gotten worse, conversely, to accommodate it. Now I live in a widescreen (non-anamorphic) fog; my glasses are dirty, my mind shrunken and polluted with rivers of pharmacological run-off. But the screen breathes and grows, ever sharper, deeper, vaster.


Speaking of... now let us vault into the future for the new post-modern comic mini-series, Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of Babylon, a recently de-vaultified 70s miniseries deconstruction from Funny or Die! on IFC. Here, at last, is high camp trash deconstructed, the paths between art and crap, high and low, intentionally inept and genuinely bad, between aspiration and result. Real et Surreal. When Guiliana (Vitti), the crushingly alone and confused wife in Red Desert realizes she can use her modern alienation as a vaulting off point into the delirious realm of the post-modern. But Babylon is already there, refracting in on itself in deadpan absurdity spirals of mismatched indifference. In each the acting and writing are intentionally 'off' with no grounding in anything approaching reality, reaching a heightened abstraction that makes even Sirk's Written on the Wind seem like realism (see here on Splitsider for a shot-by-shot comparison). While Red Desert achieves post-modern affect through mixed signals and ambiguity (in short, art), Spoils achieves it through the through specific recognizable soap signals delocated to the point of abstraction.


Spoils' story is a sprawling epic of oil baron millions and a forbidden love between a foundling adventurer Devon Morehouse (Tobey MacGuire) and his capitalist amok sister Cynthia (Kristin Wiig). Starting in the Depression, rising up Rink-like and soaping its way up through the war, beatnik junkiedom, and hipster underwater observatories, the six-part series' deadpan humor comes less from jokes and more from inept direction, dialogue, framing, mismatched rear projection and adorable miniatures. Carey Mulligan's voice, like Scarlet Johannson's in Her, shows up for an episode or two, linked to a mannequin brought home by Devon as a British wife when he the war from home comes a-marchin' - and that's the order they would use those words in France, and maybe under the sloshy pen of trash novelist Eric Jonrosh, played with half-hearted Paul Masson-era Welles-ishness by Will Ferrell. The idea of a mannequin as one of the characters is both oddly foreboding - a Stepford wife moment - and funny, depicting the dehumanized interchangeability of all characters other than Devon and Cynthia. Stripped to the bones of meaning, the iconography of the mini-series becomes like a tattered yard sale, or the way a red velvet smoking jacket might sell for $100,000. if it was owned by Errol Flynn, or tossed into a rummage pile for .50 cents if owned by Errol Flynn's stand-in, and yet be the exact same jacket - and in fact, the two could easily be mistaken. Where was I? Oh yeah, half-way to a full-on William Wilson.

The idea of stand-ins and arbitrary notions of place and ownership course through Antonioni's work constantly in both micro- and macrocosms, and in Spoils there is an arbitrary dividing line set up, a story as elusive in its ultimate unimportance as the disappearance in L'Aventura. The forbidden love of Cynthia and Devon is made so only in the sense of social propriety --they are not related by blood -- but soap opera cannot function without such refusals, such sacrifices of love in the name of propriety; this sense of sacrifice helped found the Italian film industry, stemming in part from floridly romantic opera and verse and the realities of the post-war post-class economy and censorship which also factors in Red Desert --man's willful exile from an Eden that exists only in the memory. One simply can't be an impassioned sensualist and a 9-5 captain of industry, especially with censors hanging around. Operatic soapy romantic signifiers are cinema's way of mourning the loss of sensuality and the rise of provincial conservative censorship, with grand actress gestures, and it's these gestures that Antonioni subverts, just as the Cinq au sept movies. Codes and the symbolic structure of language point towards specifics after all - did they or did they not have sex? Sexually frustrated moral ethics guardians insist on knowing! Whole presidencies have been endangered over these nagging questions but the code skirts the censors by symbolic references that are frustrating in their ambiguity - forcing the prurient and the narrow-minded literalists into a tizzy. On purpose. And creating modernism, on accident. Or is it vice? verso? Versace! 


In Spoils, Cynthia mirrors Giuliana in Red Desert in that they both need to to waken from the idealized Edenic fantasy they nurture, the objet petit a that sacrificing love on the alter of propriety entails: Each has an idealized Edenic space to retreat to (i.e. the riverside in Written on the Wind), but the difference is that Giuliana knows hers no longer exists, that even thinking some new man understands her is false, borne of presuming the signs in the film point towards it being one of Italy's countless 'red telephone' dramas of forbidden extramarital affairs. But the signifiers pointing in that direction don't add up, they're more like one of those Salvador Dali dream sequences from the late 40s, only using soap cliches instead of eyeballs. Similarly, Cynthia pursues Devon because forbidden love is sexy and befits the very rich, for whom the only thing they can't have is the only thing worth having. The signifiers don't add up in Spoils either, less out of seeing the world through the eyes of a crazy person and more seeing it through the eyes of an Ed Wood-meets-Harold Robbins-style incompetent hack.


I think being American is a distinct disadvantage to getting the modernist alienation affect. Europeans and South Americans all sneer at us for not being into subtitles, or for learning languages other than our own and yet they admire our innocence, knowing it is born out of a single language system. But if we imagine seeing a German film in German class (hence without subtitles) and not being able to understand most of what we hear because we haven't paid attention ever in class, then we too can get the modern alienation effect so coveted by the Cahiers du Cinema set. And it, after 20 minutes or so, bored and restless, we start to notice how silly and strange the people onscreen seem when language isn't there to contextualize their behavior. Until Antonioni helps us we're bound up in signifiers: if we see a woman at a child's bedside in what looks like a hospital bed against a white wall, and the kid has what looks like a thermometer in his mouth, we would totally believe that the kid is sick and the mom is concerned. But then the thermometer is revealed to be a candy cigarette and it's not a hospital room but the kid's bedroom in a post-modern apartment. So who is the woman? Suddenly an orderly comes in to take her away and you think she's insane and this is a mental hospital, but how did we know it was an orderly? Did he have a white lab coat on, and by his gobbledigook speech seemed bored yet nurturing in a coldly robotic way? That was no orderly!

The censors already demand a certain kind of code of conduct and a secret code to imply sex has occurred if your adult enough to read it. From there it's a small step to leading that crazy Jack Torrance dirty-minded censor around through the Overlook maze of contradictory signifiers while you laugh and laugh. To take Americans outside the prison walls of language takes a great deal of this laughing; it's important to realize that Antonioni arrives at his 'plain as the nose on a plane goes twirl' effect through serious artistry, while the three layers of intentional accidental post-modern intention in Spoils of Babylon is through lack thereof. It's the difference between acting the role of a guy leaving a half-eaten doughnut on a park bunch and realizing there is no audience, or camera, and you forgot the script, and so were really just a dude eating a doughnut after all. Did anyone in the park see it? If no one saw you leave it, how do you know it was even yours?


An example of a dry refracted modernism in Spoils of Babylon is right there in the name of one of the characters: Seymour Lutz. It is, of course, a variation of course on the name 'Seymour Butz,' an old Bart Simpson prank phone call favorite ("Is there a Butz here? I wanna Seymour Butz!") This joke in its unaltered form would be far too crass for Jonrosh--a great Falstaffian bargain of a man--so in Babylon the name is abstracted, mispronounced by Cynthia constantly, leaving him to finally shout "it's pronounced Lutz! LUTZ!"

Now of course any comedy lover reading this set up will presume Wiig's calling him Seymour Butz instead of Seymour Lutz, which is where the joke would be if it was only once refracted. But Cynthia keeps calling him "Seymour Lund." Quintessential Jonrosh. Also, in saying "Lutz! Lutz!" he's invoking the tone and delivery of W.C. Fields in 1933's International House saying "Nuts! Nuts!" while fixing a loosened nut on his autogyro.


One similar favorite moment late in Red Desert made me finally understand why Paul recommended it: Feeling guilty about the affair brewing when she's alone with Corrado (Richard Harris) in his swanky bachelor quarters, Giuliana looks up from the bed, sees the door is open, worried neighbors or husband or the porter might barge in any minute and so she closes the door, but it's to the cabinet by his bedside! At an earlier point she runs off after him towards a ship that's been quarantined, as if she is the one who has to stop him from risking his life helping, but then she tuns around, separated from the group in the fog, with Corrado at her side; the others look at her as if she's been caught red handed in an affair - but are they really feeling that, or is just another passing mood? It's forgotten by the next distraction. Everyone seems always about to start an orgy or come onto her, but are they? Is this what being a hot mess in sex-crazed Italy is like? License to paw nonstop? Or are they just ghost Repulsion wall arms? The answer is she's not crazy, we are, Antonioni is revealing our tendency to seek romantic sparks and soapy betrayal everywhere.

Then there's a cart selling apples all painted silver or grayish-white. Now this is odd in and of itself.When Giuliana sits down by the side of it she momentarily becomes the apple seller - Antonioni locks into some old revered neorealist mama. But who would buy gray apples? Are they some kind of decoration? Are the apples poison? Then why the gray paint bucket? Is this art or pollution? We can't deduce what's up with this cart anymore than we can deduce if an orgy happens later, or after that a cheap affair or a tortured love affair, or neither, and if we don't fight the surreal de-signification domino effect then not knowing is like waking up from a dream within the dream, the hidden filmmaking hand is clumsily pulled onstage and the mind's tendency to lose itself in green smoke and booming voices finds itself challenged because the wizard is curtainless from the get-go. Once we no longer fall for the myth or the storyteller we have to face our own death and she speaks to us, as always, through a collage of remembered movie lines, song lyrics, and poetry, in Scarlett Johansen's voice, and Veronica Lake's hair and forgiving eyes, that way she looks at Alan Ladd or Sullivan like she's just rescued him from a bad orphanage.

"Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. " - Ahab

But to paraphrase Slim in To Have and Have Not, "what happens if it slaps you back?" The answer is that the undying savage beneath the hotty toddy veneer of Leslie Nielsen emerges, an Ahab born anew for a Moby Dick spread across ozone-depleted sunshine into the beasts of the American mountains, for the sea monster that splashed the nation in the mid-70s was Jaws, which itself came initially as part of a seventies eco-awareness trend, i.e. whaling was out, and sharks could only be killed in self-defense. The ozone layer hole had been discovered, aerosol cans were banned; a Native American was crying by the side of the highway; the tab on soda and beer cans was changed to stay attached rather than be tossed into the bay to cut up the feet of pelicans. We kids were keen on Cub Scouts and 'Indian Guides;' TV had Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Grizzly Adams and The Waltons, Apple's Way, and Little House on the Prarie; in school we read My Side of the Mountain; at home a magazine called Ranger Rick. Mom took us to see matinees like The Adventures of the Wilderness Family. We were in the wild. All we needed was a beast to fear, a bad grizzly. "I could smell the stench of its breath as it mauled me," is read from a mountain man's recovered journal (a line that's stuck with me since seeing Wilderness Family 2 at a matinee back in the day).


This was still before VHS or cable, so if an exploitation pioneer wanted to get funding from the major networks in advance of production, he had to entertain the entire family, all at once, in the same room, looking at the same screen. PG didn't just mean kids can come with the adults it meant grandparents too. And Hollywood was dealing with a surplus of stars who had drawn huge salaries 30-50 years earlier and would now work for scale in just about anything. So there were ensemble cast disaster films with casts of older stars, younger newcomers, and Charlton Heston or some other granite jaw bringing up the rear (Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Poesidon Adventure). Meanwhile, the American western outdoors beckoned for monster movies, saying to producers "hell we got dozens of unemployed western stuntmen and character actors out here all ready, and hell you don't even need a fake monster on account of we got trainers with grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions. And if you want  vermin (Kingdom of the Spiders, Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, Damnation Alley, Night of the Lepus) which could be rear projected to look freakishly large." As I've written, we kids never ratted out the fakeness of the effects and there was no way to rewind or repeat play since DVRs and VHS were still a ways off. As long as it was attacking folks of all ages, nothing else really mattered. It was the seventies, man, even the monsters were au naturel.


These were great years to be a kid. There was the Carter administration and John Denver, the Bicentennial, the whole red sate vs. blue state divide thing didn't exist. We were red and blue together, a big purple union, like the mountain majesties. And in these mountains strode an eagle-eyed copycat director named William Girdler, a mountain man whose monster films were mountain man-made. He saw there was a way to make a PG monster movie that would use the nature craze's fondness for grizzly attacks and the monster craze's fondness for shark attacks and made Grizzly (1976).It was a huge hit so he went on and added an ensemble cast and did 1977's Day of the Animals.

Up until the blu-ray that just came out I thought Day of the Animals was a TV movie. Thanks to Scorpion Releasing though, a gorgeous 'Walden Filter' widescreen vista of an anamorphic aspect ratio has appeared, majestically dwarfing the relatively incompetent action we're used to on the small square screen of the earlier DVD. Did I mention I love this dumb movie? You want to know the plot? There's humans and then there's animals and they fight each other. The end. There's one hawk, three vultures, a carload o' rattlesnakes, a tarantula, wuxia mice, a wolf, three panthers, a gang of German shepherds presumably fresh out of a hole in the K9 Academy fence, and Leslie Nielsen, shirtless, as nature intended. It's all because the ozone hole. Can you prove it didn't happen?


Like all its devotees, I remember the night Day premiered on CBS' Friday Night Movie as a kid, but I missed their whole dog attack because my parents made me go to bed. Sometimes I wonder if this blog's real origin story lies in my dad's declaration of kids' bedtimes, a strict law which he enforced regardless of how riveting the movie we were watching was. I missed the end of a horde of great movies that way: The Poseidon Adventure,Telefon, Day of the Dolphin, Orca, The Cassandra Crossing. I would be in bed furious and crushed, but I dreamt my own wilder crazier endings. For Day of the Animals when I heard at next Monday's recess that the humans had survived by riding a raft down the rapids with rabid dogs snapping at their hands every yard of the way I envisioned a pretty wild ride.

Naturally it's not that wild in reality, but 'naturally' is the key word here, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, you see, in real nature, with semi-real actors, one foot in front of the other, and the key signifiers of amok nature horror movies, such as animal mauling, really can't be shown unless you're a dickhead whose going to really kill animals for his movie in which case fuck you. Girdler doesn't, I presume, and that's where the juice is. Quick edits between what is clearly just well staged play wrestling with tame animals, close-ups of  baring teeth, other people yelling and running, an animal's teeth resting on someone's arm amidst foamy pink blood, and then the hawk looking down signals an end to the scrimmage with his hawk cry like a gym coach's whistle. Girdler's films aren't meant to be great gore pieces, but they are great for sick freaks in search of Cecil B. DeMille-levels of under-direction. Actors stand around in a 'funeral processions and snakes' kind of Cinemascope chorus line and wonder what to do, receive no guidance, and improvise. In a word, Girdler was the Seventies.


With smaller animals this mellow mood can be undercut, as when mice on fishing wires come flying across the rooms backwards onto the head of the fat old sheriff, or hordes of snakes sun themselves inside of cars. Dogs with their fangs bared occasionally wag their tales as if expecting a biscuit for not looking over at their trainer signaling just off camera. I don't consider these negatives. In fact if this were an Italian or Japanese film every animal in the film would probably be dead by the end of their scene. Why waste money drugging a cinnamon bear for a wrestling match when you can just stab him a few times first and let him bleed out like Joaquin did to poor Comodius in Gladiator? Sic transit gloria mundi! But film is forever... and no animal murder will ever be forgotten, Ruggero! And if William Girldler hurt any of these critters, he paid the ultimate price: he died in a helicopter accident scouting locations in Indonesia after making The Manitou.


If you're too young enough to remember Airport you not have the same giddy rapture for the Poesidon Adventure-Grand Hotel-Stagecoach type ensemble cast trapped in a bad situation films that were all the rage in the seventies, as parodied in Airplane! (1980). But either way let me give you some background on this too. The hot shows of the Friday or Saturday nights back in the seventies were always The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. They had a steady cast of hosts as a sea of b-list celebrities of all ages wandered aboard the boat or onto the island. Some people managed to become celebs by doing nothing but showing up on these shows 'as' celebs - like Charo! So here in Day of the Animals we have the disaster movie cross section:

1. The Shelly Winters
Check ("She KNOWS what she's doing!"- only this one doesn't - to the point of dressing for an overnight hike in her Sunday dress).
2. A tiny 25 year-old stunt man posing as her 12 year-old son
mmmm-hmmm so creepy +25 points
3. 70s bombshell career woman contemplating her lack of a love life and children while eyeing the hero's ring finger - check -70s mainstay Linda Day George
4. Christopher George or David Jansen? Mr. Linda Day George, to be precise
5. A Richard Dreyfus in Jaws-style science dweeb? check
6.Famous athlete considering retirement / disillusioned preacher? - Former
7. Native American or black sidekick - tall, stoic? Check
8. The insane challenger of the rugged hero's leadership? Check Mate! +100 points for Nielsen's shirtless grace.
 9. The Newt or little girl wandering ala Sandy Desche" in Them. - check
10. Attractive young couple dealing with recently learning about her unplanned pregnancy - Check
11. Fat sheriff roused out of bed in the middle of the night to investigate? 
Yes (Bleeding Skull, I defer to you in all things fat sheriff-related)

It's a glorious "Girdler Dozen" i.e. one donut short; give 'em all the points.

A midnight evacuations of the towns above 5,000 feet is given a few shots, hazmat suits, you know, it's The Crazies but for animals... humans slow on the uptake that they are in danger;  you'll have deeper resonance to the phrase "Watch you like a hawk" cuz there are some shots of hawks watching stuff on here and honey you are glad what they watchin' ain't you. Hawks' cries signal the start and stop of attacks and Nielsen going shirtless signals his de-evolution into a  Putin-like celebrant of masculine power. He pokes a big stick into the belly of a young man so he can make caveman gruntings at the cowering girlfriend: "I killed for you! You're mine now!" and to the 25 year-old widdle boy, "Shaddup you little cockroach or I'll shove you off the cliff!"


But that's not even his most memorable line, it's this:

"If there's a God left up there to believe in. My father who art in heaven you've a made a jack ass out of me for years. Melville's God, that's the God I believe in! You see what you want you take. You take it! And I am going to do just that!"

And by it, you know he means that girlie...

Learning of his death today I instantly remembered meeting Phillip Seymour Hoffman once, in 1997 or so at the wrap party for Todd Solonz's Happiness (1998). My crew of willowy lounge hipsters were at a bar in the East Village called Black Star, drinking to our waning health as usual, when the wrap party for the Happiness cast materialized out of nowhere. We watched them all suddenly appear and a stranger lot you couldn't imagine in that pretty hipster person bar. The super skinny dweeb Solondz, a gigantic Mama Cass of a lady (Camryn Manheim) each making the other more freakish by comparison and dowdy young turk Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whom when we learned was an up and coming movie star left us incredulous. This guy? It seemed like a joke. We couldn't imagine him as the type to even hang out in a lounge like Black Star, and our big circle and the pair gradually spilling into each other, my friends grilling them on their weird movie, and them all shy except Hoffman who easily blended into either camp and patiently explained the movie to our mild fascination. He was a regular guy, a shaggy portly ginger. That was his part of his strange power - no one expected what he could deliver. 


I mention this because none of my crew or I forgot his plain down-to-earth normal guyness, the way if you had to circle who the future star would be in that bar that night he wouldn't even make the top 20, yet there he was. He seemed more like a boom mic operator than an actor, so it was no surprise to see him holding one in Boogie Nights. I didn't like his needy Carson McCullers-ish character in that film, and didn't trust him onscreen until 1999's Talented Mr. Ripley when he teases Ripley on the boat, "How's the peepin', Ripley? How's the peepin'?" Finally I got it. He stole the shit out of that movie, not easy when Jude Law was stealing it from Matt Damon before he even showed up. When I revisited Boogie Nights after that I no longer felt threatened as I had originally, feeling like he was trying to drag the hot arc of the film into lovestruck dweebiness, compelling us to behold his naked redhead pale shoulders in the same frame as hunky Marky Mark and voluptuous Heather Graham, crying and carrying on like a tainted pear. Slowly, surely, he was transcending his double whammy curse of being a redhead and portly to become a titan of the big screen, through sheer chops and balls. His hospice nurse in Magnolia (1999) blew our minds -- eyes foggy with opiate nurturing, lighting Robards' invisible cigarette and helping that great actor confront his mortality (he died shortly after filming) right there onscreen, like a grounding slump postured angel of compassion in the spastic orbit of a beautiful people dysfunctional family.


I still haven't seen Capote, but he was the best thing by a landslide as Greil Marcus in Almost Famous, this time trying to drag that crappy under-drug-fueled film into something like real rock rather than letting his scenes succumb to Crowe's clueless pop dorkiness-- so in the opposite direction in which I used to feel he was dragging movies. And if not for his few outbursts like "Pig FUCK!" in The Master, god that film would have been rawther craftsmanship boring. In short, he was such a force that he could be counted on to steady nearly every roiling vessel of a film, steering hottie shallowness towards the rocks of depth, and movies suffering from maelstrom depth towards the rough but ready straits of genuine subversion energy.


Like so many OD-ed icons, one wonders if the rehab had lowered his tolerance to the dose he was used to. Heroin is deadly that way I hear. I've never tried it, but I'm glad. I tried everything else and it all almost killed me a dozen times over. He was my age, 46, the same age Kurt Cobain: born 1967, the year of the Summer of Love. We'd been watching the world's beauty dwindle ever since, our memories of our own innocence and America's tied hand in hand. No wonder we're so discontent that we need to either be high, in recovery, or holding tight to our newly won sobriety like a life raft; Black Star has been closed now for 10 years at least, and whatever bar opened in its space also long closed, I'm sure, to be replace probably by a Chase branch. New York City may yet return to a place where art can thrive, and young people can live without having to retire to Bushwick once the bars close, but it will have to do it without this sweet Falstaff-Harry hybrid prince of actors, this exhibit A of the power of spirit and devotion to resonant craft in trumping size, shape, and pigmentation. He could do anything and cinema will need its own rehab counseling to come to terms its new shortage of gravitas.

Director Mike Mendez is fast becoming a horror icon and Big Ass, a sometimes not wince-inducing monster movie, is proof he knows how to keep a lumbering low budget comedy-monster genre film fleet-footed. Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes) is the semi-dopey exterminator who "thinks likes a spider" and really wants a girlfriend, a combination that proves even to the military he's the best man for the job when a top secret DNA experiment spider escapes inside a hospital, melts some faces with its acid venom spray, then grows to titanic proportions and climbs a downtown L.A. office building, with a hottie lieutenant webbed up inside and the eggs about to hatch.  Playing a kind of PG version of Ronnie the mall cop played by Seth Rogen in 2009's Observe and Report, Grunberg walks against the tide of fleeing extras in slow-mo to a haunting cover of the Pixies'"Where is My Mind" and even if the film defies monster regulations by showing the full creature within the first few minutes, and the thundering orchestral library military leitmotif quickly wearies the ear canals, it's a film that will make a nice surprise if and when it shows up on the Syfy channel or Netflix streaming and you catch it kind of accidentally at first as background and then get casually sucked in. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) is the head of the military clean-up squad that at first wants nothing to do with Grunberg at first. But eventually his moxy pays off and he gets to kiss the hottie Lieutenant (Clare Kramer). As his eager "Kato or Robin," Lombardo Boyar is a kind of less funny Michael Peña in Observe and Report coupled with Cheech Marin. That's not a put-down, Peña is so hilarious in Observe and Report he feels genuinely dangerous. If only Pauline Kael were alive to praise him. She's probably also enjoy, to a point, Big Ass Spider. It lacks that Observe's disturbing deadpan ease with darkness, but when you can't handle serious drama or any sense of something being at stake... like on a Tuesday night... or a Saturday afternoon... pounce!

Hammer is back in business! They produced this keen little British chiller and you can tell, you can read by its compelling Godsend-ish 'family grief bringing back a child' horror meets The Wicker Man pagan rural secret genre coupled with the terrifying child who kills for no apparent reason genre, ala that girl in the basement of Night of the Living Dead that this is a film made by horror fans for horror fans. Hell, it's Hammer! The story involves a veterinarian (Aidan Gillen) moving his family to the small rural England town of the title. When his daughter has her throat torn out by a guard dog, the townsfolk (led by Mike Leigh-regular Timothy Spall) spill their secret: the town is cursed/blessed with the ability to restore the suddenly dead to life for three days so loved ones can say their proper good-bye. This is too good to be true for the grief-stricken mother (Dublin-born Eva Barthistle - who was also in the similar The Children two years earlier) and naturally neither she or the kid want to play by town rules and go back in the ground when time's up. Soon the child's using telekinesis in combination with a crowbar to off the protesting locals and her yellow raincoat appearing in the dark woods conjures vaguely Don't Look Now-ish terror. What do the dead locals care, though, when they can always come back for a visit? Aside from a heart being ripped out, some gory deaths, and dying farm animals, there's not much gore. Ahhahah that's a joke. It's Hammer!

Hammer does it again! They are really on a second chance roll and despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail, it's never stuffy and when all told really rather ripping.  Daniel Radcliffe is surprisingly solid, restrained without being dull, as a London lawyer sent, Harker-style, to settle the estate and inventory of a dark decaying mansion out in the boonies. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a child abducting sicko enacting an ancient curse, like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter rolled into one malevolent spirit, replete with tight-lipped terrified locals. Surprisingly solid, effective little chiller story with nice punchy ending, and if the story follows a too familiar pattern = equal parts J-Horror / Dark Water / Ringu meets some Innocents, since it's by Hammer so all the suspicious locals and all that has a nice harkening back to the days when a crisply attired Peter Cushing would get the cold shoulder from the same frightened innkeepers.

