All the Howard Hughes' Aviator-Womanizer Extraordinaire mytholos aside, this is a pretty interesting film marred solely by a pair of charisma-deprived actors playing unlikable WWI pilot Yank brothers from Oxford, one of whom, Roy (James Hall) is a cowardly womanizing douchebag, the other, Monte (Ben Lyon). is a naive simp who believes the hype about how a 'good woman' should behave and expects nymphomaniac Jean Harlow (in the role that made her a sex symbol) to live up to his ideal since, you know, she kissed him once. Refusing even to believe his own brother shagged her, he's quite laugh worthy, and Hughes invites us to share a conspiratorial groan at his naivete. Some guys, man, a girl winks at him and he suddenly insists she meets his parents and start going to church with him, you know the type. Hell, I used to be that type - weren't we all, once upon a time? "Never love a woman, just make love to her" Monte tells his brother, and so in a way, Hughes tells us his life mission.


The thing about Hughes is, he walks it likes he talks it: there's a cool sense of uninhibited sexual congress, with one of the best all-time 'fade-outs' in the pre-code code, wherein we fade out on Monte and Harlow making out on a couch, cut over to naive brother Roy sulking back at the bunks having been blown off by her, and when we return to the couch at Harlow's pad, Monte's ashen mood and Harlow's nonplussed attitude ("It seems colder in here now, doesn't it?" she asks with some bitter reproach) indicates some deed has occurred. So now Monte hates himself and thinks she's a slut now because like a true douchebag he lacks the self-awareness to realize his post-orgasm depression is not her fault and will pass within an hour or so. Dude, this is pre-code shit we could have used all through the 40s and 50s. Damn Joseph Breen to an angel-less Hell, if he's not there already.

Anyway, the two boys are drags, as I say, and part of the blame lies with the actors and Hughes, who clearly casts lame ducks to make himself handsomer by contrast: as the stalwart but clueless Roy Rutledge, James Hall is like a vaguely bloated mix of Richard Barthelmess and Bob Newhart and he overacts horribly; as Monte, Ben Lyon is a big improvement, though unconvincing as a ladykiller he does a decent job with his scenes of his being seduced against his very weak will by Harlow, who with her jet black eyebrows and platinum wave in their big debut almost steal the movie from the spectacular aerial combat, are one of the highlights.

A word on that: Harlow is a different beast here than she would be later for MGM -- less a gutter-baby-talking brawler who likes sex and lounging around eating bonbons and babbling to her maid--and more an upscale nymphomaniac whose refusal to be a one-man guy is never disparaged by Hughes' script --instead it's Roy who comes off looking like a dopey punter and Monte not far behind. There's no Joe Breen around to hobble Harlow for Roy as he thinks is proper since she winked at him once, six men ago, to spot weld her chains to the kitchen so he can fly away in confidence she won't be screwing the ground crew. And right behind him in assholery is Monte who seems to resent any girl who would be dumb enough to shag him. Two chumps from Oxford indeed!

 But who cares? I've never been a HUGE fan of Harlowe's MGM baby-talk blonde. I admire her skill playing that character, but I find the character cloying at times. BUT she's different here, maybe it's that she's thinner, younger, and those fierce black eyebrows make her seem accessible -you can feel the hair on her arms, she's like a living electric sheet of fire. She's not perfect, but she's dazzling. (Compare to how kind of busted she looks just a year later in Public Enemy, below).


Second big bang for the buck here -- superb aerial action. This being the film that was begun silently and finished with sound there's a certain freedom to be found not worrying about sound in the lengthy aerial combat: all the sounds of all the guns and the humming of the biplane engines as they go buzzing about is strangely soothing, especially in a very long and riveting scene involving a German zeppelin attempting to drop bombs on Piccadilly Circus by lowering the bombardier down through the clouds on a cable (the zeppelin's only chance to escape getting blown out of the sky is to stay up where the air is too thin for the old school bi-planes). Hughes being an aviator delivers not just action thrills but an idea of what was really involved in dogfighting and  bombing - the mix of luck, patience, not freaking out or choking on the trigger, and just how damn slow those planes were trying to ride to the rescue. Hughes went all out for this stuff especially with hand-painted color tints. And nary a word is granted the brave young German lowered down on a cable below the cloud line from a gigantic German dirigible so he can direct the bombing of London - but who lies to his commander, and has them drop the full load of bombs into the Thames instead. And Hughes milks the tension - the Germans speak in dubbed German! (with silent film intertitles instead of subtitles! Genius!)


And as the German who first duels with then later questions the boys after they're shot down behind enemy lines, Lucien Prival is a delight, a leaner feral version of Erich Von Stroheim, he steals the picture even from Harlow. Don't forget the Germans weren't yet Nazis, there was still a lot of sporting blood between Germans and their rivals - they'd all been drinking and dueling together scant years before. Of all the characters in this filthy war, it's actually Prival who glows the hardest, seems the staunchest of fellows. Harlow also earns her bombshell wings and can make fans of even on-the-fence-about-her types like myself hitherto, but man, those two brothers are just stinkers.

Warren William is his usual jubilant self in this frivolous Warner Brothers comedy, maybe even too much so, and I say this as a die-hard William fan. I even like Satan Met a Lady, that original Maltese Falcon adaptation where he hams it up so much he seems continually buzzing on his first martini after a hard day. Here in Goodbye Again he's just as airy, but he has weird cool chemistry with Joan Blondell, with whom he's appeared in many a WB pre-code. This time around she's his secretary and he's a ladykiller romance writer; Helen Chandler (Mina from Dracula) is looking extra alien hybrid as the sister of WW's current (married) conquest (Genevieve Tobin) . She's already looking a world older and stranger than she did two years earlier in Dracula (she was a notorious alcoholic who burnt herself up in a fire shortly hereafter). Wallace Ford--bespectacled!-- is cast against type as a litigious relative (and Chandler's husband). Dragging Tobin's husband (Hugh Herbert) in tow, they set about following William from Cleveland to Albany on the sleeper train, and there's a great scene where their presence in the next car all but forces William to sleep with Tobin, waiting in his sleeper in a sexy negligee. It all ends in William's Albany boudoir where he jumps around on the bed and generally carries on while Blondell is gradually revealed to be far more than a secretary but hitherto 'open-minded' to his dalliances with ladies such as Tobin - usually, but because she's married and he's lying to her about it, she gets pissed.

That's about it --not much to write home about though the actors sure strive for a farcical peak. It doesn't come but William is onstage every minute, almost, so it's tough to care about anything else if you're a fan (and why wouldn't you be?) even if this ain't his finest hour. He needs more menace to be really riveting. Here he's coasting on his wolfish charm like he knows we love him no matter what. We do.

Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell hustle around from the Turkish baths of NYC to Chicago to Marina Del Rey or thereabouts before seeking refuge in a small Portuguese fishing community, the kind showgirls and good-hearted whores go for their second chances, you know, to be respectable, and marry some big hunk of hick local or dumb lunk of a fisherman like so many before her (see also: Tiger Shark, Anna Christie, The Wedding Night, The Purchase Price, The Wind, to name merely a few) - almost like one last dig at the sanctity of, as Blondell's heart-of-golder puts it, "good honest decent hardworking people, which you wouldn't know anything about Dick Jordan!"


Believe it or not, the big surprise here is Victor Jory as the dumb lunk fisherman, the kind of guy usually played by Gary Cooper or George Brent (if he's the hero) or Edward G. Robinson or Ralph Bellamy (if he's the foil). Jory might not be as good an actor as any of those guys, but he does have a great deep voice, a looming height  like some crazy stock company Sitting Bull, and gravitas that belies his then-lean years. He might be burdened with a hack-accent and mangled syntax but he's no rube. Cagney and Joan might talk faster and think on their feet, but Jory actually steals the show, or at least gives Cagney a run for his money. It's even got one of those typically succinct encapsulations of the advent of Joe Breen's draconian code rubrick, the sanctity of marriage prevails and Cagney walks off into the sunset, arm in arm with his killers. Let it come down.


Robust Michael Curtiz direction makes this turn-of-the-century New York City Darryl F. Zanuck opus The Gangs of New York-style farce to beat, with all the downtown warring fire brigades (they brawl in the street while burning Chinese laundrymen plead in vain out their second story window in a bit of sly callous racism), corruption, nickel beer, sawdust, tear-stained pathos, and freewheeling publicity stunts the era can offer. Wallace Beery plays Chuck, the big shot of the Bowery (the Bill the Butcher); Jackie Cooper is a racist version of his orphan self, who lives for throwing rocks through "Chink's winders", Fay Wray is the good girl who ends up keeping house for the pair of them, and George Raft is Chuck's rival, an up-and-coming sharpie with a saloon and fire brigade of his own. Chuck don't like that and he's so tough he saps a broad who drunkenly crashes his table, as illustration to Cooper that women are "only after yer spondoolicks" since Cooper's gone in for trading cigarette cards "from guinea kids." Yeesh! Coogan's presence is somewhat superfluous, but he does his best with a third wheel role that seems affixed to Beery like some kind of blubbering lamprey.


The problem with the whole motivation of Leo DiCaprio in GANGS OF NEW YORK was swearing revenge on a man who his father fought fairly, and is commemorated by. Swearing revenge would be like the grandson of a fallen German soldier tracking down the American who killed his grandfather on the battlefield, illogical and certainly nothing to root for. Does Scorsese even understand how vengeance works? Well, BOWERY has it's problems too, once the smoke clears and the auld triangle coheres from the crowded streets betwixt Wray, Raft, and the jealous brute Beery. But at least it doesn't get it in the way of the scantily clad dancers. A better plot thread has Raft jumping off the Brooklyn bridge on a wager for Chuck's saloon; he makes it but almost used a dummy in his place, so reversals of fortune are always happening on the Bowery, including an appearance of vile liquor-bashing Carrie Nation and her armada of shrewish wives, living examples of the evils of sobriety. For a country finally free of the evils of prohibition (it was repealed in 1933 - the same year of THE BOWERY's release), the drunkenness on display here is almost patriotic.
Karen Morley is at her warmest in this pre-code MGM caper: The romance between her and John Barrymore starts with her naked in his bed at his party (he insists on being in the room while she dresses - with the lights off and it's pretty sexy -for he is no gentleman!) and --oh right, this is Paris, where such things are okay -- he doesn't have to go to the gallows to spare her having to confess she spent the night with him, and even if he doesn't believe her story about being an exiled Russian countess, he still likes her. I'm not a huge Lionel fan (he plays the head of the French Secret Service, sworn to bag Lupin before he retires - and is always is fussy and overly sincere) but I am a huge apologist and unrepentant fan for his great, drunk brother John - and the pair have more great rapport here than in all the other films together, and there's even some fun ambiance and dabs of old dark house mystery (it takes awhile to learn which, if either, brother is Arsène and naturally I can't spill it).


Even if, by the end, it's really not too much at stake and it all kind of resembles the later THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (i.e. no deaths), right down the daylight hour museum theft, it's a-pretty hot, breezy fun, and despite its rough treatment in the theft, the Mona Lisa is none the worse for wear. The real stealing going on here is the theft of Karen Morley from being in more films, appearing only sporadically after she left MGM (due to disputes over her private life, and her career was silenced later during the blacklist). So we have only a handful of films with which to treasure her adult sexual openness and witty walk and the way she more than made up for actorly limitations through charm, wit, presence and her icy laugh. There's this film, PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD, SCARFACE, MASK OF FU MANCHU, DINNER AT EIGHT and, well, they're all worthwhile anyway, but with her... sublime. You can have Garbo (though I always cried during GRAND HOTEL when I watched it really drunk back in the day), for my money its her sexual chemistry with John Barrymore here that kind of melted the keys in my pocket, like if the sexy Jean Harlow of HELL'S ANGELS grew a few years and inches and went to finishing school but got kicked out for opium smoking, instead of suffering from a terrible case of renal failure, and dying at the tragic age of 26. God bless and keep these angels both, in whatever heaven they doth reign in.

First, the lovely KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of life and justifying dressing up in goofy costumes and risking your pretty (masked) face by sticking it harm's way in the name of a safe America. But if like me you loathe the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count issues with things like the old A-TEAM show, the very real (within the context of the film) damage done to property and limb makes KICK-ASS unusual in its gleefully sociopathy- as in the movie is sociopathic not just the characters! Cool, right? For Crom's sake, Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is hiring cop-killing badasses from the dregs of his father's mob business to kill nemesis Kick-Ass, gussying them up in costumes with badass names and sending them out to gut people, strangle them, pummel and maul and god knows what else. Meanwhile dull cop Morris Chestnut doesn't want his orphaned (since her vigilante father was killed in the first film) little Hit Girl (the still-glorious Chloe Grace Moretz) doing any more hits and she reluctantly agrees to act like a normal girl, which includes getting date-ditched, humiliated and otherwise bored out of her mind. Dude! Normal suburban life is about the worst thing you can inflict on a fifteen year-old, it makes Morris Chestnut's concerned cop the piece's real villain in my mind. So this is a film about realizing that just because you promise something to an adult you don't have to deliver on it if it goes against your grain, just promise them whatever to get them to leave you the hell alone. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kids drawers for drugs seems to be the in thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search the drawers.


 I kept praying Chestnut was one of the cops to be killed during the massive cop slaughter inflicted by 'Mother Russia' - a gigantic female ex-KGB assassin McLovin hires and puts in spandex, figuring with him gone Hit Girl could get out from under his buzzkill sanctimony, and she decimates about six cop cars worth in a few minutes in one of the film's many awesome action scenes. Complain all you want, and some have, even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids, and was shocked at all the beheadings). Another cool aspect is there's another badass female, Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) though a strange rape gag about not being able to get it up is really unsound. What the hell is going on? Is this a comedy or a violent rape-revenge saga? That part I did not care for, nor did I like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your guns! What the fuck!


But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist way or just unconsciously blind to its own brutality, it matters not a whit. I totally dig the cut of Hit Girl's jib and think Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. I think of Hit Girl as an extension of her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much missed 30 ROCK. Here she has a great scene wiping out a speeding van full of goons while hanging on the roof! Girls meanwhile can vibe on the few shots of our new improved hunky title character's abs.


One last complaint- I didn't like the gag in the ads for this last year wherein Kick-Ass and Hit Girl are riding in a car and he says "we're like Batman and Robin" and she says "Robin wishes he were me." - That annoyed me, why is it assumed she's be Robin? He'd be Robin? It was pretty sexist. But THEN the full conversation in the film turns out to be they're really talking about her late dad - the Batman-esque avenger played by Nic Cage in the first film (See my Last Great Dad of the Seventies: Nic Cage in BAD-ASS)!! Which is fine because he was her teacher, and father. In other words, the film isn't sexist, ageist or height-ist, it was the PR people's manipulation! Why are those dim bulb punters so scared of revolution!?


Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant --but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic, and in its weird opposite day nervewracking endurance test way, prophetic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' saga as just another 'two boys fighting over a girl' trip, but that's just the sideline view. Up close this is an envisioning a grim future of 24/7 media coverage where the slightest slip-up, the failure to smile with casual joie de vivre for the cameras or failure to adequately pretend to be in love with some short dude is enough to ensure your family is tortured and your home fire-bombed. It's ingenious, because HUNGER equates the ceaseless flash of paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits endless award shows that is the grueling regimen of our modern starlets (Britney, Lindsay, et al) comparable to the slow torture of a dance marathon (THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY - here) or sexual enslavement in a neoconservative dystopia (HANDMAID'S TALE) or being randomly chosen to kill your classmates on some heavily camera-ready island (BATTLE ROYALE).


Stealing the film from a perennially dour and Oscar-winning Jennifer Lawrence (who's wearing enough make-up for a dozen Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley), Jena Malone scores props as a free-spirit badass. She looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood. Donald Sutherland is once again the evil emperor, one of those odd ducks whose failure to grasp fundamental tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader very unbelievable since he genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. Did he learn nothing from the 20th century? He should mass produce that verboten mockingjay symbol as a keychain, and have his jackass TV host (played by Stanley Tucci) use it when greeting the TV audience (in short, comrade, recuperation) and give the people just enough food and televisions to quell their nothing-left-to-lose anger. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolution, in fact it all but ensures it! And so it is the evil Sutherland's preference for bloodthirsty draconian brutality is off-kilter, as if he's trying to throw us off the scent of the film's own ingenious use of 'the golden trinket' strategy, in this case those 'mockingjay' pendants, which I have no doubt are available for sale next door at Hot Topic as you exit the malltiplex (or online here)

I've generally loathed the glam French Revolution fashions of the series, and the D.W. Griffithianly hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés and the peasants starving and flogged in the outer boroughs--it's all so ORPHANS OF THE STORM!--but there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act in, as the needless cruelty of the Sutherland character finally wises her up to the evil she's part of --and the build-up in hype to the latest battle royale is fascinating both within itself and the more metatextual analysis of the Hunger Games marketing juggernaut (Gross: 400 million and counting!)


 In that sense of course, Woody Harrelson as the drunken older brother type advising our girl how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, is one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens. He eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things than sulking. Secondly, the bizarro twist here is that the usual Jake-Edward dichotomy involves being forced to spend all one's time with the dude you don't like yet must pretend to love, the way, say, an actress does or a closeted gay person. Having been on all sides of that equation, I can assure you the unrequited granite-jawed shortie with the emasculating name of Peeta has the catbird seat, the saintly piner role, which Lacan and Josef Von Sternberg sanctify with their analysis and imagery and the whole idea of needing to fake one's love affair gets a nice echo in the accidental slip of the name of some girl named Alice from Malone's lips - in short this might be the most trenchantly well camouflaged tale of class resentment and closeted gayness since the endurance test season two of AMERICAN HORROR STORY!


(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)


ENDER'S GAME (2013): what I like about this one, first in a series it no doubt hopes, is the care and time spent with getting the glistening eyes of the space bug exactly right and the way Asa Butterfield as Ender is himself is so spooky, a kind of Hannibal Lector-for-good recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts. But unlike the bland 'every lad' in STARFIGHTER or the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP, Ender's not some gung ho drone or awkward doormat. He can defend himself and underneath his nervous ecotmorphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer, but inside that is the old liberal guilt. His nebulous doubt about the rightness of the past battle sung so highly of in future Earth's annals (were the bugs really that big of a threat? who shot first? Haven't we ever tried to communicate with them?) are played up but we never really get the full story or HEARTS AND MINDS effect before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens, in other words, what the military is doing right now! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!

Real life drone pilots at their gaming consoles

Like CATCHING FIRE, ENDER ends with a hopeful cliffhanger. If you want the sequels, then my friend you have to invest in the marketing, get the DVD, see it again on the Imax, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should but... you know -- it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the kid no one else like. I read all the original John Carter Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, that shit was my Twilight, my Hunger Games. I read all of Burroughs'Warlords of Mars series, the Tarzans and even Carson of Venus; Robert E. Howard's Conan; Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser. And the best part about all of them? No fucking kids in any of them, no 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adult, the ones who could kill the oppressors of his conscience without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those kinds of adults in our science ficiton, and more bitches like Hit Girl and Jena Malone's foul-mouthed marauder in Hunger Games 2. We need more heroes ripping their opponents' heads off and blowing up the school rather than showing misplaced mercy like those liberal bleeding hearts Ender, Katniss, and Morris goddamned Chestnut. We must fight the Chestnut's call to safety. Already he's gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing. Stop him before he jabs his safety-first overhead florescent light dagger into the dark heart of myth!

If you have cable, and love cool shit, you must seek out the EL REY network (if you have Time Warner, its channel 797, at least in Brooklyn). The man who gave the world some of my favorite post-modern grindhouse epics - including PLANET TERROR is behind it. The big series being launched is a TV version of FROM DUSK TIL DAWN. I haven't been able to get into it, as it's like a longer slower weirder and quieter version of the film (though having a real, subtler actor in Quentin's part helps), but that's small potatoes compared to the channel's overall vision, particularly the promo stuff, which is smash cut grindhouse images all layered with celluloid stresses, lines, cigarette burns, emulsion scratches, and bright, flashy colors. Meta grindhouse! Between this channel and the Alamo Drafthouse, Texas is officially becoming the last bastion of the drive-in.



One of my pet fantasies is having my own cable channel, wherein I could just show all my favorite stuff, and I love that one man basically has such control over a channel, so we have cherry-picked shit stretching back to the 70s through to now: reruns of STARSKY AND HUTCH, X-FILES, and DARK ANGEL to name a few (he's tight with the hot Latina American goddess Jessica Alba, and fellow indie auteur Cameron, presumably). Not that I'm a fan of all them, but look at the overarching theme - badassitude!


For example, right as I write this he's interviewing Carpenter, showing some of the best of his early stuff (not HALLOWEEN or THE THING interestingly): THE FOG, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA. Damn right. I can hardly wait to see who's next! His choices for Grinhouse Fridays show a definite familiarity with the good stuff vs. the dross: NIGHT OF THE COMET, SHAFT, HEAVY METAL, FROM BEYOND, DAY OF THE DEAD... the kind of cherry picked greatness only one familiar with the genre would know, and one with a keen eye would appreciate. In short, it's a fan's dream. Then there's the kung fu, shown in English but with quality sound effects and dub jobs, which somehow makes it all right, especially as they're all in widescreen, from the Dragon Dynasty versions released by Miramax a few years ago, shit like FIVE ELEMENTS NINJAS and EIGHT-DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER. Again, it's the fan's eye view.

My new hero, the 21st century's JC

What's been so strange is the way the press junkets Rodriguez has been on focus the channel's name and 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' aspect, as if the show's Telemundo or something. It's in goddamned English, and its Mexican-American aspect exists only via Roberto's chosen filmic locations and the multi-racial, Tex-Mex-American slant of el casto. It's way off the mark, this is simply a cool channel, reflecting--which is rare even in our allegedly post-racist age--an accurate depiction of America. With programming that reflects what Rodriguez would put on when his drinking buddies come over for a party weekend. The channel's still pretty young --the advertising is mostly junk like those scrunchy hoses, Flex-Seal, and Rosetta Stone, but I couldn't be more excited for this gonzo channel's future, or devoted to the great Robert Rodriguez for this ambitious move. And I've never been happier to see car commercials, the first sign El Rey rides... to victory!

