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Shatner on the Altar: HORROR AT 37,000 FEET, DEVIL'S RAIN

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William Shatner, the Hawksian organizer of men in a future without currency, determined player of crisis-bound priests and rock-like teachers, and an Arizona sheriff named 'Dances with Tarantulas.' In the following two films you will see him drink from a flask on frozen airplanes, and bare his chest to preserve a book and drop and lose a protective amulet the minute a Borgesian glimmer spell rolls its 20 sided serpent die his way... He's a relic from when hunky sci fi guys were brainy, had resonant voices and a certain catlike nimbleness. A tad macho and impulsive, but able to draw on cooler minds to guide him. Shatner is his name. He never lived with common people, but common people are all we have now. The Emmys prove that more every year. And the winner is, American Family.

Not in the late 60s-early 70s it wasn't! And we kids couldn't have been happier about it, even we didn't want to see kids onscreen unless they were going to be terrifying - Bop Bop! 


I know there are those hardcore Trekkies who are annoyed by Shatner's nimble macho fey arrogance as Kirk, who prefer the dry baldness of Patrick Stewart. They probably also hate There will be Blood and W.C. Fields. I am not them. Stewart's a bore. Maybe it was growing up watching Trek with my dad in syndication as a wee nipper. But to me Shatner can do no wrong. Even his terrible toupee is all right with me. Always just a bit hammier than called for, his expressive resonant voice... his unique... pauses...followedby... rapidcascades.... ofwords, have brought decades of amusement to a beleaguered nation. (See: Sex, Drugs, and Quantum Existentialism).

And when starring in dopey films like the one included here, or artsy experiments like Incubus, he went for broke, lugging Shakespeare-style oratory into the rarefied sphere of the cowboys-vs.-Satanists, cowboys vs. marauding spiders, and bearing torches on planes 37,000 Feet in the air, with a flask ever at the ready. If you're ready, Mr. Spock... 

HORROR AT 37,000 FEET
1973 - TVM / CBS
***
In order to earn the prime time slot, a 70s TV movie had to borrow from at least popular cinematic themes then in vogue, so here we get 1) the ancient curse attached to an ancient artifact, 2) the social commentary, and 3) the ensemble disaster movie (a welcome form of actor equity: faded stars, child actors, nearly-ran starlets, and granite-jawed authority figures could all meet as strangers and end as bonded heroes--see also: Day of the Animals). Here they board a jumbo jet luxury "airplane" hauling a massively heavy Celtic altar, and a dog. And the downstairs storage freezes --the dog is frozen solid! And the plane become suspended at 37,000 feet, trapped in a crossfire of wind tunnels, providing an ingenious explanation of why the plane interiors never once give the impression of movement, or engine roar, or being anything but a three-wall set.


The result is a kind of zero point surreal experience where some smoke wafting up from a hole in the carpet and the occasional Val Lewtonian shadow substitutes for any kind of literal monster or concrete threat. The strange fascination with sub-zero temperatures on a plane (just touching the door makes Chuck's whole arm go numb) goes well with the array of locked-in ensemble types (Buddy Ebsen!) waiting for their line in the script with the reserved confusion of a Sartre one-act drama directed by Rod Serling's nephew after too a night of too many olives in hs martinis.


The sparse passengers include a wild-eyed single lady (the dog's owner), who knows all about the stone's colorful human sacrifice-enriched past, her eyes alight with ancient magick. Chuck Connors is the square-jawed pilot; Shatner is the quintessential priest who lost his faith (I was shocked when a hot stewardess in a short skirt wanted to confiscate his flask - when meanwhile he's also helping himself to the bar without paying, which doesn't bother her at all). Once he's drunk enough, Shatner laughs ruefully at their collective fate, though snaps to life when the other passengers contemplate child sacrifice after first trying to pacify the spirit with the kid's doll as effigy. Will they commit the ultimate transgression or will the dawn come up in time to save them? We'll find out after this brief fade out where commercials once played, dissipating whatever tensions may have accrued.


It all moves pretty fast and fans of Italian horror can luxuriate in the colorful red lights of the cockpit and everyone can notice the way one of the actresses has a Rosemary Woodhouse buzz cut and sweat sheen, and another looks like Carrie White (though that film was still three years away). Naturally unless you were around in the 70s and remember these kinds of TV events, you're far less likely to care. But those of us who were kids will be glad to know the DVD of this looks way better than most. If only Satan's School for Girls or Death at Love Housewould one day get the same respectful treatment. May Cheesy Flix die a thousand deaths for its profaning the profane and blurring the Kate Jackson!
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THE DEVIL'S RAIN
1975 - dir. Robert Fuest
***
I've seen hellfire and I've seen face-melting rain - and it's not, um, a great movie, but for kids from the 70s The Devil's Rain is an unholy and powerful relic. Its TV spots were an inescapable part of local prime time TV in 1975. I was eight and had a bizarre childhood dream about that rain and even now there's a lingering prepubescent-perverse erotic charge associated with imagining acid rain hitting me and my coven and melting us all down like so much birthday candle wax. We'd heard Devil's Rain was lousy, but my dream was amazing, and if I wasn't so savvy about Satanic cinema even at eight years-old, and it was the 80s instead of the 70s, and a careerist child psychologist heard my dream, he'd probably think I was abducted by Satanists and convinced it was only a dream through hypnosis, and they'd arrest my parents and teachers. But in the 70s it was anybody's game, a whole Middle America demographic gone to the devil with touchy feely cocktails, bridge, Jaycees, smoking on planes, turtleneck and medallion conclaves of wife-swappers, communes and encounter groups, all-night block parties leading into softball breakfast picnics of still-drunk adults and kids high on their very first sunrise and sleep deprivation. So in rode devil films, a parallel subconscious repository that all of us, down to the smallest most impressionable infant, knew was only fantasy, yet a fantasy so powerful it spilled over into our collective subconscious, leading to witch hunts in the 1980s and the rise of nervous micro-managing overprotective brand parenting we're still hurting our children and ourselves with today.


That feeling of these films having some supernatural power is gone but, as a kid growing up in the Satanic 70s, just seeing the TV commercial for an R-rated horror movie was enough to give you sexy nightmares and make the world seem full of strange telekinetic magic and unimaginable terror. And when we imagined the effects of the then brand-new acid rain, the Devil's Rain is what we imagined.


Turns out, in real life, the film is too strange, too 'off' to be scary, with daytime afternoon Satanic ceremonies in the Arizona desert and Shatner hamming it up worse than Vincent Price at the end of Pit and the Pendulum. There's a nice 'start in the middle' approach to narrative (it's never really explained why or how Shatner's family's holding onto the Corwin's magic Satanic bible until a flashback) and an old deserted western ghost town making a surprisingly effective setting for a Satanic takeover, with an old church covered in black and the crosses replaced with pentagrams. Earnest Borgnine is an odd choice for the head Satanist, but Shatner is great as the cowboy whose parents are sucked into the coven, which has taken over the whole ghost town. Meanwhile Joan Prather is psychic for no good reason except to allow her to 'see' the flashback (via looking into coven member John Travolta's dead black eyes) and to provide an interesting scene where she performs an EKG for a crowd of psychology students while Dr. Eddie Albert explains that ESP is very real and he's in the process of discovering what brainwave controls it. Tom Skerritt is her husband and eventually wrests the lead away from Shatner. The big climactic melting rain sequence goes on for what seems like an hour; it was the big 'money shot' of the film, even on the posters, so the director clearly wanted to get his money's worth. I got mine. The DVD is a must at $6.98, even if  most critics lambast the film, urging their slavish followers towards the admittedly superior and similar Brotherhood of Satan. I love that film too but I never saw commercials for it as a kid, so there's no perverse unconscious charge.


Got to admire a film that gives Hieronymus Bosch a name credit in the titles. What, were his lawyers all up in arms? Anton LaVey was a consultant, too, whatever that means (he knew which way to point the pentagrams? I've never considered him an authority, except at self-promotion). This movie gets no love from critics (20% approval on rotten tomatoes,) but I think they're being harsh. A nice buzz and low expectations is key to any Satanic film, and the whiskey-loving LaVey would agree. Still, Rain was infamous enough it destroyed director Robert Fuest's career --though he'd also made the more well-received And Soon the Darkness and Dr. Phibes neither of which I like as well as this. Got no Shat!!


BLACK MIRROR: Handle with Care

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I'm a big fan of 70s-80s sci fi dystopia films because they show a world of space age outfits, modular furniture, free love, gigantic computers--which is reassuring as none of that happened --maybe humanity will triumph over itself after all! But then a show like BLACK MIRROR comes along and sneak attacks me right in the screen-screen-screen criss-crossed world I "live" in (computer at work, cell phone while traveling, TV at home). The world suddenly vanishes behind me, as worlds will once you cross into new ones. Since we don't need to go out anymore, the 'out' ceases to exist. The entire planet becomes indoors; a vast maze of living and work cubicles powered by exercise bikes; full-wall screens instead of windows. Surround sound, surround screens, and everyone shouting and everything paid for by 'merits' we can follow onscreen as they rise and fall with every step (each squeeze of toothpaste a merit,  as does each FF past a commercial). In this crazy world even closing your eyes to an ad costs merits and if we don't have them a shrill noise permeates your 'room' until we open our eyes again, so the commercial can resume. And that's just one grim future outlined on this crazy BBC IV TV show.


In other words, as far as nightmare dystopian parables, BLACK MIRROR is twenty years ahead of its closest neighbors and that it's on Netflix streaming is just too perfect as far as metatextuality. Watch and be warned, though: This show questions the very presence of media in your life in ways I know I, personally, wasn't quite ready for. The show has left a burnished patina of dread to my life; the usual amniotic safety of the widescreen HD image is no longer so reassuring. There's no magic at work, no hallucinations, no monsters in BLACK MIRROR - just sci fi-tinged but believable parables about where we're headed with the light speed advancements in digital media and advertising saturation, and maybe it's already too late to change. Maybe all those contracts we clicked 'I accept' on have quietly stripped us of 'real' self, like watching a commercial for the swinging pendulum from the couch-strapped pit, as thousands of avatars cheer from nearby screens, or the razor coming at your eye in a Dali or Fulci film right as you find yourself having left the last few scraps of 'reality' behind and entered the no-exit image, trapped in a nightmare feedback loop. It's a feeling I had forgotten about, safe in my mediated womb, a feeling I know only from the few times I took way way too much acid back in the 80s. But this show's got my womb all cased out and they're not afraid to cut right in with the cesarian scalpel.

The Channel 4 
If you're new to the series, I'd suggest what I was recommended: Don't start with the first episode of the first season, it's a bit disturbing, disgusting, and ultimately pointless. Save it for last, for one final sucker punch on your way out. Start with the last episode of the first season (there's only three episodes per season, ah the BBC) "The Entire History of You," then move through season 2 in order. ("White Bear" is my favorite), and then the second and then first episode of the first season. I can't tell you much more as they're all best approached cold, as "they" say. The really devastating, unbelievably on-point one is episode two, "Fifteen Million Merits." It still haunts me.


And the most terrifying part: it's all coming true faster than we can stop it. Just pressing this link here to see them on the Channel 4 (or on Netflix for a mere 8 merits a month) implicates you in the problem... I... think you should... wait. No I don't. Never mind and have a lovely day... Run! Their Xmas special with Jon Hamm premieres next week, if you got the BBC 

Tales of the Retrofuturist Pharmacy Part III: ASCENSION, THE VENTURE BROS.

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While the weirdest war of isolated 'fake' reality constructs, a Hollywood comedy about killing a dictator vs. that dictator, whose constructed his own fantasy, and kept his country in such a super-sheltered isolation they're practically a movie in themselves, or at least a TV mini-series about an 'experiment' in social isolation, Syfy's ASCENSION! The latest retrofuturist astro-swinger pad fantasia, deftly commingling MAD MEN's early 60s cocktail sexist swagger with BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's space ark, post-modern indoor beaches, nice space views, reclinable chairs, oxygen masks for turbulence (or radiation belts), sexy stewardesses, lower deck resentment of the first class passengers ala SNOWPIERCER and so forth. Because this is no ordinary space ark. It took off in 1963 years ago and while we're all post-post everything down here, they're like a space version of the Amish, stuck at the RIGHT STUFF barbecue instead of the WITNESS barn raising. It's a ginchier bigger-budgeted better written version of SPACE STATION 76 which came out this year as well, 2014, the same year BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW showed up on Netflix streaming, So it really is retro-futurism's time, if that wasn't an anachronism (see part 1, and part 2) . It's also TWIN PEAKS-y, as the focus is a Laura Palmer-esque girl's murder--that stirs up the soapy sediment as the ship passes year 51 of its 100 year mission to some far-off galaxy.


I got sucked into watching it last night via Syfy showing INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), which never fails to get me teary-eyed and proud to be an American, alcoholic, and human, in that order. And sure it's crypto-fascist Reagan-esque dogma, but so what? Jeff Goldblum walking back from their crashed saucer in the white salt flats, his macho fey hips swaggering in that flight suit with the cigar and Will Smith at his side, while a flaming UFO burns behind them? Perhaps the sexiest image of the entire 90s. Smith got the credit but it's just as much Goldblum's movie--both are in tippy top form and bring out new depths in each other--and for once the wives are more than just hovercraft --the president's wife (Mary McDonnell --she'd become a de facto actual president in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) is rescued by a a proudly non-cliche'd stripper mom (Vivica A. Fox), Goldblum's ex is a presidential aide (Margaret Colin - never better). And everyone gets to hang out together, from the drunkest yokel to the most brassed up general. And most of all, it's Reagan's dream come true, at last, the nations of the world putting aside petty differences to fight the alien threat.


I was going to change the channel after but ASCENSION cleverly slid into place before the credits of could even start rolling, it's own blast from the past we're all one planet now, a speeding locomotive or space ship crucible --and I was crying too hard by then, 'fat lady sings' cigar smoke in my eyes, to find the remote and thus avoid another dippy Syfy-Canadian joint, But having been all up in the retro-futurist thing, how could I switch up a few clicks on the old time machine? I like how they explore the idea of how damaging it must be to one's psyche living an entire life in a giant spacecraft, doomed to never have to go outside and play, or learn to drive a stick. But on the good side, it's an environment free of urban blight, AIDS, and racism apparently. But otherwise it's TWIN PEAKS-MAD MEN-GALACTICA, with a rigid class system keeping things 'in order' of the sort white people only get to generally experience walking angrily past first class to our miserable G27 aisle seat.


Cementing the Syfy connection is the indefatigable Tricia Helfer (Cylon #6- the girl in the red dress on all the posters for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) as an enigmatic head stewardess / politico / master planner (top) who connives and controls her ambitious but weak-willed captain husband. Helfer is amazing. Tall, statutesque, blonde, gorgeous with just enough Nordic alien hybrid to her TV star vibe. But she's not the overall focus. It's Laura Pal--I mean Lorelai Wright (Amanda Thomson), a Megan Fox-esque bitch sleeping with, apparently, everyone. Her mom meanwhile has secrets, too, and the killer skulks around during radiation storms in a big hazmat suit like the killer in GREEN FOR DANGER. And the black cop (Brandon Bell) struggles to get answers his mom works at the library that also rents out movies on disc (?) and tells her son to check out the works of Lang and Hitchcock to help him catch the killer. Bonus points! He was in DEAR WHITE PEOPLE also this year, coincidence?