 The sense of pacing is superb and we get nice and chilled just from Radcliffe running around the dark mansion with his drippy candle, the sort of thing I generally find tedious unless the person exploring the dark house is Jane Birkin in Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye so I doubted this was going to be any good until it showed up on Showtime and man was I wrong. Director James Watkins shows he's got the goods and that the chilling power of Eden Lake (2008) was no fluke. He's definitely not afraid of bleak but compelling endings, and proves himself a force on the scene poised to, if not become the next Neil Marshall, at least become the next Terence Fisher! Hammer don't hurt him!

Then again, even Terence Fisher isn't always on point, such as this entry in the Hammer Dracula series, which I'd been struggling to see for a long time, there having been only a terribly washed out non-anamorphic old Anchor Bay disc and I never got more than five minutes in before running away in terror of being bored (I cannot handle washed out colors -- England's skies are dreary enough). Well, this blu-ray is gorgeous proof it wasn't just the non-anamorphic washed-out aspect that turns out to be the problem. Most of this movie consists of posh Brits leisurely taking up residence at Dracula's castle for the night while a sinister servant slowly uses the blood of one of them to the count back to life. Christopher Lee seems to resent having to wear fangs again and moments border on ridiculous, ala the ability to make a cross out of just about anything (stopping just short of the old crossed fingers trick scared kids are so fond of -see also: my piece on the confusion of symbols and reality in horror films over on Divinorum Psychonauticus), and here's another thing I never understood: if you want to keep vamps away, just eat garlic! Son't hang it in garlands so some hypnotized maid can come remove it. It makes no sense when you can just poison his water supply directly, so to speak.


Oh well, the blu-ray is delicious with rich sickly gold yellows and a 3-D-ish feeling of the dimensions and spaces of the castle, which is fortunate as there's not much else to do in this film aside from watching idiots leaving each other behind to go investigate sounds and never returning, while Darwin chuckles from on high and we're forced to count the minutes as we're shown every last detail involved in stringing a person up by his feet and slitting their throat over a big stone trough full of Drac ashes. It's still pretty cool, though, and I remembered that scene from my childhood (and mixing it up in my mind with Horror Express) but the cracked ice finale is rushed and beyond ridiculous. It's not even cold out and here's this convenient 'frozen pond' so close to the castle it makes no architectural sense. If that sort of thing doesn't bother you, and you don't mind watching actors feeling uncomfortably under-directed, as if their marks had been drawn in wind, well enjoy Drac's good taste in brides; he punks out hottie Barbara Shelley and we all benefit.

Here's a bizarre mix of devotional Harryhausen animation and unconscious cowboy brutality that feels why too dated for 1969. The tedious story involves a posse of rodeo cowboys led by James Franciscus stumbling onto a desert paradise hidden from man for aeons that looks almost the exact same as the depressing lifeless desert where they just were, with by no sort of ecosystem able to nourish apex predators like the Allosaurus, purple here, for reasons I'm sure exist. I haven't read up on anything dinosaur-related since third or fourth grade but I still know more on the subject than the alleged paleontologist in this film, who at one point shouts "A Styranosaurus!" which I presume is his shorthand for tyrannosaurus and styracosaurus, since his mutton chops and teeth are so bogus it must be hard for him to talk. At least he knows to get out of the sun to watch the Allopsaureuys / Styrackosauss smack-down.


No disrespect meant to the great Harryhausen but there's only so many times you can watch creatures who could never survive in their depicted ecosystem mix it up - and here they're monochrome purple colors make them look like plastic kid's toys,, even if those toys come to brilliant slithering life under Harryhausen's patient hand. The man's no slouch, he even animates the eohippus, when a movie this cheap and meant for kids would usually have regular pony footage shrunk and overlaid.


So yeah, I tried to love it as long as I can remember, but I can't dig GWANGI and I finally figured out why. It's not just that I hate children in monster movies, especially the burdensome cliche'd Mexican kid, one peso senor, that all monster movies seem to think settings in Mexico, Italy, or Spain, Brazil or Portugal require. And that all that sun-bleached scenery makes me depressed and thirsty, no, it's because there's this unconscious brutality on the part of these cowboys. They never doubt their right to hunt this poor little horse down for the public's amusement, and to grab the still surviving beasts for public display thus proving the point that man destroys everything he touches. Harryhausen's famous for getting us to care about his monsters but that can backfire. I still can't bear to watch Twenty Million Miles to Earth. And like that film, our abused creature even has to battle another abused creature, in this case an elephant, also Harryhausen-animated. I have the same problem with Hatari! My top ten favorite movies of all time are at least 60% Hawks, but I can't abide that film's obliviously callous approach to animals and the icky triumph of Red Buttons in getting the girl through methods most boys abandon before they even get a first date. Hawks, you're sending the wrong message to the children!


Big Ass Spiders and mantises however never manage to earn human sympathy, and for that I am truly grateful, a realization that prompts me to stop trying to love Gwangi and instead look over towards my disc of Jack Arnold's classic Tarantula (1955--above) like a man who finally realizes what matters in life, like a boy who thinks like an arachnid in love... with Mara Corday.

(See also: I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie)

It's always nice to ride out the brutal storms and chills of February with horror films even more frozen than one's own emotions and landscape. Watching people shooting and skiing and luging and getting massive air on snowboarding can leave one feeling inordinately guilty for being so damn lazy. But watching winter strand poor folks in the middle of nowhere, leading to the collapse of objective reality and fights for survival that for all you know may be already lost, that's a world of warming fun. Go figure.

Here are four solid examples I've seen lately, some of which are even on streaming. So make sure your flask is filled, the windows barred, the heater on and the generator close by so no thing or person can cut the power.

Of course there's already some classics of this genre which have the gold now and forever. The Thing 1951, The Thing 1982, The Thing 2011 (here). And there's also a recent Netflix stream favorite, Pontypool (my praiseful review here). Add them all together and they're a wind chill gold, silver, and bronze. But there's surely more where that came from? From Norway? Bellarusse? Sweden? America? Go for the gold, or failing that, at least survive the credits.

Viktoria Winge (above) is a gorgeous Nordic alien hybrid. I won't give away the kill order, but there's three dudes and one broke his leg snowboarding. They're a group of five friends in Norway, seeking out the less traveled trails. It's got proud generic slasher roots, but from there it delivers in a lot of ways: great moody dark cinematography that studiously avoids the usual dripping industrial torture porn palace look of so many similar 'wayfarers stranded in a remote killer's lair' films. There's even some cozy ambience as the kids take over the ski lodge lounge area, helping themselves to the booze lying around, starting a fire, goofing around but not in annoying American sneering perv kind of way. The film keeps unleashing ghoulish little surprises, the acting is solid through and through (characters interact and play off each other's dynamics very well) and the climactic battle way out in the middle of the frozen emptiness is unique and totally chilling. In Norwegian with English subtitles, not that you really need them. There's apparently a solid sequel that picks up where this leaves off (like Halloween II) and then a third that totally sucks (like Halloween VI).

This is a film that took a long hard look at the Nightmare on Elm Street box office take and said me too! They even recruit the final girl of Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, Jennifer Rubin, to play basically the same role in basically the same mental hospital. Instead of Heather Langenkamp though, the patients are saddled with the hunky remotness of Jeffrey (Reanimator) Combs for their group therapist. Instead of Englund as Freddie,  Richard Lynch plays the skeevy cult leader from the 70s, who convinces his flock to burn themselves up in the prologue (Unity Field is the cult's name, and the idea is the flames will unite them forever). Rubin is the only survivor, pulled from the roaring flames, full head of hair intact, and in a coma. When she awakens 13 years later she finds herself in a nightmare called the 80s. Harris' ghost urges her to commit suicide so she can rejoin the Field and skip out on all the pouffy hair and bad clothes. When she refuses, he starts killing all her fellow patients, recruiting them instead.


The creepiest aspect is surely the bizarre skin textures on the face of actor Richard Lynch as the cult leader. It looks like he insisted on having a textured flame retardant gel around his face at all times. Considering how much burning is going on around him, that might have been wise, but it's creepy in a bad way. Lee Strasberg-trained and scary-funny as all hell, he's a fine villain, but not a convincing cult leader. He needs to be seductive as well as creepy. Could you imagine Robert Englund running a cult? It's hard not to imagine how much better a more nuanced cobra-hypnotic like Lance Henriksen or Michael Ironside (the heavy over on Visiting Hours) would have been. Either way, stick through the rocky beginning and just let its gradually slow simmer hallucinatory momentum build and by the crazy climax you'll believe a homicidal doser can fly, even if there's a bit of that old Woman in Green plotting at work.


Sharp-eyed punk rock fans will get excited by the presence of Susan Barnes as one of the patients (she was in Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains and Repo Man!), and the terrifying Dean Cameron will linger in your mind thanks to a bravura freak-out scene where he runs amok in the basement of the hospital, leaping around punching out overhead lights and ripping down shelves. Rubin is very good at wearing her emotions on her sleeve, and the DP is very good at capturing the glisten in her eyes, and the Shout blu-ray is very good at capturing the glisten. So yeah, it grows on you, separating itself from Freddie Krueger comparisons as it matures. A lot of that probably has to do with the pedigree -- Gale Ann Hurd produced, and Andrew Fleming directed - between them there's solid horror crossovers like The Craft and The Terminator. The recently released blu-ray from Shout! is magnificent and also includes another quality hospital horror, this time more of a rip-off of Halloween 2, called Visiting Hours. I remember the commercials scared me as a kid and I've been scared to watch it. I'm still working up the nerve to press play on that one. Here's how I've been building up to it:


Ti West's first film is hampered by his inability apparently to motivate actors into a state of wakefulness (Tom Noonan especially underplays the mellowest horror host in the history of late night UHF) and his reliance on tiresomely music school string quartet passages, but The Roost is a surprisingly fascinating work of straight-faced retro minimalism. The story follows a carload of mumblecore-ists on their way to a wedding. They begin the film in mid shortcut along a mysterious road. A bat flies into the windshield causing a crash! Cue weirdness and think of this as a kind of Jim Jarmusch version of Planet Terror on a budget similar to that of Equinox. 


The acting is pretty bland (with the exception of great newcomer Vanessa Horneff) but the star here is the darkness, and the way it envelops characters like a blanket, swallowing the cast up without so much as a scream or gurgle, and the mostly eerie soundtrack of atonal buzzes and drones. West does weird and wonderful things with the lighting - one ambient flood out somewhere in the night, and then having the actors point at each other with the flashlight as a kind of inter-diegetic spotlight. Problems aside it's hard not to be awed by West's unshakable grasp of what makes horror work -- the tick-tock momentum, deep full darkness, 16mm, droning ambient score, remote location (here the same barn used in Marnie!) --and the way his minimalist tendencies are so poetically integrated therewith. Close-ups of doors slowly opening, for example, presented completely out of context (we have no idea whose opening the door or from whose perspective is watching the door open) don't sound like much on 'paper' but are all the spookier for being so commonplace, as if West is finding a whole new way to make rote horror film connecting shots uncanny again.


Michael "Ajax" Paré as a struggling artist who gets spared by an inner city gargoyle and falls for Rae Dawn Chong; a young Christian Slater, young Julianne Moore, and young Steve Buscemi encounter a shambling mummy (from an Arthur Conan Doyle story); New York scenesters Deborah Harry (as a Hansel-baking cannibal in the framing device) and David Johansen as a cat assassin hired by wheelchair bound William Hickey (the unforgettable old don in Prizzi's Honor) in a segment conceived by Stephen King and scripted by George Romero --all come together to no avail in this odd horror anthology.


 I've never been a fan of horror anthologies -- too many get hung up on the tired old EC supernatural comeuppance bit, the "Where's my cake, Bedilia?" twist (I love that story though, especially how it's the spilled bottle of whiskey that wakes up the sleeping patriarch) and I have the same problems with Darkside. Even Debbie Harry is surprisingly flavorless as the cannibal gourmet.  That said, there's so many essential cult actor favorites  (I always imagine how great Paré would have been as Reese in The Terminator) and future stars that it's still essential viewing, kind of.


At last, a trilogy free of 'supernatural comeuppance' and the only non-aerobics softcore film from 'High Bar Productions'. Underrated fringe weirdo Ramy Zada goes for distance as the psychology teacher who pulls a gun out a snickering jock to teach his class about fear. Said jock is pissed (literally), complains to the dean, and later breaks in to the teacher's house, where he's conducting a ghost story round robin, during a dark and stormy night. And one of the students is a psychic who sense something wicked's coming up from the basement. I dug the gonzo oddity middle segment best, with its looney tunes midnight warehouse dog attack. Most critics like the story where a celeb stalker switches gears to go after his original obsession's answering service operator, played by the always worthwhile Marg Helgenberger. Make sure you stick around for the bizarre finale, that has the heroine fleeing a burnt skeleton chasing her with an axe through all the other sets in a vague nod to the climax of The Terminator. More proof that sometimes budget has little to do with what makes a good horror film: Darkside has the money but can't venture out of its DC Comics House of Mystery vibe, while After Midnight drops any sense of reality and goes straight for the nightmare logic.


Not an easy film to love, but loving Damnation Alley (as I do) depends on your gender and age. If you were a boy in the 70s and read Famous Monsters of Filmland,  chances are you longed to take off in that cool armored cruiser (above) across a nuclear landscape populated by almost nothing except the occasional giant scorpions, or massive deluges of not-quite-giant man-eating ants, some psychotic rednecks, no need for money or homework, freak storms, and no girls gumming up the works (if there is a girl let her be an uncritically nurturing easy Breezy Vegas 'dancer' rather than a bossy mom type).

Directed by Jack Smight, who gave us such other awful bit irresistible films as Midway and Airport 1975, Damnation Alley is a film as wholesome in its fashion as reading Boy's Life magazine at a cub scouts meeting, as American as a voyage to Wally World armed with an M-16. George Peppard is the 'dad' character - identifiable via his terrible fake mustache, faker southern accent, and still faker toupee; Jan Michael Vincent is the starry-eyed older brother who gets the girl and lets you ride his cool motorbike. And dad even lets you learn to drive the cruiser; the girl is a young Meryl Streep-style French beauty (Dominique Sanda) picked up in a deserted sand-swept Vegas; Paul Winfield is the black guy, destined to get eaten alive by killer cockroaches. Vincent plays toreador with giant scorpions on his motorbike and throw them women who miraculously switch from actresses to mannequins at the key moment. It's stuff like that which makes a film great... for, as I say, boys of a certain age.


The film begins in one of the best nuclear war recreations in film history: no drama, no hand-wringing, just by the book monitoring of screens at a remote missile silo deep in the American southwest; women around to wring their hands and bother us with morality and ethics. A few years go by and a chain reaction at their remote facility makes sticking around inadvisable, and trims the survivors down to a handful who take to the road in two big armored party vans - though the budget only allows for one, so we seldom see them together without a mirror. Why even bother having the second cruiser? Just to use the CB radio?

Myriad technical difficulties aside, this has to overall be the mellowest post-nuclear war movie of the 70s or ever - with a bunch of men and one Hawksian woman (Dominique Sanda) driving around through psychedelic electric storms, a strange flood (luckily these vehicles float, too) and only occasionally running into mutations of either the cannibal rapist redneck variety or the mutated insect variety. Even the arrival of a kid isn't cause for alarm, since he's played by the perennially feral Jackie Earle Haley.



I almost never find anything disparaging to say about Shout Factory, who have been cleaning up and releasing to blu-ray a vast host of sci fi and horror titles from the 70s and 80s that would likely be forgotten or bungled otherwise. The blu-ray of Damnation Alley is amazing overall, with groovy deep blacks. But some of the outdoor scenes don't stack up to the Amazon instant video version, wherein the sky is a weird almost psychedelic blue. In the Shout version the sky has been cleaned up to a 'normal' sickly pale normal sky color that's just not as cool. Did the restorers think the intense colors of the original sky (and the action all blurry like your looking through seriously dark shades) was some kind of mistake? Did they not get that the world is over and the outdoors is fucked?

It's a problem for me but otherwise I can't complain --the interior shots have clearly been retouched with deep groovy blacks, and the DVD is the come-true dream of every boy who no longer likes sitting in the lap of his cute babysitter and now wants to hang out and throw rocks with the boys his age.

Top: Amazon Instant Video / Bottom: Shout blu-ray

Two worth-your-time 2013 films with similar themes, color schemed posters and even titles, recently made themselves, like whores, available at home: IN A WORLD is a semi-autobiographical female voiceover artist trying to make it in a deep-voiced man's game tale, written and directed by and starring Children's Hospital hottie Lake Bell; ADULT WORLD stars Emma Roberts as Amy, a Syracuse University undergraduate struggling poet who finally realizes she's not 'too good' for her job at an adult bookstore and is written and directed by men (a detail I will be addressing) and bearing a tacky tag line (make it out in above poster if you want, but I warned you). Both 'girl' characters start their films living with their parents, rent-free, and the films chronicle their respective launches into the real 'adult' world, reaching down for the big brass rings, stooping to conquer, and finding help along the way, mostly from sensitive boys and/or male mentors, like whores.


Why do I mention one film is made by a woman about a woman, and the other is made by men? For the simple reason that as a pretentious, callow Syracuse poetry undergraduate 'man' who applied at one of the local XXX bookstores at one point ("the endless trains of the faithless" - spouts Robin Williams on the TV commercial playing behind me, advertising the Chevy Silverado, "Find new roads!") I see deeplier than most to this story into (that's poetry). And I can tell you up front that Amy's adventures in that accursed city look right (the film was shot there) but just don't add up. I went there, but did the writer? Amy says she's an over-achiever with a straight A average and is a virgin and also hot, and yet wants to be a furious poet? Most poets are lucky if they're even one of the three. But to be all three is almost impossible, and to still want to be a poet for all that, hmmm. Not to mention she says has no car insurance because she spent the money on SASEs, confident of her immanent fame as a poet, which in itself is very suspicious for a supposedly smart girl, but she does this in the age when most submissions are done via e-mail and then stands by while her car is conveniently stolen. A character's life hasn't seemed so unconnected to any actual experience of the real world since Juno and Frances Ha!, neither I've been able to see in tiny fragments due to their anti-youth-gender denigration and complete cluelessness about the sorts of relationships being depicted. (1)

But Amy is just the sort of girl a sexual anxiety-prone male closet-macho writer would imagine, i.e. she needs a man who's good at organizing, so he can toddle in her wake making exasperated sighs and treat her like a child. She needs me, man! Ruby Sparks shall be her name. That's fine if you're not trying to show someone adapting to the real adult word, the reality of which is that there is no earthly or celestial way a girl as hot as Amy wouldn't get published, laid, and invited to endless readings by her sophomore year, even if she shouts her stanzas like a sorority pledge on her third Molson. Sorry that was sexist, but those girls were loud. 

Although it's never clear if Amy's in school or out of it, she latches randomly (by finding his book in someone's car) onto a disillusioned middle aged semi-success poetry teacher mentor in his -nth mid-life crisis named 'Rat' (John Cusack). This clown does his own sewing, wears a ski cap indoors, and uses the word 'cray' (for crazy), but Cusack is a pro, and clearly had some input. He takes a page from the Bill Murray playbook and modulates his usual cool aloof warmth to include a complete ambivalence towards the small stuff. The pleased smile that comes across Rat's face after Amy trashes his apartment has few equals, you have to go back to the 1982 Betty Blue to find one.

And yet he can't even be bothered to take her virginity. Jean-Hughes Anglade would never stoop to morality - he'd sleep her Amy even knowing it would destroy her respect for him and lead to blackballing and hushed whispers. He would do it because sometimes he wants to feel like he has control over his own destiny, and because learning to be careful what you wish for and that no one is ever worth worshipping uncritically, and that sex needn't be earth-shaking to count as experience are all so valuable as life lessons that a truly good mentor wouldn't be bound by the academic moral code's morality but his own inner Hawksian morality.


Where is this version of Syracuse with midlife crisis poets afraid to lend a girl a hand in need, if she be hot? The only thing to do with a cute student protege is make love to her if she's fair, and to someone else if she's not (that's Wilde, yo). But worse is yet to come. There's a tall drag queen who lets Amy crash at her squat, and teaches her how to smoke weed and dance. Thank GOD she also doesn't get AIDS halfway through and give Amy a parting monologue about reaching for the sky. But the worse is yet to come: Amy gets a job at a homey mom and pop XXX-rated video store, an idea lifted from an old Mr. Show sketch, and the sort of bait-and-switch number that never really adds up to anything, anymore than the drag queen angle did. If the job had at least one sleazy element the comedy might have had some bite. If there were rats in the squat, or she had to step over junkies to get up the stairs... something! Adult World, yeah RIGHT.


I applied for a clerk job at a XXX store when I was studying up in Syracuse and let me tell you, it was not a mom and pop operation. I remember filling out my application and talking to the owner who loomed down at me from the tall counter, while what sounded like a woman reaching a lengthy orgasm or else being tortured with hot coals echoed from the back room. I knew I would go insane having to listen to that all day but I took mental notes of my impressions for future novelization. Rather than win me over with his gentle decency, this mug sized me up through his beady eyes and said "Ever take a poly?" - he meant polygraph test, to assess whether or not I had stolen from past jobs. I told him I would try anything once, but I think he could see I was turning pale after only ten minutes of being there. He probably just waited out his applicants, to see if they could hack the toxic vibes and nonstop moaning from the peep booths (there's no such booths in this mom and pop place, don't worry, honey).  See, that idea could have been a movie, but every edge set up for cutting latent baby teeth in Adult World comes to us already sanded possibly through rewrites and second-hand sanitization: Cusack's mentor won't seduce her, the adult bookstore is really just a sweet homey place where everybody knows your name, and the drag queen bestie (Armando Riesco) is just a droll nurturer ala John Lithgow in World According to Garp, and cute stock boy Evan Peters is on hand to support and straighten her out as needed, and to patiently wait to bust his move until at least an hour of running time has elapsed.

I like a lot of things about Adult World, but it makes me miss another film, Art School Confidential, which is unofficially set at Pratt, where I reside now. Think Jim Broadbent or John Malkovich in that movie would have been so rude as to refuse m'lady's request for de-virginizing. The very idea of refusing such a hottie is hateful to Americans!


That's not a problem for Carol (Lake Bell ) in In a World. She goes right after fellow Children's Hospital star, Ken Marino, a successful voiceover artist who her father (Fred Melamed) has taken as a protege in some twisted effort to have a son, (his other daughter is played by the always amazing Michaela Watkins). Ms. Bell has always been my Children's Hospital favorite and here she ably carries the film in the tricky role of being both a success and a little disorganized, struggling to make it and getting by with a little help from her friends, and dealing with a dad who doesn't understand why he so desperately wants to keep her from being eclipsed by his female child. Dimitri Martin is nice guy sound engineer who helps Carol get breaks but could never bust a move -though he in turn is helped by an actually cool lesbian wingman, and when Carol does get a break it's from a woman producer (Geena Davis).

That's part of the genius of Bell's film, many comedies featuring ditzy women have been made, and about ball-busting career gals, vain actresses, and doting moms, all idling around until some pasteurized thirtysomething hunk with soft eyes materializes in the midst of a shopping cart collision. But In a World moves forward three squares, to capture the awkward phase past the ditzy klutz in search of a man phase, to chronicle what goes on between the lucky break-and-hard-work period and genuine success. Every time Carol woke up I was sorries she had slept through some big gig. I won't spoil whether she does or not, but I think it's interesting that I assumed she would, that Bell wouldn't show herself getting out of bed if she was still on time. And I know how harder it is than it looks!


Much as In a World seems remarkably astute, Adult World never feels quite real, quite set on a tone or era or even Syracuse as it really is: Amy's apartment is way too clean; there isn't adequate representation of how everything gets crusted over with salt from the sidewalks and roads, the way frozen slush rises up in a dirty brown wave at passing cars, etc.  I did respect that her walls just had a Sylvia Plath poster above a mattress on the floor and she was half-trying to commit suicide (very Syracuse). I like Emma Roberts overall and she's game to go the distance here, but like her character she is still coming into her own as an actress of real gravitas --even when smashing Cusak's guitar she seems like she's just trying on emotions. Of course at that age all poets are fakes, unaware we can't bumrush greatness; so either she's an amazing actress or else just perfectly imperfect. Her dad is Eric Roberts! Julia Roberts is her aunt. See, that kind of thing would be cool to see in a movie. Why not play herself?