"The movie appeared at a moment of optimum spiritual chaos in American life. Rosemary’s Baby remains an iconic memory trace of a time when anything seemed possible, including the birth of the Anti-Christ”. -- Gary Indiana, “Bedeviled”, Village Voice

"The creepy nature of the film is not in its special effects, but in its realistic premise. The story takes place in a real apartment building (the Dakota) that has a real reputation of attracting eccentric elements of New York’s high society. The evil coven is not composed of stereotypical, pointy-nose witches but of friendly neighbors, prestigious doctors and distinguished individuals. They are elegant, rational and intelligent and are connected to important people. The realism of the movie forces the viewers to ponder on the existence of such groups, to a point that some feared that the movie, after its release would cause an all-out witch hunt.” (Vigilante Citizen)

Melanie Daniels in the throes of Laudanum 2014 - collage with pre-raphaelite elements by Erich Kuersten

Decadence Lost (Collage-Surrealist-Portrait of Famke Jannsen in GoldenEye watching Eyes Wide Shut post pre-raphaelite exhibition party). - by Erich Kuersten

Melanie Daniels - first layers (ed. XXIV)

It's been a long time on its jungle creep but William Friedkin's much anticipated blu-ray SORCERER (1977) has emerged into the clearing and into the flaming oil fire of our American hypocrisy. Distance, time, and the the totality of Friedkin's stunning attention to vivid, lived-in widescreen detail are now revealed in staggeringly beautiful shots: the monstrous grins of the trucks moving through the mist like Travis Bickels through a Kubrick rainstorm; flooding rivers lifting flimsy bridges up off their moorings; crowded Tel Aviv streets rocking from a bomb and the quick soldier reprisal; an assortment of hard-looking Catholic priests counting money in the backroom of a church during a wedding; a white collar Frenchman ducking out on his wife as a swanky Parisian cafe to avoid prison for embezzlement --each character gets their origin exposition, their reason for escaping to the anonymity and weak extradition practices of some nameless South or Central American one-horse town, and each origin packs enough real  hustle and bustle for a film of their own (such as Friedkin's surreal Egyptology opener in EXORCIST); when they wind up in the surreal and savage beauty of some unnamed Central American jungle one horse town depending on nearby oil pipe for survival, the jungle adventure comprising the bulk of the film, and being the kind of thing Warner Herzog seems to go for in his own work but sometimes errs on the side of decency; he perhaps lqacks the insane drive and egotistic bullying needed to smash the world apart in order to capture its plummy essence, which is why he needed Kinski, or a Cage. Friedkin, however, is his own Kinski. We all know the horror anecdotes of the film's troubled shoot, with Friedkin harassing the locals and crew in the paranoid, foamy-at-the-mouth way of the coke head rich Anglo filmmaker from the 70s, but my friend. It was worth it.

What's most interesting is the contrast between the hostile nature of these male characters and the deeply human story (which I mean as the opposite of Fordian sentimentality - human as in 'true' human, bestial, full of long-standing grudges, fears, greed and guts - and sometimes fear, greed and guts is enough). Taking a page from Peckinpah, these men are dangerous lowdown scoundrels who are, in a sense, the only characters tough enough to handle an almost suicidal task - hauling very unstable explosives through 200 miles of rough dirt roads and jungles in the middle of Bolivia, Ecuador or some such remote rain forest outpost.

There are almost no women in the story - the one who gets actual billing in the cast is Anne Marie-Deschodt as the Frenchman's rich wife. As an ironic commentary to Clouzot's original, an elderly barkeep who never speaks but who earns a soft spot in the mens' hearts, like an unofficial den mother (contrasted by Clouzot's firey temptress played by Clouszot's then-wife Véra). It works because this is a movie that is not about desire, but survival. No time for soft stuff.  It's like THE THING or THE GREY. This is not a movie for flowers and song, it's about struggling through the mud, man. It's about the kind of men who are, as we learn in Hollywood, the nasty necessity of the western world. I like it way better than Clouzot's original because the jungle is realer. Clouzot has no interest in capturing the vivid textures of nature, of wheels and dashboards and the rumbling of trucks full of soldiers sent in to quell a riot.


The Tangerine Dream SORCERER score has been some of my favorite soundtrack for awhile and in the blu-ray mix it pulses and throbs like if John Carpenter and Klaus Schulze got together for the score of THERE WILL BE BLOOD, like the best synth scores of the era it never micro-manages our emotional state, the way, say, John Williams or Howard Shore do with their flourishing orchestras, rather the pulsating amniotic eerie music just sets the chilly, nerve-shredding tone and as such is ahead of its time, at least for Hollywood. Don't forget Carpenter's groundbreaking HALLOWEEN score was a year or so away. As far as great scores in America we only knew Ennio Morricone through the handful of films that wound up on TV or the drive-in. The movie scores we kids talked about on the playground (excluding those of GREASE and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER) were strictly micro-managerial and orchestral - Nino Rota's melancholic GODFATHER, and above all the pompous thunder majesty of John Williams' scores for JAWS (sure he has the famous shark approach music but he also sticks in pirate jauntiness that deflates all the suspense when the Orca sets out to sea) and STAR WARS (much of it ripped from Holst the way JAWS was ripped from Stravinsky). Tangerine Dream's SORCERER score by contrast never tells us what to feel, it just gives us a way to feel it, a way to mystically transfer this rainy wet misery we see onscreen into an atmospheric alien buzz.

I remember this film when it came out in 1977, being intrigued by the title of this film when it came out around the same time as STAR WARS, thinking it might involve wizards and armies of the dead and so forth - and instead, what, trucks? Good lord, that's false advertising! But now that ignition is thrown in reverse. Victory is thine, you crazy coked-up sonofabitch! So drive!

Two new horror series are worth checking out, presuming you have the patience, the cajones, and the channels on your cable. The Robert Rodriguez-backed new cable channle El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) launched a month or so ago with the From Dusk Til Dawn series, a 10 episode-long retelling/elaboration of the RR-QT 1999 film, adding the full measure of hallucinations and replacing Tarantino in the part of psycho brother Richie Gecko with a much more mesmerizing lad named Zane Holz. As Richie's brother and fellow bank robber Seth, D.J. Cotrana diffuses Clooney's terminal charm with hothead overreactions, so now the two feel like real brothers who actually grew up together, rather than the charismatically mismatched Quentin and Clooney. And the queen Mayan reptilian hottie Santanica Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star and staggering beauty Eiza Gonzalez (above, below). And there's Robert Patrick as the disillusioned preacher, and Don Johnson in the Michael Parks part, and a cast of handsome well-spoken Mexican-Americans with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity. The ten part series all occurs over the course of one 24-hour period, from dusk to dawn more or less, which slows things way down with that old tick-tockality and a novelistic attention to detail.

Eiza on the street!

It all works because it's not that the performances are all that great, but that they are all of a piece, as is so essential for a good horror to work (i.e. John Carpenter's best), they play it deadpan straight while never overdoing it and driving the ordeals into bummer territory. I mention all that because in Showtime's new horror series, Penny Dreadful that level of solid team player dynamics vanishes to be replaced with a bunch of breathing exercise-prepared actors all fighting over every syllable like it's their last chance at an Emmy, only dimly aware there's other actors across the dark expanses.


I'll confess I desperately wanted to like Penny Dreadful, being a huge fan of American Horror Story, this is certainly the British version (and a chronic disciple of Eva Green, especially in Dark Shadows), but the show simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough. Cramming in all the famous literary characters from the Victorian era's (and earlier) literary mythology it never seems to know what to do with them, other then send them walking in ornate garments through gloomy cavernous sets, or into bed for joylessly graphic sex scenes. One missed opp I'm hoping they rectify is the absence of any characters or monsters actually from the real penny dreadfuls, as seen above in my hand-made collage. Instead of the same old Dracula (here a Drac-mummy hybrid) or Jack the Ripper (and no doubt Burke and Hare also soon to shamble forth), or Frankenstein, where's Spring-Heeled Jack? Varney the Vampire? Just because Dorian Gray's an immortal bunburying Sadean doesn't make him a monster, just an aesthete.


Meanwhile the murky dim brown Victorian London craftsmaship chokes the life out of things and the writers are so busy paraphrasing the eloquent flights of 19th century authors, that the British thesps run unsupervised over actorly monologues until every syllable sings with overly spellbinding oratory. In other words, it's very gay, in its way, especially with Frankenstein and his moist-eyed perfect specimen, though not in a giddy, delightful Tim Curry or Udo Kier way, more a Sal from Mad Men kind of way. And the handful of character must play many parts: Eva Green is a vampire hunter who is also a trance medium, easily possessed by demons and departed angry daughters; Timothy Dalton is the Qatermain / Dr. Ven Helsing / Seward who just wants his daughter back, Mina, who's already gone to vamp in presumably Dracula arms; Josh Harntett is an alcoholic Wild Bill Hicock who may also be Jack the Ripper; Harry Treadaway seems born to be a hunky, smoldering but on fire brilliant young Frankenstein, but is also probably going to be Jekyll and Hyde later on, his monster doubles as the Phantom of the Opera (with a dash of The Crow); the vampires also seem to be mummies with a second skin layered in hieroglyphics.I have no doubt Drac will turn out to be another hunky British monologuist impeccably attired in elegantly distressed Victorian fashion who says things like "the burden of eternal life wears me down like a slow watch, like the opium I taste in the bodies Renfield [who is also Sweeney Todd, probably] brings me, their withered bodies holding narcotic blood enough to make eternity crawl slower still."


Second Episode gets more down to a set of reversals and twists and seems less about getting its lighting as painterly and haunted - the purplish blue mist of London coal fog in gorgeous compositions of ships in harbor and snug waterfronts is impressive, but the centerpiece Eva Green possession monologue, while a brilliant showcase for a brilliant, nervy performer (Green's voice sails up and down octaves while her body writhes and contorts and eyes glare with unholy fire) goes on for like twenty minutes, long past our patience or its own effectiveness, until one forgets even where they are or what's going oon. AMERICAN HORROR STORY might pick up and abandon story threads like an impatient schoolkid with a box full of monster toys, but it understands momentum as key, and transgression as a locomotive, and above all it doesn't take itself a tenth as seriously.


There are signs this show will get better though: The second episode introduces a second female character (Billie Piper), a kind of de facto heroine streetwalker in that she's coughing up blood like a Poe heroine but doesn't complain and not only that, has large measures of bar whiskey for breakfast with Josh Hartnett, who lounges with ease in the saloon window like he's Eugene Goddamned O'Neill waiting for Hickey. Her contagious illness doesn't stop either him or Dorian from graphic fornication with her either. I don't blame them --she's the only actor or character in the whole darned city of London who seems at all three dimensional.


These kind of character-based critiques don't concern FROM DUSK TIL DAWN, though as Santinico, Eiza Gonzalez is no Eva Green she's got a certain cold allure, even naked but for a golden bronze tan, brown bikini and Aztec shaman blood queen headdress she's always holding her own, in charge, using her body to seduce and ensnare men, to believably conjure ancient Mayan deities, to pit brothers against each other, and she's no ham. Even big tearful farewells or life and death anxieties are nicely underplayed in the American Carpenter-Hawks tradition, rather than being underplayed in the British style of PENNY (which is more like overplaying at a whisper). I wish to god PENNY's writers were up to the challenge, rather than confusing graphic sex and death with what being truly dreadful entails

Sticking it to the Walt Disney Military Intelligence Complex by inverting its 'Lächelnd macht frei' ethos, newbie writer-director Randy Moore's black and white chronicle of the last day and night of a family at Disney World, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW, is the first sign the the apocalypse will involve enforced smiling and slowly nodding animatronic vampires from around the world. Beautiful to look at in 16mm handheld on-ride stolen shots, Moore's camera delivers surprisingly little whiplash jerky motion sickness and his script offers comedic cognizance, great AMERICAN BEAUTY / LOLITA obsessive midlife crisis-ing, David Lynch post-modern artifice-surrealism, and Guy Maddin black and white fuzzy basement expressionism in abundance as dad's (and eventually mom's as well) perceptions of reality, fantasy, and papier-mâché facsimile dissolve into one throbbing archetypal hydra.

As the dad, Roy Abramsohn is a perfect blend of guarded and agape; thrown for a loop by an early morning phone call (wherein he's fired) taken out on the hotel balcony to not wake the family, sets him off, especially once his little boy locks him out of the room where his family is snuggled up asleep together. Their day at Disney finds the dad haunted by a pair of nubile but clearly underage French girls (Annet Mahendru, Danielle Safady) who giggle amidst themselves, make flirty eye contact with his children, and express vibrancy in that perfectly self-contained way that heralds any sex-starved 40-something father breakdown, leaving him powerless to resist ogling like a school boy bewildered by his first hormone surge. And why shouldn't it? The mom  (Elena Schuber) won't even accept the most rudimentary physical affection from him, for no reason she can really explain, other than perhaps sensing he's overcompensating, emasculated by his being fired.


Equating the eye of older men being drawn to younger women as analogous not to cougars but to older women being drawn to other people's very young children this is after all a reflection of the differing drives (one protective/nesting the other seed-sowing) yet one is considered holy and the other vile, and a reprisal against the other; so which came first, the vilifying of the man's attraction to younger women or his wife's treating him like a rotten kid rather than 'the father'? Shut out of the closed circuit of a child-mother pair bond and unable to raise so much as his voice against them, the man is sabotaged by negative portrayals in the media in his role as ultimate signifier. Instead, the father is himself put into the Oedipal exile originally reserved for his son, emasculated by the mother-son rejection and so both weakened and freed from the responsibility of his own actions. Why wouldn't he be drawn to a woman still young enough to think he's not a child, who is equally cast out of the closed circuit mother-son pair bond? The older man grants the younger woman a rare chance to try out her seductive powers on a 'safe' target (a wedding ring signifies both a dare and a freebie) and to feel like she's correcting the Elektra-exile she has herself suffered since she came of age to compete with the mom for status as the hottest bitch on the block (think Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Rather than recognizing her role as its instigator, the mother sees their shared secrets as a priori justification for her coldness.


This post-70s change in husbandry occurred via Hollywood in films like THE EXORCIST and E.T. with dads not even present for the trials suffered by mother and children.  Family men were and are depicted as either wimpy-voiced second class females or else gangsters, thugs, rapists, molesters, Satanists, sell-outs, pimps or psycho loners, OR simply not around at all (they only return --with their unique sets of skills--when their daughter's been abducted or killed by a man who IS around, thus negating the father function except en absentia); older daughters are Lolitas, jailbait, white trash short shorts eye candy straining at the confines of the shirt, ungrateful harlots out to tempt weak-willed husbands 'just because they can' or sexophobic virgins able to forge a sex-free friendship only with some similarly disabused and immanently dead older male, such as a sad-eyed cop, lawyer or mining engineer. Even then, the moms glower, as if the only role their man should have is as a devoted spectator to their perfect bond with their young son (ala Jennifer Connelly in LITTLE CHILDREN). Raising children on their own, these moms are elevated to saints with no time for smiles or joy, working two jobs to put food on the table and swatting away questions about why dad left with tearful displays of eternal devotion all but ensures the son never grows up, leaving the post-pubescent babysitters and any remaining fathers to drive back to her house alone together, with mom's curses and suspicions by way of adieu.C'est fou, eh, Pierrot?


But that presumes a certain midlife crisis-level case of bad judgment, the sort only spousal scorn/frigidity and no place or time to masturbate can bring. With that bad judgment comes an inability to correctly read a scene - to never know if the son has black alien eyes or if those teenage French chicks really like you or are just into your kids and by you creeped out. From there it's a short skip and a jump into the abyss of delusional paranoid schizophrenia AKA Imaginationland! Does Disney World's all-consuming devotion to fantasy encourage this escape, or actually enforce it?


Some critics complain that we never quite learn what the hell is really going on in ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW. By now you should know I am not one of them.  I applaud any movie that dares blur the line between daydream, fantasy, hallucination, nightmare, and paranoid reality. Once some parameter is set up as to what's a dream or fantasy I lose interest, which is why I'm no fan of BILLY LIAR, for example.

Ambiguity might or might not rule!


Along his embryonic journey, ESCAPE's dad gets into a fight with his bitch wife runs into a sexy nurse whose tears and veiled worry about some contagious disease rocking the park make her seem both starved for attention and desperate to seem 'open' to seduction even as she's unable to warn him about some plague being ushered into the populace (as soon as she's waved them out of sight with she breaks down - it's okay since no one is watching. Dad also runs into a spooky Maleficient-style witch (Alison Lees-Taylor - the sexiest craziest witch since Deborah Reed in TROLL 2!) who hypnotizes dad with a sparkling jewel, luring him into a midday tryst at the Presidential suite while his daughter sleeps in the other room and the witch's son watches TV. The witch's post-orgasm sad eyes reflect sad desperation. She tells him that rich Japanese businessmen pay thousands of dollars to sleep with the Disney princesses - she knows as she was one of them, and that not being able to register a single negative emotion all day at work gradually drives every Disney employee insane.



If this all plays a bit like EYES WIDE SHUT, well, old Walt was a 33.3 degree Mason and the enforced smiling signifies tier two Monarch programming.  Is the witch who hypnotizes him on the bench some kind of manipulator of his consciousness? Sent on by the forces of darkness upon sensing his vulnerability?You'd think getting his rocks off would lessen his frustrated weirdness, but even when the boyfriends, replete with obnoxious long curly hair, of the girls he can't get them out of his mind, or the camera's vision. From there, it just gets weirder, approaching flume chutes down which only the brave Cinemascope funeral snakes such as David Lynch or Bunuel dare plunge. When you can no longer tell what's real or illusion, you are finally free, finally getting your all-day pass's money's worth. Monsterdom begins at home and if you look farther than the mirror to find your mortal enemy, you never really had one to begin with.
Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all do a bit to cement the equation of madness with Disney's subversive use of archetypal psychology, enabling the idea that in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but I'm guessing it's like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, ending up given a handful of Thorazine by the Duff technician and declaring "I am the Lizard Queen." And little moments like the pre-fireworks pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards them and away at the same time until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable and Clift rodeo lassos. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this limbo? The mom's constant belittling of him only fuels the fire. Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive witch costumes, make-believe, costumed freaks, and animatronics? Considering all the photos being taken in the park it's hardly surprising that a guerilla film could be pulled off but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights, though here they've left the film alone, suspecting the producers were hoping for the publicity a lawsuit might bring) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, and aside from a few missteps, such as a scatalogically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped) it's pretty tight with the ambiguity. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen of park footage ring with an absurdist post-modern unease.


If ESCAPE ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts I for one shall not complain. I've always felt the French are far more clued-in about how to balance work and play (I loved getting the whole month of August off because my boss was French, but that's also what almost killed me.) If you go to the beach for a month you never feel the clock ticking on your space for enjoyment. You never feel the need to not waste time, to have 'more fun' than you are having now (the family rapt before some display of fireworks or whales, and mom or neutered father going "isn't that wonderful, Caitlin?!' or "isn't this fun, Caitlin?!" unable to shut off her motormouth thought babble even before a spectacle that overwhelms any rational need to comment). Instead of this (socialist) cognizance about the inability to have fun under a time clock, America surrenders to the idea of the one week vacation, the trip to Disney World as being some sacred vacation ideal, to aspire to and hold holy as you slog away the molasses hours at work waiting for that one week off in June, saving money and deferring all joy in life for this one expensive dream week, until it buckles under the pressure.

But old Walt is too canny to not understand this basic problem, hence the all-inclusive package stay, which makes the unlimited access to all rides and accommodations a liberating freedom from any imperative to enjoy, though some moms stick it in anyway (like the one in ESCAPE). Here's an example: My dad traveled all the time for work so hated going on vacation with us. He needed a break, so my mom took my brother and I by herself to Bermuda one year and then Disney World (and Epcot shortly after it opened) the next.  Going to Bermuda without him ruined my ability to enjoy anything, as I felt I had to step in, even at 13 years-old, and be the man of the family which meant worrying about how much everything cost (I wouldn't go snorkeling since it was $23 an hour per person, so my mom and brother went and I sulked in the room) but at Disney my older brother status didn't compel me to take on responsibility. We had already paid so it was about getting as much as you could out of it.


I mention all this to draw the conclusion that fathers are superfluous at Disney World. Their dreams are never meant to come true, because their dreams involve being single, childless, and young. And since they can't go back in time they become boys to try and fit in, to discover what they really want out of a fantasy, to charge into it, get drunk, dance around, buy a motorcycle or a fez, and let themselves be seduced by other, younger, less bitchy women. But beware giving up your adult father power, Papa. The American Mom may not let you switch back. You may become just the oldest child, perpetually 'in trouble' with a wife who more and more surrenders to an inner animus-domination that has her convinced she's the sole voice of authority in the family. As a child chasing the freewheeling ideals of France and nubile French girls you may stay, while she glowers and nags and acts the buzzkill until your own kids are grown, the thrill is gone, the bloom is off the rose, the new flesh mouse ears grown so deep into your brain as to be irremovable. And when you finally look for the treasure map that leads to your buried balls you find it's been torn, frayed, and scattered Osiris-like to the far corners of the REKALL amusement park. Lucky for you then, there's a facsimile souvenir offering proof you ever had some, and photos galore.

He was around from before I was born and will probably will survive the next Ice Age. All of my life he has been there in times of crisis and conquest. He has many births and a few fake deaths, yet no actor who has played him has yet to die, unless you count David Niven, and I don't. And he has the same first name as my late dad. My dad, like most dads, loved him, at least in Sean Connery form. My dads name was James, too. I've thought of my father when watching Bond, Connery's Bond anyway, since the dawn of time. I feel close to him now, through Connery especially, and so I dedicate this Father's Day Bond post to his memory. RIP, James.


Connery or no, Bond films have endured, following a handful of similar but deceptively elaborate plots that seem to bleed across each other making each particular film hard to remember, allowing for rewarding repeat viewing as we change from children to men our perceptions of the movies change, too, and new fissures of interest a sussed out. As kids the car chases are ripping, the girls hot; as adults the atomic bomb hijacking minutiae and intrigue is fascinating in ways that used to be boring. In THUNDERBALL (1965) for example it takes about five minutes of real cinematic time to throw a camouflage net over a sunken NATO bomber. Now that I'm an adult lost in a world of whiplash editing I dig that it takes its time and the advent of anamorphic makes the full picture easy to follow and get lost in as a bloody aquarium. Now I'm glad I know the whole process of how to camouflage a stolen RAF bomber. On pan and scan it was impossible to see who was wearing what color wetsuit, and the pan and scan muddying the water and cutting the action into blocks of meaningless bubbles and cut hoses.


The core of what makes Bond great is that we don't envy his living the good life because we know what it entails. He needs to know the good life because his senses are always on high alert so the good food, drink, and women are mandatory. Imagine if your taste buds were so heightened you couldn't even drink champagne unless it was perfectly chilled and just the right vintage and now it becomes clear. Bond risks his neck so we can stay asleep and dreaming at the movies. He gets to live large because each breath might be his last so why on earth would he save his money or worry about protocol? No kids, no future, no contingency plans. And his quarry are always super rich so he has to seem like something other than a peasant, it's for England, James!

If we don't have his luck, or way with the ladies, or cat-like reflexes, or perfect hair, we don't begrudge the man whose fearlessness and competence are tested daily. Where we would run away from danger he charges in deliberately, swimming up the river of fear on our behalf. It makes our middle class status easier to bear to think this, even if we know deep down it's not true. We'd just rather be alive and out of immediate danger. We can always watch the movies if we need to feel proxy danger, or luxury.


As not seen since later LICENSE TO KILL there's a very kinky edge to THUNDERBALL, with Largo beating the naked heaving backside of Domino (Claudine Auger) - I remember swooning over all that as a little masochistic freakazoid seven year-old. To me, that was Bond in the 70s, for the Moore Bonds weren't on TV yet.  In the 80s, when sexual harassment was becoming a thing, we rented them all from the newly opened video stores at the mall (or from the back room of appliance stores) and saw them over and over, as reminders of the power we were once going to inherit as men. Gradually we learned to appreciate Connery over Moore. The TV game show handsomeness and self-reflexive winking of Moore was reassuring but he lacked the muscularity of Connery, and even Dalton and Lazenby, who all looked like they could handle themselves in a fight. More and more the films relied on fancy gadgets. His punches looked like they would hurt nothing but his own knuckles. My best buddy Alan and I saw them all (MOONRAKER the first one I actually saw in the theater) and when FOR YOUR EYES ONLY came to cable, we must have seen it 500 times. I can still quote it, still think in its rhythms.