The fantasy in both ASCENSION, SNOWPIERCER, NOAH and INDEPENDENCE DAY with some TRUMAN'S SHOW-ish via a God complex-brand Ed Harris / Kim Jong Un. The idea common to dreams and fiction, of being able to scale back the sheer overpopulated, polluted, fucked in the head society we live in--to go back into the past, make it all locally sourced and small business and somehow recapture the essence of what we lost -- especially heterosexual white dudes old enough to remember all the shit their father got away with, and so feel resentful they don't get away with jack, but at the same time we don't even own a tie, let alone need a whole rack of them, so gather ye perks while ye may. So to have the social order openly privileging us again, and to live in a cool space craft and drink martinis served by hotties in sexy outfits while stars spin by outside -- it's like Windows on the World or that Crystal Peak, you know... the old "animals could be bred and...slaughtered"skidoo and--and a great twist ending that makes a great metaphor for what Salvia Divinorum is like if you know how to meet it halfway. Cuz who knows what weird things are waiting for us by the time we get to Arizona?



It's space, man... it's in the air. And we are made of dreams dreamt a million years ago by a serpentine morass of DNA scary enough to make Carpenter's THE THING shit its pants. And we're still evolving and morphing and spinning madly through the abyss like a Prometheus lashed to a giant golf ball that will never land.
----

I used to be quietly fascinated by the Cartoon Network show, THE VENTURE BROS., which is like a queer Crystal Peak version of JOHNNY QUEST, with a well-constructed bizarro world retrofuturist vibe in that Dr. Venture is the genius scientist son of the kind of square-jawed super dad space race titan of industry that Tony Stark had, and who's left his son this gigantic scientific research center, laden with faded modular relics from the early days of the space race. More than even MAD MEN or BATTLESTAR, the vibe of ASCENSION recalls this show. There's a few things that irk me and are why I stopped watching after a scant five seasons, like the insistence on gross bathroom humor that seems needlessly tacked on and which, thanks to my overly acute imagination and super-sensitive nerves, I perceive way too vividly and so can't really endure it unless I'm half-anesthetized upon the Usher crypt table, which luckily is how I spend a good deal of my life, but even so... If you're the type who can handle that though, and love the retrofuturism as I do, then know that it's on Cartoon Network, ready for the Pretty Polly plucking. There's: a hybrid Kissinger-Mary Poppins; a foxy supervillainess with a voice like Harvey Fierstein; a magician who holds ayahuasca parties, has a sexy narcoleptic daughter and a power animal voiced by H. Jon Benjamin who lives in his closet / alternate reality; a sex-changed Hunter S. Thomson working undercover as a female stripper; a bodyguard with a mullet and a shoebox full of Led Zeppelin cassettes as his only non-automotive possession, and even a secret sub-basement of mutants presided over by that weird haired haired singer of that old Brit band Prodigy, the list is endless.


So savor the rich attention to retro-futurist space race Questian detail, the weird streak of semi-closeted gay stuff, and the brilliant idea that supervillains and superheroes have come to terms with their interdependence, and taken steps to ensure each other's continuation, and let the sweet lull of HD widescreen TV make everything that was old new again, even America... in the early 60s... as seen through Big Brother eyes... of Canadians.

Samara Morgan presents "Your Virtual is My Real' (or Save us SWEET EXORCIST)

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"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world." ---Jean Baudrillard
Oh those naive French. If Baudrillard was alive today he'd be rolling around in his grave, trying to get out because the treatise on today's events he could write would revive him to live another thousand digital age. Because we say in the USA have to admit -- as our theater chains surrender and the dominos tumble, that a pair of stoner comedian's idle japing would cascade out to this bizarre event. The closest thing I can think of is BLACK MIRROR, whose devastating 78 minute "White Christmas" episode just debuted, and it makes the nightmare worlds conjured by the first two seasons seem like Candyland. It even puts Jon Hamm through the ringer. Have those Brits no mercy? Is this what happens when you let atheism get in the way of peace of mind? In 'real life' Sony has been extra-dimensionally skewered --a sword sticking through a 2-D movie screen simulacrum--the alleged giant kowtowing to the ornery David while it struggles to shake off the disorientation from being sling-shotted. It's just a dumb comedy, after all. But Americans all implicitly understand that comedy is serious business. This was a time for America, who talks really big while its foe is just a rich fat kid pointing at jeeps on the TV. But when that kid uses the very TV you see him on against you, grabs you right through it and shuts off your lights like Samara in THE RING, then you better show someone else that weird avant garde film she made with her mind, or in this case the reverse, not show anyone the film you made about how her art is pretentious. I mean, a ladder? A woman on the cliff? What is she, Maya Deren? Ooops. I'll shut up. In case she's listening, snaking through the intricate back alleys of the web and on her way towards me. Just to avoid it, here's the video!


What BLACK MIRROR "White Christmas" trades on is more of an eternal Buddhist hell vibe, making the true hell of eternal damnation feel horrifyingly tangible in ways flames and pitchforks just can't match. By contrast, there's no one watching once Samara's victims are taken. They don't have any demon with a sackcloth waiting just off camera to grab their freed souls. I know that because--this we are at this time sure of--Samara Morgan isn't 'real' anymore than Naomi Watts, our post-modern mother of mirrors is really scared of her. Beyond just VERTIGO-style deja vu flashes of being Jimmy Stewart still hanging from the infinite height of the infinite Saul Bass roof gutter, I learned today all about it the true nightmare that's just a couple decades of technology away. It's already too late to even think about going off-grid. You'd only wake the demons with the sackcloths: "We got another runner." Me, I'm going to bed and actually pray. Because in the words of the great Curtis Mayfield, if there's a hell below / we're all / going to go!

Man, though, could he play guitar. "Move on Up" alone should be proof alone we got a friend upstairs. All we need is ears. French intellectuals like Baudrillard can decry our fictive dominance, but if there's one thing we know, it's how to stay funky even as the flames consume us. After all, we have done our share of consuming. It's only fair. BLACK MIRROR! SWEET EXORCIST!

On vinyl, invincible

Best of 2014 (Movies and TV)

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Here's the future I read in the blood spatter from my Herculean hacks at the digital hydra of 2014 film-TV-video: even the most lovable pop culture icons--the ones with whom I spent some considerable time in childhood (listening to my parent's LPs of "I started out as a child" and "Why is there Air" over and over)--can turn out to be monsters, and the low pit of the stomach sense of childhood being whisked away by obsequious demons must be soul-crushing at a high enough decibel; and that a few wily filmmakers can shake the world just by depicting worldshakers getting comedically killed, and that the amok digital technology curve we're headed for involves software-direct-to-brain connections--the getting rid of screens and earbuds altogether by installing them through the third eye--and we should be very careful about that and maybe not even go there.

In short, the year in entertainment seems to have melted into a lump of digital coal these last few months, it has seen my America scrambling for contextualization, hoping to right our virtual axis before we cave in the core of the world culture simulacrum. We are the world, through Seth Rogen. Long may his dick jokes reign.

But as for the other thing, the slow pall of realizing that maybe David Icke and the hysteric Satanic panickers who sank my faith in humanity during the slasher 80s and the anti-porn crusaders were right all along, it's to Disney's dark, brooding, strange masterpiece MALEFICENT I turn. I has import and dark beauty priapic critics missed, perhaps because the film came out before the Cosby thing broke, so they weren't ready to realize how well the film mythically situates the perils of trusting the Prince Charming garments of our childhood friends not to hide slimy toad intent. Trouble is there's no good men left in the family unit to turn to--dad's been left alone to die in the Disney world bathroom and the inhumane experiments of industrial science on chimps shall haunt us for a Triassic age as traumatized apes deliver unprovoked violence (or just the threat of it) to change the world into the vile place we made them see it is; and the goodness in our hearts will have to triumph again and again just to stay afloat in the bullshit sea of godless despair, and the cowardice we exhibit today will kill us tomorrow, but constant courage is hard when the BLACK MIRROR shows more and more of our decomposing Dorian Gray visage.

from top:UNDER THE SKIN, THE BABBADOOK, BLACK MIRROR
MAYBE If we can fall in love with humankind and not worry about the approaching cliff--be like Scrooge Redux, combat strangling with soft cheek caresses, challenge bogeymen with tiger-sized ferocity tempered by love and forgiveness, and keep the bogey in the basement and give him a bowl of worms at lunchtime--then maybe 2015 will open the door to Humanity Mach 2.

BUT we're still growing in population, it's doubled since the last time we worried about it. We've become the kind of space parasite we routinely defend against in sci fi blockbusters, and Matt McConaughey's heading the swarm to the next host planet while SNOWPIERCER and NOAH realize that pulling the plug on humanity altogether may just be the most heroic thing we can do, our gift to the cosmos and the inbred animals from that ark. OBVIOUS CHILD even dared wage comedy in the face of abortion, without being crude, didactic or mean-spirited --a major first. And for the badass superstar East Village bitches in BROAD CITY, and in the post-digital terror in BLACK MIRROR, and the beyond-the-pale metatextuality of TOO MANY COOKS, and ERIC ANDRE show, it's business as usual for the apocalypse of televisual memory, nostalgia and spinoffs like ever-evolving tentacles through the horror film ether. We may be heading into a black post-modern melt-down abyss, but we're doing it together, goddamn it, so be true to your friends even if they're trees.

Now if we could only get rid of the bad people... but they're everywhere, they're inside our systems, and our basements, and our childhood nostalgia vats, fermenting. Killing them only makes you one of them, and they're part of you already. Only through tiger fierceness and unconditonal love enough to embrace even the foulest of our hidden inner lepers will we at least be able to... get our wings back and/or watch MANHATTAN again. But is there any fairy paradise un-parking lot paved left to fly to? Will there ever be a rainbow? Well fly there one day... either way... sweet Lucifer Ball. The flames are there for your protection. And please mind the receptacles on your way out.

1. MALEFICENT
Dir. Robert Stromberg

Critics said it was too dark, Jolie was stiff, and it was too much like WICKED, as if two feminist revision / witch character redemption tales in the same century would topple them from their papers' lofty masthead. WICKED has been around for decades and still no film version, so what the hell are they waiting for? Look to the western skies and see MALEFICENT, a great Xmas present to the girl who's just turned too old for FROZEN, and needs a myth subverting the patriarchally-instilled importance of a handsome prince in the heroine's maturation even further. It's a complex work of psyche building that can also stand proudly next to Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" in the annals feminist psychoanalytical re-balancing of the patriarchally-endorsed brutality towards womankind and the co-opting and repression of her chthonic power. Yeah, I said it!


Scripted with great sensitivity and Jungian Girls who Run with the Wolves-ish archetypal revisionist awareness by Linda Woolverton. Jolie's not quite back at her GIRL INTERRUPTED levels of wild, but she's at least got the regal bearing, razor blade cheekbones, joyless laugh and a peerless sense of poise down pat --I know a girl or two just like her in Aand maybe their cold for similar reasons, and the drugging and innocence robbing in MALEFICENT is at last, a way to mythically contextualize that most odious crime. Elle Fanning is a great snaggle-toothed princess, like a combination Drew Barrymore now and Dakota before, and Juno Temple is the younger of the three good fairy godmothers. It's potent, and treads deep into the murky chthonic of a growing girl's true poltergeist power, and its art direction can stand proudly next to the work of Edward Burne-Jones, J.W. Waterhouse, Michael Parkes, Maxfield Parrish, and William Blake. Maleficent's fairy kingdom pulses and writhes with trees that grow and change at an accelerated rate; warriors of stone and root rise up from the ground on command; beings small and large fly and shimmer at night in ways Max Reinhardt would have been jealous of in his 1935 production of MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. And this time there's not a single Mickey Rooney.

2. THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS
(L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps)
Dir. Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani

Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani, cinema's first and only mixed gender / race / nationality directing couple have been setting my head on fire ever since their 2009 feature debut AMER. I was so blown away by their unique mix  of modernist experimental and post-modern 70s Italian horror narrative that I even coined a term to describe them, and a few other filmmakers who have found a creative wellspring in the updating and abstracting and melding of classic Argento, Morricone, and Antonioni, the Darionini Nuovo. Argento may not have made a decent film since the mid 90s, but this pair has taken his blazing primary color iconography and shattered it into a million psychosexual grim Freudian mind-meld slivers. Granted Forlani/ Cattet's unique looping style will no doubt prove alienating after about twenty minutes to people who don't know SUSPIRIA and INFERNO like the black of their gloves, and who don't swoon at gorgeous ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance. But even those of us swooning over the ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance might need a break halfway through. 


So back from the break - the question is, where can Bruno and Helene go next? This movie is their ground zero psychic crystal chronic-fantasticular-infandibulum, i.e. death and al other deaths, past, future, parallel-- and your lives flash before your eyes -- the slow shuddering standstill of time -- the full glass goblin shatter of unlimited interconnection to those around you and the time and space in which you exist; every part in the movie of your life and the interior mind iconography of your own remembrance of those movies now merges and is torn to pretty colored tears. Walk away, you two, it's finished.

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3. LAS BRUJAS DE ZAGGARAMURDI 
(Witching and Bitching)
Dir Alex de la Iglesia

Speaking of crazy witches, over in the modern Spain the gender war seems lost to the women, as it should be--or at least it's a well-matched fight. If that sounds sexist than you've clearly never been married to or dated a Spanish-speaking mujer, como yo. If you have, then you'll roar with delight over this film in which, far from the dubious victory run by Burton in TAMING OF THE SHREW or the bloody draw in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, we have something far more subversive and strange. Alex de la Iglesia directs with lots of rapid cut multiple camera perspective editing like Romero uses in DAWN OF THE DEAD, so if you can handle subtitles or speak fluent Spanish, just hold on tight, and roll with it, at least until the gigantic strutting... thing... shows up. And forgive the film it's stupid American title, WITCHING AND BITCHING. I've given it the far bettter name in my head, BITCHES' SABBATH. (my full lavish praise here).

4. SNOWPIERCER
Dir. Bong Joon-Ho

Joon Bong Ho's film is technically from 2013, but what are you going to do? It didn't really come into any kind of theatrical release here until recently - and is currently on Netflix streaming. But it's a great work of existential train class warfare druggy social critique - you can tell Ho's a fan of RUNAWAY TRAIN and every other damned train movie worth a damn. The film's a fucking work of genius. Who cares!! Fuck you!