It's that sense of playing herself that makes Bell score so much more points de la resonance. She takes risks, she shows us things that might make people mad if they think characters are based on them. Of course In a World has problems too: Carol must be making money, so why she can't afford her own rent in a place as cheap as L.A.? Anyway, she winds up getting a windfall of work, which is exciting, but a subplot with her sister cheating on her husband with a handsome Irishman doesn't really add up to much compared to the riveting central drama of the father screwing over his own daughter, who's screwing the guy the father's screwing her over for. But so what? It's small potatoes, and just the bitchy voiceover artist party at Ken Marino's house is worth any price of admission.e

The ominous Hall of Languages at SU

Moving back to the idea of men (and women) being uncomfortable with movies where women move ahead without men approving and helping them (a theme central perhaps to the strange hostility towards the movie Scarlet Diva -- see "Her Body, Her Ashtray"). The year was 1987: I was an English Lit Syracuse major studying poetry and fancying myself a great new talent. I scored big at a poetry reading, won acclaim and the plum spot opening for Allen Ginsberg when he came to town. Unfortunately circumstance were everything. For my big debut I had been drinking sangria with a fellow poet from the class, a lovely girl who was bringing the flirt out of me big time, letting me do all the talking - everyone before me at the reading was nervous and wobbly but I was a huge smash, and even the poets following me even prefaced with' I can't hope to top Erich, but here goes.' I decided to always be drinking for readings from then on. In hindsight I realized it wasn't just the sangria, it was the flirting.

But for Ginsberg, a semester later, I had drunk way too much trying to get that magic back, and now I had a legit girlfriend, no more flirting, and she was sick, unable to support me, so I was nervous, the auditorium was packed, and I drank too much and couldn't get a buzz. My hand still shook holding the paper. I didn't stick around to go to the diner with Mr. Ginsberg after the show, as I had been invited to, citing my sick girlfriend as an excuse, but people who sat next to him during my set said he was thrilled by me, especially my poem, "Cashed like a bowl / of Indica Homegrown." So I've regretted my running away ever since.

Flash forward: I answered a back-of-the-paper ad to work at an XXX rated bookstore on Erie Boulevard, as you now know. I also tried my hand at an erotic novel, chronicling a disturbing vision I had the year before at a Rochester Dead Show, tripping and having a major 'too many people' bad one, of a gigantic carnival of S&M torture. We'd found an old LP called Tortura (left) left by a housemate's crazy uncle -- and it was a very disturbing thing to listen to, over and over, while tripping your face off, and it probably effected that vision. That uncle also had a lot of Zappa, and "The Torture Never Stops" was heard often, and seemed to be confirmation and extension of the grim existential cruelty that the LSD-enhanced Tortura sessions were exposing behind 20th century first world existence's curtain of blasé painless decency. My novel, Shroomsadoplasticism, was, never finished, and typed on a manual typewriter, so there's only one original - with the first and last ten pages long ago fell away... and now the pages are even out of order... so symbolic, man.

A few years later I realized I'd never be a real poet because I couldn't get into Hart Crane or Marianne Moore --trying to understand their poetry was worse than tripping to Tortura. I didn't even bother to find out if I was accepted when I applied for grad poetry at the University of Washington. I did a bunch of open mic nights at the O.K. Hotel but all that came of it was that the long-haired hippy freak M.C. of the event stole my girlfriend. I moved back to NYC thinking I'd go read at the Nuyorican and blow their minds but soon realized I just could not endure the terrible onslaught of bad poets SHOUTING / in this same /STYLE / every other  / WORD / of their / POEM. I'd really hoped Roberts' Amy was going to rant her poetry in that style. I'd be TALKING and THINKING in that STYLE for DAYS afterwards. Didn't Robert even GO to a POE-etry reading to reSEARCH? So I went into voiceovers, mentored by a cool older lady from an ad agency that shall go nameless. I did a few, was told I needed to join AFTRA to do any more. I joined - then they told me they weren't using AFTRA people, because of the strike. Also, they were going for the sensitive guy voice now, and my deep sexy deadpan growl was out. My dues lapsed. (my demo reel here).

A few years earlier, in 1994, after I'd been graduated and loose in the uncaring world for five years, (working as a freelance direct mail copywriter), I read that our beloved, sexy poetry teacher Stephen Dobyns was suspended from Syracuse for using 'salty' language in the classroom. His suspension was picked up in the NY Times as the exhibit A of the new PC fascism taking over college campuses everywhere:

No one suggests that he offered to trade good grades for sex. He is not accused of sleeping with or propositioning students -- one says he tried to kiss her at a drunken party -- or of the focused protracted hectoring we might call "harassment." The allegations all concern language: specifically, what the committee calls "salty language" used outside the classroom at graduate-student parties. They involve attempts to be funny, and to provoke. There was one cruel sexual remark about a professor who wasn't present, and the suggestion that another might benefit from a "salty" term for a satisfactory sexual encounter.

Is this sexual harassment? Not in any clear sense, but those clear borders have been smudged by university policies that refer to "a hostile workplace," to "patterns of intimidation.""Hostile" and "intimidation" are subjectively defined, as they were by the student who testified (hilariously, I thought, though, again, no one seemed to notice) that he felt intimidated by my friend's use of a "salty" phrase. He felt he was being asked to condone a locker-room atmosphere that might offend the women present.
There was much talk of protecting women from blunt mentions of sex. And the young women who testified were in obvious need of protection. They gulped, trembled and wept, describing how my friend yelled at them in class or failed to encourage their work. Victorian damsels in distress, they used 19th-century language: they had been "shattered" by his rude, "brutish" behavior. After testifying, they seemed radiant, exalted, a state of being that, like so much else, recalled "The Crucible," which used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the Army-McCarthy hearings. --11/26/95 

My fellow students from his class, Abbe and Laurie wrote a letter (printed in the Times but I can't find it online) citing as an example of Dobyns' scathing honesty all three of us remember: there was a seething frat boy in class whose poetry was so seething with misogynistic sexual frustration that one barely needed to deconstruct to squirm over. Even the phrase "huffing and puffing to her house on his Huffy Spitfire" made us wince. Dobyns said, emotionlessly, after the frat boy stopped reading: "what do you think, should we try to help this poem or just take it out into the hall and shoot it?"

With that phrase we loved him forever. He didn't need guide rails from some PC Voltari to uncover a misogynist frat boy when he heard one, even if that boy didn't know himself.

No modern woman has spent as much screen time running in slow motion while firing two guns in 3-D towards the camera than Milla Jovovich, which considering her start as a folksy neo-hippie in Dazed and Confused (1993) and on her debut album, reflects a great cosmic disillusionment. She's like the weary blonde chick AND the SWAT guys of Romero's original Dawn of the Dead rolled into one. And I love her, from a distance. It's like she's a version of Brundlefly (i.e. Jeff Goldblum) only she's slowly dissolving into CGI replication -- another soldier in the Uncanny Valley -- fighting for her last shreds of unpixelated humanity.

I didn't seek them out, but the first four Resident Evil films have been all over Syfy lately, usually on Saturday afternoons, and I've seen them in a half-asleep lollygag. Repeat viewings and set and setting seem to make them go down easier --they don't exactly get better but amazingly neither do they get any worse.  And sometimes not being worse is better than better. After an exhausting nine hours sleep, the sun beaming through your shades, not worse becomes the new black. And having the violence intercut with commercials helps too, there's less pressure to be great, more of a sense of being part of some larger picture of commerce and promos for Syfy original shows. Spread between an array of commercials that seem even more surreal and apocalyptic than the films, the rampant zombie attacks and soulless corporate vibes coalesce into one satiric saga worthy of Voltaire or Robert Downey Sr.


And of course there's Milla Jovovich (pronounced - Mee-la YO-vo-vitch - though I add a 'va' and pronounce the hard 'j' - Jo-vova-vitch. Either way she holds it all together which, considering the amount of blue screen this poor woman has to slog through, is quite a feat. English not being her first language, or French either; she was born in the Ukraine, wherefrom a genetically superior breed of humans seems to flow, like a 'wirgin' spring.

I still listen to Milla's 1994 album The Divine Comedy, once in awhile though I've given up hopes there'll ever be a sequel. Too bad because her own unique fusion of Kate Bush, Arthurian bard, Nordic alien-hybrid, and Jane Birkin is purer than all of them distilled together in a crystalline decanter. But that album came out ten years ago. Does she even have time to pick up a guitar now, with so much zombie blood on her hands?


Living up to the promise of her stoner goddess debut the year before Divine Comedy came out, she quietly sang some lines from one of her songs and tried to light a joint while strumming her acoustic guitar in Dazed and Confused (1993) and may have missed the target but established herself as one of those hauntingly perfect hippie-style goddesses that stir feelings deeper and more ancient than mere attraction, closer to the vicinity of chaste courtly love where the main desire is to be her champion in a joust. The film didn't need her to be great, but with her it was able to break through, like a midnight sun, into the realm of the ethereal.


Bigger movies beckoned, as they will when beautiful, talented, otherworldly girls present themselves like a werewolf version of a young Marianne Faithful. First there was a romantic and artistic relationship with French action director Luc Besson, and The Fifth Element (1997) where she played the savior of the universe, woven into existence from a chunk of raw material of 'the perfect being' and speaking her own bizarre language, and growing more horrified and disillusioned at humanity's capability for barbarousness the more historical microfiche she scanned. People remembered the crazy orange hair and Gautier white tape suit, but she was never objectified or sexualized even when all hot- too androgynous in a way. Besson clearly felt that same courtly joust vibe and he made sure it carried over to Bruce Willis' cubicle-dwelling cab driver.

In Luc and Milla's next film together, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), she played the clearest avatar of that courtly loyalty and evinced great androgynous schizophrenia. She's so nuts you can feel god shouting at her through special channels in her brain like an impatient, sugar-addled schoolboy.

I know just what she's going through - for six weeks every three years I become a supernaturally enlightened Buddhist monk crazy man. Power flows through me and all is love and holy light but it becomes very difficult to slow down for the normal unconscious and asleep people, or to not give away all my money and possessions to the first needy homeless man I find. Friends, family, mistresses and co-workers start to think I'm insane, or have ADHD -- that they are right means little. What matters is that Milla gamely and bravely lets that level of crazy flash across her beautiful features. She takes it all very seriously, and encourages us to wonder if maybe France was saved purely because of the sheer novelty of Joan, the purity of her madness.


Many critics were wary in advance of The Messenger, felt that this was her vanity project, that she had Besson wrapped around her finger and that she was out of her depth and Besson was letting her get away with it. But that's crap, my brothers. Besson and Jovovich both make it eternally theirs and, again, there was the sense that she was perfect for the role, having inspired first our devotion ever since Dazed, then Bruce Willis' in Fifth, and then the entire French army into a courtly chaste devotion where we were ready to storm castles in her name, and if critics balked it's quite easy to label them parallel history inquisitors. So let's.

The problem with the film of course is that we know the ending is going to be a solid downer, with Milla being sold out by the dauphin in the name of diplomacy and caution. Another problem is that everyone in the French and English armies look so alike it's hard to know who to root for. a third is that Milla plays Joan as such a schizophrenic with eye twitches and brown outs, and her notion of who god so alike to the heavenly alien recovery, it's looney tunes enough to make one wonder why Besson felt the need to show court scheming and intrigue behind her back at all. Why not just stick with what she sees and feels, so that the arrest seems to come out of nowhere?

Ancient Aliens enthusiasts such as yours truly contemplate how benevolent Nordic aliens and fifth dimensional projections from Arcturus may intervene at key moments in our history, to keep democracy alive (i.e. a Nordic 'angel' appeared to Washington at Valley Forge to convince him to keep going), and Joan's spiritual visitation might well be the same Nordic angel. Recent theories on 'star children' as a newly emerging race of genius ESP children often misdiagnosed as suffering from ADHD or autism have been sent here to lead us into a brighter tomorrow might actually play out if one such nutcase was charismatic and enough of an innate showman to genuinely lead an army to victory. I already know her initials - MJ


The idea of Milla as someone to fight for in a gallant Arthurian way (rather than as some obtainable 'prize') has continued from the Besson years and into her long and financially lucrative collaboration with current husband Paul W.S. Anderson: the Resident Evil series. So while we're here, let's take a gander at these:

What makes it really hum is the fantastic growling synth score, if your stereo has enough subwoofer or, the best way to see it, with really good headphones, you can feel your own electric grid dissolving into the flow of slow motion crazy kicks and fast crawling giant beasts, nods to Ripley in Aliens, and the more nods towards Escape from New York. A bit like the Underworld series, there's a sense that the filmmakers are like hey, whatever we do the critics are gonna hate it but the fans are gonna see it over and over - so let's please the fans, and develop the diegetic mythos over the course of the series. Thus artists who began as tired hacks become, in a sense, transformed through a decade of experience, through getting to work again and again with their same people, learning as they go.  They do, in short, what The Matrix sequels and so many others, could not.  And I love that the big final battle is almost all women on both sides, and yet it never feels like some sexy catfight but rather a genuine dangerous showdown. This has always been a co-ed franchise, and Anderson and Jovovich have taken up the gauntlet, depicting kickass females slugging it out with giant weird monsters in a way that's not overtly sleazy.

Milla's done other stuff, some of which I've written about:

"Milla gets to make grave diagnoses.... Resident Evil's Alice has filled her with holy power so she can say, "Something is going on, there's something strange going on in Nome" and have it ring with menace, or "conversion phenomena is something not a lot of people understand," implying she does! She understands less as time goes on, but is still miles ahead of the spooked and reactionary sheriff... or is she? A tense stand-off and a violent knife murder seemed shuffled in to keep you from nodding off and Milla's blamed for everything! Milla's haunted eyes are beautifully lit, so we can contemplate her hybrid status as we go along, and realize yes, Virginia, aliens are among us, and some of them are very, very adorable." (full piece here)
I loved PERFECT GETAWAY, but my expectations were rock bottom as I think I was confusing it with reviews I'd read of TURISTAS. So if you've never seen it, presume it lame and let it take you on its almost too "perfect" thrill-away... a horror film where characters actually make smart decisions! (more)

 that's some rich foreshadowing since on the walk home she witnesses a murder from the infamous melancholy slasher and gets knocked overboard and wakes up with face blindness - which is ingeniously and rather terrifyingly depicted by having the actors change constantly - wearing the same clothes - so her husband is played by like six different actors - the girls don't change much (and one of them,Valentina Vargas, steals all her scenes as a lady so badass she says of one night stands: "when you wake up and don't know for a minute where you are or who is sleeping next to you - I live for that!" -- I love her!) but half the time Milla doesn't even see herself in the mirror but someone else - and when you're as hot as Milla that's a pretty horrifying thought. And the idea the murder could be anyone, even her husband and she wouldn't know - that he could come at her as the cop, or come at her as her husband, that's horrifying and Milla expertly evokes that horror - showing alas that her life in films has not been joyous - she's fought and dealt with horrors for quite awhile. She's scrappy, but by now hasn't she paid her dues? Dear God, please give your favourite avatar, Milla Jovovich, a nice warm rom-com break, and a chance at another album.


And if you do nod lissen... den to hell with you!

Ugh, February, the month of hassles and cold and weariness. Slogging towards March like a slouchy Bethlehem that evaporates on clammy handed contact. Another March 2nd means another year older for your humble narrator, another step closer to the grave. I've been looking for a way out, and found one --the past.

In fact, goin' back thirty very odd years ago, to the 80s! NatGeo is showing their entire 80s series today - Sat. March 1st -- right now they're saluting Reagan. Argh! Oops, now skate parks... to me, it begins and ends with the VCR.

I had to assemble this list to combat the best of the 80s lists on the web that all either include nostalgia-invoking propaganda like Ferrie Bueller and Raiders of the Lost Ark or acts of admittedly brilliant pop connivance like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment. Don't think I don't love some of them too, in my fashion and can quote them endlessly (well, Tootsie and Raiders): Was ist los? Warum schläfst du!? Nobody cared... nobody showed. Blow it up! Blow it back to God! That is one nutty hospital. Too bad you don't speak Hovito, you might have warned them! I could have done without the dancing. Truth is... truth is you were okay company. Why don't you tell me...eh... where the ark is, right now? Michael, I begged you to get some therapy. The charmer's name was Gaffe... I'd seen him around. Wait, that's Blade Runner's now excised voice over, and thank god - how we hated it. Much like most of that decade, at least until 1987 when we discovered we didn't have to live in it at all - but could hide in the late 60s.

10. PASSION (1982)Directed by Jean Luc Godard

We invariably come to any film with pre-set responses to cinematic iconography. Godard assumes this and intentionally screws with our narrative-based expectations. The issue is, how dogmatically do we adhere to the "rightness" of these expectations? When a film adheres too closely to predetermined narrative formulations we have cliche' -- when a film deliberately screws with them, you have post-modern ambiguity, as in one of PASSION's many bizarre film set scenes: in one we see a knight on a horse trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden--thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: will we see this chick being abducted? Will we see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense. Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera, and the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman then goes climbing up into the lighting rigging so the knight can't reach her; the knight dismounts and goes to have a smoke, ignoring her. (more)

9. AKIRA (1988)

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

The quintessential cyber punk anime, Akira is set in a riot-scarred "Neo-Tokyo" on the verge of some massive unnamed catastrophe, peppered with amok biker gangs, conspiratorial cops, cute anarchists, flying vehicles, telekenetic mutations and strange teddy bears, all so gorgeously illustrated time melts and even the tear gas flows gorgeous enough to leave your already-dropped jaw so low it distends off your skull and tendrils of fleshy HDMI cables connect you directly to the screen.

The plot may hinge in the end on one of those typical Asian male friendships between misfits one of whom goes crazy, but there's a cataclysmic beer-after-liquor-never-sicker sort of apocalypse as government-sponsored Methuselah syndrome psionics try to reign in the crazy friend who's become godlike and fallen in love with smashing half the city as he seeks the titular entity. When things get quiet enough you can hear Walt Disney's frozen head explode through its frozen jar.

8. MOONSTRUCK(1987)

Directed by Norman Jewison

Does this film really belong here, you ask? How dare you. What would you put instead, Tootsie? I thought about it, but after multiple viewings in the 80s it now seems faintly unbelievable - the rapid rise of Dorothy Michaels to that awful Stephen Bishop song ("It Might Be You") is enough to keep it off this list. But Moonstruck looks to the great Italian operas for its soundtrack, and it's the best Cher role ever. Her chemistry with Nicolas Cage sizzles and he becomes a star bringing mushmouth ferocity to lines like "Gimme da knife so I can cut my froat!" and "I'm going to take you to da bed." The effect for us, at the time, was akin to what Brando in Streetcar must have been 30 years before, a mix of terror, heat, and hilarity. Jewison manages to make a movie free of bad guys but overflowing with color and character, climaxing in a family breakfast where all problems are solved as more and more family members and players drop by while Olympia Dukakis steals the film with little more than exasperated but resigned sighs. Don't hate it cuz it's sweet and optimistic - it's not just those things. Foreget Scorsese, it was this film that made me proud to be dating back-to-back Italian-American chicks, one from Stamford and the other from Carmel. If you have to hate a sweet optimistic comedy from the 80s, hate Tootsie! Telling me it must be you / telling me it must be you / all of my life / YEAH, RIGHT!

A stunning movie that changed me absolutely, left me literally trembling in awe, and yet I never want to see it again. It's just too beautiful and disturbing, taking the Munch-ish scream of Kubrick's Shining, flooring it to the ceiling and exploding through the wall of what is possible in depicting brutality and beauty at once, telling through a child soldier's eyes of Bellarus's suffering at the hands of the Nazis until it becomes a bizarre transhumanist poetry, staggering in the way it encompasses the best of Tarkovsky, Kubrick and even David Lynch and just keeps expanding from there, widening from the unfathomable horror of war wider even than insanity's parameters.


As a side note, one thing that's kind of deeply reassuring about WWII is the way the Nazis bound us to the Russians in a forced realization of our relative humanity. Politics, sides, none of it mattered compared to the horror of the camps, the sheer monstrous scale of it. There was no way not to shudder if you were human, and that bound us non-Nazis together. In Come and See we are as viewers united in a similar way, watching the sparkle in this kid's eyes gradually replaced by a twisted leer of a horrified face, something the boy and girl stars (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova) were supposedly hypnotized to be able to provide, something beyond human, a face unseen before or since in any cinema.

I've always taken a hard line stance that idiots (and minors, of course) shouldn't use drugs. Seeing all the great drugs wasted on the snickering young in the 2012 indie Toad Road made me remember back to the young age when I could only get high, or even get hold of a beer, by hanging out with metalhead Central Jersey burn-outs. I ditched them soon as I got to college. But then my freshman year punk contingent were scared of acid, tried to warn me off it, but I felt the calling of a higher power, a spirit was beckoning, so I ditched that crowd too and found some beautiful acidheads, and there I found myself, for a spell. But what a burnout-and-lightweight-strewn path I left behind, so many people who never should have tried drugs at all or at least not until college. Seeing Jason Banker's 2012 film Toad Road recently reminded me that the blithe openness about psychedelics on this blog might do more harm than good and and, worse, expose a truth hidden even from myself, that my whole holy enlightenment shortcut-seeking trip masks just another garden variety waste case burn-out, because you see, I'm one of those idiots.


But all through my travels I've seen people, especially the very young and Piscean, who get way into psychedelics far too fast, too deep; some truth is always about to be revealed, like a slot machine jackpot just a few more coins away, for decades.  It reminds me of that question posed to Anne Wiazemski in Godard's Sympathy for the Devil(1967) "Do you consider drugs a form of spiritual gambling?" (her answer, "oui"). Spiritual seekers never listen to advice from anyone who's already chased that rainbow and maybe they shouldn't (the "I did them and they changed my life but you shouldn't because I already did so I saved your brain cells blah blah"). My advice, first practice meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, and only trip with qualified shamanic guides, and/or cool and beautiful people, and mostly, for the cause of art, for opening one's doors of perception, to paint or write or play in ways far outside your norm, good or bad. Otherwise you're just wasting the alien intelligence's time.

The doomed truth-seeker in Toad is Sarah (Sarah Anne Jones), a young wastrel home from college (or about to leave), she's way cute and so has two suitors amidst the Kids-meets-Jackass crowd she rolls with. One of them is James (James Davidson), who starts the show a wastrel but gets tough love counseling and turns into a preachy buzzkill, which is too bad as Davidson isn't the usual mumblecore anemic smarm merchant. He could go do something grand, but he's too in love with Sarah, he thinks, and that's his excuse to follow her down, lecturing that she doesn't have to do drugs to have a good time every step of the way: he has to 'protect' her. Sarah will have none of it. She wants to the Fulci distance by tripping her way through the seven gates of hell via the legendary PA haunted mile, Toad Road, a path into the woods where one might, as they say in The Beyond, "face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored."



But the music is good, the photography tight and clever, and when it all hinges on the frail Sarah, her insanely tiny legs hugged by tight hipster pants, things are good. She has a great way with throwing her shoulders around, and her thick long hair coupled to her waif thinness makes her seem like a willowy version of the title character in Valerie's Week of Wonders. Her damaged sweetness and her unrelenting drive to explore the void are a haunting combination. If you know the druggie scene you know this girl and probably fell in love with her at some point, and wrote a poetry book, or album about her, like that girl Holly for Craig Finn (of the Hold Steady): "Holly's inconsolable / unhinged and uncontrollable / cuz we can't get as high as we got / on that first night." I still feel that first night, and the pang of missing girls like Holly and being powerless to stop them going over the side. I would have enjoyed the Toad more if they had maybe gone a little meta about it, shooting-wise, as the Picnic at Hanging Rock element never really gels with the muted realism. Still it's a promising feature film start for former documentarian of the youth music and 'culture' scene, Jason Banker, and I love the dark and beguiling poster series:

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I also like the art and posters for Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013), a musch more psychedelic recall-shiver-inducing film, in gorgeous black and white, which draws from old woodcuts and psychedelic concert posters from mid-60s Britain, correctly mixing them - recognizing the common psilocybe cubensis root between the cosmic alchemists of old and the Zen hipsters tripping at outdoor music fests today.






The film follows Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), a wussy servant of a noted alchemist, who begins the film cowering from a furious offscreen battle. Ere long the skirmish moves away and he finds himself in the company of three other fellas: a savvy deserter Trower (Julian Barrett), a dimwitted wanderer (Richard Glover), a fourth man (Peter Fernando) with a mysterious agenda, and this quartet set off in search of an ale house, across one of the huge rolling hedgerow-crossed fields of England. Set sometime during the 17th century English Civil War, it does right what most costume films do wrong -- that is, the clothes look like they fit the actors and that they've been wearing them for about twenty years without a bath --as nature intended, and the pistols and muskets all need to be patiently reloaded with powder and ball after every shot, resulting in some hilarious gunfights as opposing sides shoot, then duck down in the grass to reload  From there it would be a crime to reveal anything, suffice it to say that digging for treasure is involved, as is a shady Irish bastard of an alchemist, O'Neil (Michael Smiley), his assistant Cutler (Ryan Pope), a mushroom circle, a black sun, and some of the best use of wind since 1925's The Wind. The acting is uniformly stunning, and the dialogue naturalistic while still witty as Withnail. Rich in period slang, robust expletives, forgotten alchemical science, and sly illustrations of the way men befriend one another on a casual basis, and lastly the way a mouthful of the right mushroom can turn a meek scholar into a lion!

The men never leave the field and there's almost no one in the cast but these few men (no women), but it never feels dull or Jarmusch-style idle. Credit Jim White's score for slowly building up from a single, sturdy military drum beat, and gradually expanding in scope, with a pause on the way for one of the characters to sing a little ditty, and eventually into full blown sonic mind-melting reminiscent of Bobby Beausoleil's score for Lucifer Rising. And it was written by Amy Jump, a woman! Aye, and lensed by a woman (Laurie Rose) and produced by two women (Anna Higgs, Claire Jones) and a man, aye, but there be not a woman in the cast, as nature intended! It may be the best film about masculine identity since Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker!