In the 90s,  my whole relationship to Bond changed when our friend Jen (not her real name) brought a rented copy of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE over to our loft one foreboding Friday night in 1997. I was so hungover from the night before it carried through the day and into the night - a blackout of shame and regret and paranoia and terror of the idea of going out again, into the night and the swankiness of another expensive bar (we were a hard-partying, very fancy bunch) was too much to bear. Once I saw the video rental bag in her hands, I knew it would all be OK. I absorbed the film fully, enraptured in ways I never would have been without Cassandra. It was a special event, one we tried to duplicate again and again after, but it never worked, not unlike the ecstasy we were so fond of.  Brosnan came in (with GOLDENEYE) a perfect choice for the Metrosexual Age.

And so Bond became something to drink to, and who could make hangovers or sobriety disappear in equal measure. This was the era of the TNT Bond marathons, so important in staving off looming male impotence they were even cited by Kevin Spacey in AMERICAN BEAUTY. By then Roger Moore, our favorite Bond as kids, was far too old and safe to not be creepy when he gets it on with a girl young enough to be his daughter, or granddaughter. He didn't smoke and seldom even drank. What kind of Bond was that? And we developed a taste for Lazenby, considering him the last good Bond. Pierce Brosnan had taken over after a two film stint by Timothy Dalton, who at the time had some big shoes to fill and people weren't prepared for a Bond who could act, or had the physicality and grace to appear like he could actually do the stuff Bond did. We had to adjust.


By then the issue of sexism was too pronounced to ignore, so they cast Judi Dench as M, and made post-modern wisecracks about his dinosaur patriarchal cluelessness. But dismissing Bond movies as sexist is a bit like dismissing MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE as alarmist. The truth is that being a spy has always been about sex (NOTORIOUS, for example), about being a whore for your country, a master of using sex to convince vulnerable people to confide secrets, then leaving them to be killed while you pursue your quarry. And the survivor of the game is the one, male or female, who can keep their wits about them even while naked and astride some heart-melting hottie. So unless a man is super confident, irresistible to women, inordinately lucky, able to keep one hand on his trigger as well as hers even unto the point of orgasm, as well as a great shot and dogged in determination to chase down his man, even at the risk of massive destruction (all those trashed and probably uninsured third world villages), he doesn't stand a chance.

Save the jokes, Mr. Bond

People make satires of Bond but forget one thing - just because you have spies, babes, and gadgets doesn't make us care - that kind of thing gets old quick when its just in service of itself (ala the first CASINO ROYALE, the Matt Helm series, or the Flint series). For best results it must be played dead straight, with nuclear threats.



One thing I've been studying of late is the importance of tick-tockality or Hawksian/Carpenterian cohesive momentum, which is to say a minimum of time lapse edits and cross cutting to other players, a sense of immanent danger where time elapses normally and we stay with the same character rather than bouncing around all over a plot. The worst culprit of the latter in all Bond is probably GOLDENEYE, which is almost as much some Russian programmer's movie as we see her by herself almost as much as we see Bond. The best example of this Hawksian momentum is the first half of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, which never really leaves Bond's side and unfolds almost in real time from the moment he lands in Tokyo, moves up through a few contacts and code words, and eventually gets to Tanaka, the Japanese chief of the secret police who lets Bond know that his assistant in the mission will be a girl posing as his wife who "looks like a pig." He also notes that "in Japan, Mr. Bond-san, men come first, women second." It's probably the most sexist moment in Bond's entire career, and though his posing as a Japense fisherman is racist as hell, it's not really a disservice as the Japanese even peasants are revealed as highly erudite. Other great stretches of tick-tock momentum - almost the entirety of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY and THUNDERBALL.

DR. NO
1962 - ****
Everything is new and fresh. There's no vocal to the opening theme song and Bond actually acts in a cumulative manner. Connery is super cool until around 3/4 of the way through when the stress of not knowing whom to trust and having so many attempts made on his life have left him stressed and jumpy. His only gadget is a new hand gun and he shoots and kills a man point blank who has an empty pistol, and nearly breaks a girl's arm for taking his picture. That's what I miss most, that Bond's kind of a cad.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
1963 - ****
These first four were filmed a year apart, capturing a very successful momentum marked by an adherence to tick-tockality of an almost Hawksian level and low stakes games (missile toppling, codex triple crosses, gold irradiation) that are more believable and therefore more engaging. Nothing like a sanely motivated super villain to feel, as the saying goes, possible, Mr. Bond,?
GOLDFINGER
1964 - ***
This movie used to annoy me because everyone talked about how it was the best Bond but I thought it was the most illogical. Goldfinger kills a mobster who wants to back out of the deal by crushing him up in a big Lincoln, along with a fortune in gold. Odd Job brings the crushed block back to the horse ranch and then needs to 'extract' his gold. Dude, talk about a waste of time and effort all just to show a car getting crushed into a block.  Just shoot him! My dad loved that scene and talked about the 'great piece of music, horns blaring, I didn't think so, and thought Bond (even though I too was drinking mint juleps) a real snob in this, lecturing heads of MI6 on an the "indifferently blended" whiskey they serve him.
THUNDERBALL
1965 - ***1/2 (see above)
Even with the new anamorphic letting us appreciate the underwater stuff, it still stops the picture dead more than once, as does the dumb shit like the spine stretcher and jet pack. Nonetheless, still strong.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
1967 - ****
Second to DR. NO and the first film as far as tick-tockality -especially the entire first half which seems to unfold almost in real time, ramping up suspense in knowing who to trust and mixing up being on the look-out for enemy spies with spies of one's own side.

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE
1969 ****
The idea to make George Lazenby's first appearance 'the one where he gets married' is a bit of a misstep. It makes him seem weak. But the whole downward chase from skis to one ski to cars, and ice rinks, is all so well done it achieves greatness. 


DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
1971 - ***
The song is over quick. The intro finds Bond tracking Blofeldt clones played by Charles RIDE WITH THE DEVIL Gray; Connery's back and looks great, rested, but the 70s has begun. Bond gets slugged from behind with the regularity of old Jim Rockford.

The two gay assassins are kind of, what is the word, antiquated in their villainous mincing? Jill St. John is a very sexy evil agent who after first seeing her on TV (one of the first movies my brother and I ever taped on our dad's new VHS) gave me a lifelong love of chokers above plunging necklines. The same Plenty O'Toole, a cooler for the casino owned by Willard White. There's a great car chase around Las Vegas, with some great stunt driving and real Vegas streets in this pre-CGI best of all possible worlds, great classic Bond music and once again Connery is in peak fighting condition and there's a certain Rat Pack swagger to the film, with good use of tick-tockality and Bond actually uses teamwork with the CIA. Still, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts, and John's voice grates.

LIVE AND LET DIE
1973 - **1/2
One of the weakest climaxes ever, just voodoo, pirhanas, and Yaphet Koto inflating like a balloon, though before then there's a great boat chase my brother and I used to watch endlessly (the second thing we ever taped), and we still talk like the southern sheriff ("what are you some kinda doomsday machine, boy?")

MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
1974 - * I've never really given this a full chance, too boring - I mean this rich killer constructs an elaborate funhouse just to chase Bond through so he can use a golden gun? A little effort, people! Christopher Lee is the only redeeming feature. Plays like a long episode of FANTASY ISLAND where some old tourist wants to play spy, rather than a real Bond movie.



SPY WHO LOVED ME
1977 - ***1/2
The producers realized they should take their time rather than deliver glorified TV movies, and the result is easily the best of the Moore Bonds. And as such (me being just eleven years old at the time, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME was a thorn in my side, as I wasn't allowed to see it by my parents, they all went on dates with their wives or others to see it and then came back and told the kids all about that underwater car and Jaws and how great it was, but we were too young to see it. It was the adult's STAR WARS. And hearing over and over about his great fall, I imagined Jaws with a monocle and a Prussian hat and black gloves (a bit like the one-armed prefect of police in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN). I was disappointed he just looked like a big dumb German farmer. I like too that it remembers Bond is a naval commander, as its a very naval adventure.

MOONRAKER
1979 -  *1/2
Bond seems very old and tired in this gadgetry-mad edition. This man should be home watering his garden not being spun around in a G-force simulator or punching giants. It's even sad when he seduces willing ladies, almost like they're all expensive call girls hired by a lonely rich old man who likes to pretend he's a spy, following little clues his butler sets up around the mansion, but doesn't drink or smoke so it never quite comes off as cool. In DR. NO Bond has a bartender come up to his hotel to mix him a martini while he dresses! The drink poured, man exits. Cool is born. I mean, who thinks like that? Whoever did is long gone, alas. MOONRAKER has good tick-tockality and expensive architecture but is rather TV show in its lighting and blocking.


 SPY WHO LOVED ME had been such a huge hit, so popular, the underwater sports car thing so cool no one could stop fantasizing about owning one, and fitting perfectly into the era of JAWS and STAR WARS but with some real moxy to it. So the follow-up brings back Richard Kiehl as Jaws, and ups the STAR WARS ante while keeping more or less the same plot, just moving things to space instead of the ocean. It's like a victory lap. The filmakers and Moore are coasting, mugging and presuming our laughter in all the right places. With his weird head and beard Drax is a dreadfully dull villain and any savvy spy should figure out what this guy is up to. The girls are all in that later 70s mode, wearing dowdy old peasant blouses, the old hippie fad that had finally crawled up to the Bond girl level but which hasn't aged well, especially with all the blouse buttons up to the neck like they're Victorian Puritans. And there a lot of them. Is this how it is when you are super rich? Is this where all the hot girls are? Or were? Waiting around for old rich dudes to just start making out with them after nary a hello? Dumb sight gags abound and repeat: an old, coughing man sees a floating coffin and throws his cigarette away, the gondola becomes a hovercraft and blazes through the square like a ridiculous peacock, a man at a cafe gazes ruefully at his wine bottle; the password to get into the secret lab is the notes from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. On and on it goes.

Thank god the 70s were almost over, and with it,all the variety show schtick that resurged from its watery Buster Keaton grave with LAUGH-IN would now descend once more. With cable there was no longer a need to appeal to a wide demographic that included the elderly, children, and everyone in between, as it is here, the sort of movie where we get a tour through a priceless antique glass exhibit and know eventually there's going to be a stick fight that trashes the place like goddamn Blake Edwards comedy. Some really inept assassins here. Jaws is like Wiley Coyote in a better mood. Bond doesn't even have a gun and only uses his dart watch to disarm those who do. Were they passing out Valium on set? Everyone seems zonked, except Richard Kiehl of course, who mugs for the cheap seats and survives everything like Wiley Coyote but has a whole range of exploding cigar-blackened emotions. Still there's one great moment: a slow Carnivale clown stalk that in its weird shambling silence recalls the previous year's HALLOWEEN and he later even gets a girlfriend! A big space station is literally half Death Star half the Jupiter Mission from 2001.


FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
1981 - ***1/2
Return to basics! Smart move, Mr. Bond. A very welcome resurfacing of one of the lost Bond archetypes, the ultimately good-natured rogue with criminal connections who helps Bond against a bigger threat, here played with robustness by Topal.
OCTOPUSSY 
1983 - *
Louis Jordan looks way too old and tired to be a convincing villain - he seems like he just wants a nap, not world domination. All the lessons of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY are forgotten. Maude Adams was hot in Playboy but dull as dishwater as the titular circus spymaster. Half the film is wandering around some Turkish harem, the other half tedious, hard-to-care about nonsense on a circus train with a cache of pilfered Russian baubles.
A VIEW TO A KILL
1985  - **
Long considered the worst Bond, I'd argue it's only the third worst - mainly since Christopher Walken is great as the bad guy, and aquamarine-eyed Tanya Roberts is in it, over whom I have always been delirious (I was of the right impressionable age when she had a Playboy cover spread with photos from BEASTMASTER in 1982, I kept that issue for years!)

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS
1987 ***1/2
LICENSE TO KILL
1989 - ***
Timothy Dalton's Bond has been underrated but its time has come. DAYLIGHTS especially is a stripped down Bond, with real and strange escapes and KILL makes hilarious use of Wayne Newton as a New Age preacher using yoga as a kind of mind control for hottie chicks (like the Ark girls in MOONRAKER).



GOLDENEYE
1995 - ***1/2
After a lengthy six year absence, a new Bond for a new decade. Famke Janssen makes her mark though her dumb name 'Onnatop' demeans an otherwise furious and crazy (and aptly named) Russian assassin who gets off on machine gunning people, and crushing spines betwixt her legs. Pierce Brosnan makes his debut and he's devastatingly handsome, with mussed dark black hair that he inherited from his predecessor Dalton. We see the first 'hacker' in Bondland, after being used to Russians or SPECTRE agents at big NASA style missile toppling or highjacking controls. Now we've got lollipop sucking nerds as legitimate threats to national security - Alan Cummings no less - and use of EMPs - ElectroMagneticPulse, and Joe Don Baker is a believable CIA agent for a change, bringing grumpy crime drama resonance to where it belongs. Not a lot of forward tick-tockality though, more plot in other places - KGB undermining by the villainous general and his aide in high places, the girl wandering around a slaughtered space defence station. Has some actually witty lines ("That's close enough" Bond says after Onnatop jumps up and starts climbing on him - subtle... for a change, almost Groucho Marxian!) I dig that the bad guys are colorfully diverse, allowed to be human and witty rather than merely asleep, i.e. Drax.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES 
1997 **1/2
This used to be one of my favorites, saw it in the theater with one of my aforementioned Faxy friends whilst getting sober, and when you're getting sober you really feel all the fights deep in your gut. But now I have misgivings. Jonathan Pryce--great in BRAZIL--is a colossal bore as a prissy coded gay stereotype media mogul ala Rupert Murdoch crafting a war with China for the nefarious purpose of filling a 24 hour news channel (which is why the paranoid amongst us know CNN cover the missing Beijing airliner so much because it was expensive to arrange). Pretty clever, but Pryce's way-too-pleased with himself delivery as he says awful things like "what kind of havoc shall we create with the world today?" and "I'm having fun with my headlines" is unbearable. At least he says, "Thank you," to his aides, while Dench's M deliver messy puns like "you always were cunning linguist, James," as if Moneypenny on her own wasn't bad enough (and Q so old and rheumy he should have retired 20 years ago), the puns are everywhere as is the clunky expository dialogue. For one thing, there's almost no female hotness: TV's Lois and Clark star Terri Hatcher is the first babe--the one who always dies early--as the way-too-fussed-over rich bitch lavender wife of Jonathan Pryce's hissy media mogul villain. She's sexy if you think Modern Bride is sexy, where all the beautiful hair is hidden behind gossamer white veils or pulled back into sharp buns, or in her case cut to shoulder length in a moussed-up tussle. Michelle Yeoh makes up for the damage in her English language debut (though we fans knew her already from SUPERCOP 2) as the second babe, but she's a lithe dancer-action star, not a buxom love machine; when she rubs noses with Pierce Brosnan, there's no question who spent the longest time in hair and makeup.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH -
1999 ***
My problem with Brosnan in this one mainly is the hair, and the Panama suits, it being the 90s only excuses so much. I saw this opening weekend with my very first AA sponsor when I was counting days. I loved it! But if, after battling it out with thugs on a speeding train, your hair is still perfectly moussed, then I would suggest you avoid work that requires such regular proximity to open flames, Mr. Bond.

But this is also the one with Sophie Marceau as the deliciously evil villainess. Award two stars and an extra for her stylist, who is without peer. Playing a Turkish-Serbo-whatever national oil baroness, Marceau ably melds styles from the west, east, north, south, and middle into a fabulous modernist wardrobe, my favorite since Jane Birkin's in SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE! And I don't care, Denise Richards IS a believable atomic scientist. Who other than someone so very hot could understand fusion?

 DIE ANOTHER DAY
2002 - ***
 Halle Berry tends to be fierce only in dramas, she's a mousy Storm and way too actorly to be a good Catwoman or Bond girl. Too much acting only gets in the way. But there's a good plot about genetic alterations that turn a North Korean army brat into a posh Brit using conflict diamonds and reflected sunlight in a bid to invade South Korea. There's a nice visit to the Ice Hotel, and a sword fight that tracks all around a posh British fencing club, such a nicely emblematic mix of class and destruction that not even Madonna's leaden presence, or the cliche'd use of the Clash's "London Calling" can detract from. And Miranda Frost looks great in fencing gear!

CASINO ROYALE
2006 - ****
I was blown away at first but this Bond--Craig is easily the best Bond and most believable killer since Connery, with those haunted sunken eyes and scowl, but as an 'origin' story it becomes harder to enjoy as years pass, the way it pains me to watch young teenagers make the same mistakes over and over (I can't save him myself). At least we learn why he would never trust a dame from now on (Eva Green redefines sultry as British treasury agent Vesper Lynde). "Does everyone have a tell." - Everyone has a tell - everyone except you, which is why you suck at poker, Erich, unless you're freshly dumped. This also has a bit of ball torture which delivers 50 years later or whenever on the threat of Goldfinger's space age gem-cutting laser and makes us fear for his future erections (did it leave him sterile which is why he never worries about protection?) Never trust a girl who doesn't have a tell.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE
2008 - **
This might have been a good Bond movie once, but some insecure editor whittled it down, shortening nearly every shot and cross-cutting like some coked-up Eisenstein between bullfights, races, post-modern operas, and Bond chasing around the bad guys. There's also some vile sexual assault undercurrents and political disillusionment very out of place for a Bond film (i.e. the CIA are run by bad guys here,  in bed with SPECTRE or Quantum here, in ways that even the Russians in the 60s Bonds wouldn't stoop to). Disillusionment with the system and our hatred for sexual violence is why we turn to Bond! We don't need that shit! Disheartening. Don't ask me to pick between RIO BRAVO and THE SEARCHERS because it will be RIO BRAVO every time,

On the other hand, the whole 'who can you trust even after they show you the right code signs and trust levels and their id checks out' harkens back to the Connerys as does the idea that a pretty girl who invites you into her car might be CIA, SPECTRE, KGB or anyone else so don't presume anything even after you sleep with them. Lastly, the post-internet and cell phone age is well represented. I don't mind the ping pong around the globe bit because that's the way the internet age is - information flows so fast it's at the risk out outrunning our boy if he doesn't keep it at Jan De Bont levels. That said, part of the escapism of Bond is to imagine that actual smart, brave, good people are at the helm of our intelligence organization. Here both the British government and American CIA are hopelessly corrupt, in bed with 'Quantum' a world conglomerate of third world puppet topplers. But there is a lot of fire in the climax, and a great airplane through a canyon chase. This is the movie where I first fell in love with Gemma Arterton, even if she does have only five fingers on each hand (she was born with six!) but of course she gets three scenes before she's offed cruelly to make yet another harsh un-Bondian statement.

SKYFALL
2012 - ****
In SKYFALL there's not even enough time for a second, nonkilled Bond babe; M and Javier Bardem are the closest we come. It's a shrinking network. Try not to muck it up, 007. Things are looking good though with a new M and a new Q, both of whom seem well-suited to the post-cheeky age.

Non Salzman-Broccoli Bonds:
CASINO ROYALE - *
NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN *
One's a lame overdone 'everything but the chicken soup' disaster, the other a remake of THUNDERBALL with age and urine jokes, though Kim Basinger at peak lusciousness is shown in wet negligees and almost sold at auction to a slavering Arab. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring plays on the soundtrack and James Fox is a very cranky boss who only cares about budgets and reigning in Bond's drinking. Idiotic plotlines abound, but old Hammer startlet Valerie Leon is in it, somewhere. Too bad Klaus Brandauer, a fine actor in his own right, ranks with Louis Jordan as far as looking too old and generic for the part and the idea of putting video arcades in the swanky hotel is really ill-conceived. It's worth seeing though just to realize how many mistakes the general Salzman-Broccoli films avoid as they blast their way to boffo box office. Reign on, Cubby and Harry, and James. The future may be written on silicone, but we'll always need a real man to kill the rich.

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 is an interconnected latticework 'other' staring back at you -- we block it out because otherwise we will go mad - and then art gives us the Perseus Medusa mirror shield by which to cautiously glimpse that which our soul cannot bear.

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, mix jet black humor with guilt-free sex, bawdy anarchy and trenchant satire, anti-Vietnam rants and un-PC skirt chasing, grim apocalypse and slapstick, in ways that may or may not seem dated today, but one can't deny that it makes the relative harmlessness and inanity of today's sexual satire seem woefully anemic.   

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 pineals being so calcified over from pollution of the precious bodily fluids that they're blind to even the idea they might be blind. They've forgotten that when intellectual satire is volleyed at sacred institutions, exposing the truth of the latticework to all our awakened horror it destroys only the dead cells within, leaving the rest vibrant and now hip enough to incorporate its own critique; meanwhile the potty-mouthed prattle of  today's grown infants is never a threat to the status quo and can indeed be yoked to the patriarchy's repressive practices. So it is WRITTED! Not one dead cell shall slough!

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, and especially himself. 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 tomorrow's America that will one day make even Jonah Hill seem a stalwart fount of manly gravitas).


If there's still an author with 'adult' intellect left standing after the PC putsch, 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 bring us out of this maturity death spiral, or 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 one's tongue hanging out. Well, if you neuter your satiric dog, he may stop humping your leg and peeing in the corners, but he's also apt to hide when the burglars of phony morality and 'sacred' patriarchy show up, thus making his entire existence rather pointless. And those burglars he let in are actually squatters 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. And yet did we think we would shame nature? Knowing how little it did for us, sex-wise, would we 80s liberal undergrads have ever gone along willingly with our PC symbolic collective castration if we knew chicks would still pick the brutish lothario's casual lay over our sensitive pledge driving? 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 said writer went out drinking with other luminaries are well recorded in their respective historical annals - making it seem like they went out all the time. The truth is, we writers are 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, getting as many women mad at us as possible, then running 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 before it's even over.

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 instantly from birdless to beflocked statue status with a single hit record and noted the accompanying changes in their sexual drive and finesse or lack thereof, for '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, Cialis for daily use still decades away, uncut coke dust in the wind and groupies impatiently waiting, their plaster cast a-drying as we speak.

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 characters' 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 with all its hairs and gasses, as incorruptible. Ultimately, what is being satirized is the sexual repression that forces men to strike comically affected postures before becoming slavering beasts when within striking distance of some hottie naif with blonde hair and a pink mini dress, and the way all their strutting and hot air just makes them all the more ridiculous when their trousers are off, for 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 grandly spectacularly pathetic and 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, "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 or burned in over 20 countries... and fourteen... developing nations." Shifting from famous genius posing to hangdog contrition 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 mailing 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."

Moments later MacPhisto has Candy in the back of his Benz (indeed there's the idea he came there expressly to pick out a co-ed) 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." A Scotch spigot in his glass bottom Benz gets turned on by accident, and McPhisto 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 verses 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 so approvingly at the crazy scene methinks I was in the kind of hetero-camp heaven I once believed 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" but 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 mixed segment: 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 or Hayden to Ripper, it's just depressing to imagine his scenario coming true, that poor kid, the both of them!