5. OBVIOUS CHILD
Written and Directed by Gillain Robespierre 

The first great abortion comedy, OBVIOUS CHILD is hilarious down to it's fertile core. SNL alum Jenny Slate stars as struggling Williamsburg hipster comic Donna who "would like an abortion, please," and respectfully declines hearing the other options from the Planned Parenthood counselor. She likes the guy she met on a one-night stand, Max (Jake Lacy, from THE OFFICE), who was too drunk to get the condom on, but it's not enough to keep the baby or even tell him, right? Credit a beautiful script by director Gillain Robespierre (based on her short film of the same name) that we never doubt Donna's sensitivity even as the jokes fly furious. We can respect that her mind is made up and that she's smart and has considered her options without needing to hear them and is neither martyr nor lost soul, checking her own tendency to leaven her inner tension to convey she's aware of the gravity of the situation, yet never presuming that tension is somehow 'valid' because of the surrounding controversy. 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 or Greenpoint-dweller college-educated witty individuals. I've seen this kind great naturalistic flow only with the best 'ensemble' female comedy teams--Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph in BRIDESMAIDS (2007), Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in BROAD CITY, and nowhere else. These are women who've done enough improv and rehearsal to make their characters breathe and roll rather than submitting to some half-assed plot twists thrust on them by some clueless male or self-hating female screenwriter. (more)

6. DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
Dir. Matt Reeves

It's not quite the howl of freedom for oppressed primates that the original was, more a ballad about what's good in tribal living vs. bad, the way one act of violence ricochets forever with ever-increasing retaliations until no one's left alive, unless some kind of forgiveness is learned, and the painful idea that the animal kingdom itself may have inherited our violent species-ist paranoia, that the medical experiments on primates are inhumane and will have dire and far-reaching consequences to our collective karma. In short, it must be hard to work in a slaughterhouse all day unless you're a Conservative Republican. How else do you live with your crimes--the ones needed just to survive--without the ability to become a sociopath as needed? And of course, Andy Serkis is a god, our new century's technological groundbreaker. He is to motion capture technology what Sinatra was to the the condenser microphone, what Louis Armstrong was to jazz-- it's full expression beyond what we thought possible in a dawning medium. Serkis' Caesar here is so human as to be recognizably animal, and--like it does for Kim Jong Il--the goofy face of James Franco projected on a screen has uncanny power for him. Serkis' Caesar elevates both species just as the factual Kim Jong denigrates just ours --either way, el Franco is there.

7. IS THE MAN WHO IS TALL HAPPY?
Dir. Michel Gondry

Noam Chomsky + magic markers + Michel Gondry = Magic. Chomsky delves into the roots of language, how our entire unconscious is structured by basic rules of grammatical structure, and the way the symbolic register coheres between the real and imaginary like both the greatest and worst thing that can possibly happen to not just interpersonal communication but the formation of the human thought process, from neuron to mental image and all the infancy through old age in a flash in between, and all while Gondry weaves hand-drawn magic marker miracles illustrating everything far more perfectly than any lone still image or real life recreation ever could --  even when, as a freely admits, he's getting it wrong. Daring geniuses with fathomless limits of benevolent creative compassion, man.

Dir. Ben Wheatley

Great as the existential Sartre-Godot-Aristophanes-style robust gallows humor is, and the weird mystical angles with ropes into the alternate realities, etc., the peak aspect comes from a unique recreation of a ground zero time-distilled psilocybin freak-out wherein, buzzing and soaring in and around its droning center, the score sirens out across a series of overlapping strobes and mirror splitting, and you might say yeah yeah, that mirror effect hasn't been fresh since Led Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same, (I even used it in Queen of Disks) but you're wrong! Shit is fresh! And the strobe cutting is so seizure-inducing it comes with a warning label, but 'tis no stoner fucking about but a calculated specific effect. Wheatley and Amy Jump, who co-edited the film, alternate split second imagery until new shapes emerge that breathe and pulse. On one hand it's nothing too different than what one might shoot with their friends on mushrooms in the graveyard as I once did (and Syd Barrett before me) there's no unusual sight or diegetic sound (I was thinking for sure they'd switch film stock to color for the tripping parts, ala Wizard of Oz or Jose Marin's Awakening of the Beast, but the strobing overlapping images create a truly psychedelic effect, the two or more images cohering into one buzzing throbbing molecular NOW waiting for us all just outside the veil, ala William Blake or the old school alchemist woodcuts. And the thin fibreoptic line between waking life and the collective archetypal unconscious is frayed for a moment rare, and the black hole sun overlap between waking and dreaming is exposed afresh, and the union of birth and death, past and future, real and unreal, speed and stillness up our perceptions fast enough that death's hidden-from-the-sober-living flag unfurls for all three of your agog eyes and the psychedelic peak across linear time's usually uncrossable river is at last crossed... by a film no less. And when one returns to the sane bank of sanity, one is a renewed a third eye Popeye coming back from the dead and now completely made of atomic spinach. (More)

9. THLEGO MOVIE
Dir. Phil Lord

It's hard not to swoon and get chills from the cumulative emotional effect of this well-thought out barrage of sensory stimuli. And I'm grateful for its message about letting your freak flag inflat and never ask for Lego sets that come with instructions and guides to how to build cities, because it will make your dad into a control freak. It might dampen sales of such sets, but it's a lesson needs teaching, because with cell phones it's never been so easy to hover. But 'copter parents who see this with their kids can maybe see the error of their ways with the kids right in the same room, and that's golden. Though once again, Hollywood's idea of the 'average guy' hero is painfully narrow --the blankest and naivest of nerds.

Dir. Randy Moore

Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all work wondrously ambiguous in this undersong testament to the madness and derangement that results when immersed too deeply in Disney's subversive archetypal psychology-accessing 'scape, where mind and fantasy land are one, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details--and as with Antonioni, the realization there are details that aren't missing is the post-modern frisson. 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 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 glamorous witch costumes, "plushies," and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park every day it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off under their noses, 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, an--aside from a few missteps, such as a scatologically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped)--it's pretty damned artsy. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen of park footage ring with an absurdist post-modern unease (MORE)

RUNNER UPS:
10. a-c: The Marvelverse:
CAPT. AMERICA- THE WINTER SOLDIER
Dirs Anthony and Joe Russo
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
Dir. James Gunn
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
Dir. Bryan Singer

GUARDIANS left me all verklempt with the giddy boy rapture I felt watching STAR WARS at some North or South Carolina theater, months before anyone else knew about it; this time I was the very last to know how Chris Pratt is a genius in the lead, as he fits the perfect cool older brother mode, what Han Solo was to us. thus sparing us the icky Luke looking at horizons and aww shucking with Uncle Ben business and getting right to the good stuff. Story-wise it's nothing new - but neither was STAR WARS, it's mythic, so just savor the nonstop feast of imagination and great cut-through-the-crap dialogue, dialogue Marvel is by now bracingly good at.

(From Dystopian Parables for the Masses:) In WINTER... the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is when what was once just rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut, too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense, when what you didn't see coming comes not on the horizon ahead but behind, next to, within, and in all directions, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism and disarmed, isolated, and surrounded. Then the NSA takes off its mask and the Sixth Reich Paperclip draconian totalitarian future-present is right there, and has been, in disguise all this time, and the Homeland Security emblem turns out to be a scrambled up swastika, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away in the name of order, because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us. God help us, we activated SKYNET. General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids.

11.a/b - Entre les Maenads:
UNDER THE SKIN
Dir. Jonathan Glazer
VENUS IN FUR
Dir. Roman Polanski

"Stand over there! Dominate me!" these two seemingly contradictory commands given by Polanski-esque stand-in Mattieu Amalric (the bad guy in QUANTUM OF SOLACE) to Polanski's real-life wife Emmanuelle Seigner in VENUS. Her character veers from begging him for the part while dripping wet and disheveled--a last ditch auditioner from the rain after he's packing to go home--to having him beg her to stay while she badmouths the infantile myopia at the heart of his beloved Sacher Masoch source text. He claims the play has nothing to do with his personal life, she sees right through him, and Polanski proves at last he's the one true inheritor of the Josef von Sternberg collar-- she even starts talking in fake German saying she's adding some Dietrich. Both characters in this real-time two-hander are amazing, but Seigner especially runs with a girl who seems too educated on the intricacies of Masoch's text to be just a part-time temp / call girl / actress threatening to call actor's equity one minute and taking his money and passport the next while he becomes more and more dependent on her brazen gleaming energy (she's also several inches taller).


 (From Antichrist in Translation:) "Under the Skin tries hard to puncture some hidden and vital vein in our culture, the way any sense of a dislocated universal all-seeing perception dissolves in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere; Scarlett drives slowly trying to lure into her SUV figures of hunched over men, pummeling their way on foot through the darkness, shopping or working long after normal people go to sleep, and Scotland especially seems as abandoned as some lifeless corner of the galaxy...

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12. a/b/c The Rabid Mom Effect
THE BABADOOK
Written and Directed by Jennifer Kent
OCULUS
Dir. Mike Flannagan

There's a special nightmare sense of forlorn abandonment when moms turn evil, turning the once-secure house into something foreboding and sinister. In both these films, children must be very very brave as their parents are possessed, and--among other things--block all access to the outside world, to sane rational adults who might help. In other words, the Overlook is anywhere a parent is susceptible to the madness of isolation. If dad's alive and regularly gets out of the house to work, maybe reality will have a fighting chance. But if he's dead or gone or works from home, the monsters get him early on. All it takes--as we learn on THE HAUNTING TV show--is for the kid's screaming about bogeyman under the bed to rob him of a few nights sleep and he becomes the very bogeyman they fear.

In OCULUS, dad spends long hours of the night in his front room office with a strange antique mirror and gradually it makes him go very very bad. And mom's not far behind. The film brilliantly collapses flashbacks from childhood and current paranormal investigations, so eventually both sides see each other from beyond the pale. (See full review).


In BABADOOK, the widowed mom of a precocious and possibly deranged boy must resist a dark energy that's overtaken her (spurred by a lack of sleep that's due largely to the kid's constant barging in - which also prevents her from 'ahem' - due to a monster under the bed and in the closet). I'm not sure it's as great as some critics are saying, nor UNDER THE SKIN either --but if I hadn't read all this gorgeous advance press maybe my expectations would have been sufficiently lowered, as they were for the magnificent OCULUS. What's great about BABADOOK is the tight attention to Jungian fairy tale detail. We see all the time how too much surface goodness gives rise to erupting gushers of crude oil evil, never about the vice versa.
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TELEVISION

With whole series dropped all at once, expressly for "binge viewing" - it's clear more than ever that thanks to cable and Netflix, the line between TV and cinema are quickly blurring beyond all recognition. So on that note, for the first time on Acidemic, the best-of the year for TV:

Adult Swim - Cartoon Network

No amount of David Lynch or Eric Andre can compare with or prepare you for TOO MANY COOKS, the recent 12 minute long informercial on Cartoon Network. No matter where you think this bizarrity can go, it goes far farther than a fur-forn farddio brand of beyond the black rainbow farrity, beyond even the swords of photo bomb "Bob" Dobbes / giallo and Fun with Real Audio What on Was the Britney old Thinking SNL. See it and understand the cryptic proclamations of the pie Von Trier, and understand, at last, how the need to break free from our programming is so intrinsic to our identity as to be inseparable from the programming itself. It's enough to make lesser actors go mad but that's enlightenment: the acceptance of one's eternal actor darkness. Heaven for an actor is just the Hell of a sitcom cycle of endless retooling fully surrendered to, letting your ego construct dissolve as the infernal flames lick your soul clean for sweeps week, award season, reruns, stalker fans, Buddhist hell, and backforth... backatcha... and baller. (see it here)

2. BLACK MIRROR
BBC Channel 4

... as far as nightmare dystopian parables, BLACK MIRROR is twenty years ahead of its closest neighbors and that it's on Netflix streaming is just too perfect as far as metatextuality. Watch and be warned, though: This show questions the very presence of media in your life in ways I know I, personally, wasn't quite ready for. The show has left a burnished patina of dread to my life; the usual amniotic safety of the widescreen HD image is no longer so reassuring. There's no magic at work, no hallucinations, no monsters in BLACK MIRROR - just sci fi-tinged but believable parables about where we're headed with the light speed advancements in digital media and advertising saturation, and maybe it's already too late to change. Maybe all those contracts we clicked 'I accept' on have quietly stripped us of 'real' self, like watching a commercial for the swinging pendulum from the couch-strapped pit, as thousands of avatars cheer from nearby screens, or the razor coming at your eye in a Dali or Fulci film right as you leave the last few scraps of 'reality' behind and enter the no-exit image, trapped in a nightmare feedback loop. It's a feeling I had forgotten about, safe in my mediated womb, a feeling I know only from the few times I took way way too much acid back in the 80s. But this show's got my mediated womb all cased out and they cut right in... . (MORE)

3. BROAD CITY
Comedy Central

These girls are so great I wish they didn't feel the need to add this doofus pantless roomate (not even a roommate, a freeloader more or less) who eats all their food. It's basic NYC 101 learning how to get rid of dipshits like this, and these girls aren't naive simpletons like the ones in FRANCES HA or JUNO, so what the fuck? I've kicked a fair share of crashers out of my apartments and houses since I moved out from my parents in 1985, and so has my roommate, who once even threw Andy Dick out. Had to eject him out of the building. But do it he did. It's a rite of NYC passage to evict the mooch and the dork and the wally. That aside the show is priceless. How rare to see smart as whips, hard-partying girls not afraid to get belligerent or violent in the name of posterity. Check out their holiday guide where they among other things start an orgy, smoke weed in the bathroom and hurl molotov cocktails. 

4. Kyle Mooney's "Wing" and "Bad Boys" short clips on SNL
NBC
It's a testament to the power of their post-modern genius that I have almost no frame of reference for the 90s TGIF line-up (shows like STEP BY STEP, FULL HOUSE, FAMILY MATTERs, etc.) Kyle Mooney and Co. are presumably satirizing here. Awkward and bizarre, they speak to the weird overreactions to small things; in my day it was WHAT'S HAPPENING? and the bootleg taping a Doobie Brothers concert, here it's throwing someone else's ball back and forth without permission from its owner or the gay come-ons attached with getting the last wing. Either way the atonal strangeness, on-point guitar lick scene change cues, completely random cutaways, deadpan monotone acting and keyed-up studio audience laugh track all combine to make these small masterpieces of post-modern deadpan hilarity. Overall, this season's SNL was very uneven (and no end in sight to the mealy Jost) but there were two shining lights: the larger-than-life wild woman energy of Leslie Jones, and the amazing Kyle Mooney (see here for his brilliant calling card, "smoking")

5. THE ERIC ANDRE SHOW
Adult Swim - Cartoon Network


I'm a big fan of deconstruction mixed with literal destruction, especially when harnessed to genuine subversive wit and not just gross-outs and double entendres. I can't literally can't stomach TIM AND ERIC, for example, but I like that both Andre and co-host Hannibal Buress are black yet race never really factors into the show - which is more about bizarro mondo video moments of near Subgenius-abstraction, i.e. they don't need their blackness. Instead they have a bemused band, sullen Mexican day laborer producer, and strange gags, including guests that turn out to be deranged impersonators, rappers, and confused B-listers. It's short, too.

6.a. THE LATE LATE SHOW
CBS
6.b. THE COLBERT REPORT (w/Stephen Colbert)
Comedy Central

Goodbye you beautiful bastards' current incarnations.

7. the Lucas Bros. Moving Co. (Hi-Def Animation)
Fox
They're like the Brooklyn stoner version of the Olsen twins. 

8. DRUNK HISTORY
Comedy Central

Here are important or at least interesting moments in history, generally not taught in school, that need to be learned. Some of our historian drunks don't seem to take to the format as well as others (it probably helps to lay down a good bed first) but the booze works to short circuit any prosaic meandering while adding the oomph of revelry and truth, and the idea of getting an all-star cast to enact and lip sync the drunkenly related narrative is genius and the overall effect makes it the most tangible and accessible of all history shows, ever. Originally a Funny or Die video series, I hope it breeds similar education-subversion hybrids. Drugs and alcohol have a long history of being associated with idiocy, burn-outs, the unemployed and mean-- this show proves they can be associated with edshacation too.