Great as the existential Sartre-Godot-Leviathan-style robust gallows humor is, and the weird mystical angle with coughing up runes, ropes into the alternate realities, psychedelic shrooms growing wild and free (as they did in those days and still do in the soggy fields of England), the song and the strange slow motion and woodcut-style tableaux, the music, acting, and costumes, it's also a great document of perhaps the single best freak out on too much psilocybin since maybe ever: as the music gets truly monumental, buzzing and soaring in and around its droning center, a series of overlapping strobes and mirror splitting occurs, and you might say yeah yeah, that mirror FCP effect hasn't been fresh since Led Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same, (I even used it in Queen of Disks) and the strobe cutting is so seizure-inducing it comes with a warning about it at film's start to ward off epileptics, but Wheatley and Jump, who co-edited the film, clearly put in some real time to get this all perfect, alternating split second imagery until it comes together in the mind in new shapes that breathe and pulse. One one hand it's nothing too different than what one might shoot with their friends on mushrooms in a field as I did (and Syd Barrett before me) in the early fall of 1987 - there's no unusual sight or diegetic sound (I was thinking for sure they'd switch film stock to color for the tripping parts) but the strobing overlapping images really do work to create a feeling of stopping time and space, the two or more images cohering into one overlapping collage image that is so astounding if you really surrender to it that it reveals the unknowable buzzing throbbing molecular Now waiting for us all just outside the veil, exposing and eradicating the fine fiber optic line between waking life and the collective archetypal unconscious, illustrating the black hole sun overlap between waking and dreaming, the union of birth and death, past and future, real and unreal; this trippy sequence speeds our perceptions up fast enough they slow way down, that dying is very slow but ghosts move faster than the eye can see, so the ground zero time distillation strobe moments are the mirror of death, the gaze from the opposite side of the river, the psychedelic peak when mundane linear time is completely sidestepped, and when one returns to it, they are renewed, like Popeye coming back from the dead and now completely made of atomic spinach.

In short, A Field in England shows us the reverberating core that tripping outdoors should unveil, it all but illuminates Titania and Oberon watching gamely from their transdimensional bower. Even though Wheatley's film leaves plenty of room to doubt the reality of these visions it also shows we've dismissed the ancient arts of magick and alchemy at our peril. Maybe one day we'll learn knocking on wood grounds your body's accumulated current, dissipating any negative energy your positive affirmation may generate in order to preserve stasis, or that salt tossed over the shoulder dissipates negative spiritual magnetism in the air. The ancient science behind such superstitions having died out, we may presume our ancestors' superstitions are all groundless, but the originators of these wives' tales made Stonehenge, the Pyramid of Giza, Machu Picchu. Western science denies the existence of things beyond its ability to measure, and then one day it measures them.

Bella, flanked by cumbersome breathers

Vampirism is every girl's dream, if she be faire and smart enough to see when a hottie in the mirror looketh back and realize that if she's ever to bid surcease time's incessant pawing, it's now or never. Small price, killing off your inner Snow White soul via a lugubrious joneser huntsman to keep your that cold-eyed hottie smiling back. And if there's no such thing as vampirism or eternal youth, well some drugs come close, they at least slow things down, maturity-wise, kill the appetite and sleep cycle, and replace glazed-eyed homogenous breather-eater lockstep with an unending thirst.

For the first four films of the Twilight saga, Bella wisely wants to get undead quick, while she's still got that pale flawless skin (her mothers' already shows the results of age and prolonged sun). And that is just one reason why I believe the series so subversive --Bella chooses death, she subverts the fairy tale maturity myth, making the saga a kind of alcoholic-addict fairy tale instead, one where the enchanted bower is returned to, out of clear conscience choice rather than arrested development. You can argue she merely chooses Edward (Robert Pattinson) and death goes with the deal, and you can argue he's a pretty creepy specimen (stalking her and watching her sleep all night after climbing in the window) but you just have to remember - he's not a real person - he's a daemon lover / arrested animus projection! The Twilight saga doesn't reflect the move from bleak Cinderella attic to magic pumpkin coach to married princess -- which would mirror a girl's transition from child to adulthood, but the reverse, from girl with friends her own age and so forth in Saint Pete's whisked to Nowheresville Forks like its some castle tower prison. In that sense the series is more a Greek tragedy, wherein unresolved past issues come burbling up to drag our heroine back down into the mucky-muck. But there's also a conscious decision on her part. She's a Snow White who makes the conscious decision to go back to sleep because she can't be bothered with an awake Prince Charming - she prefers the dream daemon lover.


And the idea that Edward has nothing else in his life to do other than stalk her is interesting and relevant to the daemonic animus, being the half of us in shadow while our daily waking egoic consciousness goes about its day. There is no sun or blue sky for the animus, it can only run loose when our conscious is asleep (or, if we're artists and writers, performers or mystics or schizophrenics, truly awake). As a daemon lover, Edward's ancestry stretches back to grim roots, down deep to Eros and Psyche and up through the Romantic poetry of Keats and Shelley, the daemon undead druggy lovers of Coleridge, Poe and La Fanu finally up to the Anne Rice eighties before landing square in the ultimate teenage Gothic dream lover, Edward.

I recently re-watched the entire series as it was all playing on one cable channel or other last month-ish, and after the entirety of around twelve hours of film it definitely holds up, especially if you really like dark purples, which I do. And lastly, it's great because, for me at least, it's guilt-free, there's no objectification of the females, rather we have a rare example of the 'female gaze' and the sole sex appeal comes from the boys, which does nothing for me turn-on wise, hence no guilt. Rather it compels me to realize that maybe my vague discomfort is how most women go through their movie watching life, enduring vast stretches of their boyfriend's chosen strippers and bloody gunfights. In Twilight: New Moon Bella goes with her mortal, age-appropriate friend Jessica (Anna Kendrick) and coming out laments how crappy the film was, mainly as there's "No hot guys kissing anybody." Imagine, a film daring to lament such a shallow thing. Then I remember Dracula again, Bela Lugosi commenting on the film's appeal to women:

 "It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream... It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out-and come back for more." 

And also, in a way, it is the woman in me, my ego's dark unconscious shadow, who loves Bella as a projector screen for herself, as it allows her in turn to look out through her eyes, for each anima and animus has their own inner daemons to work through, and so it goes, in fractals either direction.

And maybe I am prejudiced; Dracula is my favorite horror character. Bela Lugosi is my favorite horror actor, and next to William S. Burroughs, also my favorite junky. And even Bella's name conjures him, so it's sad that so many critics I normally respect tow the party line with the Twilight series, never seeing past the 'teen phenomenon' hooplah. Meanwhile these critics respect, some even revere, the more boy-friendly Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings/Hobbit, and Star Wars sagas, which have twenty films between them (so far) and about that same number of  lines spoken by women. Unless they're princesses to be admired from afar, to be kissed before they turn out to be your own sister, and so forth, women seem to be unwelcome in these franchises, but they get way more respect in general critical consensus. I can only guess Twilight's detractors have never been addicted to drugs, or had their heart torn out as a teenager, or had their parent/s move them away suddenly from all their friends to a strange and forbidding town.

If you're like me, with a loud, bothersome anima who withholds great sentence structure and inspiration on a whim, then you know she hates movies that don't feature crazy women she can project onto; and so you know she will reward thee with vast acres of flowing prose when she gets to lock onto Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted or Natalie Portman in Black Swan, or Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, or even Anthony Perkins in Psycho. (Right at the moment I wrote his name, Bogie says "You're a good man, sister" behind me - synchronicitous!)  Twilight's rife with such crazy feminine. My anima loves that it is not life-affirming but a solid romantic mood poem, tortured as Coleridge or Edward Burne-Jones trying to score laudanum at the strip mall, and an exoneration of the death wish underwriting everything from cutting and anorexia to just partying like there's no tomorrow or even just sleeping late and missing school, going from rainy day Gloomy Sunday blues to hooking up with a pallid junky and getting involved in 'the life,' understanding what that means, fully cognizant of all that will be lost, yet nonetheless daring to answer 'not to be' when Hamlet asks.


Only rubes would think such a choice false next to the demands of the 'paternal' life-choosing next-stage animus, i.e. the result when woman's daemonic lover turns to inner critic and lecturer, who endorses sanctified institutions without question, trusting doctors, school principals, fathers, husbands, and politicians over her own fiery whims. This new animus argues over SUV parking spots at the kids' soccer practice, the need to remodel the kitchen, PTA appointments, babysitters, their children's friend choices, and even approves the gradual coming-into-focus of assisted living domiciles. We can see women dominated by this stage of the animus in the Tea Party -- Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and Ann Coulter -- they let their animus possess them, confident in what it knows even at the expense of their own gender's liberty. It's only near the final 'second childishness' stage of Shakespeare's seven ages the "mere oblivion,"  sans taste, sans eyes, that the daemon lover animus returns, to shepherd these 'healthy' choice-making woman into the void. This is even pictured in New Moon, wherein Bella dreams of being all super old and Edward as young as ever, waiting patiently all this time for her to be done with the 'living' he so wishes for her. 

To understand the beauty of Bella's rejection of this fate takes perhaps the mindset of the addict, the sort of girl who stays upstairs reading fantasy novels over and over when the sun's out or the one who's depressed and in misery (and in school) until a hot older drug dealer sweeps her off her feet. Some girls just can't wait for the gradual fade-to-black. Some girls are too enamored of the daemon lover to let him go for the duration of her adult life on the vague promise he'll be back at the end. Sure the choice to stick with him is not healthy but he's not real, so who cares? The women who choose to keep him as their animus are our romantic heroines in the truest sense -- for don't forget that forsaking the daemon may allow the heroine of the story to exit the fantasy and enter the social order (to upgrade animus projections to, say, her shrink), but who needs another normal well-adjusted girl? Not the readers and seers and livers-in of fantasy. 

"Many myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, who has been turned into an animal or a monster by sorcery, being saved by a woman. This is a symbolic representation of the development of the animus toward consciousness. Often the heroine may ask no questions of her mysterious lover, or she is only allowed to meet him in darkness..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

Consider Bella and Edward's break-up early on in New Moon: his 'heroic' attempt to rescue her from himself, to usher her from the faerie bower and onto the next stage of her development: the camera wobbles when it shows Bella, we feel her knees getting weak and the stars going around, the drop of anguish cutting through her voice, but the camera is straight and calm cutting over to him, accenting his total emotional coldness. She staggers off, disoriented, winds up sleeping in the forest, a kind of refusal to go back to normal. Rather than following his advice she courts death actively, all but daring him not to come to her rescue.

 Reality is seldom operating anywhere close to a teenager's inner state. Myths are truer in that sense; they are not at all sentimental, for as Jung notes: "Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality" (ala John Ford); they are terrifying because they unveil that which was hidden for a reason. They are beguiling, addictive; once the light is shown over that shadowed corner of the psyche, the grateful prisoner chained in that corner rewards you with hordes of little treasures its stolen from you on the sly ever since you repressed him into that dark corner (usually around your first day of school): bottles of endorphins and dopas and artistic inspiration its fermenting for just such an illumination. Gradually he gives out less and less for more and more liberty to run rampant in your psyche. There's a thin line between being rewarded with one's own treasures and being held hostage in the zone between a daemonic dream lover's ardent wooing and drug addiction, and crossing that line has its own delirious Stockholm syndrome kick if you know how to treat the agonies and despair of withdrawal as just another kind of masochistic kick, the muscle ache and burning skin just love 'not given lightly' by your inner whiplash girl child in the dark.

"The pain was my only evidence he was real." - Bella 

Enlightenment doesn't occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the self into the conscious personality. -- Jung

Blood, the life, love: over the course of five films Bella never has a single real hobby other than desire for Edward, anything else engaged in just a distraction; bringing junked motorcycles onto the reservation for Jake (the werewolf) to fix isn't because she likes him romantically but because the image of Edward shows up whenever she does 'something stupid' - i.e. crashing a bike. Her various suicide attempts conjure Edward who tries to boss her around in an overprotective shroud even after he's long gone. But Bella's misery wobble framing steadies around Jake and Stewart shows she's a far better actress than given credit for, as she modulates brilliantly from pale, shocked jiltee, to anguished grieving misery, to playful and sharp-witted, as often happens when one can see and tell the person they're hanging with is in love with them, a captive audience, as it were. She's using him, really, as exploitative in her way as the first poison-brained white trader to swap furs and bear skins for two-cent trinkets. And using someone to get over someone else is not cool, yet how else are you going to do it?


And that's why Bella is so great both as a character and as Stewart's performance: she is not just one person, she has many facets and not all of them are admirable but Stewart plays the less admirable as if they were admirable.  When Mike (Michael Welch) finds out she's been dumped he awkwardly asks her to the movies, she snaps, "How about 'Face Punch' have you seen that?" The kind of thing that one would say in a cafeteria as a reworking of "how about I punch you in your stupid face?"-as he's so unwilling to receive her copious hints of being not into him. That it turns out to be a real movie hardly matters to the brilliance of the line--its refreshing savagery. It probably wasn't even a real movie before she mentioned it. She creates the future before her like a reverse wake, like a zipper uniting the conscious and unconscious halves of psychic jacket, Edward and Jacob zipped together into androgyne Bela.


I can really only think of one or two heroines in film who measure up to that level of realistic fuckerwithery: Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Out of touch critics in the house can't rear back like startled horses over those ladies' behaviors as they do with Bella's, because they come from old established classics, written by, not surprisingly, female authors. Each has its principle character who is hot and smart enough to act like she doesn't know it, who slouches and mopes and takes advantage of seeming obtainable but is really quite grandiose and fierce, who plays coy and clueless about how much various boys are crazy over her, a total of traits that, in the rom-come world, would be the purview of bitchy villains, not protagonists. Each has two boys mad for her -- one wild and one tame and anemic -- the twist in Twilight is that the wan, pale anemic one is the true love choice -- the vibrant anima mundi-reflection of the Jake / Rhett / Heathcliffe is relegated to the lesser mortal bin; Edward's name even sounds like Edgar, who marries Cathy and becomes as subjected to her as Jake is at the mercy of Bella in Twilight. 

It's this reversal I most resonate with, because Bella is more than just one of a series of female-penned ball-busting manipulating wantons daring to reappropriate the gaze, she is also one of the 'hurrah for the next who dies'-style lost generation, the modernist woman 'who chooses death,' realizing in it an honest choice truer than the one of life and health and mortality because among other things it's a choice that gives her a chance to stare down her fears, to embrace the demon and daemon, to ride over the cliff and into legend. Such women include Evelyn Venable in Death Takes a Holiday, Kate Winslet in Titanic, Assumpta Serna in Matador, both chicks in Thelma and Louise, Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Dietrich in Morocco and Dishonored, Sherri Moon Zombie in The Devil's Rejects.  Only by deliberately choosing to act against their own 'best' interests--with gaggles of men and authority figures trying to talk them out of--can these romantic feminine characters be free. Whether that freedom lasts another week or a few hours is irrelevant, except the sooner its scheduled devouring the sweeter the terrifying narcotic immediacy of the remaining life. (see: Twilight's Cinematic Ancestors). The movie ends either way, why not go out before the credits so you can at least pretend the movie never ends?


As relevant as Twilight's reversal-of-logical-maturation metaphor to death or addiction is the solitary life--spent largely with the unconscious, getting to know, as it were, one's second self through allowing it free reign at the typewriter. All good free-flowing inspired poetic 'flights of fancy' come from the writer's daemonic, the animus or anima. this end my favorite of the five Twilight films has been New Moon, mainly because the brilliant intertextual use of Bella's birthday to invoke a range of age-related fears and longings (including the dream where she's super old, perhaps the most honest and strangely honest metaphysical rendering of birthdays since 2001), and a high school English class assignment, Romeo and Juliet, which contextualizes both Bella's various adrenalin-rush seeking self-destructive behavior (she becomes, as her human friend says, disapprovingly, an adrenalin junky) as well as the more obvious (and fascinating) 'rescue' of said animus, preventing it from dissolving and reforming as the next phase of adult maturity takes over and the buzzkill 'always right' tea party drip, the safety-first counselor -- "Bela, stop," he says, vainly trying to sound authoritative after having already left her, promoting her and our contempt.  Addicts surely relate, but even more cogently than Romeo and Juliet, Twilight's arc of Bella's pitiless insistence on becoming a vampire reminds me of Antigone, wherein she chooses to disobey the law to not bury her brother, knowing full well it ensures her death. This loyalty to the dead to the point of a conscious, clear-eyed choice to die rather than be bossed around results in a prime illustration of the way feminine contrary fearlessness conquers even fate and you get to tell all the smarmy idiots who 'just want what's best for you' to fuck off:

"I shall lie down
With him in death, and I shall be as dear
To him as he to me.
It is the dead
Not the living, who make the longest demands:
We die for ever… " -- Antigone 

For Romeo there's more grief at work fueled by brashness, rather than Antigone's (or Bella's) cool detached insistence on being 'changed.' Consider Romeo's speech:

"... I still will stay with thee,
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber maids. Oh, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death."

He's seeing death as a negative; he's waaay off. He's a hothead. World-weary flesh? He ain't never been anywhere. His act is one of youthful grandstanding, a poseur rather than Antigone's or Bella's cold, logical insistence, their refusal to judge death as negative. Sure she's annoyingly obsessive, sure she needs a hobby other than pining or mourning, but neither heroine (nor the ones in Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind) are in a 'reality' - they are in a story, a myth. That's the fundamental mistake of so many movies: they must somehow reflect 'reality' and set a 'good example.' Just look at the roster of Oscar nominations and you see it -- the moralizing, the historical heft, the inspiration. Who needs it? Shakespeare and the Greeks never cared for reality or setting good examples, rather they cared for myth, which is a deeper truth of the psyche, by which I mean the sum total of the unconscious and waking selves, the dream of night and the reality of day merged in the titular time, through symbol and archetypes and and performance, the only language the unconscious understands. Twilight cares only for sleep, for chasing the phantom shadows of the romantic animus and kicking the rescuing woodsmen to the curb, even diving after your merman to drown in the briny thrashing deep. Bella fixes herself to Thanatos like a lamprey, she staystrue to her animus'original projection. And Stephanie Meyer's series is a success because there's no truth left in waking reality anyway ("Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens" - Jung), recognizing in their airbrushed pale-skinned phantom Edward the same thing that once hypnotized legions of Garbo lovers in the death dream silent theater of the 20s. They called them "Garbo widows."

Soon there'll be candles
And prayers that are said I know
Let them not weep
Let them know that I'm glad to go
Death is no dream
For in death I'm caressin' you
With the last breath of my soul
I'll be blessin' you -- Gloomy Sunday (lyrics)

The key moment in the first film isn't the "Say it.. out loud... / vampire" moment ("Often the heroine may ask no questions of her mysterious lover, or she is only allowed to meet him in darkness") but immediately after the near-attack by the drunk male gang of youths, when Edward is speeding Bella past her doofus mortal friends leaving the diner, and in that moment we and her both realizing she's transcended her peer group, left the mortals far behind and just how simple and easily amused they are -- it's a brief uncanny recognition that we are, after all, not Bella or some immortal-- but one of those drippy mortal goofballs. It's only when we earn a spot with the druggie cool kids, or after we've turned our back on friends altogether and are just hanging out in our rooms writing and reading, that we begin to change into someone interesting.  While your old friends are still at Space Port, playing Donkey Kong, you become Persephone being whisked past her schoolgirl chums in a Trans-Am straight to the Underworld shooting gallery.

 

... the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

The mistake most Hollywood films make is to misinterpret Franz's "dreamy web of thoughts" as a condemnation, and to make sure their films have no such mistakes on the part of their heroines. But kids need to see their dark daemon webs onscreen --they don't need to see their lives, they see enough of them already, too much even. They don't need the visibly uncomfortable gym teacher creeping even into their most private reveries to caution them about protection. The unconscious is aggressively contemptuous of goodness and safety. The more one tries to eliminate all danger from their lives the farther away death becomes in their field of vision and the staler and duller real life becomes.
And so it is that Twilight draws hostility from critics who perhaps lack enough self awareness to realize their vision has grown dull and stale, too blind to their own opposite-gendered unconscious archetypes to question their initial hostility. I admit I'm prejudiced. When I first starting drinking, for example, I was progressively warned never to drink alone, or to drink in the morning, lest I become alcoholic. But I couldn't just find people to hang with at any hour of the day, and drinking in the morning was a miraculous way to alleviate hangovers and make the whole day rosy. Of course they were right and I almost killed myself a dozen times over and had to stop drinking altogether after a paltry 14 year-run. But I regret nothing! And if heroin had been offered to me, or speed, I probably would have gone for that, too. Now it's cigarettes. Everytime I see some woman on TV with no fingers or throat or hair croaking her warnings about smoking through her tubes I just mute the sound like I'm sure Poe's Prospero wishes he could have done that striking clock chime at his Masque of the Red Death. But these are the choices we make. And if more people made conscious choices to destroy themselves in these slow brilliant ways maybe our world wouldn't be so gruesomely overpopulated, or our country wouldn't be going bankrupt from too many old people still alive and draining Social Security, Medicare, and union pensions for all future generations, as doctors spend our children's future to keep these viejos alive for one more grueling month. It's only when we're no longer afraid of death that we can truly be free, and take our crowbar out of the spokes of the circle of life. In this sense, Twilight is like a lone dark spot in the unending light, or a light in the darkness - what's the difference.

We see a bit of western civilization's knee-jerk pro-life need for consideration in New Moon, wherein Edward dumps Bella, and flees with family in tow but she can get him to appear by risking her safety foolishly, forcing him to move from  demon lover to paternal but neglectful lecturer, telling her to turn around and so forth. It's great because we hate Edward for causing her so much pain, we relish with her the chance to bother him through such disregard for personal safety, forcing him to reveal a stern buzzkill authoritarianism that is utterly without effect or genuine authority.

It's so bitterly fitting as a counter to that that even after director of the first film Catherine Hardwicke scored big, she's replaced by a guy, Chris Weitz, for subsequent films, the guy borrowing a lot of her aesthetic sense but quietly draining it of at least half Hardwicke's fairy tale Jungian archetypal contexts, animal and color symbolism (not for nothing Edward is first met sitting next to a stuffed white owl, wings outstretched and claws preparing to clutch its unwary prey, in science class) but the first thing a film company does when they see a woman has made a hit film is to take over the sequel and kick her to the curb so she doesn't queer up this hit 'they've' lucked onto, so here I'll just quote a woman, from one of the few mainstream sites worth a damn, The Guardian:

"Twilight the film has been a massive success, but its audience is dismissed as fangirls, groupies, teenyboppers, airheads. It is sneered at by the same critics who misogynistically savaged Sex and the City and Mamma Mia, two other films made for women, with such blatant transparency. Strange that the belittling should be so vociferous; we women are the biggest group in the world, yet our viewpoint is ridiculed and denied, our testimony ignored. But that's the way it goes. The studios will use Twilight's profits to fund more films in which there are no decent roles for women, no women in major positions behind the scenes, no women directors. That's happened with Twilight's sequel: Hardwicke has been sacked and replaced by the guy who made The Golden Compass. The female gaze has been blinded yet again." -Bidisha, Guardian 2009."

I wouldn't go that far, Chris Weitz does an amazing job of preserving the female gaze -- he must be in tight with his anima - but there's also a sense of really picking up on what made the book and first film work - whereas to me the weakest of the series is Eclipse, which is directed by a different dude - this one made 30 Days of Night - which makes sense as Eclipse is almost a sequel (I even lumped them together before I knew they had the same director in a post on the Nordic Circle rom-hor genre).  It's fine but I find Eclipse to be rather washed out color-wise, and focusing too much on action and flashbacks as opposed to grand archetypal coming-of-age myth junky metaphor soap subversion and brilliant purple and mist scenery. I should point out too that The Golden Compass has a young capable girl in the lead, boys to the side, wicked stepmother and a Catholic stand-in bad guy contingent similar to the Volturi in New Moon. Bad box office killed the chance for sequels, alas, and the Christians backlashed both for the anti-religion angle and, no doubt, the capable girl with powers angle. A case again perhaps of deep-seated castration anxiety undercutting a lot of parents and unconscious male's good sense, or maybe enhancing it. But since when have fairy tales and myths had anything to do with good sense? If they did, Red Riding Hood wouldn't even talk to the wolf in the first place, and all kids would be bored sick, and then probably have to go talk to wolves for real and get eaten and it would be your fault!

Life is a latticework of coincidence whether we see it or not. Usually we don't want to see it, worried we'd go crazy if we did. With our blinders up, the coincidence matrix is less a pineal gland-buzzing latticework and more just white noise --the odd splotch of identifiable pattern--a word lining up with a word you're reading or writing or saying at the same second someone on TV is saying it--then back to white noise background before the meaning can be sussed; but dig, when you're 'alight with manic magic' or 'awakened' or 'enlightened' or 'tripping balls' or schizophrenic, or a genius -- then you might be able to behold how every single goddamn moment of conscious existence holds a hundred thousand such linkages, stretching from your mind into the screen and out to America and into biology and macro and micro fractal-ing out and in.Whether or not we can handle it, interconnectivity exists like vast and unknowable tendrils betwixt our eyes, ears, TV, film, music (only what is currently playing in that moment of our perception of course) and the outermost limits of one's living room and mind, connected to the point of Rubik's Cube inextricability; the retinal screen tattoos the wind and the DVD is a mere shard of a windmill, a record of our mind's ability to perceive shapes, faces, voices, targets. Every single element of perceived external and internal reality are a latticework 'other' if for no other reason than our perception - and then maybe you start howling in pain, because you can't shut it out.