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!") is a most definite second peak. His histrionic operating theatrics might seem a bit Benway-esque but Burroughs was a friend 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; aside from Burton he's the only other star in the film's luminary cast to recognize the covert brilliance buried in even the most seemingly mundane 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 Wellesian 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 (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 as a prurient administrator who seems to get off and trying to shame Candy in front of the entire post-op party after she's caught being molested by her uncle; and what a party! 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 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 so the film begins its slow wandering downhill. Candy hides out in Central Park where she hooks up with a 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 - which admittedly came after).


Candy finally winds up in the holy water-flooded mobile ashram of the guru Grindl --played by Marlon Brando -- funny if not quite at the level of Burton or Coburn and stuck in a limbo between sounding strangely like modern Johnny Depp, with an Indian accent that starts out high and fast but quickly unravels into 'Abie the fish peddler' Jewish territory, mining the rhythm of Lenny Bruce as Groucho or Sky Masterson as Peter Sellers in The Party. Brando's way too internalized for Grindl to reach the egotistic grandeur of McPhisto or Krankheit but for fans of old pre-code WB and Paramount comedies it's a gas linking his accents to the ancient Vaudeville rhythms. 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 if one doesn't have one by then anyway. Once the fake white snow comes down through the open top, Grindl now hopelessly congested and spent after a scant six 'levels' of enlightenment utters his last lines like "you muss fine da sacred boid" with 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, 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.


Which brings me to my final thought bubble --the idea central to Candy's Christian value - which begins with what MacPhisto says in the beginning about 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, and as Lenny Bruce would say, that's the difference between obscenity and humanity. The truth of our 'huge, throbbing need' is unendurable any other way except as a joke that paradoxically lets us save face and free ourselves of it at the same time. It's the last bastion of the healthy human body's societal failings, the hairy gorilla reality that won't ever totally hide 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 enlighten it. Instead, Southern proves 'nothing sacred' is itself the most sacred of philosophies, 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 and it is these hypocrisies that create the situations wherein men are consistently unable to behave courteously towards the provocation of Candy's nubile wide-eyed innocence.

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

Macroscoping out to that first paragraph coincidence latticework now -- 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. Southern's era had more repression and obscenity laws to reckon with, but they had the artistic clout to bash into them with dicks swinging and fists helicoptering. If Southern and friends had been at that food-co-op meeting they would be hurling the organic produce at that anemic hipster, bellowing like a lion, inhaling every kind of smoke presented. Back in their own time all they could do instead was rage against the dying of their pre-Viagra erections, and then die for real, as nature intended, either in Vietnam or that Norman Maine surf rather than clinging to bare life like today's greedy octogenarians bankrupting Medicare so they can eke out one more month past their due date, the impatient specter waiting in the reception area, rereading that old Us Weekly for the eleven hundredth time while doctors stall out the clock since they're paid by the nanosecond. Real hipsters, having faced death abroad or within, heroically dodged the draft, or leapt into the waiting arms of the angry fuzz, or served jail time for a single joint--earned their aliveness and their stash of army amphetamine; they were able to dig on and understand out-there modern jazz, and to smoke anywhere without complaint. They lingered at the moveable feast of expat Paris, armed with coffee, whiskey, hashish from the Arab quarter, mushrooms from Mexico, burgundy from California, hep-C from New York and, if they pilgrimaged south, the holy yage. Today we're lucky if we can afford a single Sex on the Beach and there's no smoking, sir... sir.... no smoking (and in NYC no dancing either).

Perhaps in revisiting Candy we can, as a nation, whisper "Rosebud" for our lost sleddy balls and re-discover how well-read intellectual weight might once again benefit from rabid id-driven boosters in trying to make it through the zipper of hypocrisy and into the stratosphere. Southern 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. America was still strong enough to handle any amount of MASH-style shower tent unveiling. America knew that facing its own 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 is heroic, that being able to accept and engage in casual sex with a random girl on your commuter train is brave, while refusing waving a defensive wedding ring and racing out at the next stop is not noble, but shameful indeed (and lord knows I am ashamed for doing it). 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)

If you're a fan (as I am) of romantic pre-code Lubitsch froth like The Love Parade, Trouble in Paradise, The Smiling Lieutenant, Monte Carlo, and The Merry Widow and of Wes Anderson's previous films then you surely can/have/will appreciate the icy frosting splendor over-melancholy birthday cake of their combined flavor that is The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), released this week on DVD. If you know classic films, which I bet you do, then the elaborate escape from the relatively compassionate prison will remind you of Renoir's Grand Illusion; the sledding through a winter Olympics slalom course of On Her Majesty's Secret Service; the interlocked fraternal tracking of Renoir; the McGuffins of Hitchcock and the gorgeous colors of Powell-Cardiff-Pressburger, including dusky green trophy rooms (as in Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, above), swirled together in the sugar cone manner of an excited boy explaining to his kid sister, using her dolls and tea set as props, the tale the tale of an elaborate dollhouse hotel run like clockwork by assiduous major domo Ralph Fiennes, and his deadpan Muslim lobby boy (Tony Revolori) who gets the one girl in the film (the ubiquitous Saoirse Ronan) and grows up to be F. Murray Abraham, narrating the tale to Jude Law in the now gone to communist bloc grey hotel. Law's making a book out of it, which in turn is read by a bright young Slav girl.


Anderson's previous film, Moonrise Kingdom I loved (see my best of 2012 list), because of the young outlaw lovers' detached cool and fervent devotion it marked real progress forward for Anderson, whose past films all focused more on male friendship compromised by rivalry over girls generally too mature or damaged for either of them to handle. Moonrise was like if Max in Rushmore hooked up with Gweneth Paltrow in Royal Tenenbaums - and neither was tongue-tied or awkward around the other, but pre-possessed with the refreshing eerie confidence that the first flush of mutual attraction can bring, almost Hawksian in their cool.

the coolest romance since Bogie and Bacall in To Have and Have Not? Maybe

But the relationships at the heart of Budapest indicate a racing away from the palm sweat stress of first love back to the safety of the Dungeons and Dragons kids you left behind, back to the younger Indian kid neighbor who always wants to hang out and does whatever dangerous things you tell him (in my childhood, his name was Sinul and the girl who made my palms sweat was Tracy). But the return to the boy's club makes the capering and gamboling less vital, doomed as are all quests to recapture innocence, to climb inside the tattered remains of your old coccoon. That doesn't mean Budapest is a failure, quite the contrary. The word on the street is you need to see this film a few times to get all the little details, but the thing is, I don't want to. I'm not even sure I want to see Moonrise Kingdom again, at least not at the moment. What if a second viewing dims my love? Better the safety of one more viewing of The Expendables 2. Stallone, now that's a man's man.

That said, the critical and financial box office success ofGrand Budapest is a good sign for future auteur quirky art. With its lovingly ornate tracking shots, quaint train set miniatures, and wistful rainy day isolation hinting of some deep meaning, about loss, perhaps, there's so much rich detail, such macro/micro fullness in the historical period--the last gasps of innocence before fascism, communism, and nazism destroyed humanity's confidence in itself, and cakes stopped being decadent--that The Grand Budapest seems to risk trivializing it with its endearing little sister's toys-style playfulness. It left me wondering if it had anything to say other than that Anderson wishes he could go back in time and live in a grand hotel before the war, or a nice empty safe place where no one knows your name and cavernous steam bath facilities and snowy mountain tops give you hot and cold extremes for maximum coziness. This Hotel is self-aware, which makes some of it inexcusable. Just because it's a self-reflexive fractal inward spiral narrative doesn't mean it can avoid the cumbersome duty of meaning something. As it is, it's just a reverie imagining how nice it would have been to be around opulence in the days before the Nazis destroyed most of fancy Europe; it's all dressed up and has a few worthy places to go, so why does it feel still lost?

Putting one's own private nostalgic wistfulness on the big screen, we know, is the purview of the rich who can afford to create their pet time travel realities, ala Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris (see: Oscar Picks of the Bourgeoisie - in Salieri Shades). These dreamers can afford to create their own past worlds to vanish into. So while a state-funded auteur like Bergman could create vast worlds of resonance out of two women's faces in black and white close-up, he couldn't afford to build an escape past; he had to hide out on a desolate island for most of his life, where, as we know from The Most Dangerous Game, there's no place to hide or run for long. For Bergman, stripping down his style only deepened his resonance, proving that where art cinema is concerned, more is less. Unlimited freedom allows for laziness. Excessive details undermine resonance. Anderson can only create a few chuckles out from the vast quantity of faces, sets, miniatures, and cameras at his disposal so it seems only fair that the fascist uprisings that bookend portions of this film should occur, indication of both the iron curtain evening the playing field, confiscating the cakes and artwork to enforce a strictly drab color code, and the intrusion on the Anderson fantasia by bubble-bursting bombs. As for Communism, Anderson never shows us the starving, huddled masses who aren't willing or able to work 24 hours a day for rich tourists, the types who realize it's their right to be equal to any rich punter. It's them he should be scared of!

Viva La Revolution!

That said, I'm on congressional record railing against the Trust Fund Marxist movement re: Godard (see: Sullivan's Jet Travels: Rich Kid Cinema) as much as Anderson seems to be railing against spoiled rich kid collaborators in Budapest, which is one of the reasons I respect his frivolous whims. Recalling the big split during Great Depression pre-codes between harsh reality films like Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale,and musicals and escapism, comedies and stories of the wealthy enjoying their wealth, The Grand Budapest makes a critical error in confusing our pleasure watching the wealthy enjoying their wealth with being their servants, lovers, companions, anything they need, to enjoy our place in the 'downstairs' servants' quarters, and revel in the giddy colors and luxury by proxy. A rich kid fantasia, this misstep reflects the imagination of a lonely Lord Fauntleroy whose only friends are the household servants and so fantasizes about how much joy and fullness he brings to their lives, justifying the one-way flow of attention.

For the middle class, such as myself, the fantasy of being rich never includes having servants, but they're an inescapable part of real wealth, and as Hegel knows, never having to ever have to fend for oneself gradually leaves the rich so vulnerable--so dependent on hoteliers, bellhops, maids, and consierges when abroad--that it's critical to their sense of self to believe there's a means other than money by which these supplicants are bound to them, that the servants and hoteliers love serving them hand and foot, for service's own sake, and that they would never abandon their rich clientele to starve or have to pack their own bags.

Reality is surely different but in Anderson's world these usually tertiary characters all work their fingers to the bone, 24 hours a day, to make the Grand Budapest and its ilk excellent --why? Because they love to serve the jet set? Non, monsieur, because Wes Anderson's camera transcends both the trust fund 'present of liberty' Kane-ism and socialist hand-wringing of some of his peers without careening into the life-is-a-circus Fellini-ism, for which I am not alone in feeling grateful. So what else is left in its stead?

Let us recall that quote from William Powell as Godfrey Parks, the rich scion who finds his mojo by becoming first a forgotten man and then a butler for a spoiled dingbat family in My Man Godfrey. "You're proud of being a butler?" asks a bewildered Eugene Pallette. "I'm proud of being a good butler, sir," Godfrey answers. "And  if I may so, sir, one has to be good to put up with this family." In other words, excellence of service is its own reward, even when those being served are undeserving, setting vast karmic chains in motion wherein even labeling someone as undeserving of special service is forgotten, as all judgment is suspended, creating humility, grace, and good fortune. There's not even a sense of class resentment in the effeminate reedy voice of the prefect of police (a slumbering Ed Norton), as ineffectual a depiction of law enforcement as Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me.
But like the 'glorious' martyrdom offered unwed mothers in soaps of the 1930s-50s after they work their fingers to the bone for undeserving illegitimate D.A. sons, there's the dubious aftertaste that this martyrdom is really in the service of some nefarious purpose. The 1% patriarchy plays up the grace and nobility of being a second-class citizen in this, the greatest of all possible worlds.


On the flipside of that there's also the trust fund Marxist, who blames "the rich" (i.e. his dad) for sucking the blood of the proletariat in parent-funded films. He's glamorizing the poor - but must I reach for my frothy tome of 'wise old sayings by butlers?' to find out what Burrows said to Sullivan in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (above) in order to dissuade him from playing amateur mendicant, that "only the morbid rich would find the subject glamorous?"

Godard is my boiler plate for this theory, but I still love Godard because he remains hilarious despite and even because of his leftist propaganda; he's trying something new with cinema, to connect the New Wave with Eisenstein, but no matter how didactic and naive, his playful cinematic wit endures. And the more Jean Pierre Leaud tries to look politically serious, the funnier he is. He's like Harpo Marx crossed with Young Trotsky in Love (below)

Godard's La Chinoise

That's the strange rich kid cinema angle that is both transcended and indulged by Anderson's film. The leads of Grand Budapest (like William Powell) become rich because they are tireless, loyal, fearless servers of the rich. They reject the communist ideal of equality by force, due perhaps to proximity to the wealthy (and ample leftovers back in the kitchen). Their jobs are frivolous - bellhopping and major domoing aren't necessary as we all know from carrying our own duffel into a Ramada-- and so their indispensability must be underwritten by adoring old lady residents; meanwhile the unwavering subservience of the hard-working baker (Saoirse Ronan) laboring under the callous gaze of the bakery owner seems a bit strange - a girl this hot and fearless wouldn't need to sweat her days away in a bakery making ornate sugar-coated little cakes for the rich and imprisoned! She'd be a first rate government agent or high-end prostitute. And is there a difference? Not according to Hitchcock... or Lacan!


Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's tale covers a similar old Europe canvas in its chronicle of of a spy in pre-War Vienna, a duel with a German who will become his best friend, and two world wars, all as recalled in the mind of an old general while wrestling with his younger secretary's fiancee in a Turkish bath. Jack Cardiff's eye-popping colors and the superlative set design make even the war ravaged countryside beautiful and shares Budapest's melancholy air as the onrush of mechanized warfare slowly obliterates the sporting codes and artistic splendor, the colors, elaborate customs, flavors, and decency of old-world class system Europe. (also second pic from top)

One of Lubitsch's less-revered works, this has Maurice Chevalier as a romantic soldier who winds up marrying the queen of his small country (the sort that would cease to exist when the map was redrawn at the end of WWI).

What better place to ride from Peking to Shanghai than in a first class train compartment with two cultured high fashion courtesans like Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong? Dietrich is at her most luminous and morally ambivalent, and incredibly cool; her crazy black feather outfit fulfills the promise of all the slinky black snake and feathered collar femme fatale costumes that Edith Head and her ilk had been stitching since the silent era. There's great fuck yous to the censors with Dietrich turning the tables on the old Professor Henry Davidson type and counter-snubbing an old lady with a dog, but even better is her teasing treatment of brooding British military doctor whom she loved long ago. When he tells her he tried to forget her she replies, eyes wide like a child's, "Did you try very hard?" I wouldn't be able to forget her either, and Anna May Wong was never lovelier. This film is also listed now (though it used to be considered '33) as being from 1932, but it feels like 1933 - See: 1933, not 1939 was the greatest year for Hollywood Movies...

It took awhile for this pre-code Paramount to resonate with me, but now I dig that it doesn't 'Americanize' the dialogue like so many lazier Hollywood films, instead playing up the linguistic difficulties where everyone in Europe is constantly searching for the one language each of them knows just a little bit of, as in the excited way the Italian hotelier translates EE Horton's story of how he got robbed in his room. Like BUDAPEST, a great fuss is made of getting the first class hotel experience exactly right, and there's the issue of an unscrupulous charmer butting heads with an evil conglomerate in order to fleece rich perfumer Kay Francis. While Herbert Marshall isn't Cary Grant, or even Ronald Coleman, but he's also not George Brent. He swoons well and convinces you through two layers of subterfuge that he's genuinely in love with the moon (he wants to see it reflected in champagne) and the women around him, each more beautiful than the last. (See: Pre-Code Capsules 9)


Like the narrative framework of an Eastern European girl reading a novel at the graveside of  an author whom we meet in flashback who in turn hears the story from one of its participants, this film is told via an ever-more-innate story within a story within a story structure and set in a colorful past that may never have existed but at any rate is now certainly gone (and the film was made in Eastern Europe!)

Set in the Alps (via Gaumont's finest painted backdrops), this tale of intrigue is a fine companion to Hitchcock's original version of The Man who Knew too Much. John Gielgud doesn't make much of an impression in the lead but he looks a bit like Ralph Fiennes and Peter Lorre shows up! The ever- saucy Madeleine Carroll makes a fine femme fatale and there's a memorable chase through a Swiss chocolate factory! One of my favorite $10 public domain titles I got as a kid, from Waldenbooks at the mall, in the early years of VHS.

Bond in the Alps, and a great skiing downhill chase, slalom, ski jumping, cable car rides, as well as the cool vibe of having to take long cable cars to visit the evil Telly Savalas' lair. He hypnotizes a bevy of socialite debs as they sleep using colored lights and his own grinning, cigarette-congested voice uttering instant mix CD-worthy lines like "You love chickens..." That part has no bearing on Budapest, but it never fails to put me in a good mood.

This later period Hitchcock film doesn't get the love it deserves, but Wes Anderson is beholden to it for the flavor of Eastern European intrigue and the near-silent museum chase scene (just the sound of footsteps for suspense, etc.), and the anxiety of being asked to present your papers and/or discovered on some communist bloc public conveyance. It's worth revisiting, and I wrote about it way back in '04 here

Co-written by Citizen Kane scribe Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with uncredited touch-ups by the great Ben Hecht, Million Dollar Legs is the nationalism-satirizing predecessor of Marx Bros'Duck Soup, which makes sense since the heroine in Legs was married to Harpo Marx. Cockeyed Caravan's Matt Bird calls her "absurdly deadpan." Centering around the fictional nation of Klopstockia with its majordomo who can run faster than a speeding car, the president (W.C. Fields) stays on top of his plotting cabinet through games of toss wrestling, and there's a Mata Hari-style hottie spy (doing a great Garbo impression, "I'm wery fond of yumpers!"). Budapest fans will dig the colorful cast and pre-WWII fictionalized little mountain nation vibe.

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.  

The new Lana Del Rey album is out this week, like the dark ebb of the Stygian tide, and with it "controversy" so perfect in its nonissue pitch that Lana Del Rey and her salivate-on-cue detractors; it is cool to die young, take it from an old punk rocker-turned hippy-turned hipster who missed all his chances. The only freedom from irrelevance whistles in the obsidian wind that whistles up through gratings along that other sewer's shore, because in death comes the realization that one's own art has lived forever: once past life one's art is past time, and a great pastime art the movies. There is no difference between living through the movies and living through death and writing for the future selves of yourself.

All death markers in the cane field point to Val Lewton.

It was no accident that all the Del Rey backlash ballyhoo started around yesterday-ish, as if the first shot of a starting gate, while simultaneously TCM played Val Lewton's acclaimed low-key masterwork THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943) as part of an apparent devil day, shoe-"horned" between THE DEVIL'S BRIDE (AK THE DEVIL RIDES OUT 1968) and TO THE DEVIL WITH HITLER (1942), which I mention only to tie in WW2, as Val Lewton's best work was made in 1942-43, suffused with a deep paranoia about being left back in the States, away from the action, so far from the action no bombs will ever fall there, so needing to dredge death back up from the ground like crude oil; like a modern art exhibit after the public has drifted home and the main lights are off and only a half-deaf and blind janitor slowly mops up, pausing at strange noises, the crumpled up invites and provenance lists rustling like stage tumbleweeds.

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton both understand the ebb tide of death, and how when it washes the land clean the timeless immortals are revealed. Heaven in Lana land is just her, Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, and of course Jesus, all looming on the Max Parish heavenly plane like death coaches. For Val Lewton death is already here, motionless and waiting in crevices of the ancient statues and in the rustling canefields and even in a calypso song. His idols are literally etched in stone, all-seeing through blank eyes, and his demons are all vaguely fleetingly visible in the shadows, black on black like the cover of White Light / White Heat.

"Tropico"

When the artist pursues fame only after he or she's dead, one is free from the need for validation. Surrender is the only true courage, which does not mean being a pussy about it.


So while some are threatened or indignant (same thing) over this death drive fancy I say hey, be grateful it's there, in your sights, because all she has to do is pout, turn slowly away, and take a backwards slow mo dive off the Hollywood sign and through Diane Selwyn's pale blue skylight and it's YOU who die, not her. Once you can't see her you'll know she's behind you. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium, or platinum cards, or church. You can follow her around all you want, like Boris Karloff obsessing over the hottie Greek peasant maybe-vampire in Lewton's ISLE OF THE DEAD, you can be a whole internet worth of Karloffs, reigning down on you torrents of ancient superstitions and gossip on Lana Del Rey, a whole nation of self-appointed sanity... it does not slow your rush to death one hourglass grain.


Del Rey knows, and she knows that memories and film are the same thing and that every home movie of happier times must speed up as you approach the black hole. She even casts herself as the bad guy most of the time, as in "Summertime Sadness" --driving her lesbian ex-lover to jump off a bridge ("kiss me once before you go") while she pouts in fog machine student films and home movies that repeat faster around certain points as the weeping lover falls, finally impressing Lana Del Rey enough to fall after her, the doubling inherent in an L.A. lesbian affair fully embraced- - drowning in each other's reflections in each other's eyes, their lashes a thousand penitent memories, connecting to the inescapable fact that no Hollywood lesbian couple is ever superfluous - they come already refracted like an ever-opening lotus mirror reflection of cinema: hence Rita/Betty=Diane in Lynch's quintessentially L.A. masterpiece; hence the shifting dynamics of the nurse and her glamorous willowy zombie in WALKED, Klo-Klo/KiKi's continual mirroring in LEOPARD MAN and Irina's attempted devouring of Alice in CAT PEOPLE.

It's fate, baby. The difference is in the fate. Kiss me once before you go, into the deep shadows. Watching CAT PEOPLE today on DVD it's possible to see just what's in the deep dark shadows around the swimming pool, Lewton and Tourneur have snuck a black hole cartoon animation in there, a shape that mutates from vertical to horizontal. When Irina turns back human she moves from paw prints to high heels prints (not bare feet - Lewton never tries to literalize it the way Paul Schrader's remake did), she wears a fur coat that when she changes tightens in around her and if you look close at her body lying on the ground outside the panther cage, she looks like a bearskin rug with a teddy bear's head sewn to the side, but we only see it from far off, in the shadows. In ISLE OF THE DEAD we can see, if we look very close, the way the undead Mrs. Aubyn seems to materialize out of the moonlit reflections on a stone wall, like she's only semi-corporeal but never in that common special effects way that would make it obvious.


Lewton has a Russian's love of great literature; it infuses everything, it extends deeper down than the average bourgeois respect or tenure tracks, deeper even than the blood (his real name is Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon), deeper than the cauldron from which are dredged all our hopes and fears, and our tomorrows are like a thousand yesterdays. Born to die. Die to live. Forever in Blue Jane the Lion Lana Del Rey. When death is inevitable, as it always is, a vast sea of your blood always a skinsuit away, the only freedom comes in whether to ignore it out of fear, or embrace it out of courage, love, and rock and roll who-gives-a-fuck-it. Hell yeah if my dad killed himself because of Lana Del Rey I'd be pissed. But my dad was killed by doctors. He died, after all, in the hospital. At home with an ocean of bourbon and ginger ale he was immortal. That hospice-strength IV cocktail's got no spirit. It opened the door right up and coasted him through. When we try so hard to keep the body alive we kill the soul. Who wants to die sober? Only the cowards for whom sleep is the cure-all; for some of us the only cure-all is music and films. Lana Del Rey is both the cure and the cause for the cancer of Hollywood, her faux-period home movies painstaking in their iconic recreations, like the accident fetishists in CRASH.