9. HOMELAND - season 4
Showtime

I wanted to avoid continuing series like MAD MEN but HOMELAND is now free of Brody and his nagging family--and thus is barely even the same show. Carrie's tenuous sanity is accepted as a reasonable risk for her bravery and brilliance and by setting it Islamabad, involving a Pakistani government more friendly to the Taliban than they publicly admit, the show gamely gives us a CIA that starts out more or less the bad guys, with Carrie known as 'the Drone Queen' for her merciless bombing from the air of Taliban figures -but nothing is as it seems and it all seems to reach a peak with a storming of the US Embassy. Carrie even has a similarly brilliant counterespionage spy lady foe, and there are tons of explosions, Duck Phillips, a possible friendly Pakistani ally, a hostage exchange, escapes, and other riveting stuff, the highlight being a deranged Carrie freaking out on psychedelic-spiked meds while loose in the Islamabad streets.

10.  FROM DUSK TIL DAWN - season 1
El Rey Network

The Robert Rodriguez-backed new cable channel El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) premiered with the From Dusk til Dawn series, a ten 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 Santanico Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, fully and luxuriantly embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star (and staggering beauty) Eiza Gonzalez. T2's Robert Patrick is the disillusioned preacher, Don Johnson the Michael Parks sheriff, and a cast of handsome well-spoken Mexican-American actors with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity as an array of partiers, bikers, tourists, hostages, and vampires. 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. And I love any movie or series that can go all night.  (MORE)

10 Great Hangover-Recovery Movies

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Damn but you made a mess of things, waking up now in late afternoon, bleary and a mess, to reach with shaking hand for that warm foam-crusted highball on your nightstand, swilling it down before the gag reflexes can kick in, before you can get sick from the pain of hangover, and then floating through another blackout day. Delicious until blackout. Then... waking up again, a messier mess of things, blearier, shakier hand, for that warm... wait where the fuck is it?


Not a warm foam-crusted highball, nor even a half-finished beer, or snootful of wine, nothing. You fall out of bed, the gag reflexes kick in, and there you are, crawling towards the toilet with head bowed low. But sixteen hours of nonstop dry-heaving later, after the intervention, with the stay-at-home plan detox plan, maybe a pilfered Xanax to keep the D.T.s at bay, what then?


The movies. They can guide you home.

There are no-nos for hangover or detox recovery movies:
NO: gross-outs: eating, bodily humors
NO: bugs, jungles, tropics
NO: Cruelty and ugliness
NO: Loud sudden shocks, screaming, banging on pots, or playing harmonica

YES: Sexual heat, with good rhythmic second chakra breathing (realigns the dilated nerves towards pleasure rather than pain - it only takes some breathing and imagination)
YES: cold climates, snow, ice (think of the cool of the bathroom tiles on which you slept last night, to be close to the toilet for le vomi)
YES: Youthful love and tragic romance (you're very emotional)
YES: people talking in low, conversational voices
YES: the sweet freedom of immanent death (allays your guilt re: trashing today through yesterday's revelry)

But all things in their place. (PS - I've been sober since '98, but believe me, I've forgotten more about hangoversssh thann...)

1. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969)
Dir. Peter Hunt

The main thing here that's good for alcohol-poisoned penitent is the length of the film and the cold atmosphere: the frozen, snowy on-location Alps, raced around in by hard-to-shake bad guys in pursuit of our boy Bond--Lazenby, who's dull but not obnoxious, so it's quite all right. The trip to Blofeld's mountaintop lair is itself an amazingly cohesive journey, from car to helicopter to cable car, up, up, up. And then some girls girls girls and  Telly Savalas laying out his big plan, cigarette in hand. And then down down down, via cable car, skis, one ski, ice skates, car, and on and on. By now you're pulse will be slowing and the relative leisurely composition of the first half of the film will ease you into the hair-raising second half. Bond is a comfort when detoxing, but nowhere near as comforting for the alcoholic in recovery than when sheathed in snow and supported by Mrs. Peele herself, Diana Rigg.

2. TITANIC (1997)
Dir James Cameron

See above for importance of cold - and as with the previous entry, length is an important thing. You need long movies, because being without a movie to watch or something to do is terrifying. Loneliness or the terror of being dragged out to another ritzy club are always beckoning. Also, your heart is like those icebergs, melting now with remorse, and other things. I saw this in the theater the day after New Years Day, which I spent getting royally sick as my girl tried to get me to stop booze cold turkey. She wouldn't even give me no weed! It would have helped with the nausea. That bitch. But the next day we went to see TITANIC and leaving the theater I could barely walk, my dilated nerves and heightened volatile emotions were so carried aloft in the grandeur and sweep I was a sobbing mess. I loved it. It's got everything a good hangover movie needs: ice, love, and in-the-moment live for today-no tomorrow philosophy. I could have done without the framing device... but hey. I guarantee that if you're in that dilated nerve ending brutal hangover state, the movie will work too, and now you can FF-right past that framing device opening with Bill "I never let it in" Paxton, if you want, though you won't have the wherewithal, so just SUCK IT UP!

3. I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1944)
Prod. Val Lewton

You wouldn't think a movie set in the Caribbean would fit this bill, too hot and sweaty, but this isn't the 'real' Caribbean. No one sweats here; it's a Caribbean of the mind--all shadows and palm trees, cool and dry and cool as a bone --and full of windy mystery as experienced through the eyes of a smitten nurse (Frances Drake).

I love that no one raises their voice ever, especially Frances Drake, a few screams aside; I love the spiderweb latticework shadows of potted ferns and porch struts and harp strings, and through it all blows a gentle insistent leaf-rustling wind - which builds to a thrilling, satisfying chill in the midnight through-the-cane field walk with two zombies, wind calling them through skull sign posts and dry cane stalks. When we were young, brother and I watched this and Cat People nearly every night on a back-to-back tape for an entire summer, the fan roaring in front of the TV, amazed how well such apparently slight 'everything to the imagination' films like these could hold up under such heavy repeat viewing. I watched it again recently and was floored about how so little happens, and so quickly, like a half-remembered dream, and the beautiful opening with the Canadian snow outside the window and a Frances Drake voiceover; and the end with a local black wise man's voiceover on St. Sebastian, offering a prayer for the dead. Where did that guy come from? We don't see anyone with that voice, but it works - he's St. Sebastian himself, perhaps... either way it's as soothing and lovely as a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice for breakfast.

4. NADJA (1994)
Directed by Michael Almereyda

This was made by someone with a clear love of the genre, as it's structured like a loose remake of the 1935 Universal horror classic, DRACULA'S DAUGHTER with shades of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, and BLOOD AND ROSES (i.e. CARMILLA). It's full of beautiful black and white film compositions, with occasional lapses into pixelated imagery culled from a then all the rage Fisher Price Pixelvision movie camera (they used an audio cassette instead of a videotape). With a bad hangover you wont mind the blurriness of these stretches, which add a dreamy surrealist patina, and the rest of the film is de-gorgeous (a phrase we used back then, as Deee-Lite was pop queen of NYC night life).  I couldn't get more than 45 minutes into the overbaked unoriginal pomp of Jarmusch's overpraised ONLY LOVER'S LEFT ALIVE but this film really knows its classic horror movies and has some interesting things to say, with great Gothic shots that wondrously fuse the downtown grit of NYC and the lighthouse expressionism of the old world. Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) is weary of her jet set life and longs to love her latest victim, a girl wth a great East Village apartment. The cast is gorgeous, and soothing to the eye, unlike, say so many mumblecore types, these people are both gorgeous yet intelligent, witty yet not snarky. And hangovers can be soothed by the beauty of Galaxy Craze as Lucy--a kind of mix of Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy circa HIGH ART. There's also the beautiful Martin Donovan as Harker, Peter Fonda as a hippie Van Helsing, and Jared Harris, surprisingly punk rock sexy young, as Nadja's weird brother. It's clear in every frame that the Gothic expressionistic blood of Karl Freund, and the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the downtown cool of Abel Ferrara all flow through Almereyda (his contemporary adaptation of HAMLET remains my favorite film version.) I even like his 1998 film THE ETERNAL (Aka TRANCES), a weird Irish bog mummy tale that plays out like a hybrid SHINING-SZAMANKA coupled to that old Bram Stoker chestnut, filmed by Hammer in the 60s as BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB with a smattering of STRAW DOGS. It's not as good as NADJA, but Walken has a field day as a crazy uncle. See it once you're smitten with NADJA, since it's on Netflix Streaming... and also good for a hangover.

Galaxy Craze
---
5. SPRING BREAKERS (2013)
Dir. Harmony Korine

A homeage to film noirs like GUN CRAZY or THE BIG SLEEP molded halfway into a PIERROT LE FOU and wed delirious contagious psychedelic shivering like ENTER THE VOID, a day-glo nite brite money chute that's intoxicatingly dangerous to breathe and its ASMR breathing is perfect for second chakra-alignment --and sexual heat is the best medicine for hangovers. I haven't had drugs on my person in years but suddenly I felt the cops coming in through the window, or through my skin! Korine's movie reminds me why I never liked cocaine -- I'll gladly sacrifice the sexual gyrating moment by moment heavy breathing tactile intensity to not feel the blood run cold pit of the stomach disappearing empathy response. But BREAKERS glows like the secret chamber in that Twin Peaks bordello, only on STP. Once the Jesus freak girl goes home, this shit really gets good, turning into a badass bizarro world version of Charlie's Angels, with James Franco inhabiting the role of a southern fried gangsta rapper Charlie squabblin' with his childhood buddy, the reigning (black) king of drug world St. Pete. See it with headphones on, for maximum stereophonic druggy sound, it will contextualize and heal and soothe your hungover brain.

6. THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957)
Dir. Douglas Sirk

Like Harper is a grim sequel to The Thin Man which was a sequel to The Big Sleep (i.e. Nick and Nora are what happened after Marlowe married heiress Vivian Rutledge), so The Tarnished Angels can be imagined as a sequel to those 30s MGM barnstormers, with Robert Stack as the Clark Gable daredevil pilot, and Jack Carson as the Spencer Tracy gone to ground, then there's Dorothy Malone, so smoking hot and well lit that you join the crew of leering sleazebags at the carnival that pay to watch her parachute down in a fluttering skirt. It's based on a Faulkner story and you will believe Rock Hudson can act as he plays a tipsy reporter smitten by Malone and in quiet awe of Stack's daring, but Stack needs flight "like an alcoholic needs his drink," and when his plane crashes he pimps out his wife to get a new one.

The flight races are spectacular, some truly amazing barnstormer flying going on. It's in black and white Cinemascope, a rarity in itself, but you eventually get sucked in, especially with a decent DVD transfer, which you can get via the TCM Archive and maybe nowhere else. Expensive, then, but worth it... even if you come away from it all feeling a bit down on life as a whole, you're sure one thing - these three leads show so much power they all but crack the film apart. The best scene occurs with Stack and Malone crashing on Hudson's floor and couch. He comes home a bit drunk, Carson is asleep and there she is awake and whispering to him, Sirk's gorgeous lighting shining through her white nightgown as she spreads herself along the couch, and it's so hot you almost pass the fuck out. Looks like we're... closed for the evening. I'd give Stack a plane too, and so would Rock, if we could have Malone in this film --and we hate ourselves for being so vile, and so does she. But damn... it just makes her all the sexier. That and the whispering and the live-for-the-moment all make it an ideal hangover movies

7. ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)
Dir. Victor Heerman

Few consider ANIMAL CRACKERS to be the Marx Brothers best film (it's either NIGHT AT THE OPERA or DUCK SOUP), but much as I love all their Paramount work and their first two movies at MGM, for my acid viewing, nothing beats ANIMAL CRACKERS, it's their most psychedelic in its strange way--their last based on actual stage plays (so all jokes are time-tested) and has a great George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart script. It takes it's time and spreads out and was filmed out on Long Island and it shows with the feeling of zany ease. You can catch ahold of it too, and see it from the beginning when it looks like it's going to be the most boring musical ever made -- Mrs. Rittenhouse is giving a party on her LI estate, and one by one the Marxes file in and all worries vanish into a haze of giddy laughs and forgiveness, even when they occasionally drown in puns. And you're dilated nerves will be glad to hear Harpo's absolving harp interlude. Truly, it heals the broken misery of life. 

8. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

It's regal, it's lovely, it's grey and blue color schemes soothe the spirit and of course Cary "no mother, they didn't give me a chaser" Grant. He soothes, too, just by being in nearly every scene, as does his grace in being seduced by wily agent Eva Marie Saint. Even the bad guys never shout but rather speak in silken whispers. The only loud behavior comes from Bernard Herrmann's aggro score. And it's long, too. Time enough to uncoil your misery. Tomb enough, eye. Lay on.

9. MACBETH (1948)
Dir. Orson Welles

I'm partial to this film from days of watching it over and over drawing pangs of solace from Macbeth's inconsolable guilt, his sense of letting ambition and his wife's poison words (she's the demoness in the bourbon bottle) draw him farther and farther into the morass. This is the movie for when you're trying not to think about the horrible mess you made of your night, and nervous system. Unlike Olivier's Shakespeare adaptations, there's no stifling air of soundstage no audience-theater silence - and now thanks to Olive's Blu-ray you can see the dirt on the stage sky - the vast cavernous set--with jagged mountainsides fresh from Republic westerns, like a spirit world, neither indoors no out, neither onstage, no off, with the thick atmosphere seeming to breathe and thrive, even when the Scottish brogues are so thick you can barely understand a word... but who cares? You can savvy enough to be moved and to have your emotional state of remorse and guilt reflected in great Elizabethan poetry, and Welles' voice is a constant chakra-rooting comfort. His Macbeth is as still as the night and as absolving as an Epsom salts bath.

10. THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942)
Dir. Frank Tuttle

Veronica Lake is a great salve for any hangover, with her soft dream-like voice it's like she's deliberately trying to not wake up the people sleeping in the back room (when I was a child my dad kept us quiet at the grocery store by telling me there were people sleeping in the back -- I always think of that when seeing Lake's movies). Her chemistry with Ladd is palpable and the feeling of being pursued by laws and fears is sublime enough to make the endless coincidences and deux ex machinae more than bearable. -- and topping it off, the great Laird Cregar as the most silken of villainous stooges, his whole elegantly large form trembling at the thought of the violence he must inflict on his captive brings it all into perspective; it's just another night after all... you'll live. (See: Veronica Lake Effect).

Erich Sez: When in doubt, pick quiet, dark movies.
----Now -- if you decide, wisely, to drink more the morning after, i.e. the hair of the dog -- may I suggest these three films to do so to? A strong drink, downed fast with juice or chaser (for me it was a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice) will dissolve the pain and you'll feel the glorious flush of rapture that only the true benders know. Just remember to leave a half-full glass of the same concoction by your bedside, if you know because the hangover is going to substantially worse the next time you wake up, though chances are you won't have time to even make it to bed. You'll just wake up on the couch, the DVD menu on eternal repeat. I stopped drinking before the advent of DVDs, so I woke up to a rewound videotape, but either way the effect is the same. Hit play before you have a chance to second guess your decision. Movies can be watched over and over and over when you're on a bender! I saw SPECIES a hundred times that way. Don't remember a single thing about it. 'Sept I love it.