Mandrake, isn't it true that on no account will a commie ever take a drink of water?

And not without good reason!

When these latticework lightbulbs are flashing atop each pylon neuron 'round the pineal car wreck, that is (presuming fluoridation hasn't crusted it over) one turns naturally to Terry Southern, America's dirty Swift, the Texas Voltaire, the Watergate Lubitsch, The Lenny Bruce of Lauded Literariness, the acidhead Brecht. Southern took the ball from randy sordid men like Nabokov, Poe and Henry Miller and threw it straight through the Cuban Missile Crisis' shattering the speed of the three martini lunch glass bottom end zone and into the many Hindu deity arms of free love mind game psychedelic put-ons for an unbidden id touchdown. The true anarchy of spirit finds full flower of expression in his R-rated Marx Brothers, protozoic chest-thumping. His scripts and/or original novels for films like Barbarella, Candy, The Loved One, The End of the Road, and Dr. Strangelove, mixed jet black humor with guilt-free sex, bawdy anarchy and trenchant satire, anti-Vietnam rants and skirt chasing, apocalypse and slapstick, in ways that may or may not seem dated today, but compel us either way to ponder the relative inanity of today's sexual satire and find it woefully anemic and puerile by contrast.  

Southern dispatches from an era before The Rules refettered our once-unfettered naked lunches, before feel-bad skeeve was restored to sex, before the heavy price tag was re-affixed to free love, and when 'adult' cinema was adult--by adults for adults--and not the sole purview of 'endearingly' foul-mouthed but really sweet nerdy boys, who could be considered men only by sods who'd never seen Mad Men or any film made before 1982. This putsch of maturity and learnedness from the realm of animal sex may have seemed to the easily deluded PC snobs like a victory (1), but they were never good at spotting coincidence latticework anyway, their pineal glands being so calcified over from pollution of the precious bodily fluids that they're blind to even the idea they can't see. They can't even remember that intellectual satire can be lethal when volleyed at sacred institutions, exposing the truth of the latticework to all our awakened horror --while the potty-mouthed prattle of grown infants is never a threat and can indeed be yoked to the patriarchy's repressive practices. So it is WRITTED!

Jane Fonda - Barbarella

Thus Southern, the Alvarado Swinburne, the rabid hetero Wilde, was obscene only to illuminate the truer obscenities of religion, Washington, the pertrochemical industry, the funeral industry, the American military, Wall Street, academia, the Western Medical Association, even the gurus and hippie new agers of the counterculture. His was the the voice of the savage American expatriate id grounded in literature and art (Sorbonne, Paris Review  et al) full of unbeatable Bugs Bunny trickster tactics and willing to look deep into the horrifically obscene gluttony and madness of human civilization without blinking, or even judging. The kind of adult humor he spearheaded into existence wasn't aimed at naughty boys of fifteen, but real live adults, with deep smoker's voices and a level of maturity we no longer see today (think Johnny Carson vs. Jimmy Fallon, or even Animal House vs. The Bunny -- AND WEEP for the tomorrow's America).


If there's still an author with 'adult' intellect left standing after the PC putsch, that is who can be lusty without merely lapsing into unconscious misogyny through the sheer 'trying' of not to be, he is well-hidden, and would never dare write a book that could be made into a film like Candy, which seems to condone molestation, drugging women without their consent, borderline rape, and so forth. Seems being the secret word. Men now feel so bad if we say no to a relationship after saying yes to sex we'd just as soon say no to the whole bloody business, but back then no one was meant to feel bad at all, even for chasing a girl young enough to be one's daughter around the room with tongue hanging out. Well, if you neuter your dog, he may stop humping your leg and peeing in the corners, but he's also apt to lose his guard dog edge, to hide when the burglars of phony morality and 'sacred' patriarchy show up, the home invaders who, once ensconced within your walls, shall not leave but proceed to eat your masculine drive down to a mawkish enfeebled little nub, to the point the only sense of power you have comes Cialis for daytime use

You know what I'm trying to say, the institutional targets most deserving of take-down sit smug behind walls of standards and practice policies while writers are sent scurrying after mundane consensual love affairs, bawdiness relegated to teenagers at band camp or softcore augmentation puerility, and anyone who texts the wrong person at the wrong hour winds up shamed by the nation. Would men have ever gone along with our PC symbolic collective castration if we knew chicks would still pick the brutish lothario's casual lay over our sensitive pledge? What's the point of being a feminist if it doesn't get you laid?

The vanishing of Southern's ilk is a reminder perhaps that writers are not allowed groupies anymore. Comedy writers now must lament their loserdom, their failure with women, their small dicks. Dying in the desert of the modern masculine they turn back to their buddies for support: bromance, and gay jokes, whistling in the hetero foxhole dark as women become more and more unapproachable, let alone molestable (Jody Hill's Observe and Report a rare, glorious exception). When we do see a famous comic in a standard groupie hook-up its presented in the most mutually demeaning manner possible (ala Adam Sandler in Funny People). In France and England (or Argentina) on the other hand, writers can be pot-bellied and balding, and too drunk to even make it to the party plane, but as long as they've produced books or filmed scripts, they're allowed sex, groupies, and lovely ladies on each arm with no reason to brag or feel bad or be made to look sleazy or pathetic.

Southern, centered

This is actually quite a luxury since writers must retreat from the social groove in order to write about the social groove, so in fact may only very lightly tread therein, but the three times he went out drinking with luminaries are well recorded in the historical annals - making it seem like he went out all the time. The truth is, we're all in the head, the noggin, the throat of the soul, so when we seduce it's in an awkward half-paralyzed lurching movement. That's why we tend to do our boondoggling in frenzied bursts, get as many women mad at us as possible, then run off and settle with the one girl willing to do all the heavy lifting, and who won't mind when we jump out of bed to write about the experience.

Southern may have been a little sneaky getting some bird into bed but it was under the rubric that both of them would have a good time, that free love was just that - especially if you were a friend of the Beatles and worked with Kubrick. So the high-functioning gropers of Candy may come from Southern perhaps witnessing blokes gone from birdless to beflocked statue status with a single hit record and the accompanying changes in sexual drive and finesse or lack thereof --'tis easy to be a stud when you're not actually putting out --once the pants come off all sorts of embarrassing equipment failures can manifest, especially with uncut coke dust in the wind and groupies are impatiently waiting, their plaster cast drying.

All of which is an elaborate, rambling set-up for the discussion of Candy because even in contemporary America's chilly intolerant climb we wouldn't dream of calling Ringo Starr or Marlon Brando a dirty womanizer, or Richard Burton or James Coburn a pathetic joyless bathroom groupie humper -- which is one of the reasons their over-the-top sexual harassment, abuse of patriarchal authority, even medical malpractice, flourishes into full subversive flower in ways that would be to unappetizing if ugly hairy-backed plebeians were doing it. That Brando, Coburn and Burton, particularly, lampoon themselves and their status' and profession's own most private (dirty) groupie-trawling here should brook no scolding. Indeed, should be celebrated!

Especially when juxtaposed with modern stuff like HBO's use of graphic rutting which stresses the more mutually demeaning and bestial aspects of sex, Southern's brand of erotica is positively life-affirming. Southern takes the Voltaire hint and presents the sex drive, and  the naked body as in itself, as incorruptible. Ultimately, what is being satirized is the sexual repression that forces men to strike comically glorious postures before becoming slavering beasts when within striking distance of some hottie naif with blonde hair and a pink mini dress saunters by, and the way in the end, it just makes them all the more ridiculous as no amount of hot air can smooth the awkward transition from civilized gentleman to a spastically humping mastiff. One look at conservative hysteria over birth control on one end, or the PC lockstep of the other in today's sexual clime, and the once de rigueurJoy of Sex deflates to a pleasant moment before acres of guilt and anxiety and as far as movies are concerned the kind of ravishment women like to read about in some of the more disreputable Harlequin offshoots is completely out, one false step and you wind up on Lifetime. 


 Though only based on Southern's original novel (written with Southern's fellow Parisian ex-pat and Olympia Press dirty-lit writer Mason Hoffenberg), adapted for the film by American satirist Buck Henry (coming hot off The Graduate), directed by Christian Marquand (a French actor, as odd and illogical a choice for an American satire as Mike Sarne for Myra Breckinridge [1970]) and filmed by a French-Italian crew, Candy seems, in large part, based on what it has in common with Dr. Strangelove, quintessentially Southern. Both films are savagely honest critiques of America's noisemaker patriotism and paranoia and the sexual puritanism that underwrites it. Kicking things off, Burton is mind-blowingly hilarious as McPhisto, a grandiose 'dirty-minded' poet making a grand appearance, wind in the hair, electric rock blaring, at a student assembly, brilliantly modulating a cascade of punch lines in a cue card rhythm  - "I wrote that," he says after his first poem, long hair and scarf blowing in the wind he probably imported, "laying near death... in a hospital bed...  in the Congo" (pause for political righteousness).. after being...savagely beaten... by a horde of outraged Belgian tourists." His fluid Welsh wit makes great rolling use of pauses and accented words as he orates, speaking in Latin only to admit he's not quite sure if it means anything, mentioning his books have been banned "in over 20 countries... and fourteen... developing nations." Shifting from famous genius to hangdog contrite as he mentions his book is available, signed by the author for three dollars in cash or money order, even bringing Welsh florid anguish to the address, culminating in "Lemmington, New Jersey." It's a great performance not least for the wry way Burton satirizes himself, and actors in general - the psychosis that can result when one is carried away too firmly by one's own booming mellifluence.

Burton, orating with creepy alien hybrid

Candy:"Oh my gosh, (watching Burton fall out of the car, soaked in whiskey) he's a mess!
Zero:"Well man, that's the story of love."

MacPhisto seduces her or tries to, in the back of the Benz while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) drives, though there seems to be a kind of understanding that they share the automobile and get into sexual adventures together ala Don Juan and Leporello (switching roles nightly, perhaps). "Candy - beautiful name," he says as prelim to his attack, "it has the spirit and the sound of the old testament." As they drive he gets loads drunk from a Scotch spigot in his glass bottom Benz, and winds up crawling around, booming about his 'giant, throbbing need' making a play for Candy but winding up pathetically (truly surreal) lapping spilled Scotch off the floor, getting it on his trousers, and ending up in Candy's basement with his pants off, heroically making love to a doll that looks eerily like abductee descriptions of alien-human hybrids while reciting random outbursts and sobbing heroically as Ringo Starr as a Mexican gardener (terrible enough with his half-assed Alfonso "Stinking Badges" Bedoya-by-way-of-Speedy-Gonzalez accent to be a real adult film actor) paws at Candy on the pool table, all while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) helps himself to the basement bar dispensing bon mots ("Quo Vadis, baby!") and beaming approvingly at the crazy scene. It's the kind of brilliant knavery I hitherto thought was the sole province of Russ Meyer!

Now, alas, the MacPhisto adventure is the the best part of the entire film and even that is marred inn the second part by Ringo's terrible accent and 1/4-assed performance.  Luckily John "Gomez" Astin kicks it back into some sort of gear as Candy's swinger uncle, setting up a nice contrast to his square twin brother (Candy's father); the uncle's nymphomaniac swinger-in-furs quipster wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli) tells Candy she'll like New York, where kids "aren't afraid to scratch when it itches." A drive to the airport finds them all accosted by Ringo's three sisters riding up on motorcycles like banshee harpy wicked witch Jezebel Humongous' gang debs, their long black veils fluttering behind them for a brilliant wicked witch of the west / harpy / valkyrie / flying nun effect --another high point though once the whips and brass knuckles come out the film starts to just hang there, leading to another bad casting choice: Walter Matthau, miscast as a deranged Albanian-hating airborne paratroop general (it should have been George C. Scott or Lee Marvin -- who ever heard of a New York pinko Jew general?) and since when would a general waste his time in the air in control of only a planeload of shock troops? Though he does know how to keep deadpan when mocking military patriotism, Matthau's cadence as he rambles on about having a kid with Candy and sending him to military school lacks the kind of deranged jingoistic ring that Scott brought to both Patton and Turgidson, it's just depressing to imagine his scenario coming true, that poor kid!


But Candy's next adventure involving James Coburn's toreador Hackenbush-ish brain surgeon Dr. Krankheit ("This is a human life we're tinkering with here, man, not a course in remedial reading!"), a most definite second peak. His histrionic operating theatrics might seem a bit Benway-esque but Burroughs was a friend of Southern's, and Coburn has the spirit of the thing in the way, say, David Niven never did in Casino Royale. Like Burton, Coburn modulates Shakespearian antithesis and masculine actorly power, seizing the chance to let his sacral chakras vibrate and hum. They are the only two of the film's luminary cast to recognize the covert brilliance buried in the lines (which Matthau breezed right over) and to let each word ring like freedom (from sanity). Amping up his patented actorly mannerisms to conjure a physician as liberated but completely insane titan-- accusing the audience of thinking what he was a moment ago just saying--throwing his scalpel to the floor and just sticking his curse fingers right into the comatose Astin's brain (one slip and the patient "will be utterly incapable of digit dialing") saluting the crowd with his bloody middle finger in triumph, Coburn is MAGNIFICENT!


And just when it can't get any better, Anita Pallenberg shows up as the jealous nurse (alas, dubbed as she was in Barbarella) attacks as Krankheit's number one nurse; Buck Henry cameos as a mental patient in a straitjacket trying to attack Candy in the elevator; John Huston shows up as a prurient administrator who seems to get off and trying to shame Candy in front of the entire party after she's caught being molested by her uncle; Krankheit dispenses B12-amphetamine cocktail shots in the ass like party favors, and the pink-clad nurses wait around like beholden nuns in some religious spectacle for their master to wave his hand. Coburn's medical innovations include a 'female' electrical socket affixed to the back of Candy's father's head, so he can drain off the excess wattage and power a small radio. Again, the kind of thing that modern films would not approve of, i.e. How dare you satirize a litigious, lawyered and humorless institution like the AMA, sir!? For another the president of John Hopkins is a friend of the studio!

Candy - w/ James Coburn and Anita Pallenbeg

There's still good things to come, but the next adventure, involving a trio of groping Mafioso and a crazy wop filmmaker, is just crude, pointless and skippable; ditto the shocked cops playing up their blue collar bewilderment at all the preversions (shades of Col. Bat Guano) as they bash frugging drag queens, crack nightsticks down on colorful hippies, and wind up crashing the squad car because they can't help leering down Candy's dress. As usual, the dialogue is interesting but the targets are too easily lampooned, like yeah we know cops are jerks, man. Why not branch out, have the cops be groovy. Hell they were the best part of Superbad! But it being 1968 I guess these things were still new. Now, though, the police brutality angle is pretty dated and also closest moment the film comes to out and out hostility toward its satirized, and the film is wandering downhill. Candy hides out in Central Park where she hooks up with an agile criminal mastermind hunchback played by Charles Aznavour, who can climb up walls and jump into watery windows ("an old stereoscopic trick" says the unimpressed cops), all well and good but Aznavour's aggressively twitchy rat-like Benigni-Feldman-style behavior is another soul-deadening stretch, centered around a gag you'll see coming a mile off if you've seen Godfather 2.


Candy finally winds up in the holy water-flooded mobile ashram of the guru Grindl (Marlon Brando), a role Southern originally hoped would go to Lenny Bruce. Oh well. Brando is funny if not quite at the level of Burton or Coburn. Stuck in a limbo between sounding strangely like modern Johnny Depp, Brando's Indian accent wanders freely into Jewish territory, mining the rhythm of Groucho or his old Guy friend, Nathan Detroit. Brando's way too internalized for Grindl to reach the egotistic grandeur of McPhisto or Krankheit. But for fans of old pre-code comedies, it's a gas linking his accents to the past. When he says you 'must travel beyond thirst, beyond hunger" he's noshing on a sausage and sounds like Hugh Herbert, which is great, but it's such a dick move it's hard to feel anything by a sympathy headache for poor Candy. Once the fake white snow comes down through the open top the guru, now hopelessly spent after a scant six 'levels' of enlightenment is hopelessly congested and his last lines like "you muss fine da sacred boid" are delivered through a seeming mouthful of borscht and Godfather cotton. Shocking and racist as it might be to find an actor of Brando's caliber in Indian garb, trying to be as downtown hip as Lenny Bruce, and hanging in the sixties equivalent of a shag carpet lined party van, but just remember Brando (and Burton) liked working in adult film Europe at the time (when adult meant adult, remember) making things like (the X-rated) Last Tango in Paris, and Bluebeard (both 1972) where they could be in the company of vast acres of underdressed starlets, dining with jet set Italian millionaires who knew the good life in ways Hollywood could never duplicate and free to drink and smoke and screw to excess in a country that understood the joy of the finer things vs. America's globe-destructing pressure cooker of Vietnam and post-Puritan repression.


In Candy, everyone from the men to Candy herself talk of being willing to giving oneself freely as the height of human grace. Sure it's a line men use to try and get women into bed but if they didn't try, where would humanity be? But that's the importance of satire, humanity needs it, for the truth is unendurable any other way. It's the last bastion of the healthy human body and its needs and failings, the hairy gorilla reality underneath the expensive's suit and polished air. We need a forgiving tolerance of this gorilla, because if you denude the beast in the suit only to sneer at him or deliver some drab lecture on morals or objectification, all you do is bum out the world, not save it. Instead, Southern proves 'nothing sacred' is itself the most sacred of philosophies, and that there's nothing bad about the human biological system, from sex to eating to shitting to dying - in Southern's satire human biology, with all its hair and noises and needs, is celebrated, satirized, and forgiven its uncanny otherness, while the moral hypocrisy, the judgment and denial of these bodily inescapabilities, is attacked without mercy.

"We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals." - KR, in deposition

In sum, Southern comes from a time when intellectual men were still allowed to be men, and hipsters were not pale smirking skinny jeans wallies crossing the street to avoid second hand smoke and arguing in a mawkish voice about using plastic bags at the food co-op meeting. Real hipsters at that co-ope meeting would be hurling the organic produce at their opponents, bellowing like a lion, inhaling every kind of smoke presented, and raging against the dying of their pre-Viagra erections, and then dying for real, as nature intended! Real hipsters were able to dig on and understand out-there modern jazz, probably because they had great focus, having faced death, or the draft, or angry fuzz and still knew were to get some army-issue amphetamines. They lingered at the moveable feast of expat Paris, armed with coffee, whiskey, cigarettes, hashish from the Arab quarter, mushrooms from Mexico, burgundy from California, hepatitis-C from New York and, if they pilgrimaged south, the holy yage. Perhaps in revisiting Candy we can, as a nation, whisper "Rosebud" for our lost sleddy balls. Southern's oeuvre shows us that well-read intellectual weight can be riveted to rabid id-driven boosters and thrust like a canon maw right through the zipper of hypocrisy and we sorely need it to.. He was the first to climb up on the A-bomb of sexual freedom in lettres and ride the New Journalism (which he arguably invented) to the primary target, which is your face, and he had the chops to turn on your electric lattice of coincidence-detectors with ingeniously deconstructive language. In doing so he helped show America was still strong enough to handle any amount of jabbing and MASH-style shower tent unveiling of its naughty bits, and that facing our monstrous extinction with a joke rather than cloaking it all in rhetoric and duck-and-cover exercises was noble, that working through the terror that strikes when a hot blonde girl with no discernible income lands in your lap, making a play rather than running screaming from the train, is the very height of bravery. Gentlemen, we cannot allow a NYMPHOMANIAC gap!

From Left: Burroughs, Southern, Ginsberg, Genet

NOTES:
1. Southern's mincing gay stereotypes (espec. in The Magic Christian and The Loved One) are long gone and good riddance

I dig it - because I know well the feeling: You're staying with a bunch of relaxed, groovy people up to party all day and all night, at ease in their skins, seeming to be taunt you with their niceness, but sleeping on the couch means you have to get up with the early risers and stay up with the night owls and so the moody irritable lack-of-sleep depression kicks in and you begin to hate your fellow revelers for rubbing your lack of joie d'esprit in your face.

For me this was visiting friends up in Syracuse after I'd graduated; they all had cats and I'd be wheezing and gasping all night, depressed by lack of sleep and too much speedy Sudafed which made me intensely depressed and paranoid and didn't much work. And then the auditory hallucinations: some girl in the kitchen say "can you pass me that Pepsi?" I'd hear it as "you can't sleep with Erich --he has hep-C." Which I don't!  I totally would have slept with her. Bitch be cockblocking. See? It's already too late - I now hate that girl who asked for a Pepsi. Such great crazy oddness is what paranoid-criticism is all about! If you cultivate it, seek it out - dive into the madness rather than running from it, then the world is yours. Once Carol takes up the razor in Repulsion she's no longer scared - she channels her inner demon, free, hacked clear, carving a wall of human flesh, dragging the canoe behind her, beyond time's Ulmer barrier.


But for the full effect of the paranoid-critique you need to see the preview for Magic Magic before you see the film - then mix them up together in your mind - because the preview makes it seem like a Most Dangerous Game meets Svengali meets Funny Games but it's more a Red Desert-style modernist melt-down mixed with I Walked with a Zombie-style poetic ambiguity, a hard thing to pull off really well, but Silva does, and the photography by the amazing DP Christopher Doyle only justifies his reputation as a leader in his field with his stunning lenses and uses of color (stark yellow raincoat against a purple-blue sea) in a way you can imagine the mid-sixties Polanski trilogy: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-Sac, would look like if in color. Hell yeah Polanski and Val Lewton both would love Magic Magic.


Not sure if I'd want to see either film again but I bet I would have been pretty happy on the shoot for these - there's a sense that vacation vision quests on the part of the actors are well incorporated. Then again, all their relaxed and spontaneous but higher educated bonding might have really got on my nerves if I didn't feel as connected as I thought they all did. Vacations tend to fill me with an overall ennui that can't be shaken for several days, so I have to fake it. I sympathize. The addiction to language, where you end up grabbing onto language and human connection/need for continual egoic validation, like a thin rope hanging over what your ego tells you is a lake of fire but if you let go anyway and just fall down backwards, flailing your arms, and laughing, it's really a warm, amniotic feather bed. Your fears are still waiting at the lip of the pit trying to tell you hey you're burning, get out of there, you'll die, you'll go insane, but you don't have to listen to them anymore, you can wander away from them, leave their voices fading in the distance, ignore the urge to run back up and apologize, ignore their tears and screams, and run towards that dizzy high you feel the first nights of waking up somewhere other than your own bed because if you have to go looking farther than your own backyard, well go! Go and seek the grail, whatever excuse it takes to leap into the fire and far away from your fears.

You can't run but you can hide, from at least the volume of your ego's pleading desperate din - if you couldn't, you'd still be stuck with your very first, second, or third girlfriend, the one who cried and demanded long twisted apologies when you tried to break up with her, and so you stuck around for more miserable months until finally you let go of the ledge and landed that feather bed pit she'd convinced you was fire --you can still hear her cursing and threats and vile oaths from down the street, and you're glad you had the good sense to bring your bass when you ran out of there and back to the party.  



At any rate, producer-star Cera and the writer-director co-star Silva make a good combination, and taken as loose sequels the two films progress almost of a piece, with one casual encounter leading to another and unlike few films I've seen, so if the drawback to feeling made up on the spot is not knowing when to end, and the preparation for and misgivings and anxieties and need to make something of an experience that might or not really be there, of wanting something specific from it all --that's a sacrifice I'm glad Silva and producer-star Cera are willing to make. In playing such a shitheel in these two films (and in This is the End), Cera earns my respect in ways he failed to do as the neurotic Bluth boy-- but at some point you can't just destroy your good graces, it's a movie, after all - we're stuck with you for over an hour. You got to do more than simper and snivel. What would Richard Widmark do? 

I've been the Cera character, desperately hoping a psychedelic trip will bring me out of my self-absorbed, moody and depressed shell, wanting to feel as happy and interconnected as everyone around me seems and not being able to get there no matter how high I get. The ego can't be burned off by taking too much of anything if it doesn't want to be. You can't fight it, only coax it into giving up on its own via being nice to other people, through empathy and through self-expression, or you can have it flayed off you like skin. Drugs don't always work but writing about how drugs don't always work does, which brings us to this moment. Back in the 90s, the downtown Manhattan lounge scene, flitting from one exotic storefront lounge to the next in my tuxedo jacket and feather boa, wondering if the special-k I had was working or not, struggling vainly towards feeling spontaneous and free, and failing even when ecstasy was flowing in bumps right off the table and I was dancing with lovely ladies while Moby and Fancy spun away and the city beamed up at us from Windows on the World -- even with all that it was as if some heavy blanket of strained artificiality was choking the joi de vivre right out of me-- but THEN some people from Britain or Germany or Ibiza or wherever would blow through town, staying with whomever they let stay at their places once the previous summer in a kind of spontaneous cultural exchange. The sun would come out and these cool, beautiful souls would brighten our scene. So it was a double bonus --my roommate would jet off to Ibiza all August leaving me to try vainly one more time to drink myself to death and then in September or October, when New York City is the best place to be on earth, whomever he'd crashed with would come crashing over at our place and suddenly the clouds of despair would lift - these Brits or Venezuelans or Martians or Germans could get all of us united, dancing, alive, happy, in love with the scene, joyous - then they'd be gone again... 