From top: CRASH, LEOPARD MAN

I love Lana because of her pro-death chanteuse-rock fuckitness and have no problem with it all being a persona put on by a failed pop star named Lizzy Grant. If it didn't resonate we wouldn't be talking about her, and if her story is really a confession, then so is mine, though not, apparently, Rolling Stone's and Jezebel's -- who were both once edgy in their ways, I hear. Now they're both 'institutions' successful enough to feel they have something to lose, or even kill to protect (see CinemArchetype 5: The Human Sacrifice).

The Seventh Victim

Lana Del Rey is a persona that has nothing whatsoever to protect, so can engage in a kind of high wire free-form self-immolation theater. Animas with respectable DSM-IV counts are plentiful but then they have kids, the persona is replaced, even grown out of, but is it really growing or just doubling and diluting? How many great sexy young actresses have we lost to their children? Even when they come back to us they're not the same: their dangerous heart, that thrilling gleam in their eye, now exists off camera, transferred to vessels still into the mewling and puking into nurse's arms stage. It shoulda been me, puking. I had to quit her, my whiskey... sweet whiskey. My sober life, that's my cross to bear, my child, the thing that robbed me of the gleam. My lost Lenore. But I'm not a star. No one even notices. But I notice, and I still haven't forgiven Angelina Jolie, or Liz Phair. Ladies, you broke my heart!

Never stop smoking, or drinking - even knowing both are poisons, for you've spilled more than secrets (bottom: SEVENTH VICTIM)

Now you love your children the way you used to love the camera.
Now your love is funneled to some off-camera cradle.
Which makes you worthless to the camera! Love the camera, o favored image!
We love you back through it.
But we can't love you through your kids' eyes,
for we are not John Cusak in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.
Then again, what else would you do with yourself once we eventually moved on?
You'd have to leap off the edge.
Like Lana Del Rey does, but she does it in advance of your gaze, and so
you will never move on.

In a semi-deserted Bijou n 1943
a nervous young assembly line worker uses her sick day,
watches SEVENTH VICTIM or THE LEOPARD MAN
and the shadows around her, where a boyfriend or husband would be,
 onscreen in the shadows she sees him, beckoning...

Lana Del Rey is the eyes that discern changing shapes in that darkness, and the darkness.
On digital nothing escapes notice, even the void hidden within the void.

This is the girls

That's why Val Letwon's morbid preoccupation with death is so relevant. Using deep black shadows he reveals that the thing wartime America most fears isn't death but loneliness, the dreamy sense of being entombed only b-movie sets provide. America's overriding fear is of somehow losing itself inside a cheap hotel room set--of being left alone too long in a dark empty country so remote and far from the action not even a single enemy bomb can find it, only the ghost radio signal one clings to for company, for news of the vast armadas of sweethearts and sons vanished into the mist of the bookending oceans. And then... Frank Sinatra's voice like a phantom echo; his mastery of mic technique giving his programs an almost unworldly amniotic sound markedly different from the rest, welcoming you to join him in the pulsing warm fog between two shores: "if our romance should break up / I hope I never wake up /if you are but a dream." You are. Hardly even born yet. There in the unrealized amniotic slumber of the Stygian crossing, as Sinatra's songs coast overhead in ceaseless tachyons towards the past, you can hear your father's conception, buried in the sunken space between the words. 

The way Lana keeps her expression blank for our haunted projector, so too Val Lewton's deep black shapes - accept our shadow's projection, just the country as a whole during the war years became, in some smaller areas, a ghost town ripe for metaphor: the younger healthier men all drained away by old Europe vampires, even in Hollywood, until all that's left to star in the B's are the tenderfoots, the old men, the crippled, the meek, the short and reedy. And everywhere, in the air wafting from Europe, the smell of death --the inevitability of it--in ways we can't imagine with our current wars and their paltry kill levels (we might lose a few dozen thousand but nothing close to Europe and Asia's combined sixty million in World War Two). Only a full scale nuclear war would even put a dent in us now. There could be a dozen earthquakes hundred of million dead, and that would still only be the same % as we lost in WW2, a spit in the bucket. Half of us could die and we'd only be where we were in the seventies, when we first started to worry about overpopulation. It's not death that dooms our planet, but life. Our blind clinging to health like panicked survivors swamping the lifeboat. If we could all just die like gentlemen, like the great Solomon Guggenheim, if Lana Del Rey can lead us by power of bad example, and if we leave right now we just might make it.

Echo of my undead soldier (from top) Del Rey, DEATHDREAM

Lana Del Rey sees the ghost of America's past in the deep shadows of the cinema; but she's all alone, like any phantom lost in the whirling echo of death. As Pitchfork notes she's "an utterly distinctive figure in popular music, not part of a scene, with no serious imitators—and befitting someone completely off on her own, she’s lonely." There are a few artists over the years who have explored similar ghost transmissions: Miles Davis' trumpet echoing through the primordial pre-ears-to-hear-it howling of an uncooled earth in Agharta; Kubrick's "Maisie" and "Midnight, the Stars and You"; Lynch's Roy Orbison songs and Julee Cruise... but none live and breathe within that ghost transmission - none play on the idea that even if you weren't alive to hear them sing, the sound is encoded in your DNA.  




Lana Del Rey, herself, her videos, most of them (not "Tropico"), her willingness to invite nanny state feminist shock and outrage, is to return Freud's 'death drive' to its preferred verb status, down Route 66; to make music for drug overdoses, lover's suicide pacts, and self-immolation at the graveside of James Dea--but without Morissey-moping or emo posture--but rather with hair done up and radio playing Elvis with JFK convertible top down, smoking, hovering over Marilyn's lifeless body like a wraith, hiring an actor to dress like Elvis and sneer while rubbing against the microphone stand in front of the John Wayne's rawhide coffin before falling backwards off the Hollywood sign in slow motion. Falling, but never landing. And to paraphrase the Donne-quoting devil-worshippers in Lewton's SEVENTH VICTIM, death falls to meets you as fast, halfway.

What Del Rey has done is to embrace the sacrificial phoenix icon of the damaged hottie in ways Lindsay Lohan who instead let Oprah set her chronically bouncing back from relevance but Lana Del Rey avoids the trap by becoming the 'act' of the drunk, of the death wish Baby New Year. She is her own exploiter, the manager of her singular vision --where Lohan avoids the stake and the torch of the frightened villagers, Del Rey climbs right up and starts the fire and directs the camera angles. Val Lewton's poetic dread of death similarly produces films that hang inches from the darkened grave. They are the ones who never try to hide the skull in the ice cubes because when the death wish is externalized for posterity it loses its power and so one achieves, in the constant airplay of a =funeral, the true immortality, the living ghost retina burn outline. 




Del Rey trusts we're not going to kill ourselves just because she says it would a sweet gesture, would show her we really care, that we've played her lyrics backwards and prepared our pyres. That's her whole secret. How many films other than Lewton's and Lana's with this level of guts? I mean aside from THE BLACK SWAN? I sympathize with Kurt's daughter but really, Rolling Stone, it's you should be ashamed soliciting angry responses from a girl who never got to know her father any better than we did --to me that doesn't reflect badly on LDR's statement, or FBC's retort, only on your journalistic 'ethics,' RS, you who were a once mighty countercultural institution (even smart enough to be aware of the paradox in that phrase)--now reduced to running back and forth passing gossip like some tattletale angling to be ground zero of a viral thread, leaping down the throat of anyone speaking out against the principles of bland nanny state life-for-life's-sake-PG-tedium, of rock as sanitized of genuine rebellion. Maybe you should go run another cover piece about Bob Dylan and Tom Petty together again! Like all the other fallen giants, you've let 'trending' become the new version of stock market panics, all genuine rebellion trampled underfoot. Well let me tell you about another bunch of tramplers, and the shit they've come to trample is the flimsy wool over your own eyes! 



Most filmmakers and artists and musicians think largely of themselves, of their fortune and fame or lack thereof. But some of us know well that every film, post, or album we make will survive our own death, and therefore we know black magic's promise of eternal youth, of the ghost in the machine, the threading projector beam light measuring death out in still image ribbons that give the projected the only immortality there is, the phantom echo, the Sinatra ghost broadcasts still flying out into space. Those people are named Val Lewton and Lana Del Rey. They will not pretend that what the camera records was ever alive. They will not pretend life is just death at 24 frames per second. They know that the unafraid to die must enact rituals of death and transfiguration --for these rituals endure like Zapruder. Watch THE SEVENTH VICTIM and THE LEOPARD MAN and a few Lana Del Rey videos in the same night (preferably the older ones--"National Anthem,""Video Games,""Born to Die," and "Summertime Sadness") and before you die you shall see the America of ghosts. 

I came late to the party, as always, in Manhattan, hanging out beginning only in 1990; couch-surfing all along 2nd Ave, I've seen it all happen. You know this blog. You read my 2011 piece, Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock, wherein I admonished the average New Yorker so comfortable in his city he can go to some park or pier at night for an outdoor screening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. I admonish! "All tends towards chaos and this little sneeze of righteous nanny-state micromanaging we're mired in too shall pass... just as the ex-meek have inherited the earth, so too will the nouveau-meek re-inherit, and the summer will be electric... and the city shall be sleazy.... and crime-ridden once more."

Man, what genius. Three years later and I finally spell-checked the proper spelling of 'nouveau.'

Godard homage indicated by pose and striped shirt

I know I'm a genius because of a young turk named Ashley Cahill who feels as I do about NYC not being dangerous enough to foster the arts correctly. And he's done something about. Oh shit, you're in trouble now, Disneyfiers! A Brit filmmaker who has lived in NYC for most of his life (but still rocks a posh accent) and looks like a weird cross between a Williamsburg hipster Seth Meyers and Beck, writes, stars and directs but best of all kills random citizenry in order to set the fuse on what he hopes will be a rent-lowering, Summer of Sam-style fear-upping citywide crime wave. The film's had more than a few titles, CHARM, for example, but here it's RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE and its on Netflix Streaming with one of those ubiquitous torture porn-looking covers. You have to look really close to see the blood around his mouth is the NYC skyline. But please do.

Celebrity friends should always be displayed proudly.

Note ironic T-shirts

I'm kind of in love with the girl on the left; mmm that Andie MacDowell hair.

It's one of those first person meta-documentary films ala MAN BITES DOG, with Cahill as Malcolm, a slightly more homicidal version of, presumably, himself. Since Cahill knows cinema inside the film and out the movie's automatically superior to most such endeavors (90% of filmmakers know nothing of film history). Malcolm doesn't just talk the talk, he knows that in order for NYC to return to its former affordable rent and artistic downtown glory days, he'll need to fire the first shot. He doesn't just rage against the Disneyfication of the New York night, he tinges the frame with Godard-esque metatexual in-jokes (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller for a reason). He can talk the talk-- and though he never says so outright, he shares my dislike of the second-guessing anxiety that sabotages so many homicidal comedies, i.e. the need to balance it all out with goodness --to have Winona Ryder feel bad when she kills teens in HEATHERS, or she just puts them into comas until she finds true love in SEX AND DEATH 101 (see "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise?); or to have Dexter only kill other serial killers. You know, they're afraid to get all Alex and his 3 Droogs. They want to be Scorsese but are afraid of Tommy DeVito. But once Malcolm does his first random stabbing you know he's not fucking around; he's going deep into the morally ambivalent jugular.


From the first, when he stops addressing the camera in his blithe discourse on the greatness of 70s NYC (when it beat out Detroit as "the murder capital of the world") when someone answers the random door he's been knocking on, we expect some kind of standard pre-arranged greeting (wherein a camera is already inside waiting for him as per so many reality shows). Instead, he races in, grabs the unlucky inhabitant and stabs her repeatedly and rapidly, without any drama or Bernard Hermann scissor music; the effect is chilling. Even though we know it's not 'real' per se it's hard not to shiver. So many faux-que-mentaries have tried to get to this spot, only to pull back like little pussies. But Cahill dives in, and ignores our ashen complexions.


Your reaction will probably be centered around your own neighborhood; to me the suburbs are far scarier at night than the city --there's usually at least three doors and dozens of ground floor single pane windows that even a child could break. Most of us in NYC have deadbolts on thick metal doors, and only one possible entry window (the one above the fire escape), and that has bars -all leftover from the 60s-70s crime era. But if your buzzer goes off or there's a knock on the door while you're watching this film, it could be quite scary, and going to theaters is still. When Malcolm garrotes a guy for texting in what looks like the Anthology Film Archives' downstairs screening room it's fun to imagine seeing the film there and getting a text and being afraid to answer it. Even if it's a bit unnerving, one must applaud the filmmaker's full commitment to the tenets of starting a crime wave and his own sadness when copycats start but in all the wrong ways. Gradually he turns on his director, and quirky girl friend friend, and even his own French girlfriend when she objects to his SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE-style birthday present. Well that's to be expected. What's not expected is the deader-than-deadpan approach that never trivializes the violence Malcolm commits while the girlfriend's reaction aside, never judging it either, so we end up in a very unique zone in that it's the opposite of HEATHERS' hypocritical inference that we're all so impressionable we need a pretty girl's buzzkill morals to remind us killing our high school enemies isn't cool anymore, thus not only denying us the promised cathartic pleasures and making us feel bad for wanting them. We've learned a long time ago to distrust anyone who tries to lecture us, we're Americans - and we know, deep down the bigger the demonstration of regret and "this is serious" morality, the more likely the person is a two-faced scoundrel.


With its attention to the world of downtown art film fanatics (I even thought I recognized my buddy Jamie Frey outside the Film Forum - above left), sly Godardian winks, and gradually escalating disturbing behavior that pushes our audience identification to HENRY or RICHARD III extremes, we trust Cahill because he's so openly homicidal he shatters walls well past the 'fourth' and beyond the metatextual infinite. The phrasing Cahill incorporates into his speech that show deep absorption of GODFATHER 2 ("you gonna help me with these things I gotta do, or what?"), TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, and BREATHLESS to name only a handful. I applaud the deadpan misanthropy on display, and how much it ties into film lovers' rejection of banal reality (we live only to be transported out of ourselves as often as we can via movies) and I can't help myself for applauding Cahill's brazen ballsiness - a near Don Quixote-esque quest to exhume the twitchy corpse of New York's badass past, to go all MS. 45 on SEX INTHE CITY. Like all great quests, it's doomed to backfire, but then again NYC hasn't ever been the same, not once in its 390 year history. It's like a mutating geographical variation of THE THING.

Vince Gallo!

BLANK CITY (2010) is a real documentary about the time and place Cahill longs to return to in RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE, specifically the underground film scene centered in the then-crime ridden East Village / Alphabet City. Full of exquisite glimpses into the early 8 and 16mm films, from the artsty downtown glory days that Cahill wants back. Of course as underground / outsider filmmakers (see my output here), we can't go back if for no other reason than youtube, Final Cut, and digital video which makes video-making so easy there's no magick or mystery like there was when we used to project 8mm and 16mm films on white walls or sheets for gathered friends and/or family members. Each showing was a one-time event, special in the way no amount of today's day Skyy Vodka sponsorship and gift bags can equal. And they had more drugs -they could afford them living in $10 a month loft apartments with ten other people. So with ample footage from the original films and talking heads like Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Deborah Harry, Amos Poe, and various members of various punk bands, it's better than being there, I'm sure - at least smell-wise, and has a good sense of humor about the poverty-enforced ingenuity of these early filmmakers. I especially loved the snippets of ROME 78 - a re-enactment of the fall of an empire as filmed on the sly around the City --so while a kid in a toga dies in the Central Park fountain, tourists walk by; a coliseum scene occurs in front of the Bronx Zoo lion cage, etc. It's the kind of gutsy shot stealing that makes New York City great!

ROME 78 - John Lurie (bottom)

It's that kind of poverty-is-the-mother-of-invention ingenuity that makes these films so impressive (though I probably wouldn't be able to sit through the whole thing), while the problems faced getting a film distributed didn't exist, since every weekend there were underground screenings, and everyone showed since everyone was in them and/or heard there'd be free wine. The inclusiveness is impressive (a coordinated effort merged the downtown punks with the uptown African American WILD STYLE graffiti artists, breakdancers and street poets) as is the proletarian mix of kids kicked out of their working class Bronx neighborhoods for being gay or fleeing their midwestern nowheresville hometowns, the idea that if you're literate, young, and hot you can never be considered homeless in a land where everyone takes care of everyone else and the class system is part of what's being rebelled against. Sudden wealth led to skyrocketing rents, which meant big real estate investments, which meant the need to protect those investments, which meant Republican mayors, so gradually, especially with the incursion of Giuliani in 1994, the herald of zero tolerance smoking, the abolition of the 'brown bag' law (alcoholic beverages okay as long as they're in a brown bag, supplied by bodega guys who would also open the beer for you if it had a cap); and the Cabaret Law that Kevin Bacon fought successfully in FOOTLOOSE in the 80s but we lost in the 'real life' of the New York streets; the crackdowns on the drugs in the club scene, the rise of swing dancing and my own near death over and over from alcoholism. I blame Giuliani for all of it. We could use a man like David Dinkins again.


Shooting your own shit is so easy now it's hard to warrant a film festival at all, hard to motivate people to go find some shady address and sit on the concrete floor for three house when the movie you're showing them is a mere click away on the home screen - but back then if you had a projector and a camera you could make a movie on Monday and show it to a waiting crowd that weekend, since everyone knew everyone else and half the people were squatters, and half the people were in the movie anyway, it would just happen. Huge crowds packed into abandoned buildings. I used to love that! Showing my movies to a big audience was great, but Youtube has made public screenings too unreliable - there's no word of mouth anymore because word of mouth itself has vanished, and posting invites to Facebook is so easy any given night in the City has so many options that none of them end up being anything interesting. Why go anywhere when you can download the scene from home? Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital - you know, like with Friendster.  

Lydia Lunch

I remember my last film screening, in 2007 for QUEEN OF DICKS - held in my friend's loft, with an impressive cross section of new friends and old - it was great to have an audience and hear the laughter. But I realized that this was it - I made this films for this purpose - an impromptu video screening. I knew I never really wanted to go beyond that - to make the festival rounds. It held no appeal. My camera broke during my follow-up - HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET. And I've kind of been out of the game ever since.

I left the red loading circle in, for art's sake!

What's the future, then? For these scene makers, some of them anyway, the future was staggering wealth. The 80s exploded the art scene, and now people who used get kicked out of clothing stores for looking too shady became icons plastered on the walls of NYU dorms or huge American Apparel ads; the art they used to sell by the yard is now going for millions of dollars. John Lurie, one of the few whose stayed true to the underground, laments the big change in Jean Michel Basquiat (above) who used to sleep on Lurie's floor and suddenly was a pretentious millionaire who made it about money; the scene followed suit and then home video became super cheap and real estate became too expensive to allow for squatters and ragamuffins. In a sense, that large influx of money, the cash deluge of Reagan's 80s, is what's been holding the city back from returning to its dank cellar roots.


Is Detroit waiting for us degenerate artists to settle it like a mix of the wild west and SUBURBIA? I have my doubts. Detroit's just not that congested you can get around without a car. But I respect some are out there, already trying. But to me that's the best part of NYC, especially during my drunk days - being arrested for drunk driving used to be one of my big fears, especially since I did it so often. But in NYC it wasn't necessary. If you liked to walk and enjoyed looking at people without needing to wave hello or feel skeevy, NYC was your only hope. Detroit would undo all that. Then again, I'm sober so with the money I'd save on booze and rent I could lease a goddamned Beemer (see Free Houses for Writers Program).

Vince Gallo!

But anything can happen, and the future is cyclical and in the meantime every so often a film sneaks by the guards that isn't afraid to smash the icons and moral signposts that have been in place so long most filmmakers don't even know their morals are not their own but serve the status quo, set up by a rich and privileged white bourgeois patriarchy. If a film can illuminate this status quo con job (the way, say, THE MATRIX, FIGHT CLUB, AMERICAN BEAUTY, LAST SEDUCTION, and PULP FICTION did), it can leave you feeling invincible and open for anything the whole drive home. Outside the box is still far too close to the box.  RANDOM is a good sign that at least somewhere in NYC the kind of box-cutting we see in BLANK CITY is still going on. The box. Bro. From the safety of my one bedroom hermitage doth I protest. One way or another, the box gets too big to escape. The walls are so far out now that raw fish, gayness, marijuana, and "rebellion," have been ironed into familiarity.


POST SCRIPT - There's this other documentary on Netflix, WE CAUSE SCENES: THE RISE OF IMPROV EVERYWHERE (2013), about a group of NYC hipsters who do big flash mob-ish pranks and I'm a little jealous of their huge turnouts and it would seem to contradict all I've said, except for the whole rule-following aspect (strangest are the emails from around the world of people 'asking' to start chapters of the group in their home towns. Dude, what kind of prankster asks permission - just do it, take credit, pretend to be the guy. And I've never been good at highly organized 'spontaneity' - it's fine for some people but the New Yorker embodied by Cahill or the filmmakers in BLANK CITY would never belong to a club that would want to have them as members - hence the whole "blank generation" concept of the No Wave / New Wave / Blank Generation monikers (as in, the lack of a genuine distinctive signifier), a bunch of people brought together by drugs, desire, and genuine artistic streaks, not the urge to connect or be told what to do by some pale hipster, to make some safe PG groupthink connection doing line dances at Virgin Megastore or doing pantless subway rides.

safe for mainstream consumption

I can respect the original gaggle involved in the sudden improv concept, but the idea that whole masses of people want to join up and be led into safe, happy flash mob style stuff makes me realize that cigarettes are essential to true revolution (and I say this as part of Shelley Jackson's SKIN project). It kind of lacks the everyone's in charge freedom of similar movements (as in the Merry Pranksters or the Cockettes or Diggers) that relied on chaos and true freedom of the sort impossible without very strong psychedelics and tobacco. The idea that sober people eagerly participate in chances to get told what to do in order to 'break away' from the social reality makes no sense. This is how ideas like the Diggers morphed into cults like the People's Temple, and how the Rolling Stone mossed itself. Such change is as inevitable as the thawing of the ice caps, or the closing of CBGBs and the opening of the CBGBs exhibit at the Vegas Hard Rock Cafe.

Thank god there's one artist who will never break that seal. Abel Ferrara, I dedicate this site to you.

from top: Jessica Harper w/mic in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (De Palma); Jessica Harper w/knife in SUSPIRIA (Argento)

Clara Calamai, Jacopo Mariani - DEEP RED

from top: De Palma - CARRIE, Argento - INFERNO, De Palma - DRESSED TO KILL, Argento - 4 FLIES ON GREY VELVET

Top: THE FURY (De Palma), botom: PHENOMENA (Argento)

Color-coded patterns from top (alternating De Palma/Argento):  FURY, SUSPIRIA, RAISING CAIN, INFERNO, UNTOUCHABLES, SUSPIRIA, PASSION, DEEP RED, FURY, 4 FLIES

Naturally these psychic twins are not identtical: Argento's psychoanalysis is perhaps deeper while De Palma is more into politics (Italy wasn't mired in Vietnam so Argento couldn't find his horror there). Argento's connection to music is more wryly contrapuntal than De Palma's, making innovative use of children's songs, whispering, percussion and even electric bassline-driven funk from Goblin and Ennio Morricone. In DEEP RED, particularly a real break with convention is begun: swooning pop balladry as heads get slow motion sliced by shattered windshields--the glass a pop art snowstorm--and rattling nerve-grating, plastic cup echo-drenched percussion leaping into life and then stopping just as suddenly all just because David Hemmings steps on a bottle, then resuming just as abruptly when a shade falls--or accompanying an impromptu Daria Nicolodi vamp. This approach is the total opposite of the usual emotional-telegraphing of Hollywood, though De Palma gets great mileage out of Bernard Herrmann.