But in the meantime, you're an outlaw now, so enjoy that giddy flush of freedom that comes with the pall of death hanging over it, the rare Marx Brothers-ish joy when you know the ship has sailed and you're not getting back to land until you jump in the ice cold water and try to swim to shore. And the longer you wait, the farther the boat sails.

See also the good folks at Modern Drunkard, who originally published my Guide to the Bender article (later reprinted in Daedalus Press's Decadent Handbook), and who have lots of great film reviews. Of course anything by W.C. Fields is golden, particularly INTERNATIONAL HOUSE and NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK. There's also THE THIN MAN, APOCALYPSE NOW, and of course, I would imagine since again I got sober before it came out, but GHOSTS OF MARS. One look at this great, terrible, magnificent film - and I knew.


Mars, in the company of Natasha Henstridge and her stash of 'clear.' What better place to drink through the day? Come on, you Martian motherfuckers!

2014 Year in Debrief (Erich Writing Roundup)

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CNN is excitedly reporting on the Paris comic strip massacre today. Pow! Whiz! But 2014 already had examples of how the media secretly thrills when humorless zealots react violently to satire. Evil has no sense of humor, but Anderson, Wolf, and Burnett get their sails filled with mighter-than-the-sword gusts: NK vs. Sony (The Interview), Daily Show vs. Iran (Rosewater), Homeland Security out after Bill Hader for portraying Julian Assange (SNL). That last one was a bad joke, but they all seem like Borgesian ficciones, though foretold long ago by Sartre, Joan of Arc, and Phillip IV. But they won't bother me for being a harbinger of the nonlocal future, a chrysalis (or pupa) beyond place and time, camel-threading through the noose's nose just to stay in Park Slope place, but it's all right, ma... I'm only receding / into the past... past... past... psst ... by my toes. Get your ass to Mars. 

1. Hearts of Darkness, Lights of Madness: Herzog - The Collection

Bright Lights Film Journal - 11/14
"I myself hate the jungle, but I share Herzog’s abiding love for the magnetic charisma inherent in many forms of megalomaniacal insanity, for narcissism or messianic complexes in charismatic geniuses are the gasoline that fuels all the great artistic engines. I’ve followed such people off many a cliff, so part of me admires the way Herzog never falls in after them, only scales patiently, even tortuously, down the ravine. He never follows the ego so closely he’s burnt when it flies into the lightbulb. Some might call that madness, but it's actually the worst kind of sanity--the sign of a mind so rational it implodes without craziness to orbit..."(More)

2. America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the new Val Lewton

"... both understand the ebb tide of childhood fears of abandonment stronger than any fear of death, and how when this tide washes through the land, the crap's washed away and all that remains are the immovable immortal icons in whom we first a source of protection that wouldn't abandon us: Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, and of course Jesus--all loom on Lana's heavenly plane like death coaches. On Val Lewton's plane there's no need for living pop culture icons; all that remains after his death tide are immortal archetype statuses from Greek and Egyptian myth: statues of Cerberus, Set, and San Sebastian (above): heaven, hell, and the dark doorway between them motionless and waiting in crevices of the stone stairways and rustling cane fields and wine goblets and calypso songs. His idols are literally etched from rock; all-seeing through blank eyes, demons that are only vaguely fleetingly visible in the shadows, black on black like the cover of White Light / White Heat, only animated, a cartoon black splotch that resists all but the final Rorschach meaning.

3. Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

"When we sense something is being kept from us, whatever it is gains in power as our fears project onto it and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative nine-dimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's optic nerves. This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in; it's an ocean wherein all dreaming beings are as fish, surfers, sailors, drowners, whales, or dolphins. The Satanist sail on the surface (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a navy man, and Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control)  while the psychedelic shamans surf, unconscious dreamers bob in the waves, and the schizophrenics drown in eternity. Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end she joins the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes." And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven." (more)

4. Choose Death: Revisiting TWILIGHT's Junky Delirium:

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

5. Blank Like a Panther: CAT PEOPLE (Blu-ray review) 

Bright Lights Film Journal - 1/14
"High on cocaine, top flight champagne, Vietnam disillusionment, European art cinema, and classy prostitutes (I assume) in the pre-awareness-of-AIDs era, these tubmates shot for the skies, for the dark literary Conradian heart of the American dream. As for their right to immortality, well, time has told and most film lovers agree: better one flawed crass attempt at Manly Greatness than a perfect little PC film of no particular reach or ambition. Julie Dench’s grey eyes reflecting a windswept coastline will earn a film all sorts of polite applause but the bloody nude sexy daughter of Klaus Kinski stalking a dream jungle in Paul Schrader’s lush-lipped 1982 hit Cat People will get those same applauders stamping and straining at the bit, either for or against, incensed, turned on, outraged. In short, it dares to walk the Eurocine walk between art and sleaze, and is very of its time..." (more)

6. Laureate of the Laid: Terry Southern and CANDY (1968)

"Candy 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 or arguing in a mawkish voice against 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 WW2 or Vietnam or that Norman Maine surf from which no faded reprobate returns. Rather than clinging to bare life like today's greedy octogenarians, bankrupting Medicare so they can eke out one more month, 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 getting richer by the nanosecond, they die like men!" (More)

7. Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of the Red Desert 

"In Spoils, Cynthia mirrors Giuliana in Red Desert in that they both need to to waken from the idealized Edenic fantasy they nurture, the objet petit a renouncement that sacrificing love on the altar of propriety entails. Each has an idealized Edenic space to retreat to (i.e. the riverside in Written on the Wind), but the difference is that Giuliana knows hers no longer exists, it's been cut-off by toxic sludge, and that even thinking some new man understands her is barely substantial enough to be a pipe dream. If we've been presuming the signs in the film point towards it being one of Italy's countless 'red telephone' dramas of forbidden extramarital affairs, we're as confused as she is. But the signifiers pointing in that direction don't add up, they're more like one of those Salvador Dali dream sequences from the late 40s, only using smokestacks instead of scissors. Similarly, Cynthia pursues Devon because forbidden love is sexy and befits the very rich, for whom the only thing they can't have etc. etc. The signifiers don't add up in Spoils either, less out of seeing the world through the eyes of a crazy person and more seeing it through the eyes of an Ed Wood-meets-Harold Robbins-style Paul Masson-engorged windbag." (MORE)

8. It's only real if it wrecks your life: HER, THE WAY WE WERE, LOVE AFFAIR

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

9. Dystopian Parables for the Masses: DIVERGENT, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER 

"But if grooving to a nine figure-budgeted movie spinning in your hardware can make you feel that you're part of a vox populi juggernaut revolution, even if only for two hours and ten minutes, facing danger unafraid, just by watching, dissolving into the breathless pace and riveting action... then just remember that while you were so motionless on the couch, six more species died in the rain forest.... and you could have prevented it, for just fifty cents a day, that's less than the price of a cup of coffee."

10. Taming the Tittering Tourists50 SHADES OF GREY, 9 1/2 WEEKS, EXIT TO EDEN, SECRETARY + SHE DEMONS, Franco, Bunuel, Josef von Sternberg, Alain Robbe-Grillet

"True masochism pre-dates the Oedipal complex, it moves towards total reunion or separation, peek-a-boo, as it were, of the oral phase gratification, the return to a total reunification with the mother and the annihilation of the self, Eros and Thanatos conjoined. There are no images at this stage, the eyes are closed and pressed against the heavenly breast. But movies can't go dark, so they'll never get there. Even without ruining a BDSM fantasy with buddy cop comedians there's already something faintly ridiculous and sad about bondage onscreen, ala that night at La Nouvelle Justine. It's like fiction within fiction, a double negative, which may have some value only as metatextual abstraction or intellectual discourse, which is why it's so beloved of French intellectuals like novelist/theorist Georges Bataille (Story of the Eye) and filmmaker/novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (or Lacan and Deleuze), but no matter how arty the lighting and fractured the text, the bondage and discipline stuff in Robbe-Grillet's films always looks a little sex shop goofy. There's no way to de-goofy it without going really dark."(more)

11. A Reptile Dysfunction: De Palma + Argento 

"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 and 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). The vision of her killer clears up like a post-PSYCHO shower bathroom mirror from her pupils. Unless the cops 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 identify your killer or your final thoughts."(more)

12. Dawn of the Dinkins: RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE (2013), BLANK CITY (2010)

"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 that there are now so many options none of them end up being anything interesting. Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital - you know, like with Friendster."(MORE)

13. 13 Obscure Horror Films to Watch This Halloween

Slant - 10/14
"This list of 13 weird movies all seem to reflect fear of their own obscurity: aging actresses camping it up before the mirror with highballs and axes; younger actresses having Antonioni-esque meltdowns; and space ships following the Alien slime breadcrumb trail. They throw normal reality to the wind, yet never lapse into whimsy or sentiment. They explore collective human mythos with a stout heart of darkness, and with scant budgetary means. At the very least, they can hold your attention, and deliver decent chills, especially with a nice buzz and low expectations." (more)

14. Not with a Wimp but a Banger: KICK-ASS 2, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, ENDER'S GAME

"We must fight Morris Chestnut's call to safety and fight with all our strengths unimaginative dogmatic Hollywood's glorification of 'being a kid.' Already they have gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing, from our cinema heritage. They will not stop until everyone wears helmets even to bed. Stop them before they jab their safety-first overhead florescent lights even into the darkest recesses of our most secret-sacred heart. Because you know they intends to try. I say roast him on the open fire of aimless youth rebellion! Richie in OVER THE EDGE, thou shalt not have died in vain! If only you had a cool keychain I could buy to prove my fealty." (more)

10 Reasons DOOMSDAY (2008)

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Every blood moon or so comes a movie I seem to be in the minority of calling great. I'm happy to time and again sacrifice time on the altar of their DVDs. And for them, the ten reasons: 10 Reasons GHOSTS OF MARS ; 10 Reasons TERMINATOR 3 and 10 Reasons THE THING (2011)

The 10 Reasons -- an idea whose time has come... And so... DOOMSDAY.


After the critical and commercial success of his 2005 sleeper hit THE DESCENT, Neil Marshall was Brit-horror's golden boy. Given a big budget for his next project, Marshall chose to go all out and make a big John Carpenter-George Miller-Walter Hill post-quarantine plague semi-apocalypse action thriller. Critics found it muddled and derivative. I never would have found it all had not I checked IMDB to see what he'd been up to a few years ago.

I'll confess it looked terrible from the outside. But turns out this is a film aimed directly at ME, or my demographic, the type who grew up shaped by the same great 70s-80s films that shaped it. Let's examine three films which are perhaps DOOMSDAY's main influences:

1. John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981): JC had scored two big back-to-back hits in HALLOWEEN and THE FOG. He was now a brand name, associated with launching the slasher boom, a sub-genre he had no interest in. So he took his rep and profits and went all out with this gonzo adventure story. His own hero was the maverick iconoclast Howard Hawks, regularly did the same thing, switching genres with impunity. And Carpenter found a cheap source of post-apocalyptic urban wasteland in downtown St. Louis, which had been devastated by a terrible fire and was yet to be rebuilt. He basically had the run of the place!
2. George Miller's THE ROAD WARRIOR (1982) 
MAD MAX hadn't made a big dent here in the US, but was a four alarm fireball in the rest of the world (AIP -the American distributor- insisted on dubbing the voices to get rid of the Aussie accents--a real bad idea). So Miller had real money for the sequel and it's all onscreen. And he found a cheap source of post-apocalyptic urban wasteland in the Australian outback. We kids didn't quite understand what the Outback was in relation to the rest of Australia... but we sure do now. The idea of needing speed to survive in the wasteland is now totally clear - that vast flat desert emptiness makes the whole continent like one big drag strip. 
3. Walter Hill's THE WARRIORS (1979): Hill found a cheap source of graffiti-covered urban wasteland in 70s NYC, which then at its most gang-accursed days since the days of the Dead Rabbits. Crime was so rampant the city cried for a vigilante, and got Bernard Goetz, the Guardian Angels, and (onscreen), Charlie Bronson. In THE WARRIORS, taking the subway line from the far heights of Pelham Bay Park all the way back to Coney Island was (and still is) an Odysseus-style journey, encountering an array of wimps and shoving baseball bats so far up asses the Baseball Furies look like popsicles. Yeah, we all wanted to be Ajax (James Remar) and laughed at the seriousness and narcissism of Swan (Michael Beck). It's still the quintessential New York movie, and those heady days are returning thanks to our mayor Bill "Cyrus" de Blasio.
I've already written of how my own life was changed the Halloween night in the early 80s when my mom rented us both WARRIORS and ESCAPE and had them waiting when we got back from trick-or-treating. We saw them back to back high on our scored candy, the sense of edgy urban danger bringing us higher and higher... and were never the same again. I would never have believed I would ever be crazy enough to want to live in NYC after those two movies, let alone for 20 years. And I've seen all three of the above enough times that this whole blog and my whole life flows with quotes from them - Look at yourself, Max, you're a mess. See what you get, Warriors? See what you get when you mess with the Orphans? You're the Duke! You're A number one. The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla... you always were smart, Harold. And to that outfit that had such a hard time getting home, sorry about that, guess all we can do is play you a song. What a puny plan.

Maggie... he's dead. Come on...
Losers! Losers wait!
I'm gonna shove that bat so far up your ass you'll look like a popsicle...
Keys, map of the bridge, hey! hey! Hey!
We're the Lizzies...
Just walk away... just walk away...

I think DOOMSDAY was in the end undone by one of the most derivative titles and posters that ever haunted a great trashterpiece: the biohazard tattoo and crossed sword-anarchy hybrid symbol, the face tattoos and the graphic novel-esque three color style, along with the tag "Mankind has an expiration date." So banal. I remember seeing this poster outside of a theater and thinking "oh brother, again with the Neo-Pagan post-apocalypse warrior chicks engaged in endless slow mo CGI blood-splattering combat" and the whole RESIDENT EVIL, UNDERWORLD, SUCKER PUNCH, KILL 'EM ALL vibe, all the 360 whip-around slow-mo camera CGI shots of CGI carnage and ammunition expenditure and zero count characterization or giving a damn. Even the Imdb.com main film description is lame. Who needs another "futuristic action thriller where a team of people work to prevent a disaster threatening the future of the human race."?

In short, it looked like yet another adaptation of a manga based on a FINAL FANTASY-style rotoscoped CGI animation TV show based on an arcade game, rather than a moody analog return to the 80s Carpenter-Hill-Miller heyday, a loving homage to a more visceral time. Instead of promoting it as kind of retro Tarantino-esque throwback/homage they banked on the idea we'd be intrigued by graphic novel illustrations of body mods and homemade weapons. Imagining yet another incoherent parade of overused CGI and SIN CITY high def black and white graphic novel cannibal combat, my demographic bravely stayed away. They all but redubbed it into 'American' which is the only version we Yanks could get of MAD MAX back before the DVD finally came out.


I only hesitatingly Netflixed DOOMSAY in the end because of seeing THE DESCENT yet again a few years ago and checking up on Marshall's imdb page to see if he'd done anything new. Anyway, here they are, 10 reasons with SPOILERS... so beware.