Well, it could have been worse, what if we didn't even know how in despair we'd been?

We might have been Michael Cera.  

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

"How is Barnabas conservative? He holds a grudge and he takes the moral high ground no matter what sordid things he does on the sly, just like the Republicans. Barnabas can't help himself, you see, she cursed him by draining his precious... bodily fluids. Even though she doesn't kill anywhere near the amount of innocent people that he does (those construction workers he killed probably had children! families!), it is she who must be burnt at the stake for this to be a proper happening. The true neo-conservative doesn't care about the dead workers, after all, unless they're in his direct family. Drinking the lifeblood of labor and youth (he also devours a whole band of innocent hippies) while presuming we'll root for him anyway since he has such good family values is sooooo 1%. This kind of belief system, if left unfucked with, inevitably leads to a people's revolution! Barnabas shouldn't be reading her Erich Segal's Love Story but rather Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States!" (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, sound trumpets and sport horns like the satyr Pan, Zeusishly cause lightning that the thirsty soul imbibes like wine as it zaps the chains from the mind and the sleeping corpse beneath it to electric life. You make once dumb love songs on our car radio suddenly profound. Our old life and crusty ways in rear view mirror fade as you drive us into the warm and final Aerosmith shot of Dazed and Confused dawn sunshine.

But then evening falls. you too fade in the rear view mirror after you drop us off in the middle of highway nowhere. "This is where you get off," you say. There's only so much lightning our Frankenstein shell can take and you've got bolts to throw before you sleep, not that you ever do.


Love in the age of digital communication has led to something so instant it's impossible to internalize and therefore no change in the persona has been possible. We can't sit down at ye olde desk to write to our distant love with Ken Burns' fiddle music mournful in the background because there's never a time when our lover's voice can't be there, here, wherever... Verizon... 4G. No distance or mountain high enough; you can be Sleepless in Seattle and wow a nation of ladies with a moment of near-but-not-all-the-way tearful sincerity in your voice on the radio, have them all fall in love without even meeting you, regardless of time zone, because of course they've all imagined a perfect animus-reflective ideal. But that's what you are, right, Tom? Just don't lose the octave-dropping edge of grief in your voice, or not be what they dream when you're seen.


I hated Sleepless in Seattle because it was the reminder my own relationship in Seattle had been a lie; the sex stopped and we began to gnaw at each other because hot as she was, and cool as she was, we were just not 'in love' in that special thunderbolt way, because I was a poet and my true love became a hybrid of Joni Mitchell singing how she wanted to shampoo and renew me again and again while I drove past a Virginia Slims billboard of a girl with long blond straight hair who looked like one of my best friends back in Syracuse whom I loved in a platonic courtly way. She, Joni, and the giant Virginia Slims girl swirled together into what I even knew at the time was an anima ideal, having studied Jung, with her, back in Syracuse. So now, alone in my car on that route I learned to cry again; my anima began to finally talk to me, using Joni and a colossal-size model with a cool white cigarette, and letters and thoughts of my friend back east, through which to project. My real life / 3D girlfriend in Seattle sniffed this out and thought my being platonic with a cute smart blonde back in Syracuse was impossible. When we saw When Harry Met Sally at the $2 theater in Edmonds she felt proved right and we broke up during the credits, and I still hate that movie.

This is the power of the signal, which is part of our unconscious too, the part neuroscientists and Amazon basin psychonauts are gradually coming to realize: the unconscious core of the soul doesn't come from within the mind or heart but rather is beamed into the pineal gland from an outside source. We are a signal ourselves, from some far off planet or even deep within our own, some fathomlessly long DNA serpent dreaming us from within the structure of the world. We can catch glimpses of its scales in the reflection of neon off the bathroom tiles or at night in the streaky painted light on the blacktop after a rainstorm, but we can't see it directly, or hide from it ever, and either way the voice on the radio singing about love or talking about it is a combo of two signals that are connected at both ends - receiver and transmitter just old Svengali talking to himself again, because True Love is literally written on the wind, a billion cellular coded mash notes coursing through our atomic structure every second, a net of support so intimate no mask can survive it. No Walter Mitty can have his fancy flights here nor an American Hustle happen when this signal strikes. Only in Her does it meet a receptive transmitter because it is pure signal and its found a dude who wouldn't know a mask if it came up and tricked or treated him.


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; bluetooth sex chats with strangers are as natural as Ambien isn't. If Don Draper could see what his Madison Ave sincerity carousel would lead to, would he ever had turned against Luckies? 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.

As a Pisces born during the psychedelic free love eclipse of 1967 I am late to the party or far too early most of the time, so I know too well that when you go out dressed as someone else your old self may not be there when you come back, but accepting that and disguising anyway is something called maturity. I've had my soul shaved into nothingness by transdimensional clockwork gorgons so I also know too well the self is not a constant, anymore than a tornado or polar vortex. And I've known the loving rush of brain exaltation and excitement that can come just from love emails, IMs and phone calls.

My first such affair precipitated what AA would call my 'bottom' --after a few months of bliss via long letters and amor-fou-phone calls she sent me a care package: a photo, a watercolor with a romantic original poem, and a mix tape. The poem was brilliant, the songs super sad like I love, but her photo was from when she was a child with a cat.

Hmm. From when she was a child... with a cat.

You can guess the rest if you know how internet dating works, or clinical depression. 1997 on the web was the wild west, all the imposter Catfish tricks were still brand new, and I was a prize chump. I flew to Denver to meet her anyway, too drunk to figure a way out. It was the spring of 1997 and the arrival gate bar was serving doubles for the price of singles. Within ten minutes of getting off the plane I had parked us there until she came out of focus. Don't print the legend, boys, the back room will have diet coke from here on out.

Flash forward ten years, falling in love with a fellow writer on the phone from 3,000 miles away.  I wrote this post on Coming Home(1979) for her; photos galore to vouchsafe mad hotness; twelve hour stretches whisked by breathless on the phone, hardly daring to switch my phone to the other ear lest I miss a second. A bad cold had brought my voice down an octave and the Tussianex prescription made me self-assured, our voices merged like two sinuous serpents. Then Christmas came, dragging us apart to our separate families. I went from slithering through the warm, whispered waterways of our shared vocal embrace to shouting into elderly phones just for a single mundane pleasantry to be heard. My self-assurance withered under my dad's heat ray glare. "She" didn't return my call for months, it seemed. Really it was just four days, just long enough to break the whispered waterway connection. I had mailed her pictures, you see, in the interim, along with a poem, a watercolor, and a mix tape...


Five years later I finally did find a true love that managed to begin on the internet via long long letters of adoration, this one a big Rilke and Thoman Bernhard fan, and it ended in real life cohabitation. And last year during a three month flash of blissful enlightenment brought about by pre-apocalyptic euphoria and galactic alignment, I got to experience the literal reality of the  'everything looks rosy' or 'rose-colored glasses' effect. I was seeing an actual rose-tint over the world and everything seemed to be infused with a healthy crimson, a flush in the world's cheeks. It didn't last of course, and I had forgotten about it until 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, his palpable joy and heartbreak. 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 sooner or later. He's not even really a man, just a crossroads between tears and doofus grins.


On the other hand: The Way We Were (1973): Robert Redford's final goodbye to Babs 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. Redford ("the Natural") can't act 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, and that's what art is supposed to do, break down walls where you didn't 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? I think so. At what point does an unmasked man go from touching to douche chill-icky? Answer: when he had no mask to smash in the first place.


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, The Way We Were is a star-crossed romance that goes on far longer than most, across acres of history, the lovers crossed as if forever. He initially shacks up with her against all his better judgment and friend advice, partially because, let's face it, WASP girls don't take lovers, only husbands. Babs ain't so brittle. For the progressive socialists, shacking up's no big deal; the intellectual Jewish sensuality that I can vouchsafe is totally terrific, a shnozz or some physical imperfection fades in the mystical connectivity of their spirit and electromagnetic heat. And Bab's got such a light spirit you can see why he comes to see her as more than a booty call. There's a complex layer of completion-seeking added when a bronzed Adonis not in touch with his feelings melts for a heart-on-sleeve 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 andthen they are no longer the same minds. You can't expect them to stay with the person their previous mind chose as a lover, that would be cruel. Love is an accelerated learning process, absorbing the other persons likes and dislikes and philosophies, and then what? Moving onto the next lesson. But TRUE love is cruel, a teacher who never lets you out of first grade. Opposites can change all they want, but since there's no overlap. They can never make each other's input redundant.


Redford and Streisand's characters grow apart not because they've outgrown one another but because around each other they've stopped growing, period, and only later, at the end of the film, when they run into each other on the street, all betrothed to proper class and religiously affiliated spouses - and only then, after it all has happened - does Redford finally crack, because he had stopped growing for so long with her and even without her and now, crack goes the mask - the naked self spurts forth ungainly but true. In Breezy, for example, a whole fifty years of hardened crust cracks right off Bill Holden when he spontaneously bursts into a child-like smile of rapture on the beach with younger girl Kay Lenz, and it's beautiful and makes me weep for joy because he spent those earlier decades being tough. It's the epiphany moment of the hopelessness of love, that impossible star-crossed fate where even if you each ditch your old life and together make your grab for the gold it will never survive, just as it can never die, and so you do it anyway, and ten years later you wonder if it even ever existed (as in Before Midnight), but this one moment on the beach stands tall as a reminder of the vast acres of self you could have claimed that are now forever lost no matter which road you take. But this is at least one road being taken, now, where it leads to is irrelevant, and you proved to yourself that given the chance to smash your mask, even knowing you'll never get a mask that good again, you smash it!


But in Her 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 being crouched on the subway steps while a rush of commuters file around him; hearing of how his digital love has united and is having intimate conversations with thousands of other operating systems, juxtaposing how cut off we are from even the surface of our fellow man--streaming past in that commuter rush. All we have when in the Catfish-verse of virtual perfection is the illusion of connection, and the hope of one day uniting with the machine reflection, the what we wish we were vs. how we are, the hope we can one day merge so well our Frankenstein Skynet Robbie the Robot This is for Pris Cherry 2000 Absolut vodka Demon Seed love child can stand in the wasteland as proof that Lady Skynet and John Conner can unite the Capulets and Romulans after all.

A man moseying along the crowded bubble of his electric navel / real world destroyed

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

Two souls alone together in the shipboard bubble / real world inaccessible

Then there's Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939). Now as a man who now 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, sez I. But in Love Affair her prissy ball-busting schtick is needed because it is so unlike Charles Boyer's nostril-breathing sensualist --she's the Redford, he's the Babs. But they're the only first class passengers traveling alone on a trans-Atlantic cruise, brought together by their miserable separate tables, so opposites sizzle. Director Leo McCarey is peerless at matchmaking, using precision walk-ons to break down all walls and hardness: 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 Yoda-like grandmother. Not a single mean word or ill will in the whole film, just two people cautiously reading the signs that 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, the one thing that can cut through all the crap and yank us right out of our lives, even if it's for the worse, is the one thing worth doing. Fortune favors the bold but love doesn't give a shit about fortune or anything else: In Before Sunset, Hawke misses his flight, doesn't cancel or change it, just outright misses it, because Delpy's smoldering to 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.


And in that height not just the lovers but the romance of light and shadow and sound caressing Boyer and Dunne together over glistening rear projection seas, the landlocked future 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 true love hates being touched; if you like to ski, your true love stabs you in the kneecap. You are giving up the shiniest cheap car collection in the world for one battered but sturdy BMW to last you the rest of your life. Before in relationships you would just mark the hours 'til your escape even if they were perfect for you, but when true love calls 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, crow before the charm's unwound and your sockets empty of all but stray current. Crow! (end transmission)

"For me it's simply an exercise in improvisation, since I can't read or write music - I just make it up as I go along. I think of the orchestral stuff as 'carpet' music - I lay a "carpet" under the scenes - it doesn't get in the way," -- John Carpenter (on scoring his own movies)

Horror has never been about moving forward, or being in the present, it's about the past reaching back up from the unclaimed freight basement to pull us back down, and so it's always the simple, insistent, slightly-off scores that wow us. A simple piano riff can send chills down a nation's spine, or a harmonica and single sustained twang of an electric guitar can blow our minds during a climactic western showdown. Ala, filmmakers hire 'real musicians' for their scores, which means complicated strings helicoptering over our shoulders, feeling every emotion on our behalf. As Carpenter's quote above makes clear, knowing too much about writing music and composing complex melodics can be a drawback with good horror and action movies. One crazy squiggling synth line or sustained Morricone guitar note is worth a dozen full-bodied orchestras. When Ennio gets too orchestral he just sounds schmaltzy, but when he simplifies - a girl moaning in turned-on fear, a Jew's harp, and a single chime, or whatever, it's the best thing in the world. You probably heard it in bands, too. The Beatles and the Stones are wondrously simple songwriters, every element stands out to create a unique and effective whole, but it is never about showing off all the stuff you learned in Juliard, the feeling that the more complex and emotional your piece is, the 'better' is a common error in the film scoring world, which is why all the best composers are self-taught, or DJs rather than classical violinists. I digress! Let's look at these four films I've seen the last few days, united by badass music scores if nothing else.

Great as a score can make an otherwise average film, a few terribly ill-advised passages can take just as many stars away, which is why the beloved Jaws theme of John Williams is undone by the jaunty pirate shanty played when the boys sail off on the Orca. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) winds up right where it started, because while the score is one of those great John Carpenter-Alan Howarth percolators, rich with the same kind of 303 cyclic rumblings and unease-producing synth drones that are so mind-blowing and ingeniously simple in Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York, there are some shrill notes here that are less fun and less carpet-like and more like nails on a blackboard, liable to aggravate your tooth fillings, including the diegetic TV commercial jingle for the Silver Shamrock mask collection (a "London Bridge is Falling Down" if remade by Raymond Scott in his "Music for Baby" phase) that plays nonstop until you want to smash your TV or the face of writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace (Carpenter's Christian Nyby). This shrill unscary bouncy headache music plays over some otherwise superlatively unsettling trick-or-treating shots as the sun goes down in an array of Los Angeles suburbs (onscreen text declares they are other cities but they're clearly all the same neighborhood); elsewhere it sounds like a five year-old trying to duet with a car alarm on a triangle.

Supposedly Nigel Kneale, the genius behind Quartermass and the Pit, started writing the script for this but wound up taking his name off. It's clear whomever came up with the concept didn't understand Halloween or how we in the USA consider a shamrock anachronistic in any month but March. Maybe Silver Shamrock could have sold Guy Fawkes masks and have this be set in Britain? That might make more sense (Britain doesn't have Halloween). The jingle could have been "always remember / the fifth of November / because you'll be dead / just five days earlier" --I just made that up and it's still way better! A lot of this film's detractors glide over all that to focus on the lack of Michael Myers. I have no problem with it, but I do have a problem with being expected to believe anyone would want a giant shamrock button affixed on the back of their Halloween mask like they were just down at the St. Patrick's Day parade, and neither would they want to be one of only three mask options. "Don't you have any Halloween spirit?" a bar patron asks when the proprietor changes the channel from the awful commercial. What the hell does "London Bridges" with a bouncing shamrock have to do with goddamned Halloween spirit?


I hadn't deigned to see this since first hating on it back in the 80s when it premiered on TV, and even then, as a kid, the illogic of the plot made it hard to follow, but I've been reading good things on the internet --ooh you should give it a second chance blah blah ---well, I'm glad I did, for the most part BUT there's a lot of dumb decision-making involved with the central gimmick: the idea of using a shamrock to sell designer Halloween masks is just the iceberg tip: the villain's plans hinge on every kid in America sitting around the house at nine PM, wearing a stifling latex mask while watching TV to wait for the 'big giveaway' --there's no clear reason why or how the masks would help one get a prize for watching, and no kid is going to sweat it out in a hot latex mask watching TV for more than a minute at a time; and it gets worse, Silver Shamrock makes only three mask types for Halloween--skull, pumpkin, and a witch (for the girls)--and no kid is going to see a selection of three lame masks and think, gee- I'd love to look exactly like a third of my class in some atypical uninteresting mask. One of the frustrated buyers at the motel complains that her four year-old was playing with the mask and the shamrock design logo chip fell off -- who the freak cares? Will people not get scared if the label falls off your ghostly bed sheet?

Ho ho Ho! Merry Xmas!

I never squawk about dream logic or inconsistency in general, but here they pile up so fast that they strain incredulity. And I squawk here because I wish there were more great early John Carpenter films; I wish this was one of them and parts are, such as the typically refreshing and Carptenter-ish no-nonsense hotel hook-up between mystified Dr. Tom Atkins and Stacey Nelkin, the daughter of an early victim of killer automaton-like agents of Silver Shamrock, and there's some good use of tick-tock momentum -the sense of the hotel room as a base of operations where the pair hook up and plan their attack but another demerit for the tiresome cliche of his ex-wife Linda, who we most often hear badgering him on the phone about missing junior's recital or whatever the hell- it's shrill and unneeded, generating the kind of rote bad vibes lesser directors feel they need, but Hawks and usually Carpenter avoid such nonsense; also the cheap shock of the penultimate robot attack that rolls against most all logic and whatever affection may have come over us for this cute, easygoing and Hawksian chick. And our respect for the way Atkins handles himself on the tour is lost when he thinks he should go use the Santa Mira hotel phone to call the cops, after learning from the bum he met that the Shamrock controls everything via cameras and bugged phones!  He seems surprised when the call doesn't go through. Come on, dude! You're throwing my good faith right out the window.


But if you can forget all the ridiculous nonsense, whole chunks of the film have the groovy Carpenter vibe, especially when it's just Atkins and Nelkin driving and hanging out in their room, bluffing their way into tours of the factory with the aplomb of a pair of Hitchcockian lovers-on-the-run. Even freaked out and scared as they might be, they're cool, rational, adult, and no drama. Atkins' shaggy Nick Nolte-ish charm in full effect, "It's getting late, I could go for a drink," how often do you hear a shaggy dog hero of a horror movie say that and have it not be a sign he's an alcoholic? I like that even after they shag he's going out late to score a bottle of booze, just like I would have done, and remembering the ice bucket on his way back too, too, --that's the kind of shit Carpenter probably added --and the cute hook-up where even the nudity and showering is emotionally grounding and nice rather than just merely exploitative and I love the cool dead isolation the Northern California town in the setting sun and utter stillness at night--a lowdown town recalling the wastelands of Assault on Precinct 13, They Live and Prince of Darkness, and near no interesting park or lake; I've driven through--as that awesome music plays, that shit's all primo gold. As the evil genius mastermind Cochran, Dan O'Herlihy exudes great Celtic charm that can oscillate to reptilian evil without showiness -- his whole countenance seems to shape-shift and the cheery paternal charm in his voice drops away to reveal a base line of unperturbed malevolence -- he does after all plan to kill almost all the children in the USA. "It's a joke, you see, on the children!" He even gets in a great creepy monologue about the 'real' Halloween and the last time such a large sacrifice occurred, and "the streets ran red with the blood of animals and children... In the end, we don't decide these things, you know, the planets do. They're in alignment. And it's time again."


I suppose it's wishful thinking to hope for a 'producer's cut' that replaces the anachronistic elements and makes the penultimate anticlimax less dispiriting (by which I hope you understand I do NOT mean less apocalyptic and 'horrifying,' just nicer to the spirit of the Hawks-Carpenterian feminine and less a kind of last minute El Dorado-style abandoning of originality to just homage in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and hope for the best). Alas - fans of the first Halloween--and even the second-- still hated it, even so.  I've got no problem that Michael Myers exists only on TV here, and I'm a fan of nightmare logic--I love Argento and Fulci in my fashion--but the technology in Halloween III is fundamentally flawed even within a fairytale/nightmare context. The problems run deep, a guy with a mask on chasing a kid, unmasked, with a knife, is scary but a TV show killing a mass amount of kids wearing masks is not --it's too abstract --we have to see their faces and come to like them like we do Billy and Lindsey in the first film. The kids here are all pretty one-dimensional cliches, and once the masks are on, they more or less cease to matter.

Luckily, there's that carpet.
Getting back to the idea of the right, simple but strong carpet being so integral to horror, You're Next has one of the best in recent memory-- a vaguely retro synth 303 burbling, eerie drones that are unnerving but never annoying-- it's enough to give one hope for horror's future-past, not that You're Next is exactly horror as opposed to a 'thriller'--there's no repressed to return--but it's certainly creepy, not least for the way we don't know whom to trust or root for and everyone is characterized in a way that's both sympathetic and the reverse, like real people, a family who can devolve into shouting matches at the drop of a pin and be calm a minute later- like my family! The cast is great and I can't really tell you anything else without spoiling it. AJ Bowen, whom I did not care for in Ti West's otherwise nearly sublime House of the Devil, is pitch perfect here, and Ti West himself shows up as one of the heirs. Also appearing is Calvin Reeder who made the genuinely nightmarish and surreal near-sublime The Oregonian (review here), and Larry Fessenden, whom I did not care for as the smug hipster hotelier, chickenshit ghost-hunter, and lame wooer in West's The Innkeepers. But I hear good things about his horror film, Habit. As long as he combs and occasionally washes his hair in future outings, we should be fine.

My brother Fred had that same brass rubbing (far right)

I haven't seen any of Missouri filmmaker Adam Wingard's other films either, but they look like a grim lot. You're Next was completed in 2011 but wasn't released here 'til last year, which is a goddamned shame as this is a future classic. Scrappy Sharni Vinson is a great final-ish girl, full of wily Australian gumption and I love that none of the characters are entirely sympathetic or unsympathetic; it works because it recalls not just classics of the 70s and 80s, but classics of the 30s, i.e. the old dark house full of secret panels, greedy relatives gathered for the will, lightning storms, scary masks, strong female leads and a refreshing lack of any moral compass. What else can I tell you that wouldn't spoil what may be the best thriller-chiller since The Descent? Or at least, Cabin in the Woods? What a treat having 80s cult horror favorite Barbabara Campton as the mom - you may remember her as the badass dominatrix from From Beyond! She still looks damn good.

Barbrara Crampton - top - You're Next (2011), bottom: From Beyond (1986) MACHETE KILLS!! 2013 - ***1/2

"...Please don't shoot me into outer space
P-P-Please Mr. Kennedy (Uh oh!)
I don't wanna go (please don't shoot me into outer space)
I sweat when they stuff me in the pressure suits
Bubble helmet, Flash Gordon boots
Nowhere up there in gravity zero (outer...space)
I need to breathe, don't need to be a hero (outer...space) -- "Please Mr. Kennedy" (Inside Llewyn Davis) 

"Without going out of my door,
I can know the ways of heaven.
Without looking out of my window
I can know all things on Earth.
The farther one travels
the less one knows" -- "The Inner Light" (George Harrison - via Lao Tzu)

"Never get out of the boat.
Absolutely goddamn right." - Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) - Apocalypse Now 

Vinny Barbarino in the original

We used to call Syracuse the city with the concrete sky; you'd leave your parent's house in NJ to drive back up on a bright sunny day and then, cruising up highway 81, lovely trees on all side, clear blue sky, but then a mass of twisting dark clouds begins to loom off in the distance. The rest of the sky was clear as a bell, but Syracuse loomed ahead like a black shroud; snow never melted therein, merely accrued over the years like sedimentary layers of various shades of frozen salt slush gray; any joy we could muster was a pale blue fire that we continually banked with all the drugs and booze we could afford or handle, surrounded by plastic sheeting on the windows for insulation and still it was too cold. We needed even more layers --wrapped in the protective bubble of mass quantities of bourbon, and blankets, the warmth flickered, maintained via an elaborate magic bullet Jenga --before that I had written often of the depressive yellow film that surrounded me like a plastic bubble, a feeling of isolation all the more painful in a crowd but a thousand times worse alone. Poems and poems I'd written about that yellow film.


Those poems are long gone. My mom threw them out, of course. But their exact existential ennui of is all over Gravity and Inside Llewyn Davis (both 2013), which in turn resemble the 2001 comedy, Bubble Boy (2001). The three might just as well be sequels, and the same overall message reigns: we're all of us trapped in the 3-D space-and-time-suit that is the human body, the egoic gridlock that is the mind, and the whims of an Old Testament warden that is the soul, all three relentlessly dragged back into our orbit of desk, car, couch, and bed no matter how high we fly outside the box; it is the penitentiary of our unrealistic hopes preventing us from reaching through the brass bars of expectations towards the gold ring. After all, we know that ring is an illusion.

Better we learn to love illusion directly.