From top: NORTH BY NORTHWEST, DR. NO, the full ambiguity of casual sex at its most chilling, and therefore truest.

Both both Argento and De Palma use romantic music in a subversive manner, riffing on the lovers-on-the-run style of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) by having romantic comedy tropes tossed nervously in with the suspense, sifting through the queasy mix of dread and attraction that occur during a casual hook-up, when the other person's hot but it's all happening a bit too fast to not seem suspicious (where only Connery era-Bond or Cary Grant can safely tread). Is that what happens when a charming sociopath puts their moves on you? The winding up in bed with them is carefully crafted to make you think it's chance and fate, the night conspiring to bring you together, but already they're allying you away from your old life with surgical expertise. Even if she doesn't end up boiling your rabbit, or he doesn't have someone's head in a box, it can still be dangerous.  It's like a romantic comedy is coming true and you think somehow you deserve it, that you make the mistake of rising above your class and habit, or lower than it --and the top and bottom are far closer than the middle. What would mother think? Something's not right. A grown man shouldn't be sitting down to martinis with executives at the 21 Club and then exclaim aloud, "I forgot to phone mother!"

from top: De Palma (DRESSED), Argento (BIRD), De Palma, Argento - etc. BIRD, DRESSED

Over in the U.S, De Palma had Bernard Hermann scoring a few of his last and De Palma's earlier films (SISTERS, OBSESSION), which cemented the Hitchcock connection, but genius of creating undulating nervous tension died with him, OBSESSION was his last. Even geniuses like Herrmann doesn't get how sweet romantic songs should accompany murders and suspense music play over romantic parts or that electric guitars and percolating Moogs are awesome under any scene; I've never been too crazy about the jazz music in TAXI DRIVER for that reason, it's like Herrmann doesn't get the ambivalence and Herzogian inscrutable stone face of the natural gods thing the way, say, Tangerine Dream got it for SORCERER. It takes a madness and the ability to convey the full breadth of that madness to another person so immediately they don't have time to pull away like you're crazy person. Wasn't that the genius of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, that it opened us up to genuine madness at such an advanced level we didn't have time to formulate a defense?

It's only when De Palma hooks up with an Italian composer (Pino Donaggio, Giorgio Moroder, Ennio) that he captures the full potential of music in a film as more than just telling the audience what they should feel from moment-to-moment. When Frankie Goes to Hollywood wedge their "Relax" video into the middle of BODY DOUBLE (1987) it's audacious but sensationalistic and gaudy, the love child of the porn world in that film and the T&A-filled killer POV horror film John Travolta works on in BLOW-OUT (1981).

They see you (from top: DRESSED, DEEP RED)

The stuff that really traumatizes me now is the unconscious, casual violence of other films (like VACANCY or WOLF CREEK), that aren't necessarily good or scary but leave me damaged for days. Argento and De Palma are more compassionate in that the very idea of film violence obsesses them to the point that they can target and exorcise it through a double blind mirror-to-the-audience gaze reflector, such as the movie screen-shaped white art gallery entrance in THE BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (below), or the (wider) screened window of De Palma's BODY DOUBLE (below that). We're given a profound and very arty illustration of the perverse appeal of such violence on the big screen, and the reason for our sometimes violent offense over it -- our urge to rush the screen and pull it down before the unthinkable happens. When I was young in the 70s-early 80s, seeing an R-rated murder like in SUSPIRIA or DRESSED TO KILL was the equivalent of a scary roller coaster, a rite of passage, something you needed friends to go to with (at the drive-in or dangerous downtown theater). But if the audience laughs and cheers the murder (as they would going down a roller coaster hill) and someone is there alone and sulky to review the film for the Times, would they not worry that these films are mere pornography for vicious misogynist freaks? I know that's what I would have felt. Because these murders also tap into our mammalian protective instincts, disrupting the thread of narrative immersion as best we can, causing us to scream at characters onscreen in helpless frustration. But our anger over their counterintuitive behavior is our attempt to shirk our responsibility as men, we want desperately to feel like the endangered woman brought it on herself for making so many counterintuitive decisions, to absolve us of the guilt that we couldn't be there, that her death onscreen is the result of our real-life absence from our own lives.

traversable screens - from top: Argento, De Palma, Hitchcock

But it's really the powerlessness of being tied (more or less) to our chair and unable to be heard through the screen (often represented in De Palma like a shower stall or rainy window), and guilty at our own bloodlust, the deep dark reptilian-dysfunctional part of our viewing brains (the type that eats their young and has no empathy), but it's simplistic to call that misogynist, because if we didn't feel that way, if we relished her weakness and bad choices as chances to strike then we have no mammalian brain. Do this and we reduce ourselves to the lonesome status of the reptile, rather than a mammal-reptile hybrid. As so often in Argento films, we shudder enough watching the stalkings and killings that we need our own avatar for that shuddering, someone similarly trapped outside the screen - unable to save and unable to look away - the reptile mind holding our eyes on the blood as well as the Ludovico Technique.

from top: CLOCKWORK ORANGE, OPERA

It's also true that when other artists tries to mix media theory and sex and violence, then giallo tropes can't help but appear--as in Irvin Kirshner's John Carpenter-scripted EYES OF LAURA MARS (1978), which somehow manages to be very Italian just by being into fashion and photography (via Helmet Newton) in New York. To incorporate cameras and films within films and musicians and sound engineers hearing something they shouldn't or seeing something they can't quite remember, is to enter a realm where De Palma and Argento can ace you in their sleep. And they understand something those other films don't that even Fulci and Bava don't mess with, (though I'd say the recent BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2013) does, and Michel Soavi's 1987 STAGE FRIGHT ), the meta-framing of the performance of horror as a rite, an ancient re-enactment of pagan sacrifice older than modern civilization can even grasp but ever present in our DNA just waiting to come out.

children of meta giallo: BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS, EYES OF LAURA MARS

AVENGING ANGELS and DEMONESSES: They might be scared and a victim but they shall rise, oh they shall.

from top: Argento, De Palma, Argento, De Palm -etc.

frpm top: STENDAHL SYNDROM, DRESSED TO KILL Associative and literal misogynistic devouring / dismemberment / triggers

from top: Artento, De Palma, Argento, De Palma, Argento, etc.

There are other tangents and shared motifs:

BLINDNESS: blindness allows for heightened variations on the HVR or helpless viewer response (we can't help them across the street); fetish objects for objectifying scopophiliacs (they can't look back); seeing eyes are ever threatened by what they see (as in the blind men other matriarchal coven-ruled social order in the 1978 TVM, THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME --blindness as symbolic castration).

Argento x 2, De Palma x2

MIRRORS / DOUBLES: They fog, and when something or someone looks in them and freezes stock still, they become their own objects. DOUBLING is related to that --evil twins, and the inherent split of actors and characters (as in the split between the woman playing a terrified woman in a horror film, or literally split in the case of the body doubles in De Palma's BLOW OUT and BODY DOUBLE, figuratively in the separated twins of SISTERS or RAISING CAIN or the eerie similarity romances (someone looks just like someone else the protagonist was in love with and saw die-- stemming from VERTIGO - -Geneveive Bujold in OBSESSION, Melanie Griffith in BODY DOUBLE, Margot Kidder in SISTERS, the two raincoats in DRESSED TO KILL, and so forth.


PRIMARY COLOR SYMBOLISM: Deep Red is the color of menstruation, child birth, the link to sex and excitement, flushed cheeks, heat / dark blue the color of swollen wounds, the chill of the deep, dark death, etc.

DREAMS / DREAMLIKE FLASHBACKS: De Palma relies on them but drags them really slow and methodical and dream-like, without any dialogue and often backwards; Argento flashes to them now and then, more out of stories told or childhood memories of the asylum or before or after (where everyone acts like automatons). De Palma links dreams with horror movies worked on by characters of his movie (John Travolta in BLOW-OUT), or wordless operas, or the clockworkiness of Bergman's WILD STRAWBERRIES or Dali's dream clocks in SPELLBOUND and MOONTIDE.


CIRCULAR STAIRWAYS: Great for chase sequences and as symbolic of the 'descent' into the unknowable squirmy recesses of the subconscious.

frop top: Godard, Coppola, Argento, Argemto,  De Palma, De Palma

SOUND RECORDING: The visual screen is just part of it, of course. Coppola's THE CONVERSATION was hugely influential on both De Palma and Argento (the scopophilia kink extends to eavesdropping); eavesdrops through a listening device while the 'screen' of the detective's office is visible to the left. They both similarly took notice of Godard and Truffaut (as in the DON'T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER-style arc of BLOW OUT) whose incorporation of the recording studios and screening rooms they were using into the films themselves indicated an unhesitating post-modern bent. Godard, especially, began to show the workings of recording machines obsessively in his films, even if they were eventually spouting communist rhetoric.

From top: PEEPING TOM, REAR WINDOW, BLOW-UP, TAXI DRIVER

PHOTOGRAPHY: Antonioni's BLOW UP, Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW and Powell's PEEPING TOM are huge (obviously) influences to both directors. To a lesser extent, TAXI DRIVER (if Travis had a 16mm movie camera to point at the mirror and the pimps, imagine the movie he would make! It would look exactly like TAXI DRIVER!)

from top: DEEP RED, BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, INFERNO

SUBLIMINAL SCREENS: De Palma is more obsessed with the hot female body threatened by the gaze (and threatening to it as well) while Argento is obsessed with childhood dreams, fairy tales elaborated into operatic tableaux (the automaton movements of the characters in the DEEP RED flashbacks, etc.) Argento's is more centered directly on metaphors for media viewing itself (note the way the shadows in the picture above makes the childhood drawing look like its projected on the wall or the radiated light from a TV, or a window (into the primal scene of a killer's squirmy mind); below that is the image from BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE: a theatrical screen-shaped door that the anxious writer can't cross to rescue the bloodied damsel (his desire to enter eventually results in a different screen toppling down on him like a slab); in INFERNO, the screen defenestrates the PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO-style traverser.


For De Palma it's not the art house he recreates but the drive-in, the NASHVILLE or TARGETS or PATTON-style backdrop, such as the flag behind the climax of BLOW OUT or the blue behind Carrie at THE PROM (just as in SCREAM or THE RING it's not the theater or drive-in but the TV), like a kind of multi-media breakdown (the intern introducing the film festival is stabbed onstage right as she's announcing the after-screening Q&A).

I don't see anybody else here. (from top: CARRIE, DRESSED TO KILL, TAXI DRIVER) (for DRESSED witness two lights like eyes with Allen's sexy back the nose and the phone the mouth, that's the Other!)

THE GONE-DEAD GAZE: De Palma's films are never, to my mind, as focused on art, instead dwelling more on politics and on the curvy flesh of hot girls and how the act of sex leaves one vulnerable; the orgasm as last rites; and the terror of that objectifying being reversed, of the woman desired returning the gaze, provoking a response which is always in direct relation to the viewer's fear of being viewed, of being judged by the image with the same ferocity with which we view it. Feminist critics attach too much power to the male gaze, seeing it as ownership, which is like wanting to arrest someone for looking at merchandise without buying it, for "owning it with his eyes" - the killer's look isn't the source of the homicide, it's power but only until the seen looks back, at which time the killer is as exposed as his intended victim, even if we in the audience don't see who it is, the person being attacked has seen As men we love to imagine what studs we'd be in the sack with some hottie we pass on the street. As long as she doesn't turn around and invite us upstairs for a tryst, we're safe in our delusion of male infallibility. But if she drops the pretense and offers or asks for sex, even the most courageous of studs will usually rear back like a startled mare --it's too sudden, too soon, we perceive it almost as a violent slap, we're like Medusa flashed by a mirror raincoat.

from top: 4 FLIES IN GREY VELVET, PSYCHO

And so it is that the ideal object that arouses or fascinates the killer is one that never looks back (portraits with the eyes cut out aside), allowing unchallenged staring. When the portrait of LAURA suddenly appears, in a raincoat and bad mood, the enchantment is instantly dispelled. The murderer's fantasy is to keep his prey from being able to return the gaze (by turning around, taking the killers' mask off, etc.) to becoming simply another object-- the vision of her killer reflected in her dead dilated pupils clears up like a post-PSYCHO shower bathroom mirror. Unless they scan the last image your eyeball saw and project it onto film (as in 4 FLIES ON GREY VELVET), or you come back from the grave, you'll never be able to make amends, divvy up your fortune, go through the seven stages of grief, hide your porn, or tell us who your murderer was. "Poof!" You are inanimate. God knows what strange pains and ecstasies such sudden death would bring as you soul wrenches loose from time, place, and space. I imagine it would depend a lot on your mood at the time whether there was a light to go into or not, and how many Ahmet-style demon dogs were waiting just off camera to devour your heathen soul the moment it pops free of our earthly plane. They sniffed out your soul's immanent arrival like a pack of bears plucking salmon from the river. God knows when, but the cinema of Argento and De Palma know those bears are coming, and prepared for the rending gnashing rip from the mortal coil to come.

Like pre-code neo-Jacobean Tragedy's final, venomous wheeze, THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) sinks its cobra fangs deep into the mongoose of censorship, self-abasement, and social taboo, to levels only Lon Chaney and Josef Von Sternberg dare go (Von Sternberg directed). Exploring an array of sins that the Breen Office demanded over 30 script revisions to obscure, that old devil Von Sternberg directed, and his old genius is still apparent! Somewhat! Oh for a Paramount budget, and Marlene Dietrich... instead there's her old 'sewing circle' pal, Ona Munsen (1) as a dragon lady named Mother  Gin-Sling, owner and operator of a Shanghai casino structured like the rings of Dante's Inferno: as the wheel spins and a Russian threatens to kill himself there's also gigolo-ing, gold-digging, murder, drug addiction, alcohol, white slavery, elaborate revenge, smoking, and Josef Von Sternberg's Super Masochist Sublimation Power, though by then that power was reduced in wattage by changing fate. Based on a play by John Colton, GESTURE bid 1941 America pretend Shanghai wasn't locked in a death struggle with the Japanese. But could we?


We've always needed a slinky broad for these Pacific fantasias to sizzle properly: TERRY AND THE PIRATES would be nowhere without the Dragon Lady; RAIN would be a mere drizzle without Joan Crawford; KONGO (1932) would be pure misery without Lupe Velez; RED DUST (1932) lost without Jean Harlow; MANDALAY (1934) an empty shell without Kay Francis shimmering as Spot White; and Josef Von Sternberg's whole oeuvre would be just chiaroscuro exotica not for the enigmatic Marlene Dietrich, as THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) proves, for as the Medusa-like Madame Gin-Sling--a role that would have been perfect for the then-older Dietrich--we have Ona Munsen, game enough to go up against Walter Huston as a tycoon buying up her block and planning to evict her (at least it has nothing to do with morals). With eyes calmly alight, Mother Gin-Sling encourages our confidence she has a plan, but it all depends on fate's fickle finger dialing her New Years dinner party into a third act denouement of MADAME BUTTERFLY self-immolation.


Munson is certainly commanding and regal, she seems to be having fun, but maybe that;s the trouble; she lacks Dietrich's Hawksian ability to infuse a single glance or wave with subversive innuendo. Instead of Dietrich's hypnotized cobra calm, Munsen has Gale Sondergaard's relaxed but stiff-upper-back regality, a cokehead's way of caging her formal dialogue with nasally enhanced sonorous jubilance, and headgear wild enough to play an 'Oriental' Medusa in Flo Ziegfeld's Mythology Revue. In the end, her headgear is what we remember. I mean that as no disrespect, Munson plays the part well, finds a good balance of camp and tragic aria, but there's a splash of Norma Desmond in there, and in the end she's a good actress, but the role doesn't need a good actress, it needs a star.

Munson split our mortal plane in '55 with a note that read "This is the only way I know to be free again...Please don't follow me." Classic Munson.
The other players, meanwhile, seethe and stagger about the infernal never-closing casino but never quite find a frequency they can all share: Gene Tierney pouts and sulks as Poppy, an obnoxious daddy's girl gone wild, who Victor Mature (as Mother's perennially fezzed gigolo-pimp-procurer, Dr. Omar) seduces with Song of Solomon quotes and lines like: "My mother was half-French and the other half was lost in the dust of time, related to all the earth, and nothing that's human is foreign to me." Eeecch! There's a scene where she shows up drunk and in a jealous rage at his apartment, moments after the 'chorus girl,' Phyllis Brooks has also arrived. Omar can hardly be bothered to feign innocence. It's too bad drugs, drink, gambling, and sex only worsen Poppy's abrasive moods. Tierney here is more than a bit like Tippi Hedren in parts of MARNIE, where their so busy trying to act bratty and deranged they forget to still be charming (Marlene never forgot!). Meanwhile Maria Ouspenskaya hovers below decks as Mother's pint-sized Mongolian assistant; Eric Blore provides a welcome breeze as the casino's accountant and political connection forger; Mike Mazurki is a 'coolie' rickshaw spy (there's no real Chinese stars in the film, as far as I could see); Michael Dalmatoff is the Russian expat bartender; Ivan Lebedeff about to blow his own brains out as an unlucky Russian expat gambler, and of course, looming on the horizon... Walter Huston.


It's not up to his Dietrich collaborations at Paramount, but part of this could be the relative blurriness of the 'they did what they could' restoration. Part is also the attempt to have myriad threads instead of focusing on one character, the way Marlene was the focus in his earlier work. In those we had a very vivid feeling of the street or train in relation to the interiors, to each room. We entered Dietrich's domiciles via slow moving crane shots through rainy exterior street windows. In GESTURE, we have to take Von Sternberg's word for it that the bar and upstairs of the multi-tiered casino are even in the same building. There are some good crowded Shanghai street scenes early on and towards the end, during the big Chinese New Year celebration, shot in the same writhing cacophony of Chinese hustle and bustle (lots of rickshaws) that made the opening of SHANGHAI EXPRESS so effective, but again, they never feel connected to the casino nor the casino connected to its adjacent rooms and bars. Von Sternberg's ornate mise en scene surrounds Munson in exotic murals. Turns out they painted by Keye Luke, who--though Chinese--doesn't appear. The not-adding up things keep adding up. But Tierney is beautiful enough that disinterest seems a small price to pay. Even as you come to hate her character, you just know you'd jump off a bridge if she asked you to.


That said, slowness and pointless bits of business are the side effects of JVS's style--where every character is always moving towards or away from sex or death.  Here, unlike many of his later films there's no feeling this was ever taken out of Von Sternberg's fussy hands by anxious producers (i.e. Howard Hughes with the leaden MACAO or the genuinely sexy JET PILOT).

Maybe it's his clipped delivery and rigid military posture, dart-like rapid sudden movements, the way he kind of leans back as if ready to hurl himself across a table at his quarry as his vowels shorten, but Huston always excelled as inflexible moralist captains of industry, those never hip to their own flaws. He was a cop fond of beating the truth out of suspects in BEAST OF THE CITY, a tough-ass warden in CRIMINAL CODE, a King Lear-ish rancher in THE FURIES, and he bullied and cajoled threatened witnesses to testify. The rafters shook at his inflexible (but blind to its own prejudice) moral indignation. He was like the Old Testament of male authority, just as the New would become embodied by Spencer Tracy. I know it's a side note, but Tracy never worked with Howard Hawks, and I can see why: Hawks had a code, and it had nothing whatever to do with the following the letter of the law. Tracy's characters were law fetishists, treating the strict rules of conduct like Jimmy Stewart treats his flag. At his worst, Huston would use his moral weight to ruthlessly intimidate tribes of Congolese with juju magic tricks; Spencer might do similar things, but would think he was the good guy doing it, because he'd have a bible. He would do with a dopey smirk meant to win a Hepburn heart. Huston had no interest in being seen as good or attractive, only in achieving his grand design. Surely his son John drew on that persona for his own quintessential titan of industry in CHINATOWN.

So it's this paragon who goes up against Mother Gin-Sling. At a climactic "Chinee New Year" she tells him the lurid portrait of her grim early life feigning happiness after being abducted and sold to a 'pleasure boat,' and having pebbles sewn into the bottoms of her feet after she tried to run away (and these grim details survived the 30 rewrites!) And Mother Gin Sling even gives a New Years' eve floorshow out in the street in front of the casino, of girls being hauled up in cages as a reminder of the old white slave auctions. And that survived the rewrites too!

Chinese New Year, celebrating five thousand years of white slavery.

For Huston, it turns out, all this slavery and oppression hits close to home, especially as Poppy's his daughter and she's in debt to the casino, hooked on gambling, drinking, and presumably opium, and it's up to dad to pay her tab, like he's Colonel Rutledge in THE BIG SLEEP. And Huston's tycoon is his own worst enemy, as doomed to confront his past crimes the general in UGETSU. Alas, UGETSU this ain't, and the total of its parts adds up to a shocking denouement that leads inevitably to tragedy. Walter Huston always realizes sooner or later he's his own worst enemy, and that's a sad, crazy day. He's like the censor finally realizing he's cutting off his own genitals every time he cuts a film. He forgot he had a whole other world below his own belt and when he saw that thing rising up from the bedsheet depths in the morning he thought it was a cobra.


RAIN (1931) finds Huston trying to do the reverse, to get a very young Joan Crawford out of tropical prostitution but you know how it is. Once she learns he's arranged to haul her back from the tropics to stand trial (these expat prostitutes are always on the lam after murdering either a violent john or pimp, but it was in self-defense!) she gets religion and he finds her, finally, attractive. Turns out he re-baptizes slutty Christians only so he can corrupt them anew.

There's a great scene in RAIN I was lucky enough to see by chance while tripping one afternoon, wherein Joan's angry as hell, trying to escape up a set of stairs while he stands at the bottom, reciting the lord's prayer over and over again while she screams and yells and then starts moaning and sobbing in despair at the thought of going back to the states and certain execution. I never liked Joan until I saw this scene, on shrooms, watching as she went slowly in perfect modulation during the long single take, moving expertly from demanding him to leave her alone, to begging for mercy, to pleading for her life, to sobbing in despair, to finally joining him in his prayer. Somewhere along the line their two voices entwine, entrain, and she starts reciting the prayer too, stands up, super calm, walks down the stairs, ready to go; in her darkest hour, she finds the lord. Maybe it was the mushrooms that afternoon but I've felt ever since that RAIN is a horror movie. With her thick make-up, Crawford's Sadie Thomson has a ghoulish obscene demeanor; Dr. Mirakle in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE or Irving Pichel in DRACULA'S DAUGHTER could borrow her lipstick; and Huston is her Van Helsing, but thanks to being swamped into a remote midway station on his way to the interior to convert missionaries, he takes it as his duty to convert her back from vampirism, only to turn bloodsucker himself. Naturally because of the code (though it was still weak in '32) there has to be a redemption possible in the form of a Marine who just wants to marry her and lead her into a bright light of avoidance, ala Dorothy Mackaill in DOORWAY TO HELL.