1. Rhona Mitra as the one-eyed Major Eden Sinclair: She lost her eye as a child at the border between England and Scotland (the latter the site of an unstoppable plague) and was the last civilian to make it out, thanks to a compassionate soldier who traded his seat on the last chopper out. Sure it's familiar - but I like the idea that she basically stays with the Special Air Service (SAS) like an adopted mascot (though this isn't clarified), since she takes the place of one of their own, and now has no mom or family. Growing up to the rank of major while her home country disappears behind a robotic machine-guarded quarantine wall, she narrates as the world turns its back on Britain for being so cold to Scotland, basically turning it into a no-fly zone quarantine prison, killing anyone who tries to escape. The eye she loses near the wall melee is replaced by a detachable camera orb that can record images to tiny discs in her watch. Very cool idea. And I like that there's no 'Eden grows up' montage, just her voiceover detailing the ensuing 'gone dark' status of Scotland.


And Mitra plays the Major dead straight - neither macho nor comical nor boring nor sexualized, instead possessed of smartly British esprit de corps. Bob Hoskins is great as her de-facto father figure, who perhaps was even there during her rescue but at any rate has clearly come to regard her as a kind of daughter but not in a corny way. She's Snake Plissken as a military officer. That she winds up in charge of a mostly male insertion force is never a cause for snickering or her needing to prove herself, and there's no romance, nor sex, consensual or otherwise, in the film. No boyfriend, no spark-baiting. It's glorious.


2. Malcolm McDowell and his younger punk son Sol as the bad guys  (in two separate chapters - they're never seen together) and the levelheaded daughter ('the cure'). Dad is living in a castle and reverted to Medieval basics (including torture devices and gladiator combat), while Saul (Craig Conway - one of the monsters in THE DESCENT!) is more a mix of Cyrus from THE WARRIORS and Wes (Vernon Wells) from THE ROAD WARRIOR. It might be hard to imagine why they'd practice cannibalism when fields of cows are just a few miles away, but there you go... it's ceremonial. I like that Sol doesn't try to get rape or torture porn-ish when he has Sinclair trussed up. For these folk, it's all about the spectacle. And Conway is a little much at first, but by the end we're glad he's around. The dude gives every hiss and sneer 110% and his lean muscular body looks like he's actually doing lots of hard work and exercise -they're not gym muscles like a juicehead drinking whey, they're frickin' punching guys in the mosh pit muscles, i.e. not 'sculpted' all uneven based on what he's doing in the real fucking world. Go get 'em, Sol.


As for the father, whose crowned himself king of a new era of medieval barbarism, Malcolm gets a few good scenes but barely has time to register aside from a few CALIGULA at the coliseum-cum-field of honor-style gladiator arena moments. His steel blue eyes glowing in the shadows of the actual castle location look great though.


3. The crazy cannibal feast scene and Lee-Anne Liebenberg - which meshes punk club antics with cannibalistic orgies, ska shuffles, Satanic strippers, fire eaters, bikes, the captured soldier dinner trussed up on the front of a vehicle like the captured townsfolk strapped to the gang vehicles in THE ROAD WARRIOR. It's funny (the showmanship involved made me think of similar scenes in IDIOCRACY), electric, and gives everyone a time to shine, especially Lee-Anne Liebenberg, who makes such a good impression as Sol's 'first lady' she wound up on the poster (and the top image). Her part is small but that crazy look in her eyes, pierced tongue fluttering like she's devouring the captured soldier's terror as he watches her light up the grill below him, is a great glimpse of someone dancing in the flames of raw Pagan madness rather than the usual 'actress trying to look scary.'


4. David O'Hara (THE DEPARTED) as Canaris - his "thinning the herd" mentality and gravel-voiced iron hardness makes a great gravitas-enriched parallel to Malcolm - three separate bad guys! And his is a much better comeuppance than Snake's pulling the tape out at the end of ESCAPE to screw over the president (Donald Pleasance).


5. The ROAD WARRIOR-style car chase climax -minus one demerit for cheesy addition of a 90s Siouxie and the Banshees (?) song that I think you need to be British to deem appropriate. Imagine if George Miller put some Men Without Hats song over the climax of THE ROAD WARRIOR, Neil! Yeah, now you know how we feel. Otherwise, sublime. And the cars and trucks are so badass you can't even begin to appreciate the detail the first viewing -- as in the human skeleton hand holding the rearview side mirror above.


6. Scotland - it's like an EMPEROR JONES of Scottish history - the troupe traveling (in DAMNATION ALLEY-style assault trucks) through the fields and highways first to TRAINSPOTTING punk rock Pagan Glasgow back to BRAVEHEART-era castles and knights on horses, before returning to the modern highway, and eventually to Eden's intact and untouched aside from dust childhood home.


7. The Time Window - They only have 48 hours to complete their mission, 'otherwise there'll be no 'back' to come home to, as the plague has broken out in London. It means they can't slow down for a second, which explains the crazy heedlong wild weekend racing to catch a train vibe. It's not clear why Canaris would come on so menacing--arriving in a giant combat helicopter--when she finally delivers the cure, and she's so stand-offish, and then two seconds later he's saying "come with us" as if there's no reason she would. Well, why wouldn't she? She's working for them. Why wouldn't she think he would want her back? Did she miss the window? Is it because the PM--the presumed good guy her boss (Hoskins) trusts and works for is dead? Are there script revisions that don't quite cohere? Well, all the above referenced movies have similar problems, and who cares? It rocks.

8.  Ingenious 'collapse of the real' art direction and set decoration- rewards close notice (i.e the 'souvenir shop' signs in the castle - ironically now a sign of ancient history rather than vice versa), all the great body mods and other details. It didn't have to be so rich. But it is. Just take a look at Liebenberg in the top image, look closely and notice the white ink biohazard tattoo on her shoulder. Savor the rich tribal detail.


9. Another moody score by David Julyan - I wish it had pulsed with analog synths more, but I love its subliminal checks and nods towards scores by Carpenter (ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13), Tangerine Dream (SORCERER), Vangelis (BLADE RUNNER), Bart De Vorzon (THE WARRIORS), just to let you know the references are lovingly intentional. Rather than doing the helicopter score bit, Julyan deftly acknowledges his references rather than dictating audience emotions. The result is a score that's largely invisible in that it never draws too much attention to itself (except in the above-mentioned Siouxie incident)


10. The great ending The way first Sinclair 'breaks' as she finally gets back to her childhood home in Glasgow, to find a picture of her mother --it's not corny since she's been so stoic all the while.

And then the superb "have a piece of your friend!" last line with the head and the punks. Why didn't every great post-apocalyptic movie end that way? Do I stand up and cheer every time and wish for a sequel that will most likely never come?

I do. 

The Gummo Marx Way: INHERENT VICE (2014)

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The sexy girl was languidly gyrating atop our seated hero when the drugs began to take hold. Her every slow deep rhythmic breath sending electric thin twisty second chakra waves through my senses, me buried in a seat next to a giant who never took off his leather coat, my own giant winter coat all around me, contraband spilling everywhere, the image of these two drug-addled lovers, bigger than life on the BAM screen, on Doc's couch, coming deeper into 3-D focus with each inhale; each shadowy spiderweb sketch line filaments of the deep seething photography like a mental brushstroke framing the pair of them against the darkening afternoon of the apartment. Her Tropic of Cancer-style twisted sexual bondage extended single take narrative slowly driving our hero into a ferocious rutting frenzy. Beginning to end of a single take, single shot, it turned me on in ways I forgot were possible for a movie to do, the way being turned on by a pretty girl's breathing can trigger the onset of whatever substance you took as the movie started, the way her whole aura trembles and vibrates, a being of pure delicious energy that works its way into your soul deeper with every inhalation. It's all right there in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, where just being an elevator with a laughing Cameron Diaz is enough to send Benicio del Toro's acidhead lawyer into a slow-building howl of pain that infects his mind and body for the rest of the trip and results in him even pulling a knife on her friend. Ya dig?


GF later tells me I was moaning softly all through the scene. Not the first time I've been told that. I never notice it, but who notices anything when they're so transfixed in the dark of a crowded BAM? I had my first psychedelic moment at a late night double feature of YELLOW SUBMARINE and HEAD in 1986... not knowing what to expect and excited in the dark and then, as the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds plunged down on her carousel horse and the animation shifted into an Art Nouveau Matisse rotoscope, I plunged down with her, the floor opening up beneath me and my idea of what was possible in the realm of my perception and experience widened into a once-in-a-lifetime flash awakening. It was like that again, with INHERENT VICE, in that scene, but sexier. Every strand of her hair and flush of desire in her eyes morphing in shimmering thin spiderweb heat lines. the deep mind-blowing breathing second chakra freak-out of this moment. Everything that came before and after in director Paul Thomas Anderson's crowded canvas impossible to all savvy in one viewing, but this one scene something like the erotic heart of all things, and a reminder that lurid stories of domination and submission often work more powerfully when told (as in PERSONA) and not seen (which is why 9 1/2 WEEKS is so much hotter when you haven't seen it - and why people are going to be laughing all through 50 SHADES OF GREY). Unlike THE MASTER, though where there wasn't any character worth hanging with, especially not all those pink bow-tie cult members, or Phoenix's mangy scrawny townie sailor or Hoffman's bouncy infant. But this is, man... we still got Phoenix but his fierceness has more value since it's brought out only when needed; but more important we got a damned good anima, not just for him but the entirety of PTA's emotionally stunted male character psyches--in the great breakout vividness of Katherine Waterston; a moving and very weird scene with the great Eric Roberts (this is to him what KILL BILL was David Carradine). And most of all, rather than Monterey or wherever the hell in the dullard post-war 40s-50s, this is1970, California, via the literary tripper's choice, Thomas Pynchon.  I want to hang onto everything but most of it is a blur of names and faces and places. A stray streak of sunshine on Doc's face during a drive to the beach, a sunrise reunion of a reformed junky family, the glow of the doorway and the horizon line behind matching in perfect transcendentally lucid pink, and that Waterston monologue --that's what I remember most. Just a stem and a cap to heighten the gorgeous golden magic hour moments, just a little Gordita Beach Turkey Ranch, that's all I got. Just a couple of acres. And the Marx Brothers, weren't they there? Groucho looking out from the ANIMAL CRACKERS arch and talking to Doc like a cross-mediated platform surfer? Stuff was on TVs. I remember that much. Always is in a Pynchon, he'd be a great film critic if he wasn't so high-falutin' - kind of the best part of the books, to be honest. He knows his pop culture shit, and blends it and spikes it with post-modern glug glug glug real nice. 


Mystified critics reasoned English major Generation X stoners who remembered the 70s from childhood as some mystic California consciousness raising half-scam half-dawning of the Age of Aquarius high water mark--an orgy they saw but never experienced as the frigid sexual slasher post-Lennon-getting-shot-AIDS 80s clamped the lid down--would probably dig it more than their bourgeois-kowtowing local paper fusty baby boomer selves. Paul Thomas Anderson, as far as they were concerned, hadn't made a decent movie since HARD EIGHT. The Gen X-ed of us knew better, we loved everything, but 2012's THE MASTER had thrown us for a loop. We dutifully saw it twice thinking it would cohere into genius but no, it was still just gorgeously photographed acting of no more lasting effect than a sleepover at grandpa's house and being made to chop wood and liking it. After that, a sense of existential despair set in for we PTA devotees. The only moment of THERE WILL BE BLOOD-level badass Bunyan truth in the whole film is when Hoffman shouts "Pig Fuck" with a coiled unresolved adolescent fury any frustrated enlightened charlatan knows all too well. The more drivel you speak, the surlier your squirming toad cortex seethes below. But it was hard to buy Hoffman, for all his towering talent, as a cult leader. Neither he nor Phoenix is the sort, for example, you'd want a bedroom poster of, or to pray to on an altar, the way say we would Cary Grant or Russell Crowe.


But this is INHERENT VICE: Ultimately, as the narrating Joanna Newsom notes, a nameless eternal evil has seeped like a vapor out from the ancient opium Pacific and co-opted the Age of Aquarius, which in this part of 1970 California is apparently very near becoming such a dominant culture that cops don't even bat an eye when you spark up a joint in their presence. They do beat you up for having long hair though. Ain't no gettin' around that. So just assume the passive stance of protecting head and fingers and groin and let the billy clubs fall where they may.

Milk
The strange ancient frenemies relationship with Josh Brolin's flat topped cop Bigfoot being all similar to his role as the 'Twinky Defense'-copping assassin Dan White in MILK (2008), just one of the myriad interconnections (Newsom's debut album being THE MILK-EYED MENDER). PTA's always been first and foremost a filmmaker for de facto brother or father relationships, and part of what BLOOD's power emerged from was the relative lack of a feminine element. Certainly, to my memory, no female character has a line of dialogue. Instead it was like a boy scout-cum-capitalist narrative nursing on the crude oil teat of the Paul Bunyan masculine John Henry Steel Driving consciousness to craft the dark father of capitalism. THE MASTER tried to do the same, but Amy Adams' as Hoffman's wife snaked forward with more power perhaps than even Hoffman (as his Clinton-esque hand job indicates). Now, in VICE, it's even narrated by a woman, and not a Spacey in BADLANDS blank slate but a savvy all-knowing Cali free spirit shamaness of no small wit, harp expertise and mystic acumen, albums rich with great existential lines that would stagger Whitman and leave my iPod devastated "and though our bodies recoil / from the grip of the soil / why the long face?" These in short, are not stealth buzzkills like Amy Adams, but wild untamed goddesses of strange alliance, gravitating towards men in motion like moons but belonging to no single planet.


Then there's Joaquin as old Doc, the hippie detective. His office lurks deep in a medical suite, his 'office' including his gynecology chair that he sits in when smoking weed and staring at the window, huffing laughing gas when the myriad threads get too much for a single viewing. Seeing double somehow comes out them focus to. And the weird way heroin and Manson-esque cults were the dead end of the counterculture: ouija board, astrology, all-star cast including Anderson's ex-girlfriend Maya Rudolph as his doctor office receptionist (along with another, real, doctor) whose mother Minnie Ripperton's song "Les Fleurs" rises triumphantly from the soundtrack during Doc's mosey back to his office:

Ring all the bells /sing and tell 
the people everywhere that the flower has come
Light up the sky with your prayers of gladness 

and rejoice for the darkness is gone...