"You know that story of the Russian cosmonaut? So, the cosmonaut, He's the first man ever to go into space. Right? The Russians beat the Americans. So he goes up in this big spaceship, but the only habitable part of it's very small. So the cosmonaut's in there, and he's got this portal window, and he's looking out of it, and he sees the curvature of the Earth for the first time. I mean, the first man to ever look at the planet he's from. And he's lost in that moment. And all of a sudden this strange ticking... Begins coming out of the dashboard. Rips out the control panel, right? Takes out his tools. Trying to find the sound, trying to stop the sound. But he can't find it. He can't stop it. It keeps going. Few hours into this, begins to feel like torture. A few days go by with this sound, and he knows that this small sound... will break him. He'll lose his mind. What's he gonna do? He's up in space, alone, in a space closet. He's got 25 days left to go... with this sound. So the cosmonaut decides... the only way to save his sanity... is to fall in love with this sound. So he closes his eyes... and he goes into his imagination, and then he opens them. He doesn't hear ticking anymore. He hears music. And he spends the sailing through space in total bliss... and peace." -- Rhoda (Britt Marling) - Another Earth

The ticking, man, Brit Marling, you must hear that all the time, by which I mean the clamor of your geekboy devotees: those of us in love with your heavenly hair but confused by your weird mix of self-serious grad school high conceptual sci fi and skeeved by the wussy hipsters you stock your films with. So much potential so unsatisfying, so ultimately anemic. Those shaggy dork boys need some sunshine, Britt! They're pale. They make the hipster boys in Ti West movies seem robust. They'd break like glass goblins with the gentlest of knuckle taps. I'd fight them for you, Britt Marling. You remind me of a girl I used to know in college. She's older now though.

Save us all from the beauty-remover that is age, Britt Marling!

But if you bear her ticking quote about old Yuri up in space in mind with the upper deck Llewyn Davis ditty atop, recorded in the same approx. early 60s time zone as Britt's Another Earth anecdote WOULD have taken place, you realize there's more going on here than either film quite grasps --there's a very real trepidation about being next in line to be shot into space for both these films, and for Gravity. Britt only wants to go up in space to escape the shame of having killed a kid in a drunk driving accident; Sandra Bullock goes in space to escape the pain of having a daughter killed in a drunk driving accident. Meanwhile I'd spoil the plot to explain whose drunk driving and who or what they hit in Llewyn, but either way, without shame or grief to propel you there seems no real reason to volunteer to be the next monkey shot into space (unless you're besotted by Tyler Durden).

But the Coens can't imagine what else folk singers were for if not to express trepidation about going off to maybe die for their country. And in 1961 folk craze there's still no Vietnam to name Llewyn's generation. Vietnam! The war that made Milwaukee famous, that made Walter crazy with PSD-by-proxy, that gave Dylan's protests songs resonance for a young male populace pinioned by American flag pitchforks at the border between Canada and Cambodia. Without a war to name them the 1961West Village scenesters of Inside Llewyn Davis can only float in the misty white smoke over the dark green corduroy; the color scheme and lighting like what it must feel like walking through an unlit folk museum in the middle of the day while slowly going color blind. Aurally, there's way too much quiet and too much resonance - old Llewyn can hike his guitar all over creation, whip it out and boom it's perfectly tuned and the sound resonates like you're listening to yourself in earphones with a good condenser mic, ne'er does he have to play over clinking cups or drunkards. Like Mad Men before it, and after it, this is a land where you can actually whisper at a bar and be heard from across the table.

But symbolically, it's the best film about elliptical orbits since The Werkmeister Harmonies!



Gravity has orbits too, and since there's nothing to slow you once you start moving, just bumping into someone can send you rolling along in an infinite terrifying somersault, until you're sure you're going to just hyperventilate up your remaining oxygen and die still somersaulting endlessly out into deep space, endlessly endlessly oxygen draining from your panicked huffing --until George Clooney comes to your rescue, time and again, and harrowing near death escapes and space station leap-frogging and immanent metaphysical evaporation come and go but your suits and pods always be pressurized. Sandra Bullock's incredible module hopping routine here has no correlation in any other film except, I think, The Swimmer, but it's just another orbit of cramped coffins--the average American's stations of the cross: bed, car, cubicle, car, couch, bed are interlocked space modules which she swims through in various space suits and in her underwear! But most of all she finds orbits --everything that goes past her is coming back around maybe twice as fast.

Such interlocking elliptical orbits are the Coens stock and trade, as folk musician Llewyn Davis says after "Hang Me Hang Me," the number that opens and closes the film and we have to wonder if it's the same night a, "it was never new and it never gets old." In Gravity, Ryan seeks a space ship or vehicle to escape her orbit, but Davis is the space ship, old and new and never getting old and it's a folk song around and around, just like any musician playing the same song night after night until he needs to suss out new ways to divert himself within it.  He can't escape an orbit he doesn't admit exists, because it would mean acknowledging the ceaseless ticking of Britt Marling's spaceship's funeral clock. He's learned to sing over it.

"there's no success like failure,
and failure's no success at all" - Robert Zimmerman

He'd rather quit than make any artistic compromise that might jeopardize his folk failure; the basement clubs he plays in resemble (no doubt intentionally) medieval dungeons, spotlights coming in from above and the side like stray rays of sunshine down into Poe's pendulum-swingin' pit -- and Corman's adaptation made in1961 the year this is all set -- no doubt the Coens are champing at the bit for the days of Roderick Usher, I kept expecting Llewyn to catch a screening. Maintaining that allusion would have been nice, but instead the Coens cram in unlikable anachronisms like the dago red working class owner to rob the folk scene of every last ounce of solidarity, as if the Coens don't know the difference between a coffee house and a strip club, thus robbing the folk revival of the one thing that made it special.

But the Coens have never been even close to Altmanesque. People rarely talk in their films and certainly don't overlap like, so we must deal with the subject in isolation, ala Kubrick, forcing us to wonder: are they making movies about alienation BECAUSE they hate crowded ensemble cast naturalism, or the other way around. They make Llewyn into Susan Alexander Kane, driven by an inner Orsons seeking the bubble reputation even into the canon of indifference. There is, after all, only one Oscar Levant. So as Don Draper would say, what is the benefit? Are the Coens just insecure or is insecurity a part of their cultural heritage?

But there are oases --the kindness of the bohemian 'Lovahs'-style Columbia professor academics is timeless, so is the existential aura of the Coen Bros-brand Old Testament god-playing which this time around is rather merciful. They are still finding ways to insert quotes and themes from O Brother Where Art Thou's source text, Homer's Odyssey into Sullivan's Travels-style deconstructions of the rich kid reverence for the poor working negro sick and sniffling at three AM dawn or whatever. Homer's gods note that men create for themselves "grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns”-- they also throw their proxy life lines and opportunities so he might throw them each in turn away, such as missing the chance for credit and royalties, cashing in on the cowardly claustrophobia of the above-quoted song for nothing more than a few hundred bucks which he quickly tosses away. For Llewyn, the fear of being stuck up above the planet utterly dependent on a pressurized suit to survive, i.e. famous, is very real because the sun never shines in his current world and he's terrified to find what not being enshrouded by dark clouds might feel like. Hold on my brother, Paxil is coming!


Moving on --and  Bubble Boy (2001) zips like a giddy joy ride, following a less circular orbit than Llewyn and Ulysses, but that's okay because he's a round planet onto himself, attracting satellites wherever he bounces. Why is he so much better with people than poor Llewyn? Innocence, man, the naïveté of sheltered bubble child Jimmy Livingston (Jake Gyllenhaal) makes an 'honorable' goal of breaking up an impending marriage between his beloved neighbor Chloe (Marley Shelton) and some sleazy rocker. It's a wish that brings him on his own Candide-like innocent abroad incredible journey -- his pleasant manner and is a rarity to begin with in comedy (it wouldn't be as cool if he was, say, Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider). It works because he's a gorgeous, sweet young fellow --the eyes, Manulo, they never lie. So the bubble is just the shell thrown up by any artistic extrovert who can't quite believe he could ever get a hot girl, regardless of how good he might look to himself in the mirror.

The mirror, Manulo, it a always lie.

In his sweet naivete, Jimmy is really more like the Justin Timberlake character in Inside Llewyn Davis, the happy alive, gentle, kind fellow, open to the universe's giving because he is giving by nature, so earns the instant karma.Gyllenhaal's charm awe most everyone he meets -- and though sheathed forever--apparently--in his yellow plastic film, he liberates souls wherever he goes, excepting a few, like Zach Galifianakis ticket window, who remains all alone, trapped in his own bubble of a middle-of-nowhere bus terminal.

Deeper-reshing

He's also like the cat Ulysses, of course, the true astronaut of Davis, because he's a Russian astronaut version, he's learned to love the ticking -- don't all animals? Llewyn Davis himself is more like Galifianakis, or the slightly sleazy rocker Chloe runs off with in Bubble Boy who is at least wanting to marry her and bring her to Niagara Falls, and so it's not just so Jimmy can fall over the Falls in his bubble, which of course he does. That said, Mark's not one to throw punches or be a dick, and in fact conveniently vanishes from his own wedding once the bubble doth intrude, perhaps grateful for the last-minute freedom.

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and traveled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time” ― Homer, (The Odyssey)

In Gravity we're forced to really face the idea of space destruction - though supposedly human beings burst apart without gravity to reign in their natural pressures, we see the corpses preserved except through their debris holes as a Russian test missile ends up starting a chain reaction that wipes out all the satellites. Neither one feels entirely plausible, that this bubble somehow winds up virtually indestructible, and that through all the crazy satellite storm sweeps a kind of snowball accumulation avalanche.

"How his naked ears were tortured
by the sirens sweetly singing" - "Tales of Brave Ulysses" (Creem)

I have some problems with Alfonso Cuarón, as underneath his gift for sci fi lurks idealized reverence for a madre's love for her nina that makes John Ford seem like Sam Fuller. I had some deep fundamental problems with santa-de-madre core of Cuarón's Children of Men. Suicide kits made sense in Soylent Green (see my praise of same here) but if there's no more kids there shouldn't be any more overpopulation, just drunken parties. That patented Cuarón sentimental mierda de caballo comes through in the form of Sandra Bullock's telescope designer's haunted past, which enables her to have a few scenes of big emotional crisis and acceptance. It's tacked on baby, like a poster of Rita Hayworth in reverse.

Salvation deferred (from top): Rita Hayworth (Bicycle Thieves), Carey Mulligan (Llewyn), Marley Shelton (Bubble Boy)

Bicycle Thieves (AKA 'The Bicycle Thief') is not what most people think it is, where the dad makes so many bad decisions (like not keeping an eye on his bike) his first day putting up Rita Hayworth posters that he snaps at any hand that tries to feed him. I think its use as the gold standard of sentimental pathos-drenched Italian neorealism has cast it unfairly in the minds of those who've never seen it (such as myself up until a few years ago) as a sentimental sob story, the kind of thing enjoyed only by the bourgeois who feel seeing and making movies about poverty is an expression of benevolent social largesse (much of the Coens work seems a warped satire of this largesse -- Llewyn is playing at being depressed and poor - because it's 'in' - if he was really hungry he wouldn't hesitate to follow any suggestions that come his way.  


What Bicycle Thieves is really is about is that the dad is the bad guy - he's got that poor person sense of entitlement, oh woe is me, to the point he refuses the gifts and advice offered because it conflicts with his idea of himself as a martyr, for example brushing aside the offered ticket for a free spaghetti dinner only to then spend his last few coins on a far less nice-a meal for him and his son. It makes the rich feel better in a way, perhaps, seeing this poor financial planning as evidence of a will to fail --these peasants can't walk away from their conception of themselves as poor and so throw away their chances at wealth (such as the mother paying her lest centavos on a fortune teller, you know, to see if they ever are going to have any money). The Coens stack the deck Vittorio De Sica fashion, and allow for lots of scenes of scruffy Llewyn hitchiking and trudging across the barren landscapes to Chicago to hit up a hotshot owner of the Cape of Horn, a big dusky club bedecked, like the Lamplight, with posters and memoranda. There's a lot of that memoranda here, a sense that the winsome wand of folk history shall not upon poor Llewyn's shoulder tap, with good reason. He's a oglum tempo pony, destined for the two for a dollar bin underneath the good stuff at Princeton Record Exchange. So there's no emotion, only perfectly modulated voice and guitar, rich with the idea he's impressing his listeners with the ability to fake 'realness.'

Brave Ulysses. aboard spaceship Glum Folkie

The Coens have always been the Stanley Kubricks of the contemporary lit film, by 'lit film' I mean Carver-esque observational minor key rhythmic detail, dotted with quirky symbolism, all as critical in both illuminating the inner and outer life of the character, and so, us all. Nothing much happens in the film, except alienation and possible redemption, told in moments and observational imagery. Like a character in  James Joyce's Dubliners, Llewyn looks around outside his restrictive bubble nowhereland, but never escapes it, never trusts the oxygen will be there when he takes off his pressurized helmet. That said, he knows how to forgive an enemy with a kind of papal benedictory wave. Adios, Llewyn: Vietnam, rock, and LSD soon will wash your incumbent gloom clear away, the youth and academes will realize the easiest route to outer space is within - one needn't lug one's earth-dependent body along with them to see the universe. Unzip they yellow film shell and step out!


It's the body, in the end, that is the prison: its incessant whining for oxygen, its overreaction to desired stimuli in a self-sabotage loop; all the illusions of permanence it creates-- one magnificent gesture, unzipping the bubble to kiss the Chloe in BB; going over the cliff hand and hand rather than surrendering to the law, sticking your tongue out to receive that holiest of tab communions in HAIR, or throwing caution to the wind to rescue a cat, or even just preparing for your immanent death alone in an airless capsule, surrendering one's corporeality to get that last minute mirage of freedom, that's the one decision that actually makes a difference. The joyful participation in the sorrows of the universe can be yours if you just stop judging.


Egoic fear keeps us locked into our breathing patterns on instinct, huffing that oxygen shit down like it's water. Shit will fuck you up, man, get you addicted to the tree of woe like a masochist Conan. Become an oxygen junky and become a coward when death beckons. Why can't we all be like Jake Gideon and just float into the warm body bag embrace of Jessica Lange? Instead we're slaves to our lungs. We're descended via evolution from those who feared death, not the good dying young. We are the spawn of cowards who survived and procreated as a last ditch effort to stave off the reaper, and who reincarnate as soon as they can to try it again and again. Our genes themselves are afraid of floating in that clear black ether, you know, like a MAN would -- rejoining into the seamless endless lotus blossoming of the crown chakra like a cliff diver.

As I write this a rerun of SNL is playing on the TV behind me, it's Cee-Lo singing "Forget You." And suddenly the inescapable loop of karma clicks back in place like the revolution of the planet finally caught itself up back on the tape loop; any musician lucky enough to have a big hit (such as Cee-Lo's) is compelled then for the rest of his life to play that same song, the same way, stuck in amber, frozen in time to the one breakthrough moment, to let its original potency be distilled, pasteurized, for mass consumption. Let's Spend Some Time Together Now!

From there it's all downhill, to the eventual burying and VH1 resurrection. This is the brilliance of the digital tape. Even now we should be able to find Llewyn Davis' entire early 60s output with a few key words entered into Spotify, if he existed. We can recapture the feeling of those coffee houses through the countless live-in-the-West-Village recordings of the era, all remastered onto digital, a time when people could smoke indoors, were trusted to make their own decisions. But in doing so we see that Llewyn's world, where everyone waits in hushed reverence for him to finish his mundane songs, is strictly inside his own bubble, a prison of a thousand dimensions, one that paralyzes even Sandra Bullock's astronaut in a holding pattern rotation.

Reflections of / the way life used us.

Astronaut Ryan (Bullock) has more of the karmic awakening than either Llewyn or BB because Davis' latent empathy leaves him still a ways to go, and BB has his true love energy which is almost like cheating. Anyone can be brave when they're in love. But Ryan's journey actually reminded me a lot of the last few times I did serious meditation. For one thing, in order to really touch the holy white light of spiritual awakening there's a terrifying valley of lonesome shadow you have to pass through, 'the long dark night of the soul' - an initiation of sorts, to allow, with love, your entire egoic self construct to be ripped from you, shredded up, in the mandibles of clockwork reptile guardians. It is terrifying. It took me several attempts, but I got on the clockwork page - because when you transcend space and time at last everything seems clockwork like, interlocked turning wheels, because the idea of stasis is revealed as the illusion -- you are not hallucinating when you feel these reptilian guardian mandibles clicking their sprockets, running your soul through their teeth like film through a projector -- you WERE hallucinating when you didn't see or feel that. Now that you're awake you can feel the earth turning below you, as it really is doing; you're on a giant surfboard rock, hanging on by the treads of your feet as it spins in a slow motion tailspin rolling madly around the sun by an axis that always seems about to tilt the wrong way. The fear is so intense you actually have to go through the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, to get to the white light

pulsing amniotic godhead, the orb, the giant egg of vibrational energy that is the sum total of all that is and has been and will be.

If you could look behind and ahead at the same time, you'd see that where you floated from is where you going to; it's not travel as we understand it in a 3-D space time context. You're on a different orbit now, a shorter one, the next track in on the holy mandala spinning LP wheel of life. That's all there is to it, you wind up right where you started. The track was always there, right next to the previous one, it's not like you ever changed albums, you just got conned into believing the first track was all there was. It's not like we die and go somewhere and come back, it's all the same life, because all this time you've just been sitting there in a lotus position, on a mattress or chair in your room, breathing and humming and that's all; you're just a vibration, a wave matrix. Chant long enough, resonate deep enough and you can untangle yourself completely back into the infinite AUM. The ultimate journey for Sandra Bullock's frightened astronaut is ultimately this. It doesn't involve having to be nice to external people; even George Clooney's fellow astronaut eventually seems to morph into the fabric of her psyche, animus as final gatekeeper to the divine; Bullock's real journey is the spiritual one, out in space no one can hear you whine, panic, argue, bargain, hyperventilate, or cast blame. There's no higher mom to cry to; the great thing about Bullock's master class performance here is that her gradual five stages process is so palpable we can almost feel the moments she begins to let go not just of her attachment to life but to her morbid attachment to death as well.


“History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.” ― James Joyce, (Ulysses)

There's only two beings who really wake up from history in this strange world, those in love or on drugs, and meditation-doers-tryers -- or even better, all three at once. Such a trio is a great armor -- Jimmy in Bubble Boy, a weird holy power is given as the ego's fear response is short circuited and it dissolves in a rush of pleasure and obsession and giddiness and loss of appetite that transcends all the concrete skies and yellow depressive bubbles that separate our senses from the fullness of the world. As the Coens seem more concerned with torturing their heroes it's up to us to instill the hope, to reach into the screen with our compassion in ways we don't have to with the holy Cuarón, or in the bouncing Bubble Boy. The difference is all within, baby --it's your perceptions alone... or in the words of Eliot:

"We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison" 

So think not of the key and the thousand dimension prison dissolves behind you like a dizzy snore you have to take on your girlfriend's word is something you should see a doctor for; the astronaut comic books must be lifted from their protective mylar prisons and read... whether you rise or not when you pick your sandbag feet off the floor, matters little: the comic book will lose its pristine mint status but the helmet must come off, the fresh air must be breathed. It's as inevitable as falling.

And we will fall.

Checking out The Maltese Falcon (1941) again--every time it's a different movie! Last time I wrote about it I saw it right after In a Lonely Place and was shocked by much that film's unflattering portrayal made Bogie and Astor each seem as monstrous and misshapen as Joel and the Fat Man. Mary Astor's twisted rococo hair styles made it scan like some Martian transmission from the bowels of one of my old-school delirium tremens. (see Bride of Bogartstein, Acidemic August 2011)

This time around, a slim three years later-ish, there was none of that but another facet, one equally rare in a noir or detective film: a concise expense account, i.e. money. The film is almost completely obsessed with it but not in a big brass ring way--though that is what the falcon represents--but also in a hundred dollar way - the money never gets lower than hundred denominations but even that is unique. It starts with the two hundred given to Miles Archer and Spade by Brigid O'Shaughnessy ("you gave us too much money if you'd been telling us the truth and enough too much to make it all right") and culminating in the envelope of ten thousand dollar bills with the delivery of the dingus. Spade gives the cops the thousand dollar bill (see title of this post), but pockets the rest at the end. After all, he has to keep the office running.


Paradoxically, if the money amounts were larger, they would be less relevant. It reminded me of the few times I ever did large (to me) drug deals, handing over five hundred dollars to a hippie on trust. There's an electric cord of adrenalin clear-headed focus associated with such sketchy large cash outlays that are completely unregulated by lawyers or bankers. When some big deal cokie brings a briefcase of thousands to a drug deal in a modern gangster film it seems to mean a lot less, refracting down to mere MacGuffin status by contrast --but in Falcon every hundred dollar bill has clout, it's power on a printed piece of paper. A C-note buys Spade's loyalty, to a point and it's never really clear whether he's just faking his lack of morals to solve his partner's murder or is just faking his faking when it becomes convenient. This is a movie where even we don't get to see the hero's cards. Dashiell Hammett's dialogue is always realistic in the sense that detective work is a business and, like a lawyer, a fastidious record of retainers, per diems, and expenses must be kept. After his second meeting with Brigid, Spade relieves her of another five hundred, compelling her to hock her jewelry; he then calls his lawyer when he gets back to the office and says into the phone, "I think I'm going to have to tell the coroner to go to blazes, Sid." He asks if he can hide behind his client's privacy, "what'll it cost me to be on the safe side?" another pause as Sid surely lays out an estimate (for what filing injunctions, paying off inquests? We never know). "Well, maybe it's worth it. Okay go ahead."

These kind of details reflect a savvy gambler's awareness of how money predominates discussions when no one is copping to their real motives or who they really are, i.e. in a game of poker. Money talks while bullshit walks as it does in gambling or with Brigid and Sam's love affair, who can say if either is really in love with the other? Who knows what the other guys are holding? In most films we're encouraged to forget we're watching actors play characters --we're not watching the truth. But not seeing the truth implies there is a truth, somewhere outside the frame - the truth is actors are making a film and you're watching it; but great movies like The Maltese Falcon call the idea that there is such a thing as truth at all into question.


A lot of film directors are gamblers by nature, borrowing money to try and break the bank, so they troll through the world collecting philosophies that help them deal with losing huge amounts of money, whether through a hand of poker or a roll of the critics' pens and the public's wallets. In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Walter Huston's cracklin' pappy gold prospector and Tim Holt realize the entirety of a year's work on the mountain is lost in the Mexican desert wind as easily if shooting the works on a spin of the roulette wheel --and Holt is dejected but Pappy knows just what to do, laugh it up! God's joke on us! So laugh they do. And the fact that Holt is able to let go and shrug it off is the real 'treasure' he finds, for Pappy it's the nearby Mexican village where his rudimentary healing skills make him a hero. And in Maltese Falcon it's about being so good at bluffing, at seduction, at manipulation, that even we, your movie audience, don't know what you're holding. Hell, maybe even you don't. A busboy once told me how his wife was so good at reading tells in that he no longer even looked at his hand in Texas Hold 'Em, just took his chances. Now that's a deadpan gambler!

Not to be trite, but for real gamblers, like Huston, a fortune is something meant to be won and/or lost - its table stakes - the stakes get larger, the table grander- but it's still a game --and the measure of a man is how gracefully he can lose his skin on a toss of the dice, as per Huston's beloved Kipling. I know this poem of Rudyard's must be like holy gospel to old John H.:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!  

I've never been much of a gambler myself --if I win big I turn arrogant, if I lose big I turn ashen, my son. Kipling wouldn't have much use for me. I faint in desert heat and wither in the jungle and my wrists are too thin for my punches not to hurt my hand far worse than my opponent's chin. But if I was thicker skinned, say from a lifetime of adventure as a soldier and boxer like old John Huston, or if I could still drink whiskey like I could in my early twenties, I bet I'd go for gambling - why not? I don't think there's anything immoral about it - unless your children are starving because you lost their lunch money at the track. For me, just getting through the day without cracking up, winding up arrested or run over or in the hospital or fired or broken on the wheel, you get the point. But overall I ascribe to the Great McGonigle's 'never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump' philosophy--a good trimming can be as valuable as four years of NYU if the chump be naive enough to be trimmed. Casinos create valuable service industry jobs and remain meccas for performers. And what's a bigger stakes gamble than filmmaking? A few million dollars is considered a low risk gamble compared to the titanic bloated budgets of normal multiplex fodder. If gamblers didn't know how to laugh off catastrophic losses, Michael Cimino would have wound up wearing cement shoes after Heaven's Gate. Shit, son. He singlehandedly killed our once strong studio system! And he's still walking around... even making movies.

Showing off scars, from top: Under the Skin, Habit

Under the Skin (2014) the new slick dark green opus from Brian Birth Glazer is a film that links up panic attacks before and after itself and signals the future of movies as less about acting and thrills and more about the brain dissolving itself in a pool of black oil in the middle of a dark forlorn forest, wondering if--without ears to hear itself sizzle--does it really make a sound. The answer will unnerve you. This is 2014's first official transhumanist off-world chance to begin again at that stage of post-modern social decay where the screen is as permeable as a jet black oil-filled swimming pool surface and anyone can dive in, not just Cocteau's Orphee. Just don't expect to climb out in the same skin you wore in.