As Marlene said in MOROCCO, "there's a Foreign Legion of women, too."

Kongo (1932)

But that's the thing, if there's an entrainment of the lord, there's an entrainment of the jungle, too. And it entrains Huston's Henry Davidson just as the lord's doctrine entrains Sadie. Huston who clearly doesn't have her interest at heart, but is just a sadist, adhering to the letter of the law out of a kind of continual self-denial, the way senators campaign against gay rights and then go have a men's room tryst.

Just how many movies had women of adventure expatriating in some remote tropical outpost, either servicing the local sailors, or just drinking with the other refugees? Oh, countless. But it all stemmed from two things:

1. Miscegenation -  It's important to remember that censors weren't just patriarchal prudes, they were racist: pre-code never meant no censorship, just less 'clear' rules of conduct: sex outside wedlock between two white people could occur if the woman was a divorcee or widow, or if it occurred in the land of savages--Africa, the tropics, Asia-- where they're more or less the only 'civilized' people around, and the jungle entrainment rules; usually the only thing remotely like a white authority figure is a drunk or junkie priest or doctor or ship's captain under some sort of fever or addiction, to further break down the veneer of modern civilization so that morality can't help but buckle. MGM was the worst, in films like RED DUST: being around 'the coolies' with only a small number of white people around, well the censors were so nervous about miscegenation breaking out that the white-on-white adultery and call girl-trysting was overlooked. A trick still used on racist parents by manipulative white high school girls to this day!

2. Maugham -Just advertising your film as about some hottie who thinks she killed a man taking it on the lam to the tropics where she hooks up with a junkie doctor means you want the public to associate it W. Somerset Maugham, the E.L. James of the 30s. Any film that wanted to have 'steam' just cherry picked plot points from his RAIN, SEVENTH VEIL, and THE LETTER.

2. Prohibition - Only America could be crazy enough to try to enforce such a law, so voyaging abroad where liquor didn't taste like Turpentine became double sexy. Also in the Post-WWI economy, the dollar went farther than most, so one could live the high life in Europe on a pittance, and the kingly life in the tropics. It was on everyone's mind. .

3. Exotica - There would still be flak from minority groups, but the Great War had forced us to get social; we came back interested in the art and cultures, keeping and even further weirding up the aesthetics, creating a picture of the 'other' as kinky, lurid, savage, totally class-conscious, but with exquisite and bizarre taste.


And the Brits always loved Egypt.

Even in our modern age of 'chick-flicks' there are some issues which never get treated 'openly' unless it's during a Very Serious Episode, usually involving both parties deciding to keep the child, despite all the odds, and or give it up for adoption, and/or the father is a religious nutjob trying every means at his disposal to save the 'receptacle' of his holy gift from destroying her chance at salvation even if it means her death. If there's an abortion there must be a great deal of shaming, of tears and anguish over this decision that will haunt the woman the rest of her life. If she doesn't kill herself over i then she's a no-good hussy who deserves what she gets (she's either murdered or ODs). If she has a child out of wedlock and its the pre-code era she deserves to suffer, in fact she insists, but if she suffers long enough she can finally get her child back, and if she tries to make the man own up and do the right thing he might, as was done in the unjustly iconic OFFICER AND A GENTLEMEN, hang himself in his hotel room. If, like in STEEL MAGNOLIAS, the woman is told she will die if she gives birth, it's fine if she dies, as long as the baby lives. There's seldom a doubt if the woman is fallen in some respect that she'll gladly die so her child may live --as in the horrible ending of Blake Edwards' SWITCH or a host of pre-code films like LIFE BEGINS. Even GODFATHER 2 has an abortion used like a weapon, Diane Keaton sneering like she's in the wrong movie about "this Italian thing" and how it all must stop, like she's angry about some fantasy football league instead of a billion dollar empire.

Slate at Cross's.

All of which is to say that like everyone else on the planet I feel strongly on the way the abortion issue is addressed in cinema, and so was overjoyed that the new and great comedy, OBVIOUS CHILD (2014) commits no last minute patriarchal womb co-opting or sudden influx of barbaric fundamentalist patriarchal 'Christian' or 'Muslim' values. At Planned Parenthood-ish office, up and coming comedienne Donna (Jenny Slate) says, "I would like an abortion, please," and respectfully declines the attendant's attempt to encourage her to consider all her options, which is more sympathetic than it sounds, for Slate's delivery is not strident; she doesn't want to seem like she's not taking the situation seriously but neither does she want to wait for some extenuating rom-com circumstance to enter, tumbling, and ruin her figure by 'saving her soul' as so often happens in similar films. Credit the writing and direction of first-time feature filmmaker Gillian Robespierre that we never doubt Donna's sensitivity but her mind is made up and that she's smart and has considered her options and is neither martyr nor lost soul, checking her own tendency to crack jokes to leaven her inner tension, while never presuming that tension is somehow 'valid' because of the surrounding controversy.



Thanks to the red-blue fight-baiting popular media, we know the pitfalls movies like this usually present, as if fate itself restructures reality to allow for some grand sacrificial gesture, so we're totally with her at every moment to break the century-of-cinema-long trend, as when she's about to tell Max (Jake Lacy) the father--a dude she barely knows, who is suspiciously perfect--attentive, nice, witty, good-looking, able to keep right up with her, single --and he mentions he wants to be a grandfather one day and that we was raised a Christian, which she registers with a sudden masterful eyebrow raise and sudden decision to hold off on asking him to chip in for the cost of the procedure. Written and directed by newcomer Gillian Robespierre from an original short, there's such a perfect flow between Slate and the material it's hard to believe it's all not happening in the moment with special attention to the way people actually talk --not 'normal' people, the kind of banal life-affirming doltishness Hollywood jadedly associates with the 'true America'--but real young Williamsburg-dweller college-educated witty individuals. Mining everything for great comedy right down to the drunken fumblings with a condom that are so often jettisoned in nights of drunken abandon, it's the kind of keenly-observed, brilliantly played interaction I've seen only in the best 'ensemble' comedy work, by for example Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph in BRIDESMAIDS (2007) or Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in BROAD CITY (Comedy Central). In short, by people who've done the work to make their characters come alive, rather than by some clueless male or self-hating female screenwriter whose low opinion of young women masks a real cluelessness about how people clever enough to eke out a life on their own but still struggling with self-sabotage issues actually talk and think (as opposed to the godawful dialogue of JUNO and FRANCES HA for example).

Broad City

Slate's ably escorted by a solid batch of actors including: Polly Draper as her business school professor mother; Richard Kind as her puppeteer dad; David Cross as a skeevy comedian chum; Gabe Liedman as the bitchy gay emcee buddy, and Gaby Hoffmann (see: The Little Mescalito that Couldn't) as the roommate.
Great hilarious and brave scenes abound, transcending all the usual chick flick malarkey. Sure, as is the problem seen on everything from the IFC shows GARFUNKEL AND OATES, MARON, and Mike Birbiglia's SLEEPWALK WITH ME, lovers tend to break up with you once you discuss the minutiae of your shared sex life in intimate detail onstage. But how else are you going to prick up audience ears in a crowded bar or wake up sleepy college students? When Donna busts the tale of her abortion out on stage we cringe and hold tight to the arm rests, teeth gritted, expecting yet another long, sad bombing like her previous performance, a drunken monologue of the kind of bitterness and borderline stalking. I won't spoil the endings but I wouldn't even be writing this post were any of the trite pitfalls to be true. The title, incidentally is a Paul Simon song from his percussion-drenched South American follow-up to the South African-centric GRACELAND, and it offers a great primal pumping soundtrack to late night drunken dancing by Donna and Max on their first-night hookup.


Max is perhaps the film's only misstep, casting-wise. I don't mind that he's at least two hotness points over Slate (who gets to keep her sharp ethnic features, hair up in unflattering ways, letting it all hang out) so that it's almost a reversal of the usual comedy with shlubby losers marrying hotties as a matter of course-- just that he's a bit too perfect, one of those second chance no-negative-traits dreamboats that the heroine can't help but be mean to. It would be great if he had, say, an ex-girlfriend booty call girl on the side, or was in the midst of a break-up like she was and also on the rebound, or a drunk, or some other such thing other than a smart career path lawyer and all the other ideal things that might make life easy one day for a snarky downtown bohemian comedienne with no real job skills.

Robespierre and Slate...

It's a sad, strange process, abortion, but what OBVIOUS does is far more daring than just that, it actually gamely takes the first shot at turning that process into legitimate material for a stand-up routine, its honesty translated right across the two usual extremes and long-held vow of silence, denial, and the drabness so many filmmakers confuse with 'importance'. I can see this becoming the film women watch while on the couch recovering from their Planned Parenthood journeys, something that won't make them feel bad about their decision while never making light of it either, seeing it just as a process, something you go through, with no need for self-hatred or permanent emotional scarring. May this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship and collaboration: Slate and Robespierre, the Tina Fey and Amy Poehler of a new generation!

Speak of menstrual cyclists and female teams against the Broseph Patriarchy, GINGER SNAPS (2000) arrives on a stunning blu-ray/DVD combo from Shout Factory this week and as usual they've stepped up to the plate with a fan's loving attention. A classic piece in the history of feminine hygiene horror, it has a justly deserved cult, and a genuine badass attitude. The story is of two sisters, the older Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) and younger introvert Brigitte (Emily Perkins) who hate everyone in their nowhere Canadian high school and live in their own world, taking pictures of themselves in various death scenarios for a badly-received art project. When a popular girl overhears their bitter remarks about her during field hockey practice, an escalating series of fights leads to her death, and Ginger's being attacked by a werewolf. It works because Ginger is not an either/or creation, as in wolf or human. For most of the movie she's more half-and-half: becoming a woman, getting her first period and tufts of fur, is equated with wild animals (like bears after menstruating campers), in ways that are both fantastical and literal, sexuality and monstrous lupine, carnal and charnel. Younger Brigitte, meanwhile, has to begin the scary task of trying not only to help her sister by finding a cure and then cooking it up and injecting it, but by pulling away from their sacred death pact and passing judgment against the 'right' of might, i.e. killing humans is not a moral problem for werewolves, anymore than steak for most 'normal' eaters. There's a few boys and meals to the side, including a helpful chemist/horticulturist/pot dealer who seems partially inspired Josh Hartnett's character in THE FACULTY (1998), but more than anything, this is a girl's horror movie, bloody like the menses-minded wolf.


I didn't really dig this film the first time around (renting it from Blockbuster, on VHS - talk about patriarchal oppression), but now on blu-ray and in full anamorphic glory the autumnal colors glow and the framing and lighting of director John Fawcett can be better appreciated, the echoes of fellow Canadian horror filmmaker Cronenberg better discerned. Its seductive comic book rhythm rushes past all the usual crap that bogs down most high school horror films, focusing instead on the two sisters and their gradual transformation from all-talk to genuine murder and too-late-to-turn-back-now violence escalations.

There's still a few problems like the less-than-stellar werewolf effects (there's no real transformation money shot ala HOWLING or AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON- and the little poodle nose on Ginger is fairly campy), the kinds of problems which could have been covered by CGI, but digital effects were still, as we learn in the extras, in their expensive infancy, and now that CGI is so pervasive, GINGER's reliance on analog latex is retro-cool and adorable. Credit is due in huge part to Emily Perkins, who makes scenes with the transformed Ginger come alive in ways the monster on its own could not. She makes it work. Like Slate in OBVIOUS CHILD we can read all sorts of inferences in her eyes--her understanding of the impassive rubber wolf mask's little gestures makes the mask come alive for us as well. She brings home the real sadness of being stalked by your own sister, the only one in the world you trusted, who know wants you to kill your new and only other friend to prove your devotion. With her sullen long face hidden in a deep foxhole of long protective hair, Perkins is so great and her rapport with Isabelle so solid, the minor problems all melt away.


The wealth of extras include a somewhat rambling making-of documentary, deleted scenes, previews, two separate commentary tracks. The director John Fawcett makes sure we know he's the feminist behind this, not all the women who worked on it, like co-writer Karen Walton (though she does get her own commentary track). They're currently working on the hit BBC show ORPHAN BLACK so they must still be tight -- but I thought that kind of credit-grabbing insecurity existed only in Hollywood. (He does have some slyly deprecating things to say about the final monster, and how they had to keep it in shadow a lot to keep up the scariness --a nice way of saying it sucked - though he was the one who insisted it be hairless and albino). There's some insight into the tax-funded Canadian film industry (there was a backlash when the script was sent around to casting agencies because Columbine had just occurred), audition tapes from the early part of the process, and what the actors look like now (or Emily Perkins anyway, who seems like a completely different person, below)

But the real juicy extra is a panel of female horror writers and filmmakers discussing menstrual horror films that deal with women's sexuality and how drastically apart films like GINGER SNAPS are from the bulk of slasher films and expressions of man's horror of gynecology and the female orgasm, the scariness and pain for the girl of her first period, and the way females can only achieve orgasm in movies if they also kill their lover immediately. They give some love to the underrated JENNIFER'S BODY (a woman-directed film written by Diablo Cody that I like way better than JUNO, obviously), CARRIE (of course), and VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS, a film that could really use a blu-ray treatment. And they seem to agree with me that TEETH is a nice idea that totally fails as a film, its makers second-guessing and sewing members back on right up to the time I turned it off.


The sum of their discussion is never voiced, but you can read it here: GINGER SNAPS is badass, it dares to never even approach the idea of a 'normal' life being worth a shit. We don't end the film with Brigitte cutting her hair and finding a nice boy her own age and all that garbage usually force-fed audiences by an out-of-touch Hollywood. It and OBVIOUS CHILD are worth anyone's time, and repeat viewings. GINGER has gone on to have quite a cult for itself, and even two pretty good sequels. I hope OBVIOUS CHILD does the same, and that it blows Zach Braff's facile WISH I WAS HERE (which includes "Obvious Child" on its golden indie oldies soundtrack - as if snooping over Gillian Robespierre's shoulder) out of the water, and that more female writers and directors and actors have the balls, if you'll forgive the expression, to take the reigns of conveying the bizarre terrors of their menstrual and reproductive cycles, rather than leaving it to men for whom the vagina is still a disturbing thing, a lack -- a void ever ready to swallow them up, but over which they presume control once they have successfully entered and planted their flag, so to speak. Fuck them and their flags, so to speak. If every abused suffering wife and daughter in a fundamentalist or abusive home just slit her husband's, father's or oldest son's throat in the dead of night, we'd wake up to a world free of violence. Am I the only one who thinks like this? Fuck the irony! Wake the Venusian Flytrap kraken, a screaming jock or frat boy bleeding from its every anemone tendril orifice!

Most fans of 50 Shades of Grey--the kinky BDSM bestseller by E.L. James--were wincing (and not in a good way) at last week's debut of the forthcoming film adaptation's conventional, fashion mag-slick trailer - "I didn't like it the the sixth time, when it was called 9 1/2 Weeks!" But no one asked the big question: What's wrong with cinema that it can't seem to capture the sickly turn-ons of a good bondage book? When I saw and heard the conventional sounding Edward of the piece, Mr. Grey (Jamie Dornan), the "masterful" captain of industry and 'wealthy, spontaneous, travel-minded' gentleman (the kind of man every girl with an online personal ad pines for --take it from me, who's lazy, poor, hates travel, and is too cheap to shop anywhere but H&M and Kohl's). I was glad to see he had one of those freaky reptilian-bird-alien-CGI-hybrid faces like old Bob Pattinson's, but his hair, suits, and voice, not to mention age, are as ROTM as a lawyer-cum-porn star in a 90s direct-to-cable office thriller.

There, there. There's always Wild Orchids 2.

Maybe no one now working today could have filled the Mr. Grey part with any degree of affect, except Harvey Keitel (the latter a prospect too odious for the producers to consider seriously, which is exactly why it would have been awesome). It also may have worked if Dornan kept his Irish accent, or wore his hair in a crazed Irish tousle to give himself the air of a coked-up Caligula, but there are just too many  young male models with nothing but gym muscles and hair gel by way of 'gravitas' pretending to be high-powered executives on network TV.  Dornan is beautiful but would he ever make it as a dom outside of a Westworld-style robo-fantasy? I know some girls who are or were dominatrixes for a living. They are terrifying.


And that's the problem with adaptations of bondage books in a nutshell. Shit's Freudian, it runs deep. Anger over one actor playing a character already cast in the mind of every turned-on broad in America is normal but sadomasochistic stuff is doubly difficult because what's so very erotic on the page becomes either too goofy, i.e. tame (Secretary) or too genuinely violent and disturbing (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).  Too much visual information (facial cues) lead us right out of the sadomasochistic spectator pleasure position, which short-circuits our higher mammalian complexes, recapturing the the age when we tattled constantly on our fellow children in hopes of witnessing their humiliation via their mom's wooden spoon or dad's belt (1). Ideally we evolve past this stage by around third or fourth grade. But on the printed page we can easily override the empathic response (as long as we know it's fiction and not some true crime novel) whereas onscreen our mammalian higher functioning kicks in --presuming we're not sociopaths or high on cocaine (2). Masochism may survive onto the big screen without much damage (as in the films of Josef von Sternberg or Luis Bunuel), but not in the form of traditional leather and lace scenes as books might describe.

According to Gaylyn Studlar, true masochism can only exist in dreams, conjured more out of a need to safely experience the abyss, or to trick out the satisfactory endorphin rush that surges to accommodate sudden pain (or the heroic measure of wasabi or hot sauce); it must be done person or in the mind where we can imagine a transformational ecstasy that ordinary movie watching doesn't accommodate. That's why for example the shocking Times Square marquee or the film capsule review might get our desire fired up but the actual film will never measure up; it's the difference between remembering your own crazy, erotic dream and hearing about someone else's.

There was a small, velvet-lined restaurant in NYC called La Nouvelle Justine (in the late 1990s) that offered a menu that included spanking hot young slaves or being spanked, and an overpriced chocolate mousse cake in shape of a spike heeled boot for parties of five or more. While tourists and bachelorettes snapped pictures and laughed in embarrassment, tame bondage rituals were enacted and pretty slaves marched back and forth, pretending to be thrilled at the prospect of their future lucrative punishments by the diners. We were there for my roommate's orgymongering sister's birthday, so we bought her a hot boy of her choosing to spank, knowing she was no slouch in this department. One light (for her) slap and he jumped up and ran away with a yelp; the bouncers came over to warn her to be gentle. Fuckin' midtown, man.

Hearing is believing (from top): Weekend, Persona

I was into bondage myself, off and on, for years, always more in theory than practice (losing my virginity to "Venus in Furs" helped), and generally turned off by any evidence of it onscreen (see above uncanny valley illus.) why, for example, so many Nerve profiles cite as their favorite sex scene Persona (1966), which has no sex scene at all. What it has a monologue, delivered in a flat, slightly ashamed voice.

As our French correspondent Severine notes: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic literature." But then the book sells, gets passed around at private working mom book clubs, and boom, best-seller, so then someone has to make a movie of it. The problem should have already been apparent to us back in the era of 9 1/2 Weeks (see top image), a 1986 film that had a lot of buzz, a bit like 50 Shades has now, and fooled people who saw it into forgetting they hated it. Part of a post-American Gigolo cocaine-modernist penthouse spandex-and wool socks aerobics sexual aesthetic that has not aged well except as camp (see also: The Hunger, Flashdance, Shiver, Last Seduction, Disclosure, Basic Instinct), 9 1/2 Weeks with hot young Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke (back when he was still pretty) engaged in all sorts of kinky shit with ice cubes and candle wax; it never drew much of a response other than titters at the college Quad when I saw it. Sure I was drunk at the time, and drunk college students in a large group are apt to jeer a terrible film like 9 1/2 Weeks, especially since there's always one or two girls (and Roger Ebert) who loooove it.

mens in black, blondes to the right: 9 1/2 Weeks (1986); Dangerous Game (1993)

Similarly, all that 'R' erotica stuff in the back row of Netflix and Amazon Prime, like Emmanuelle, Justine, or The Story of O is never sexy except in rare instances of almost incidental hotness and of worth only for their non-'erotic' elements --the zooms, the terrible fashions, the hilariously stilted artsy blocking; and sometimes we 'remember' them as hot, since remembering brings eventually us into the same zone as literature, or the dream. We live in an age of STDs like no one in the ancient 60s and 70s could have e'er envisioned; free love has been hidden away so that the jovial bacchanal of 70s XXX is replaced by condoms on gym-muscled dudes pumped with Viagara so a girl doesn't get a break; and stuff that moves off the lip of the familiar and seems genuinely dangerous-- such as the borderline misogynistic mental pummeling of Madonna in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game (1993)--stirs our preliminary superegoic shock troops into inner-censorial unsexy PC knee-jerking.

While the trailer reminded me of Adran Lynne's 9 1/2 Weeks and its subsequent deluge of big budget late 80s-early 90s sex thrillers, the uproar reminded me of the last big author of sexy bondage and vampire love stories, Anne Rice, had a surprise S/M novel breakthrough akin to that of 50 Shades with her kinky 1985 novel, Exit to Eden. It was of course picked up by Hollywood, but for some reason they balked at its original conception and cast Dan Akroyd and Rosie O'Donnell in the leads as buddy cops, which made the book's fans feel like Jimmy Stewart when Midge shows him her self-portrait in Vertigo (1958)

Venus in furs

From top: Blonde Venus, That Obscure Object of Desire

I've been going to bed really early lately, sometimes five or six AM. And any film lover knows movies at dawn have their own rare magic, illuminating inner truths not usually seen within earlier screenings, just as two opposing mirrors might illuminate rarefied sights such as the back of one's head, the better to appraise one's hair, freeing the gaze from its familiar angles in ways the day's medicine cabinet mirror glance of prime time doth not afford. Films I've seen a thousand times are alien and strange at this black magic hour, are delivered from their familiarity and made new and wondrous. I would bring on my desert island these gathered here, though if I haven't been living on a desert island lately I never will be. So keep your VERTIGO, your CITIZEN KANE, your RULES OF THE GAME and GONE WITH THE WINDs. They make me sick. I've been sick all week, reaching the end of a decade-long mid-life crisis--my tethers coming to an end at once. So if e'er was a time to build a raft from these timbres, it's now, for these films have proven of late still lighter than air, and still potent enough to remind me why I drank in the first place and that anything that kills you makes you cool first, unless you were behaving like an idiot to begin with.


I'll never go to bed early again, not when I can re-watch THE BIG SLEEP over and over, flipping the disc (there are two versions now, for wonders never cease) and pondering the mystery of who actually killed Owen Taylor and what the hell happened in that sexy bookstore fadeout and why there's no one around today with the hetero cool of Hawks and Bogart and no girl like Bacall as their third wheel, and why in the hell that damned good looking girl I brought in the Sunday rain to the Film Forum to see the recently discovered 'pre-release cut' would throw me over for some Italian the following week. All I need to know is that Bogie and Bacall both radiate such alchemically rich magic both separately and together that time stands still and the fine print of the plot fades into the dripping shadows of time like the chuckling gasp of a post-shot in a paper cup Harry Jones. Bet that Agnes of yours wouldn't turn it down. Even knowing it would be her last. (See Anima Scythe).