Of course 1970 it was still possible to be idealistic enough to believe that. And it's Anderson's genius that he can recreate not only our Gen X collective memory of that era, which being when we were children a source of lasting mythic resonance, every flare of a girl's jeans some kind of enchanted forest, her ironed-straight long blonde hair forever marked in our idea of a perfect woman. My mom volunteered at a runaway shelter. My dad's company bought them a coffee percolater. Toots was the name of the girl who came to stay with us for Xmas, a gorgeous thing in a jean jacket and perfectly pressed long blonde hair, my mom gave her two packs of Marlboros as an Xmas present, along with some other things I don't remember. But I remember her, and how she left me forever a-swoon for the type. But that's it right there-- she was a runaway, damaged, seeking some dream and leaving some parental abuse and finding.... us. For Xmas, my rapture over her every movement paralyzing me so I still remember how hard it was to ask her if she wanted to do Doodle Art. But it was mainly that fate had deposited her there, on my orange shag rug, like a gift from the karmic wheel. In the safety of my family, there she was, and able to let it all hang out. And it's a family affair in H.O. double hockey sticks why double-you double Oh-Dee too, in camp PTA: Sam Waterston's sexy daughter Katherine blows the film apart with her hotness as Doc's ex-girlfriend. Is Martin Donovan as the angry dad of a similar hippie chick the stand-in for Col. "I enjoyed that drink as much as you did" Rutledge, or old perma-slur Sam himself? Elaine May's daughter Jeannie Berlin is Doc's savvy New Yorker Aunt Reet, whose 'face' is a mess and who signifies Doc's Jewishness and police roots; Josh Brolin is James Brolin's son; Eric Roberts is Julia's brother; Serena Scott Thomas is Kristen Scott Thomas' sister; Jena Malone is an emancipated minor... her mom had too much Lindsay Lohan's mom-style leeching going on. Some of us remember Joaquin didn't grow so much as appear from the shadow of brother River once he joined the angels outside the Viper Club, and as every lover of old blues knows, 'viper' is what they used to call potheads back in the 20s-30s when weed was the sole proclivity of the negro jazzman. Joanna Newsom as the narrator and Doc's platonic girlfriend friend is married to Andy Samberg who later that same night (that we saw VICE) showed up on Eric Andre Show, uncredited, as Eric's double and their schtick together goes back to 1933's DUCK SOUP, starring the Marx Brothers, and the street name Gummo Marx Way--Gummo famously the only Marx Brother never to appear on film--is on one of the papers looked over by Doc at the Hall of Top Secret Records. And there's GUMMO by Harmony Korine, who also made SPRING BREAKERS, set also on a beach involving pretty people doing crimes while engaging in deep druggy binaural second chakra breathing. Of course that film was set in Florida, where Elmore Leonard set so much of his oeuvre, and that oeuvre a clear inspiration for Pynchon's source novel, along with Hunter S. Thompson (Doc and Duke sharing Benicio del Toro's eccentric lawyer) and The Firesign Theater's How Can you be Two Places at Once when You're not anywhere at all. And back around again. Gummo Marx's film oeuvre, a study through which someone in some Allen film obtained some film doctorate... which brings me back to VICE yet again, and Martin Short's obscene corrupting uncut Cockaine dentist love. 


And a wow of a super sexy girlfriend free spirit played by Katherine Waterston (Sam's daughter) named Shasta Fay Hepworth. She basically owns the movie, no mean feat considering the heavy hitters in all directions. She's the mystery, and by the end we can understand why this stoner but brilliant detective is so crazy about her. Like Lebowski about that rug, or Gould's Marlowe about that friend, or Hackman for poor Melanie in Night Moves. Woke last night to the sound of thunder / how far off I sat and wondered / started gummin' a song from 1970... was it Minnie Ripperton's "Les Fleurs?"

Throw off your fears, let your heart beat freely 
at the sign that a new time is born

Yo, Maya was that fleur? She was born two years after that song came out. So no. She wasn't even a gleam in her father's eye. But Hindustani texts all know Maya is illusion and eternally beguiling. No black coating of terrible weave could hide the value from PTA's eyes. Maya, under the Moorish wall, flower in her 'hair' like the Andalusian girls used; Maya, the woods we must hack our way clear of towards the clear-cut riverside of Nirvana, with no Excalibur machete or golden ankh to wave. And let's just take a look at this fabulous Yucatan Blue, priced only what the traffic will allow, delivered to me, Ralph Icebag, by a brown-shoed square, in the dead of night. Yeah, two Communiss on that cover - one Lennon, one brother of Gummo. Neither one of them into guns or sharp swords in the hands of young children, or frozen bananas sucked on / by Josh Brolin.


By 1970 we had already, in some ways, given up on the utopian ideal for a united and very hip America, one inflated to new heights by the California experiment: love, reefers and LSD would convert every last square to the One True Vibe. Instead: Altamont. Instead: 'free love' grubbers from the 'burbs. Instead: Manson decoding The White Album. Instead: evil cokehead troglodytes dropping by your intimate ego-dissolving LSD party at four AM and drinking all your bourbon, stealing CDs, and harassing the women, and you realizing you need your ego after all, because only your ego could get aggressive enough to get rid of them and all you can do is try, vainly, to formulate a coherent sentence without contradicting the love vibes you've vouchsafed. Instead: peaceful but filthy barefoot hippies clogging ever last public bathroom pore of the Haight and everyone being too cool to work or pay money and just presuming they'll be taken care of by the very social order they spit on. Instead: communes all slowly coming unglued as psychedelic unity and the blazing tribal consciousness that had emerged from the primitive inner rolodex for the first time in 1,000 years giving way to petty squabbles, malnourished infants of uncertain parentage, and tension over undone chores. Squalor, in short, reducing even the most enlightened of near-Buddhacatholichrists back down to grouchy adolescent earth, craving comfort of mom's clean sheets and the now-weakened capitalist behemoth's car keys.

But we had brought all the trappings of the counterculture with us back to our home suburbs, and 1970 signaled the beginning of that smooth Laurel Canyon sound. The radio lit up with songs that managed to be sexy and vaguely dangerous to us kids without seeming to offend or challenge in any way. Parents and children in unison swooned from the emotional connection of "American Pie" or "You Light Up My Life." Vietnam still sulked around but we'd given up on protesting. Instead there was bridge mix, wife swapping, martinis, and above all kids unleashed, you understand. Us. We loved Fleetwood Mac. Whatever dreams Stevie Nicks wanted to sell, we'd buy them. I stole every cent I could to buy Wacky Package. We ran loose in packs, like dogs. We could still get spanked in public and no one bat an eye. One whack for every year on our birthday in front of the whole class. At home, indoors, we towered like Godzilla over wood block towers we'd smash with our tail before sloughing back into the depths. Wood paneling was our sky; orange shag carpet the jungle canopy; couch cushions laid in a line on the floor our Bridge of Toome in County Antrim Ireland whereon  we'd march and pretend to be hung like Rodney McCorley. PTA was there, I was there. Were were you, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Smith of Anytown, USA?


I don't know how many times I've seen BIG LEBOWSKI.  I don't even like it but it's endlessly re-watchable, some part is always just right for the moment its on, and its always on... Sooner or later though, it grates on my nerves, somewhere around the funeral home. But it's never the same film twice, until now, for Jackie Treehorn's shoe prints are all over the Pynchon PTA's lovingly detailed semi-sordidness. VICE even uses the same Les Baxter-Yma Sumac Tropicalia vibe that was Treehorn's leitmotif to conjure the same crossroads between the Jack Horner nurturing free love spirit and the Treehorn mobbed-up porno-decadence. But that's just one of a thousand twuggy-druggy twiggy-wiggy branches. You can dig it. I can dig it. Cyrus, the one and only, can.... But most of all, Paul Thomas Anderson has exhumed himself from beneath THE MASTER's weighty muck to re-dig it. Who knows what would have been the result if Welles had done a 70s stoner detective film ala Coens, ala Altman. Would it have been INHERENT VICE? Or is there just no character titanic enough to hold his interest? In the end, that may be the thing. There's no core to the VICE. Phoenix is a great actor, but he's a shell, a short wiry little weirdo. We don't gravitate to him like we do to Warren William or Bogart. As for the detective narrative, it's more coherent than some, but trying to explain i to my underwhelmed GF, all I could do is relate the anecdote about Hawks calling Raymond Chandler from the BIG SLEEP set to ask who actually killed Owen Taylor and Chandler not knowing the answer either. It doesn't matter. I've seen BIG SLEEP a dozen times at least and I'm almost ready to blame Joe Brody, but Joe's saying he just sapped him for the incriminating picture from the back of the head of Krishna, So don't even draw the connections. Just soak in Eric Roberts' brilliant monologue that rips the guts out of capitalism with an LSD trowel and reveals nothing but jewelry-coated vultures, falcon predators, the breathing, cinematographer Robert Elswit's spiderweb lines of light and shadow haloing around every actor, the visible auras, the great clothes and cars like some old album come to life, and Phoenix like a little monkey wiggling free of his angel dust entrapment and every drug you watching have ever done shivering to your DNA surfaces. You're home, in this murky mythic din. Even if you were three years old at the time you remember the morning when every TV channel was the streaky shot of astronauts bouncing around the moon in molasses air, like they were underwater. In some strange way that was true love. Our whole identity formed in those moments. Harper Valley, we didn't know how much you meant to us until we thought we'd lost you. But a new time has come, we're free to love movies like those mythic moon moments, free to see you again in the same slow motion bouncing astronaut ground zero persona-dissolving mythic glow.  A new go-to comfort food bible is born, if you care to blast for it. It's the Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective, brought to you by Wild Root Cream Oil Hair tonic. Yeah, it tastes electric... crimson... almost like fire. Almost. But were real 70s cars ever this collector clean? Or ever a humor in this woman one? Take this lozenge from my tongue, this pink and blue Tab (languette) of / Purple Barrel Plums / Untie from me the TruCoat, Ralph Spoilsport. Though our bodies may break and our souls separate, why the long face? Rejoice for the darkness has come back! Remember Les Fleurs, Walter! Les Fleurs! Ils brillent dans le noir. And most of all... Rejoice, sisters and brothers and siblings transgendered: there's finally a movie where being a stoner isn't the same thing as being a sophomoric idiot. I never in a million addled years thought we'd overcome that dopey stigma, let alone Washington and Colorado. Let alone, baby.  Let alone.


Al Shean Presents: Vice Grip of the PYNCHON

Death to Realism!! eXistenZ + Oculus Rift Vs. Marcel Duchamp + Al Jazeera America

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With every passing year, Cronenberg's 1999 mindbender eXistenZ grows in its many-tentacled relevance. Back 1999, lest we forget, the internet was still only five or six years old and dot.com bubble hadn't burst. Virtual reality was just beginning to figure itself out and William Gibson cyberpunk adaptations or offshoot homages were popping off right and left--Donnie Download, Strange Days, New Rose Hotel--they all worried about 2000, when the internet was going to explode and cripple the worldWe could hardly wait. We stocked up on bottled water and duct tape. We loved The Matrix and didn't really care about the rest, because we couldn't quite grasp what was at stake unless you could actually die while in the virtual reality (we bough Morphius' sketchy "the body can't live without the mind" adage but on close scrutiny it's crap --what about comas?).


Now, 16 years later, eXistenZ seems to predict everything The Matrix was too busy slow mo bullet dodging to notice. The dot.com bubble burst long ago; nothing happened on 2000, or 2012. The Matrix seems dated and naive. Making the 'real' extra grungy and depressing (lots of grotty grey dreadlocks, short guys. cream of gruel for every meal, leaky pipes, cold grates instead of floors, and constant robot threats, ala the Terminator series' future) so the grungy and depressing artificial reality (corporate skyscrapers, busted down telephone booths) is believable as artificiality, i.e. the fake real as more real than the 'real' (just as 'they' intended!) But recently, in the past two months or so, the symbolic is trumping the real to the point reality is at best a third class passenger to the symbolic and imaginary realms. Cases in point: the storm of bad press over the all-white 2014 Oscar noms; the storm of pro-and-anti-American Sniper sentiment, the sheer weirdness of North Korea-vs.-A Stoner Comedy case lingering in the mind as The Interview pops up on Netflix; the bloody events of Paris earlier and the "Je suis Charlie" response, we're experiencing a Zizek-ish collapse of the boundary between the real and imaginary that's goes much deeper than what the First World sees as a free speech issue, just as it had nothing to do with O.J. Simpson being guilty or innocent at all that caused so many black people to celebrate spontaneously and chill white folks to the bone in the process when the Juice was at last set loose... in 1995, the same year aol.com began messing with our minds... setting the gears in motion for the 1999 Prince party moptop dotcom collapse pinnacle of bidding wars on nothingness.

Today, 16 or so years later, we in America have very little real left, just there is very little symbolic or imaginary dimension left when you live in a war zone, especially when contending with radical Islam, who are--to begin with--so anti-graven image that any kind of representational (non-decorative) art is a signpost straight to Hell. To most westerners, 'thou shalt not kill or steal' are the only commandments worth fussing over. Adultery, lying to your parents, bowing down to graven images, these are negligible sins at best, their potential for evil dispelled most often with a simple apology, certainly you won't be stoned to death for them. But not everybody is as 'evolved' as we are, we who seem never more than a few votes away from reversing every last humanitarian stride we've made since the Dawn of our Democracy and bringing our country back into a kind oppressive fundamentalist Handmaid's Tale-style WASP dystopia.

Al Jazeera America welcomes you to the Desert of the Real
Back to eXistenZ: telling the chronicle of an immersive interactive virtual reality game that's interrupted by a terrorist threat on the life of the designer, Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Cronenberg's film is a fine illustration of how western culture's ever-widening hall of virtual mirrors keeps edging out the 'Real' to the point images provoke real life threats just as much as vice versa. The terrorists in Cronenberg's films even call themselves 'Realists.' They seek to destroy the game and specifically game designer Geller, who's just taken it all to a next level mind-fuck. In her world sense of 'alternate' reality is so vivid that they worry our breadcrumb trail back to sanity will disappear altogether, resulting in a collective psychotic break. It's all written in the winds of Jungian psychology, the artist-visionary needs to venture outside the pack but should never go so far they snap the cord, they go outside in service of the pack, as scouts and foragers, ambush-blockers, stray rounder-uppers. If they just go out to escape the pack and that cord snaps, they'll wind up floating helplessly through space like Syd Barrett, or Brian Jones, or Don Birnim, or Dr. X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes. A game too real, that manages the Matrix trick of transcending the real through the performance of realness; "more human than human is our motto," as Tyrell tolds his Roy. "Is this still the game?" asks one bystander after all the presumed layers get peeled back.

But of course that confusion is why the terrorists are there, inside the game working out, in the first place. Post-modernists could have saved the terrorists the worry from the get-go, however, noting with wry consternation that reality's been slipping away since the late 1920s. If they wanted to smash something, they should have started with 'R. Mutt's' urinal, they'd say, taking a pompously pronounced sip of his absinthe. Duchamp's original point was drowned out in the bidding war over it, and eventually Duchamp had to hide his art so well no one even saw it, and at last succeeded with "Trap (Trébuchet)" 1917. a coatrack that went unnoticed. And then Andy Warhol turned lazy silkscreens into the height of post-Duchampian balderdash, and now it's not ask what post-modernism can do for reality, it's what can reality do for post-modernism. Reality bows before the "Fountain" as if its the prodigal golden calf returned from the mountaintop with a dozen teraflops of commandments, each one composed of so many ones and zeros it writes its way right into your subconscious, and just a little tiny speck more of your once vibrant imagination is snuffed to make room.

"Fountain" - Marcel Duchamp / eXistenZ gaming console
"(as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle." - Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
If there's any point to film theory at all (and there isn't), it should be that the Void/Real Thing, as Zizek extrapolates from Lacan, is approachable only via the fake spectacle, the Perseus Medusa shield, in the living room. To confront the thing in itself means total annihilation. The mistake of the 'realist' terrorists is to think that in killing the fake spectacle, they align themselves with the power of the Void, its tragic raw horror dimension becomes their ally. But we've been subsumed into the screen to the point our fake spectacle doesn't mirror the real at all, and the terrorists are seldom more than images to most of us. We only notice the eruption of the real when passing soldiers on the street, or getting our fingers dusted for... explosives (? - who knows, you don't dare ask either) at the airport. Otherwise the formula mirrors the below chart illustrating the future and past of immersive video game tech, only with terrorists struggling to deliver the void of the real onto more than just CNN, to blow our walls and electricity clear away and force us to watch the slaughter of our kin in first person, up close, to essentially provide a feedback loop that erupts from CNN and explodes our eyes and ear drums, paradoxically opening our senses to 'the Real.'