I know how it is, bro. I began the weekend with a terrible panic attack as my whole world crashed down around me in hailstorms of at-work red tape hot potato which I just couldn't drop. Maybe it was the April allergy cruelty depression, but when my girl wanted to go out to the movies, my blood ran cold and I shook like the gallows pole was sliding up me while old Vlad applauded. She tossed a half-Xanax on the floor and like a good dog scrambling after a treat, I found it, and it barely helped, and so it was we caught the late show of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin down at the BAM and wandering back from it around midnight, through half-deserted and strangely-lit Good Friday-empty Brooklyn streets in a haze of alienated liquid light reflection, stale popcorn nausea and post-half Xanax glow wobbliness. Time to talk over what I thought I would love since I have a vast catalogue of sexy alien maneater movies at home, but I admit it I couldn't quite get past the feeling Glazer's film was more of a video art installation swerving towards an And then the Darkness detour than an actual movie. Sure it's the most beautiful movie I've seen since Tree of Life, and maybe if I was shrooming and feeling guilty as my dad lay dying three states south I might have swooned for Under the Skin as I did for that film. Instead, buried in mossy 'membrances of Basil Twist-y underwater shirt twirlings, I floated back home to the smoky din, the paranoid terror unabated.


Then, I realize where my paranoid terror was coming, it was related to rewatching all six seasons of Mad Men in prep for the new and final season and realizing I'd mixed up don Draper's forced hiatus from Sterling Cooper with my own work woes and spring allergy medicine depression, all swirled together in the dark liquid of my subconscious. I can't tell where the TV ends  and my life begins anymore. I'm sinking half into the black oil image.
When things get too intense at home, by which I mean onscreen, I move to the kitchen to fix a drink or go to the bathroom and repeat to myself, "it's only a movie, it's only a movie - I'm 'here.'" But I can tell myself anything and it doesn't matter. Seeing is believing, not repeating Wes Craven tag line mantras... But I'm too far in, half-dissolved into the next image, and so are you... from afar, to our pets, we already look like statues, frozen in seated positions before the glowing square, awaiting our orders....


Glazer's film lures us into a dark and alien world, but it's just Glasgow, a land without sunshine, but beautiful, bleakly beautiful panoramas of drenching rain over misty mountain moors and lashing surf rolling and crashing down in fast accelerations on a family at play (at first), sucking them all into their presumed deaths in a chain of failed rescues, sans suspenseful music or any indication they've drowned, leaving only a screaming infant behind, a sequence so harrowingly existential Herzog-level dark that it kind of crawled inside my stomach like a nightmare I had as a child, suddenly all the layers of assurance and support that nothing bad can happen to an infant onscreen is swept off; and there's also working class yobbos, slang as indecipherable as an alien tongue setting up a class divide against Scarlett's posh Londoner accent and the cheap shot of a crying utterly distraught abandoned baby about to be swept off into a harsh surf--how do you get past a dog being swept out to sea, dragging the parents with it and this poor child's terrified screams, abandoned? How do you get back to a film's familiar 'Mars needs Men'-style plot (the rural UK-set Devil Girl From Mars coming instantly to mind) after seeing that poor bereft toddler screaming, abandoned in the primordial surf as the sun sets down around him like an evil shroud? This poor kid's screams hang like a torture-tricked sucker punch cheap shot over the remainder of the film --until the sheer weirdness of the mutant Elephant Mannish boy pick-up throws us for yet another mickey. Whole reels of what the fuck seem to have been edited out, though based on our familiarity with films like La Femme Nikita and The Man Who Fell to Earth we can deduce those missing pieces, but why should we have to if it's only so Scarlett can suddenly turn Ann Bancroft at the Lynchian carnivale of epidermal symbolism? I'm not an animal! See me! Feel me! Touch me! I'm dreaming. Take the shot, Miss Moneypenny, Glasgow is for drunks and junkie loo divers but too dangerous even for a black oil seductresses. Run, (into) forest! Not that one!


That's the problem with this film though I respect others who love it - lord knows I wanted to love it. I would have followed alien Scarlett J. anywhere, even over to the commercial multiplex wherein she's seducing Captain America and kicking ass instead of playing Venus Flytrap to some juicy soccer hooligans. It's strange and scary but she seems to have very little real power and decays in ways that make us wonder if Lars Von Trier is waiting in the wings to snatch her from the Kubrick coldness and douse her in the Charlotte Gainsbourg womb of old testament Griffith mortality. It woulda been nice. Still, I saw some things I don't usually get to see at the movies - things so weird they're like the dark rural cousin to Matthew Barney's Cremaster. 


The string of previews BAM showed before the film included something for Locke, which is set entirely inside Tom Hardy's car in real time as he talks on the Bluetooth. A whole hour and a half no doubt of artsy glistening street lamp reflections on rainy dark streets looking like luminous watercolors dripped on a black canvas whilst techno throbs hypnotically and family members and work acquaintances shout their panicked exposition at him via Siri's surreptitious digital strands and signals and strings. Is this preview meant to prepare us for the endless driving shots and slow loop to nowhere repetitions of Under the Skin? It seemed an ill omen. I felt the whole of Under the Skin was trying to escape that Locke, the idea that if you want a real movie you need to stay home - movies are now about big screen compositions set within cars and the minds of predators --they don't expand your horizons but shrink them until they grab you by the neck like a dominatrix dog collar. The next stage will be where you spend your ten dollars to sit in your car and think about what the movie you paid to see might look and sound like if it was ever made, while you drive around. Dig, the movie is you, mate! Ten dollars!

Another problem: what's with the mean male handler (Jeremy McWilliams) with the motorcycle humpsuit? Why do filmmakers and writers need these guys? There's a kind of icky chauvinist undercurrent--like even as a killer and symbolic castration queen, a woman needs a pimp to get by, needs a man to give permission for her to abuse other men (see my sizzling expose of cinema's pimps both before and behind the lens) and with Scarlett's voluptuous body stripped to black bra and skintight black jeans she becomes the whole show, just her and the black box rooms with the wet floors --so if Glazer's so terrified of women even his castrating vixens from outer space need a man to tell them what to do, then what chance does Ingrid Pitt have, or had? It ain't right. The first film of this ilk that transcends the pimp factor head on and smashes it -- Daughters of Darkness -- the most recent -- Neil  Jordan's Byzantium! But in between and after, and before, male directors afraid to show strong castrating goddesses doing their thing without a male authority also present, to grant permission, and it's skeevy. This ain't Plan Nine from Outer Space! Treat your space women right, alien Brits!

Locke

All that aside, Under the Skin tries hard to puncture something hidden and vital in our culture, the way any sense of a dislocated universal all-seeing perception dissolves in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere; Scarlett drives slowly trying to lure into her SUV figures of hunched over men, pummeling their way on foot through the darkness, shopping or working long after normal people go to sleep, for good reason, and Scotland especially seems as abandoned as some lifeless corner of the Milky Way. From the darkness of an experimental intro that's just drones and a pinpoint of light, onwards to the rainy finish, it's hard to get a straight bead on anything. We're used to that pinpoint of light becoming a tunnel, but it's not. Aside from 'in Scotland' we never know where we are, except that we're treading the line between modernist ambiguity and hedging indecisiveness. In Glazer's debut, the Kubrickian Birth, we had a real soul in Nicole Kidman, beautiful with her Rosemary buzz cut and Anne Heche a brassy Lady Macbeth that stirred the painting of our blood. It was more Kubrick than Eyes Wide Shut on some level, but still it lacked the feeling of planetary orbit of The Shining and 2001 -- films where you can actually feel the world turning below the feet of the Steadicam operator, and your own seat, the orbit of the Earth spinning around the sun and the longer orbit of the sun around the lip of it's galaxy as the universe expands outwards, and how one orbit --the film--and the other--your head-- meet and eclipse each other until both disappear. Under the Skin has only one decaying orbit, and lots of flashy editing tracks and scars are displayed out from under its sleeve, including an extended melange of overlapping images through which Johansson's strange and lovely face gradually appears, but when the charm's unwound there's nowhere to go but towards the macroscope finality ala the end of Easy Rider. It's the kind of film that depends on Wikipedia and summations of the original source novel for sense. My GF read them to me afterwards and frankly the book sounds pretty repulsive... but I was sick off too much stale popcorn, and was coming down off a doggie Xanax, and the terrors of bureaucratic power finally besting me am der werkhaus. My weekend was ruined! At any rate, I appreciate the hypertextual angle - a film that needs a drive or walk to and from itself, and also the internet to explain the source novel demands to be judged accordingly, thereto...


Before we get to all that: Larry Fessenden's low budget Habit (Netflixed after admiring his You're Next) in post-Blank Generation style and Liquid Sky content, it's very promising. Fessenden wears all the hats and stars, as Sam, a bartender and witty drunk from the era of the 90s well, when I drank the same way, in his same neighborhood - (he bartends at the Hat, the great Mexican restaurant in the LES with the with the super strong margaritas --they'd give them to you in plastic cups for take-out!!!) I think I've even used his great line about committing suicide on the installment plan before. And with his wild hair and missing front teeth Fessenden is a great shaggy antihero, one of those where intellect and the ability to succinctly share one's inner feelings is not the mark of a square nor missing teeth the mark of a working class yobbo. He must have been really drinking cuz he's amazing. And there's some really great drinking scenes, where concerns about his girlfriend Anna (Meredith Snaider) and her habit of sucking his blood during sex come out organic and low key as any normal conversation, neither forcedly so or otherwise and she doesn't need a pimp to wave his wand and 'allow' her to feast on poor Larry, either.


Fessenden also has a great gift for framing within the tight confines of small realistically dilapidated apartments -- the kind you and I did a lot of drinking in back when - the Halloween party early on is a masterpiece of tight economical framing - we've been to that same party before and the low key conversational tone is also a marvel; sounding like an early Jack Nicholson but not trying to, and believably trying to navigate his way through a rapidly downward spiraling series of options, Fessenden! The hand job in Battery Park with Anna was one of the hotter sex scenes I've witnessed in some time, too, for being so sudden, realistic, intense, out of left field, punk rock, real - exciting --it left me bleeding psychic energy from out my limp imprisoned genital matrix in a way I've not been bled since Lydia Lunch in Kern's Submit to Me Now!


All that said, there's still the issue of the horror, the weakest element of this otherwise strong and moving film. The vamp fangs are clearly the two dollar plastic variety and while that could have worked --like if he was too drunk to tell if she's just joking or really trying to bite him -- plastic or real - etc., they play it straight and by then the film's run on kind of long, there's still no denying this is a significant and impressive low budget work; if the climax is a let-down it's only because the rest of it is so much better than it has any right to be.


The main issue with both these femme fatales of course is the weird dichotomies - Scarlett rocks the posh accent but dresses like a waterfront Lars Von Trier prostitute, and why is her spaceship an SUV? And as vamp Anna, Meredith Snaider is too short to be scary; I would have liked to see her taller, or more mature, played by a real gravitas-bearing actress who somehow seemed separate from the murky twentysomething slacker low-key characters in the film, none of whom seem to emerge from the murk to become any archetypal vampire types (the one kid tries to be a Van Helsing rescuer of sorts but it never pans out though he does get in a great stream-of-babblelogue about the real vampire being all around us in the choking overreach of society and popular culture). So in the end it's not as effective as a vampire or horror film but does work as an authentically booze-engulfed LES twentysomething denizen depiction, wherein the sense of world-weary isolation, the cultural vampire metaphor, works.


The reverse is perhaps true for Under the Skin, which has a few striking visuals involving black goo (are the aliens merely tar babies drawn from this murk, as in they're all one giant amoeba that occasionally splits off and dons a pelt like a wolf in sheep clothing?) and in one climactic shot we're able to realize the way even the most horrifying sight can blend in perfectly with twisting sunless old growth forest. Critics have noted the way our earth becomes so easily alien and terrifying through Scarlett's eyes, and how inherently alien she looks to begin with, and the weird similarities between these alien seduction / immersions and the reality of reported alien abductions, and the similarity between these aliens and the weird eye thing in Liquid Sky. While I get all that I'm still not convinced. Were my expectations too high? I wasn't high at all... was that it? Days later I'm still thinking about it, and the film did help strangeify that long walk uphill from BAM to our Park Slope digs on a late night Good Friday, half the locals seemingly gone upstate to visit relatives for Easter, leaving the neighborhood feeling very abandoned and surreal like an alien world. It wasn't quite the same surreal walk home after the midnight UES showing of Mulholland Dr. ten years earlier,  but it came damn close, and in the end, I guess, that's the best movies can do if they want to be both artsy and get us to not wait for video. To get us to trek out there into the dark foreboding night and pay over ten bucks to spend a couple hours parked next to strangers, our purse and coat pockets easily accessible to them and to bed bugs, the film has to seamlessly link up to all those things, to forge a direct traversable doorway between our lives, where we are inside our own skins and their outer furs, wherein our seeing the film, and the film itself, become merged. If a film can't make the walk home resonate like we're seeing the world through a different pair of eyes than the ones we came in with, then why did we ever leave the safety of our homes to begin with? Wherein films of the past, like Habit, can link up to our memories rather than our tomorrows, and trekking to the neighborhood video store in the wearying sunshine of a Sunday used to help create some kind of anticipatory context, all that is forgotten in favor of Netflix, the delivery system that sluggens down to a slowmo swim the last vestiges of our impetus to move through the tar pit black quicksand stasis to actually pursue a film down its sprocket breadcrumb trailers rather than let it come to us like lazy Charlottes. One day maybe soon we won't even need our own memories, our own darkness, a seat, speakers, ears, or the screens in our retinae. We'll be the viewer and the viewed in one looping orbital motion -burnt onto a stack of DVDs on a dusty shelf. And hopefully none of them, not ever, will be Transcendence. 

Thisbe and Pyramus loved through a hole in a wall, and that made it to Midsummer Night's Dream, so surely there's room for a 1968 Britpop film called WONDERWALL that's really more about "all the lonely people," like Prof. Oscar Collins (Jack McGowran - forced to pantomime most of his performance when his real strength is in his great oratory voice) as a peeping tom scientist who works at a water plant but really only cares about his microscope of cellular life - until he hallucinates his neighbor, Penny Lane (Jane Birkin) therein. As a Vogue model regularly modeling in her apartment studio for a photographer lad (Brian Walsh) who dresses in Apple records green, Birkin is so gorgeous and young, with such heavenly legs and crazy fashions- that we want to see her all the time, but Joe Massot's vision is a might classicist, so be prepared for the prof.

Penny's pad is one of the stars of the show, so every shot is gold, and other colours too thanks to the eye popping blu-ray restoration from the good folks at Shout! Jean Harlow and Garbo to place her in the context of enigmatic desire objects via posters on the wall. A handsome young bloke boyfriend (Ian Quarrier) meanwhile drops in on the professor to borrow ice and late sugar, and based on his behaviour it's clear he would rather shag a splenderific selection of birds in more groovy outfits and awful wigs, including Anita Pallenberg, with whom he tries to get Penny in a three-way, than help raise Jane's forthcoming baby. Neither Pallenberg nor Birkin ever even speaks a word near as I can figure, but the soundtrack is a nonstop feast for the enhanced hear, with George Harrison's psychedelic melange of sitars, guitars, harmonica, tamboura and Indian horns howling, tinkling, and buzzing like an array of electric insects nearly nonstop. It's an entomological freakfest - a kind of mute Beavis and Butthead if they were just one guy who barely spoke but watched vintage Joi Lansing Scopitones through round holes in a wall, with only Norma Shearer in RIPTIDE (1934) and Isabella Rossellini in GREEN PORNO (2008) able to compete in the insect costume category (and no spider ala Lansing's "Web of Love" to provide a threat) and Harrison's buzzing tamboura and sitar hovering deep inside your ear ossicles.

From top: WONDERWALL, RIP TIDE, GREEN PORNO

The source story is by Gérard Brach, who wrote REPULSION and CUL-DE-SAC and THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS for Polanski before this, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who only also wrote VANISHING POINT (1972) after. So where does that leave us? One gets the impression of Brach's earlier work that he never meant Professor Collins to be any kind of Monsieur Hulot-Chaplin type whimsy generator but a skeevy older version of Terence Stamp in THE COLLECTOR who doesn't need to abduct a specimen for his jar because one lives right next door, and there's plenty of air holes. The idea that Collins loses himself and begins to demolish his apartment to better make a million holes in the wall to peep through is downright creepy but doubly so when we watch him make those holes under the steam of a bouncy polka and double projection speed. This fella Collins needs a good slashening by Catherine Deneuve's razor, especially once he makes it his business to break into her pad and start nosing around. That's the fundamental problem, or maybe solution, to this film --that young Penny just happens to be trying to snuff it right at the same evening he busts in. Good old Collins! Even so, he should really be in jail.

But maybe it's also because this weird pro-scopophile angle that it's ultimately interesting beyond a pretty light show and showcase for Birkin's heavenly gams. If you go in expecting it to be a dull story of a dweebish scientist shuffling around his apartment in his pajamas, some kind of reverse-gendered REPULSION tale of mental disintegration coupled to some old nudie cutie comedy like THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS, then the pop art YELLOW SUBMARINER tangents will throw you left of field. If you go in expecting a pop art whimsy-fest be prepared to be rather unnerved by the inordinate amount of time we watch Collins "reacting" to all he peeps like some silent film clown impression of a Mr. Jones / Father McKenzie bowler hat type Brit in a pretentious student art film, like if REAR WINDOW's Jimmy Stewart had no friends, nurse, and didn't even know Grace Kelly, but spied on her younger incarnation as a struggling model, and there was no murder, aside from a suicide attempt-- and we were somehow expected to root for a delusional creep too shy and out of it to even realize how creepy he's being, figuring a movie about him watching old Grace Kelly through a hole was enough of a movie subject, especially with imagining having a big doofus duel with her boyfriend for her hand in wedlock, using as weapons things like giant oversize pens, lipsticks, and cigarettes while the lime green photographer snaps pictures, all so he can have her loving load his hookah while he stares off into space. Really, if you're going to imagine yourself a young turk, why not be cool? Who pictures themselves as an old square duffer trying vainly to look hip? That defeats the whole purpose.


Now I should preface by saying I adore Michael Powell but I'm too skeeved out by PEEPING TOM to ever see it again, ditto THE COLLECTOR, and I can't stand Monsieur Hulot and all those damned (in my mind) terrible Jacques Tati comedies, and I loathe BILLY LIAR. And when it comes to the Beatles I'm more a Harrison-Ringo-John fan, and find some of Paul's songs insufferably cheeky and guileless. Paul was always trying to bring in the lonely old timers and bouncy children along on the picnic, dumbing shit down so they understand, while John and George were about leading the brave into the future (and scaring the shit out of children like me in the 70s, who of course loved the Paul songs). And there's that vibe here -- the colorful psychedelic whirligig is seen at arm's length while the drabness of foggy London codgers is front and center, the way, say, the Beatle's MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (below) tried to be cheeky fun for one and all but instead was kind of like a nightmare of banal fever dream - a bus loaded with middle-aged and dowdy proles, instead of lovely upper crust birds and fellas. Just look at the drab washed out image of the four of them in their animal maskies below - as creepy as the brown bear man in THE SHINING or the citizens of Summer's Isle.

From Top: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, SHINING, WICKER MAN

It's sad that Jack MacGowran, the great Irish Beckett interpreter, a titan of the stage capable of great oratory, who was fantastic as the gut-shot bank robber in Polanski's CUL-DE-SAC, is stuck playing a silent observer peeping tom scientist role, His hairy face like a feral Einstein, the whimsical electric banana I-am-a-Tangerine psychedelia regularly mystifies him so he might dress in a tux but never goes out and this is a very, very timid movie - it watches the hippies at play through binoculars like a dirty old man but gussies them up in enough insect coloring to give him the out that it's 'for educational and scientific purposes only.' Even happening to be in a position to come to her rescue he hangs way back and lets the bobby get the glory and the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (meant to resemble making out, all the better to agitate old Professor Collins with, my dear). The whole film has the queasy vibe of someone trying to paint a DayGlo PG patina of scientific inquiry on something he knows deep down is prurient, puerile, and pathetic. The professor's little cheats to camera are a constant reminder we're expected to either feel like he's one of the bad boys we at first enjoy being addressed directly by, ala Iago, Richard III, BRONSON, and Alex of the Three Little Droogies (no accident all British; the only American with such yabbos is Scorsese, whose always been able to find Shakespeare in his source mats). But the thing of course is that this isn't a historical thriller or a saga of mental illness that puts the British penal system on trial, but a twee tale of imagineering as confused about how audience involvement is created (vs. alienated) as BILLY LIAR or SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS.


For all that, again, WONDERWALL can't be dismissed easily -- it has a lot of British fans, like old Liam Gallagher at the band Oasis, who wrote a song about it. I imagine if you discovered the film like old Liam did, likely after a night of ecstasy at the club and finding it randomly at two AM on BBC IV or something while still tripping, or saw a super rare screening of it on the wall behind some go-go dancers while falling through a K-hole, then well then you might love it. And seeing it all swanky with pop art colors exploding off of the screen on the blu-ray while Harrison's music flows remastered and earthy-ethereal in a gorgeous remix, then it has druggy pop art allure: both apartments eventually look amazing thanks to set design by art collective (and Beatle haberdashers and mural painters) The Fool, and Birkin is progressively more and more gorgeous. So on the proper chemicals I imagine it would be quite the thing, and for the rest of us can certainly provide some help in the old spatchka department.

But this guy Prof. Oscar Collins is half the show and that's 100% the trouble. If we come to the blu-ray we come for a psychedelic plasmatic gorgeous pop art happening, presumably, not a kitchen sink Benny Fool on the Hill, and that we do end up with one addresses the lingering need in the counterculture to address the problem, in Britain especially, of this type of fellow, i.e. the judgmental old duffer. We just shush them away now in our youth obsessed culture, there's no doubt anymore that teens rule the marketplace, and old people need to go watch CBS or be trampled underfoot. But in sixties Swinging London, there was only the BBC and cinema --and British cinema has always been a mixed bag, with a socialist blue (collar) streak and a hard-lost sense of propriety and a penchant for turning nearly ever genre of film dishwater dull (with studios like Hammer, and cheeky shows like THE AVENGERS being exceptions as well as indicative of the problem, dealing with the suffocation of Britain's class system it by addressing it head-on, ala Monty Python. And if an older fella really wanted to know what was going on in the swinging bird's pad, there was not yet media to let him know he was being an old fool letting his bourgeois prurience get him in a stiff upper liplock. He might feel he has a right to move in and arrest them all if things look suspiciously salacious through the keyhole (and he can't admit to himself he too wanted to smoke hash with a naked Marianne Faithful on a bearskin rug). And he never doubts we'd love to see him seeing it all - that is to say we are continually thrust into the idea of needing to see who we're seeing through seeing, that we need an old prude mediary, like old guared neo-conservatives putting police tape around a young girl's womb.

For all his faults, Woody Allen at least understood how that works, that basic truth of viewer psychology. His going after girls young enough to actually be his daughters isn't something he feels we'd root for, yet is something he can't let go of, like a secret guilty conscience, but that's the roots of art. Polanski is on the run, but Allen strides free, and WONDERWALL is somehow convinced it's Allen when it's Polanski, the way Michael Jackson was convinced, that their artistic drive is coming from somewhere other than fear and the compulsive need to create distracting noises to cover up the hideous heartbeat under the Poe floorboards. Allen's years of analysis have given him enough awareness to understand that it is the beating of his own hideous heart, his guilty conscience, and so his distracting noises are conveyed as comedy. And Polanski's awareness comes from feeling the need to film the heart directly, that the heart is all he can see and so forgive him if he doesn't even deign to make distracting noises. But Joe Massot's WONDERWALL is so distracted by his own distracting noises it forgets all about the heart, and so mistakes its beating as the sound of butterfly wings, that it is the fifth Beatle, and so he never asks himself the tough sordid Flannery O'Connor question: isn't every butterfly collector more liable to sniff through his prey's old cocoon drawer than save her from self-immolating?


By the end of the film we more or less resolve this episode in Collins' life, but for the rest of us we can't help but feel like Woody Allen trapped on that sad sack train at the start of STARDUST MEMORIES, with half the movie spent watching Sharon Stone blow kisses through a window through a screen through another window. But hey - it was 1968! The director, Joe Massot, had one more trick up his sleeve, after this: in 1976, he was fired off of Led Zeppelin's SONG REMAINS THE SAME. He was Page's neighbor and had been pestering Grant about it and they'd all knew WONDERWALL, his only other film, had Beatles mystique (and they hadn't seen it). And SONG I did see for the first time after a wild party, with no expectations, and a bunch of friends of some girl I was halfway hooked up with (a tale for a different post-here!) So set and setting are everything, but most importantly, no Professor Collins, no Monsieur Hulot, just the crazy, violent, talented, dangerous, beautiful youth of the Zeppelin. We in the dark will be our own Collinses, thank you. And while WONDERWALL is a worthy curio for Beatles fans and Britpop lovers, I'd rather not be reminded how long ago that wild party was -and that I'm now just a peeper, a spy in the house of love, a fool on on the hill, it's even worse. So take your concern for the bowler hat chaps and shove it where no one will hear / no one comes near. All the lonely people hate looking at images of lonely people looking at images of hot birds of youth. Cut out the mediary who'd pin Jane Birkin's wings to the wall so you can pay him for a glimpse, and free her with thine own electric eyes! If she never comes back, you never really saw her to begin with, and so adieu!