Latest viewing notes, post-reshoot version: I understand now that my adult tastes were formed around this film and that it left me with no love of outdoor scenes actually filmed outdoors. I just noticed, finally, that there are no actual outdoor shoots here, that all the exteriors are on gloomy Warner Bros. sets, in and around Geiger's house and street, and Huck's Garage and the house in the back, and how Bogie prowls around them like a kid's imagination on his father's train set with the basement lights off in the dead of night; his giant face like the moon above the scene, alive with great dialogue, and stellar lighting. Bacall glows right off the screen thanks to all that dark; even CASABLANCA has sunny LA exteriors around the WB set to dampen the dream-like mood with hangovers and bazaars, but SLEEP never leaves the darkness; there was probably a war on. And all the women have jobs or are on the make, or are into drugs, gambling, decadence, smoking, drinking their lunch from a bottle, and falling onto a guy's lap while he's standing up. Hawks' greatest film, it leaves me with zero tolerance for ditzy housewives, Norman Rockwell mailmen, and apple-cheeked kids--may they all rot in hell for their code-poisoning. why couldn't there have been Hawks-Bogart adaptions of all Chandler's books, all filmed just like this? I would cut off my left foot for that. I wouldn't need it. Or sunlight.

It was starting on a local TV station one afternoon in 1981, the exact moment my mom's friend from church had connected the very first ever VCR. It was like landing on the moon. I taped the whole thing, missing only the first half of the credits, and I watched it obsessively, even though it was missing several scenes. When those scenes showed up later I was as excited as I could ever get - that is until 1997 when the Army preview cut of BIG SLEEP surfaced. By then I had read the Robin Wood book on Hawks at the library and become a dyed in-the-wool Hawksian at 14 years-old.  If I have courage in my life it's for the sense of brotherhood in this film - there's such a great rapport between Hendry and his crew that I really wants to be all I can be in the Air Force, at the North Pole, forever and ever.

When a peer group is captured correctly on film, as in Howard Hawks, or Richard Linklater, you get a feeling of the power and joy of belonging, a power and joy most adults hiding behind the evening paper at home have no recollection of. They condemn it in their children as dangerous, but without that kind of peer group power there wouldn't be a civil rights movement, a free India or America, or women voters, or even the current Wall Street occupation. And I can't help but wonder if EDGE wasn't shelved just for that reason, because of the terror producers must have felt when seeing a movie where the kids were genuinely dangerous, instead of just screwing in cars and kidnapping the school mascot and being 'edgy' in that edgeless rote misogynist PORKY'S way. (See Vandal in the Wind)

I don't recall these skulls in the movie, but they're on a BAM notice for the film and are damned cool.

The whole first half of this film is a glorious ribbing of censors, colonialism, and British prudery, only to reverse the flow by having the Henry Davidson harumpher turn over to Shanghai Lily's side after he sees her praying for Captain Harvey's safe return. The middle chunk occurs at a midway between Peking and Shanghai depot that Chinese revolutionaries have held for a prisoner swap, wherein Warner Oland barters with Shanghai Lily, incurs the vengeance of Anna May Wong, and otherwise sets himself up for trouble at a second floor railway station with more mosquito net wall veils than a dozen hospitals. One doesn't get rape-revenge sagas folded neatly within a single reel of a 1932 movie, but this is special even for Von Sternberg-Dietrich. I taped it by accident when a whole festival of JVS/MD films were on PBS in the early 80s and I was a monster-hungry high school nerd not sure quite why I liked it but I did, and became a fan all just from the one scene where the frumpy boarding house matron tries to give her card to Anna May and Marlene ("What kind of a house did you say?").


Second only to OVER THE EDGE as far as sending up the harbingers of decency and parental micro-managing, it's got great quintessential pre-code Paramount jazz music score, and the cream of the crop of character actors including Eugene Palette and Gustav von Seyffertitz and Anna May Wong, so sexy and exotic and makes such a fine pair with Dietrich in her black feathers and veil that they seem like a pair of 60s Carnaby Fashion models wandering into the 30s via a Donald Cammell time warp.

Finally, it's the ultimate rationale for why artifice and illusion are cinema's--as well as woman's--stock and trade. Without all the smoke and mirrors no one would ever hook up of their own free will. The man wants to fuck and run and it's the woman's task to devour him like a Venus flytrap luring the unwary fly. She mustn't betray her true feelings at first, mustn't tremble the leaves and tip off the prey; she must stay aloof in the same way the image mustn't include a boom mike shadow. It is accomplished.


My favorite comedy, it's like the Marxes if there were all Chicos and sociopathic killers; Mr. Camonte's secretary Angelo (Vince Barnett) getting so mad he almost shoots the phone, wondering 'bout the word 'education' - the uneasy chill of Camonte's clowning and smiles with his innocence and corruption and nothing in between...  the insert scene at the DA's office - seems like Hawks took the DA scene out of SLEEP because they put this one in."But what can we private citizens do?" The rant about "they offered their services two years ago!" The cops are dour "When I think what goes on in the minds of these lice I want to vomit!" snarling and bitter, the reporters snarky and half-crazed from hot ink fumes. The gangsters half mad from giggles, unable to stay out of hiding to bowl. Hecht's black comic Broadway witticism all over a scene at the theater seeing RAIN."This a girl Sadie... she's been a-what-a you call 'disillusioned.' Ann Dvorak's jazz baby seductive dance (even the music rocks like Satchmo), Karen Morley calmly accepting Tony's light instead of Lovo's, and on and on.


There's certain movies so much like my life I can't tell them apart. This is one movie like that, though I first saw and taped it on a TNT colorization, where it saved my life (details here); "I'm a New England spinster who's pushing 40.""Well who the hell isn't?!" Sure it's pretentious in parts but so is my life; when one is a romantic at heart one risks all for love even if or especially if it means your certain doom. And there's Sue Lyon luring you over the falls like a mirage in the mist.

Like OVER THE EDGE it is clearly on the side of the drunks and deviants, a punch in the snoot to the Tab Hunter beach movie (the fight with the beach boys and Hank). It's written by a gay man from the Southern 50s and the Ava Gardner part is meant for Ana Magnani where it would make more sense that Shannon's 'settling' to stay in paradise rather than take the long swim. And there's the old poet, ranting during the luncheon: "Love's an old remembered song a drunken fiddler plays / stumbling crazily along crooked alleyways."

My band and I loved this film in the 90s when the (colorized TNT version I'd taped) was a post-gig come-down favorite which we'd quote liberally: "strike the iron's hot, while its hot." It's a film for all kinds of romantic dysfunction, including abstinence and impotence and as one who's been both I respect that "nothing human disgusts (Deborah Kerr), Mr. Shannon... unless it's unkind... or violent." That line has become my creed, and a good way to imagine AA meetings, the 'talking cure' the way sharing intimate personal tragedy and strangeness with others helps calm us down. "I had a spook like yours once, I used to call him the blue devil" / "Endurance is something that spooks and blue devils respect, and the tricks they use to dispel their panic. Everything we do to give them the slip and so keep on going." Well, this movie is mine, this my trick, this movie my life raft that's never deflating, even sans colorization, sans band, sans Cialis, sans alcohol, sans... everything.


I had to pick one W.C. Fields movie, or Marx Brothers, so it was this. It's not perfect but I love it and can watch it incessantly. Peggy Hopkins Joyce is the pre-code equivalent of Anna Nicole Smith, and Burns and Allen do their schtick, and W.C. Fields is at his most feral, alcoholic, and assertive. I guess NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK is a favorite as well, but it's tough to put on this list because of all the lengthy Gloria Jean musical numbers, which even she doesn't seem to like doing. Bela Lugosi is the Russian buyer for the radioscope.. "Kansas City is lost, I am here!

Death is all around in TWENTIETH CENTURY. Oscar Jaffe threatens suicide (with sublime melodramatic flair) every time he starts to lose control of his actress or budget and the dialogue is choked with hilarious threats and insults, like "If he were dead and in his grave, I'd throw a rope around his neck and drag him on a Cook's tour!" But like some crazy shaman, Jaffe treads the lip between life and death in split second ham doses. Contorted like his old silent version of Mr. Hyde with hands curled in pre-strangling mode one moment, lowering them them gently at his sides in the manner of a priest to meet a backer that wants to finance his play "from a religious angle" the next. In a split second after split second, Barrymore's whole soul morphs and erupts into entire plays worth of indelible moments bashed together in long single shot takes where Hawks just uses the edges of the image as the train dimensions and lets these cats with their tails tied together have at it. It's ham-shamanistic alchemy, and the great, dark self-reflexive material brings out a full-on dose of Barrymore mania...kind of like what Robin Williams pulls off sporadically as the voice of the genie in ALADDIN or the TERMINATOR 2000 model dying in a molten pool of steel. A tale, ultimately, of a doomed impresario hurtling ever forward into the void, we wouldn't see a better locomotive-character/fearlessly self-depth-plumbing actor combo until Jon Voight's crazed escaped convict in RUNAWAY TRAIN.
Had to pick one desert island Kubrick. THE SHINING is maybe better, or has more class, but this has a sterling deep black comic magic that's in some ways far more terrifying, especially with the mad genius of Peter Sellers in full flower.

---- I suppose this is the mark for desert island discs. but if in a pinch I might even take some of these first:

11. DRACULA (1931)
dir. Todd Browning

This movie has my DNA stamped into it - it's a part of me and that's a fact. I've performed it in a one man ten-minute rooftop sideshow, screened it (in a 'Castle Films' reel) at druggy outdoor parties at half speed, been Drac for Halloween countless times, and I could give a shit that the film's so disjointed, that Whale's two FRANKENSTEIN films are so much better. This is the groundbreaker, the one everyone has seen once at least, and it used to be on all the time on UHF TV (without the girl being thrown in the lake cut out). Lugosi is the quintessential undead, the one from which all others flow. He is immortal. He's a part of me. His unworldly power is still startling, not that he's scary so much as magnetic. When he tries to control Van Helsing wiht his will you think to yourself Lugosi really does have ESP ability, you can see the shimmering auric tentacled drawing Van Helsing to him across the room. I even love the quiet, the lack of film music, making this seem like it was forgotten, that the camera just happened to be on during someone's 5 AM laudanum fever dream. Mina Harker - unearthly; David Manners - anemic - dwight Frye - hammy,

Lastly a recent uncovering (thanks to Mick LaSalle) of the existentially morbid WWI aviator films written by John Monk Saunders, I've been better able to situate the film in terms of drunken chilled moments at the flight control HQ bar or the consoling arms of Parisian meter maids. Lucy's recitation of the "Hurrah for the next who dies" toast in DRACULA connects to the same toast in EAGLE AND THE HAWK and DAWN PATROL (similar toasts and surrealist gusto in ACE OF ACES); and Helen Chandler wafts through LAST FLIGHT like the ghost of Mina Harker's soul now that Drac has her body. There may have been better movies, but this one's still never been bested. In its unearthly quiet and sheer perverse oddity it's like a British opiate addict WWI pilot's fever dream of what's going on in the mansion of his fiancee back home while he's battling the Hun. Next time you watch it just let it set in your mind that everyone involved with this film is long dead... that's true for most 1931 films but this one feels like it, it's a ghost transmission made from beyond while the actors were still alive (a formality); how's that for ghoulish existential truth? Black and white film - the ultimate vampire bite.
John Carpenter is always at his best when trying to remake RIO BRAVO, and this here is RIO BRAVO on Mars meets the old school bad guys and cops binding together to fight an alien source that he explored earlier in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, another favorite. I would never leave the planet without it. The greatest film of the 22nd century, it's genius has yet to be fully appreciated, but if PLAN NINE had a baby with THE THING, it would be GHOSTS. And Ice Cube and Natasha are a dynamite team.

A stock of top shelf eccentric character actors as the salty pirates; a real ship on real seas, Beery hobbling masterfully about like he's seldom been t'land. Poetic and darkly hilarious "this molasses is sweeter than serpent sedative!" - Great effects, sets and so forth, I personally love old Jim Hawkins and I generally hate kid actors, so there you go. When old scalawag Long John rows away at the end, there's a strange elegiac tone almost akin to the end of THE MISFITS. We're saying goodbye to charming rogues who could advise and guide wide eyed innocents in the ways of social scheming, all the things the code was worried that kids would learn. After this no Long Johns, certainly they couldn't escape at the end, to plunder happily ever after, and certainly not be around as a sage to children. Too damn bad.

I love this film for myriad reasons but one that jumps to mind is its gleeful shucking of romance (it sticks to the book and doesn’t tack on any pointless love interests) and total absence of morality. After all, the plot involves young Jim Hawkin’s going after loot stolen by pirates from murdered Spanish men and women who fell victim to the marauders of the high seas. Talk about gray areas! It aint like they’re gonna return it to the rightful owners… no sir. You root for Hawkins and his bewigged parent figures because–to quote from the scriptures of the Holy Grail, “they ‘aven’t got shit all over ‘em” – but you also root for smooth talking Silver, played with great dog-eared goofiness by Wallace Beery and his rawther repulsive looking band of brigands.

There’s a real palpable sense of bonding between Hawkins and Silver here (Beery had won an Oscar working with Cooper in THE CHAMP earlier) which takes the place of a usual dull romance as the film’s central “evolving” relationship. Basically what we see is that Silver wins out, evil as he is, because he’s good with children. He knows how to stoke the fires of Hawkin’s imagination and together they come out ahead even as everyone is dying all around them. You have to appreciate as well the sight of a young boy shooting a pirate and killing him dead with no moral hand-wringing and all the crap you’d have to go through with the ratings board and parent organizations in today’s hellishly overprotective climate. Other highlights? Lionel Barrymore as Billy Bones, telling horrible tales of warming his rum with the blood of slaughtered royalty and drunkenly bullying all the folks at the Admiral Benbow into singing “Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum.” My favorite movie to convulse to back in my drinking days. Lots of great wind effects.

Sticking it to the Walt Disney Military Intelligence Complex by inverting its 'Lächelnd macht frei' ethos, newbie writer-director Randy Moore's black and white chronicle of the last day and night of a family at Disney World, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW is the first sign the the apocalypse will involve enforced smiling and animatronic vampires holding hands around the world. Beautiful to look at in 16mm handheld on-ride stolen shots (the movie was filmed on the sly without Disney permission), ESCAPE's camerawork delivers surprisingly little whiplash jerky motion sickness and instead offers comedic cognizance, great AMERICAN BEAUTY / LOLITA obsessive midlife crisis-ing, David Lynch post-modern artifice-surrealism, and Guy Maddin black and white fuzzy basement expressionism as we watch a nuclear family implode as dad's (and eventually mom's as well) perceptions of reality, fantasy, and papier-mâché facsimile dissolve into one throbbing archetypal hydra.

As this dissolving father, Roy Abramsohn is a perfect blend of guarded and agape; thrown for a loop by an early morning phone call (wherein he's fired) taken out on the hotel balcony to not wake the family, sets him off, especially once his little boy locks him out of the room where his family is snuggled up asleep together. Their day at Disney finds the dad haunted by a pair of nubile but clearly underage French girls (Annet Mahendru, Danielle Safady) who giggle amidst themselves, make flirty eye contact with his children, and express vibrancy in that perfectly self-contained way that heralds any sex-starved 40-something father breakdown, leaving him powerless to resist ogling them like a school boy bewildered by his first hormone surge. And why shouldn't it? The mom (Elena Schuber) won't even accept his most rudimentary physical affection, for no reason she can really explain, other than perhaps sensing he's overcompensating --though for what she's too stressed to bother finding out.


Equating the eye of older men being drawn to younger women as analogous not to cougars but to older women being drawn to other people's very young children, the film becomes a reflection of the differing gender drives (one protective/nesting the other seed-sowing) and how one is considered holy and the other vile, each a reprisal against the other; so which came first, the vilifying of the man's attraction to younger women or his wife's treating him like a rotten kid rather than granting him any power or respect as 'the father'? Shut out of the closed circuit of a child-mother pair bond and unable to raise so much as his voice against them, the dissolving father is sabotaged by negative portrayals in the media on his role as ultimate signifier. Instead, the father is himself put into the Oedipal exile originally reserved for his son, emasculated by the mother-son rejection and so both weakened and freed from the responsibility of his own actions. Why wouldn't he be drawn to a woman still young enough to think he's not a child, who is equally cast out of the closed circuit mother-son pair bond? The older man grants the younger woman a rare chance to try out her seductive powers on a 'safe' target (a wedding ring signifies both a dare and a freebie) and to feel like she's correcting the Elektra-exile she has herself suffered since she came of age to compete with the mom for status as the hottest bitch on the block (think Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Rather than recognizing her role as its instigator, the mother sees their shared secrets as a priori justification for her coldness.


This post-70s change in husbandry was instigated by huge films like THE EXORCIST and E.T. with dads not even present for the trials suffered by mother and children. Family men were and are depicted as either wimpy-voiced second class females or else gangsters, thugs, rapists, molesters, Satanists, sell-outs, government flunkies, pimps or psycho loners, OR simply not around at all (they only return --with their unique sets of skills--when their daughter's been abducted or killed by a man who IS around, thus negating the father function except en absentia); older daughters meanwhile are Lolitas, jailbait, white trash short shorts eye candy harlots out to tempt weak-willed husbands 'just because they can' or sexophobic virgins able to forge a sex-free friendship only with some similarly disabused and immanently dead older male, such as a sad-eyed cop, lawyer or mining engineer. Even then, mom glowers, as if the only role their man should have is as a devoted spectator to her perfect bond with their young son (ala Jennifer Connelly in LITTLE CHILDREN). Raising children on their own, these moms are elevated to saints with no time for smiles or joy as they work two jobs to put food on the table and swat away questions about why dad left with tearful displays of eternal devotion that all but ensure the son never grows up, leaving the post-pubescent babysitters and any remaining fathers to drive back to her house alone together, with mom's curses and suspicions by way of adieu.C'est fou, eh, Pierrot?


But that presumes a certain midlife crisis-level case of bad judgment, the sort only spousal scorn/frigidity and no place or time to masturbate can bring. With that bad judgment comes an inability to correctly read a scene - to never know if the son has black alien eyes or if those teenage French chicks really like you or are just creeped out. From there it's a short skip and a jump into the abyss of delusional paranoid schizophrenia AKA Imaginationland! Does Disney World's all-consuming devotion to fantasy encourage this escape, or actually enforce it?


Some critics complain that we never quite learn what the hell is really going on in ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW. By now you should know I am not one of them.  I applaud any movie that dares blur the line between daydream, fantasy, hallucination, nightmare, and paranoid reality. Once some parameter is set up as to what's a dream or fantasy I lose interest, which is why I'm no fan of BILLY LIAR, for example.

Ambiguity might or might not rule!


Along his embryonic journey, ESCAPE's dad gets into a fight with his bitch wife, runs into a sexy nurse whose tears and veiled worry about some contagious disease rocking the park make her seem both starved for attention and desperate to seem 'open' to seduction (as soon as she's waved them out of sight with she breaks down - it's okay since no one is watching). Dad also runs into a spooky Maleficient-style witch (Alison Lees-Taylor - the sexiest craziest witch since Deborah Reed in TROLL 2!) who hypnotizes dad with a sparkling jewel, luring him into a midday tryst at the presidential suite while his daughter sleeps in the other room and the witch's son watches TV. The witch's post-orgasm sad eyes reflect sad desperation. She tells him that rich Japanese businessmen pay thousands of dollars to sleep with the Disney princesses --and she was one of them, and that not being able to register a single negative emotion all day at work gradually drives every Disney employee insane.



If this all plays a bit like EYES WIDE SHUT, well, old Walt was a 33.3 degree Mason and the enforced smiling signifies tier-two Monarch programming. Is the witch some kind of manipulator/ trigger sent on by the forces of darkness upon sensing his vulnerability? You'd think getting his rocks off would lessen his frustrated weirdness, but even when the boyfriends, replete with obnoxious long curly hair, of the girls show up he can't get them out of his mind, or the camera's vision. From there, it just gets weirder, approaching flume chutes down which only the brave Cinemascope funeral snakes such as David Lynch or Bunuel dare plunge. When you can no longer tell what's real or illusion, you are finally free, finally getting your all-day pass's money's worth. Monsterdom begins at home and if you look farther than the mirror to find your mortal enemy, you never really had one to begin with.
Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all do a bit to cement the equation of madness with Disney's subversive use of archetypal psychology, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but I'm guessing it's like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, and eventually declaring "I am the Lizard Queen." And little moments like the pre-fireworks pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards them and away at the same time until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable and Clift rodeo lassos. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive witch costumes, make-believe, costumed freaks, and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, and aside from a few missteps, such as a scatalogically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped) it's pretty tight with the ambiguity. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen of park footage ring with an absurdist post-modern unease.


If ESCAPE ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts I for one shall not complain. I've always felt the French are far more clued-in about how to balance work and play. If you go to the beach for a month you never feel the clock ticking on your space for enjoyment. You never feel the need to not waste time, to have 'more fun' than you are having now (the family rapt before some display of fireworks or whales, and mom or neutered father going "isn't that wonderful, Caitlin?!' or "isn't this fun, Caitlin?!" unable to shut off her motormouth thought babble even before a spectacle that overwhelms any rational need to comment). Instead of this (socialist) cognizance about the inability to have fun under a time clock, America surrenders to the idea of the one week vacation, the trip to Disney World as being some sacred ideal to aspire to and hold holy as you slog away the molasses hours at work the rest of the year, waiting for that one week off in July, saving money and deferring all joy in life for this one expensive dream week, until you're finally there, and any sense of spontaneity or fun buckles under the pressure.

But old Walt is too canny to not understand this basic problem, hence the all-inclusive package stay, which makes the unlimited access to all rides and accommodations a liberating freedom from any imperative to enjoy, though some moms stick it in anyway (like the one in ESCAPE). Here's an example: My dad traveled all the time for work so hated going on vacation with us. He needed a break, so my mom took my brother and I by herself to Bermuda one year and then Disney and Epcot (shortly after it opened) the next. Going to Bermuda without him made me feel I had to step in, even at 13 years-old, and be the man of the family, which meant worrying about how much everything cost (I wouldn't go snorkeling since it was $23 an hour per person, so my mom and brother went and I sulked in the room) but at Disney my oldest man of the house status didn't compel me to take on responsibility. We had already paid so it was about getting as much as you could out of it.


I mention all this to draw the conclusion that fathers are superfluous at Disney World. Their dreams are never meant to come true, because their dreams involve being single, childless, and young. And since they can't go back in time to being 22 they are unable to discover what in advance of seeing it. Once they see a way back into the past, a chance to dive onto the passing train, they take it. They get drunk, dance around, buy a motorcycle or a fez, and let themselves be seduced by younger women. But beware giving up your adult father power, Papa. This move will only confirm mom's treatment of you as just the oldest child, the perpetually 'in trouble' oldest son as the mom more and more surrenders to an inner animus-domination that has her convinced she's the sole voice of authority in the family. You can try to be free while she glowers and nags, but soon even there the thrill will be gone, the bloom will be off the rose, and the new flesh mouse ears grown so deep into your brain as to be irremovable. And when you finally look for the treasure map that leads to your buried balls you find it's been torn, frayed, and scattered Osiris-like to the far corners of the REKALL amusement park. Lucky for you then, there's a facsimile souvenir offering proof you ever had some, and photos. Look, you're smiling!