Source: WIKI

 The terrorists endeavor to widen the sliver by destroying the imaginary just as we (or at any rate, I) narrow it still further by living totally within a comfortable cocoon of movies, letting our reality go all to seed from inattention and considering the terrorists as a direct threat to that cocoon, and with good reason. Perhaps it is because of their rejection of the imaginary realm that fundamentalists mistake satire / humor for genuine attack, and why I become so disinclined to hear unpleasant news. I'm worse than anyone as far as not caring to see the suffering. I turn the channel at the first wide-eyed orphan or emaciated dog on my TV. CNN understands. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, shows images like the ones above, of life in Syrian refugee camps, the carnage of bombings of Palestine. Watch Al Jazeera and CNN in alternating segments and maybe you can get a proper idea of our whole fucked world, but who wants that? That's too much real! We need smaller doses of horror, otherwise we're like Scarlett at the makeshift hospital, we just keep walking.


But the converse is true, not enough 'real' is just as corrosive, you come to crave it. If you ban harsh images you give them power, just ask any Brit who was denied Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) for 25 years due to Britain's ban on 'video nasties' - those nasties became that poor Brit's obsession, sight unseen. Nothing gives an image power like enforcing its absence. No actual 'nasty' measured up to the dread associated with not seeing it. Of all the nasties, Texas comes closest, but partly because it understands, on a deep level, the horror, the horror -- and alas, the extra 'real' smash to the head power it still holds today might have to do with the hell the cast and crew underwent to make it and that's a hard thing to intentionally duplicate. In a way, it rips the screen open to become a whole new thing, a once-in-a-million-tries 'true' horror. But it's the exception. Still, want and curiosity is a powerful thing; images have obscene amounts of power for those denied them, and like the Brit kid squinting to see some bootleg seventh generation dupe of Texas Chainsaw, the imagination never yet met a blank it couldn't fill in. By contrast to Mohammed, Jesus and the Buddha are omnipresent in figurative representations, providing both a comfort at odd moments and an excuse to keep us out of the real (as in we don't have to imagine anymore --every last bank is filled). Mohammed isn't supposed to be depicted for reasons not unlike what motivates the 'Realist' terrorists in Cronenberg's eXistenZ. I forget which of the Ten Commandments says not to bow down to graven images, been bowing to that shizz for so long. I doubt Moses would be on the terrorist's side if he were here, but to his rheumy eyes every animated billboard on Times Square might be for Golden Calf. You got to be quick and ruthless to maintain a holy order, cut the advertisements down at the knee. Because if you don't then even the Commandment tablets themselves will inevitably be worshipped as graven images, or at the very least bid on as collector's items. We had a big marble sculpt of the commandments removed from out in front of a Southern courthouse awhile ago, not that it's the same thing as violating free speech (the atheists didn't try to kill the sculptor) but it shows the same confusion that motivates jihads on cartoonists and hacks on stoner comics.


'Now' at the time of 1999, newly sober and full of angst--uneducated in the tenets of Baudrillard and Lacan--I loved The Matrix and thought Cronenberg's film was meandering and too much like a rehash of ideas he worked over already in Videodrome and Naked Lunch. There was the druggy saga of harvesting amphibious monsters for their organs (for making drugs in Naked Lunch, biomorphic gaming consoles in Existenz), guns made of organic material (Videodrome); a bewildered protagonist shuffling along after a savvy, sexy woman who knows her way around (Judy Davis in Lunch, Deborah Harry in Videodrome, Leigh in Existenz, etc.), a maze of spies and counterspies where, as the talking fly's ass says in Lunch, the best agent is one who is unaware he is an agent at all (hence our hero is caught in the middle and never knows the score); the scene in the garage with Dafoe installing the portal in Jude Law's spine a mirror to the Naked Lunch scene where the Moroccan man sticks the broken Martinelli in the forge and pulls it out as a giant Mugwump head. And on and on. And at least neither 'drome nor Lunch involved actual gross eating of weird monster things (the sight of which makes Leigh gag in the film - and leaves a bad feeling in sensitive viewers like myself).


But it's all come true since then. Hasn't it? eXistenZ, I mean? Once we get over the 'using living organic matter for data transmission' stigma and learn how to tap the inner recesses of the pineal gland and bypass the clumsy ear and eye, we'll be exactly there --using the dream energy to craft something our brain can't distinguish from the reality its used to. We've come a long way since The Matrix (1999) or Ralph Fiennes selling other people's bootleg sensory impressions in Strange Days (1995). Virtual reality isn't just for Michael Douglas breaking into a virtual safe in Disclosure (1994) or falling off a roof in The Game (1991), not no more it's not. Cuz this here's real. Unlike Matrix, though, you can't die in reality just because you die in the Matrix. It's just a damned game after all and maybe that's part of the problem... there's very little at stake. But is it really so little? Really? Reelleeeee?? The point that works is we can't really tell, we just keep waking up out of one reality into another - is that death, or just finishing a level on the game, and there are millions of levels?

Some have argued that showing bloodshed and trauma repeatedly and sensationally can dull emotional understanding. But never showing these images in the first place guarantees that such an understanding will never develop. “Try to imagine, if only for a moment, what your intellectual, political, and ethical world would be like if you had never seen a photograph,” author Susie Linfield asks in The Cruel Radiance, her book on photography and political violence. Photos like Jarecke’s (above) not only show that bombs drop on real people; they also make the public feel accountable. As David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2003, war photography has “an ability not just to offend the viewer, but to implicate him or her as well.” (The Atlantic "The War Photo No One Would Publish")
You might be shocked but I haven't ever been shot or been in a war, or even fired a real gun more than a handful of times, but I was way into the cap gun artillery as a kid in the 70s-early 80s; but I've had some profoundly spiritual Lovecraftian transdimensional horror/void plunges since I put guns away and picked up guitars and hookahs, I've had some roller coaster reptilian demon devouring soul cleanings that make my worst college acid experiences seem like mild disturbances in the force --mainly because I had them stone cold sober. And they have stripped my soul clean 'til all that was left was a glowing sunlit circle. To dismiss these experiences as just manic episodes or a pure hallucination is the same as presuming there's no subjective-imaginary component to the experience of death, to dismiss the most profound human experience (NDEs) as nothing more than 'mere hallucinations' of an oxygen-deprived malfunctioning brain - which is, to the 'experienced,' like saying getting shot in a war is nothing but malfunctioning of the physical 3-D space-time arc of one particular body. I don't mean to compare a meditation or drug experience to war but either experience can be pretty damned terrifying and traumatic, life-changing in profound ways, so to dismiss either as 'mere hallucination' or 'mere reality' is to convey, clearly, you've never had either experience yourself. If you did then you'd know that what's going on is a deep drinking in of the pure intersubjective real, soul, mind, and body suddenly fused in ways it is normally spared. The horror of constant growth and decay that is our organic, physical world is grasped on a level usually unreachable thanks to our symbolic and imaginary filters. These filters are important. Without them we wind up either penniless spiritual wanderers, or institutionally-committed. But if they're so overused that the real is all but obscured, we turn into pompous a-holes without, as they say, a clue.


For example: a real sunflower beheld by someone with their imaginary-symbolic blinders on is merely a sunflower - identified against one's inner rolodex of flower names as if to impress one's inner grade school horticulture teacher, and its full elaborate mystery screened out since it's neither a source of fear (it won't kill you or steal your wallet) or desire (unless some sexy new lover gave it to you). But for someone without those blinders, like a yogi, Buddha, master painter, tripper, child, or schizophrenic --that sunflower breathes and radiates light and is alive with the little yellow petals around the big stamen center like yellow flames. Just as the digital cell phone snap of the sunflower is a mirror image of the sunflower, the sunflower itself is a mirror that lets us look directly into the radiant crown chakra sun... these are all not 'mere hallucinations' over something a less tripped-out friend might dismiss as "dude, it's just a sunflower!" In fact it is that attitude --that the real is completely contained within its symbolic component--that is the hallucination, a symbolic breaker that's moved from a defense mechanism to a screen that keeps the joy of life out. For those people trapped in a morass of the purely symbolic-imaginary, the only time they feel that joy is when they buy an expensive trinket or paint the bedroom a new color. And even then, it's fleeting. And for those trapped on the outside of the purely symbolic-imaginary, the prisoners of the morass of that real, the symbolic-imaginary is taken as a real threat, hence the Parisian cartoonist massacre. The person for whom an NDE to be just a dying brain hallucination is perhaps also most likely to consider "it's like a painting" the highest compliment they can give an outdoor vista; or, if they behold some surreal carnage or high strangeness in the real, note that "it's like something out of a movie" i.e. the more 'real' things get, i.e. outside their language's dismissive pincers, the more things get "like a movie", i.e. imaginary); the average fundamentalist Islam terrorist perhaps considers the hallucination of the atheist consumer a physical threat, and the purity of the real then becomes its own hallucination and they, in effect, go to war 'in the real' over a purely symbolic representation (i.e. Mohammed). Which would be, in a sense, like arresting Spielberg for depicting war crimes because of Schindler's List. Or being so freaked out by some grotesque cannibal movie you arrest the director and demand to see the actors who were killed show up in court, to prove they're not dead. 

So NOW for my less critical post-1999 eyes and ears, the idea that a newbie to the virtual reality game like Jude Law in eXistenZ would act all amateur hour is not surprising or even that upsetting. These are the types who have some serious resistance to the 'weird' - they hang out with us (the psychedelic surfers) latching onto some girl or guy they like, and fall prey to the first anxiety that comes along. We called them 'wallies' in the day (see: The Bleating of the Wallies) A voice in their head tells them they're drowning, so next thing you know they're clutching at your lapel, begging you to take them to the emergency room when a moment ago you were both fine and chilling out listening to Hendrix, man, and exploring the vast universe between your thumb and cigarette. And who among us in that same situation hasn't heard that same voice in our head? We just know to ignore it, along with all the other panic triggers being pressed. But if you're not prepared, you're like the surfer hypnotized by the size of an approaching groundswell.

As Ted (Jude Law) notes after spending a little time in the game:
"I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here."
It's silly to think that of course, even if it's true, no one forced him to play the game so he should stop being a little bitch, be more like Bill Burroughs, but when I was leaving my physical body and hovering around on the ceiling over my bed every night after work circa 2003, my first feeling was always 'what if I stop breathing while I'm not in my body?' which is kind of dumb, since we don't worry much about that when we go to sleep at night - and in dreams we're just as outside ourselves, and that shit goes on for hours and hours. These excursions only took a ten minutes or so of linear time, though they seem to go on for hours... in the game and in the InterZone.

Real (pre-symbolic)
So I came to realize Cronenberg's Naked Lunch's InterZone has always been true --anywhere the majority of people have taken or are currently on powerful hallucinogens a kind of group mind outside linear time and space takes over, and the usual layers of symbolic and imaginary are peeled away, denuding the lunch as it were. And even if you haven't taken any substances you start seeing things 'as they really are' which is the same as seeing things as 'they usually aren't' and the result is a profound existential nausea (Sartre was a big mescaline fan).

In this sense, trying to differentiate truth and illusion is like separating an orange from its peel and asking "which one is the true orange?" You might say the 'inside' is the orange and the skin and seeds are just compost, but the outer peel or skin is just as much 'the orange' and will exist far longer than the rest of it, which you will eat and then it will cease to exist. But it's then that it finally becomes real, when it's ground up and cycled through your system before being expelled, then the real is occurring. Wait... wait I know where I'm going with this, it's that Cronenberg has always known this real horror, that biotech is the wave of the future as much as virtual reality. It's already beginning to happen that designers are learning to 'write' DNA. And new steps in virtual reality are always imminent. Imagine vast teraflops of data in what looks like a simple eye drop. "Right now we're at the pong stage" notes Reesonblast39 when discussing virtual reality, "but within ten years we'll be full circle." What the hell do you mean, Reasonblast? I axed. But he didn't exist anymore - just a glitch in the matrix of our lives. (See also Post-Sensory Pong). Similarly, David Cronenberg's allegory for the collapse of the symbolic is now revealed as savvy enough to undersand that only be denuding the lunch, as it were, can the imaginary transcend the symbolic and become 'more real than reality'. It's also the realization that our human nervous system has long been an elaborate immersive experience for higher beings. These demons and angels use our delicate nervous system as video-audio immersive booths with which to experience all sorts of Hellraiser-esque masochistic pleasures. Jesus wept, bra. But he wept our tears. We'll be marching through the traumatic real of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre bone rooms and be impaled on spikes, all just so some far away punk kid robot can thrill with a Batailles-esque ecstasy via our sawed nerve endings.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as close to Traumatic Real as horror can get.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake) - the Re-Staging of the Re-Staging of the real becomes
unreal through excessive realness i.e. the art direction is so so so 'real'
 from the high contrast photography, elaborately stressed wood, and other 
art direction that it becomes commercial jeans ad banal
Because, you see, as in Lunch, in eXistenZ we're dealing with agents and counter-agents, spies, saboteurs called 'realists' who are worried--understandably as it turns out--that once games get too 'real' we'll lose our grip on reality, so are out to kill our heroine. Indeed we will lose our grip, kids. And in that sense the realists aren't too far off from hardcore Islamists who see even an innocent portrait or landscape hanging on a wall as evil - so determined are they to be free of the Platonic cave of illusion confusion that they create their own even smaller cave through a performance of non-caveness. Where do you draw the line between an editorial cartoon of a guy with a big Arabian Night-style turban on his head and the word 'Mohammed' on his chest being an offense worthy of slaughtering six people and, say, someone getting fired at NBC for letting an 'F-bomb' slip during a live broadcast, or a sports team owner getting crucified because his mistress leaks a private phone conversation where he uses the word 'nappy' or is that Don Imus? Also fired for word use deemed unsavory.


I'm not justifying any of it, you understand, everyone in both sides feels their strong emotions demand action, only those of us who've seen the limitations of our own judgement, who've learned to never trust our own feelings ("feelings aren't facts" as they say in AA) can step back and not send that e-mail. But I am just pointing out that if we think we're beyond confusing our umbrage over symbolic representation --either in printed word, speech, or image--with legitimate real life retaliation, then we're blind. Destroying a man's standing in the real world because of what he said in a private conversation to his mistress is just a nonviolent first world cousin to the Charlie massacre, i.e. killing people because of marks and remarks. Names hurt worse than sticks and stones, so the response is in proportion to the sense of hurt, rather than in proportion to the actual offense. In both cases, if we never heard the phone conversation, played obsessively on CNN, or if the terrorists never saw the offending Charlie cover, would they or we be any the worse for it? No. In these cases we can blame the messenger, to some degree, but it's a messenger we can't live without. We created it, a giant amorphous amoeba blob of all our hopes and fears jammed within. The 24-hour news cycle is a bunch of snappy piranha orbiting the latest popular kid on the playground and shunning aloud the unpopular, and instigating each's rise and fall.

The minute / you let it under your skin....  
Ted: We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand.
Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
Ted: That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market.
Allegra: But it's a game everybody's already playing.
It's a game everybody's already playing, just no one uses the same rules because in admitting it's a game at all, they lose half their pieces. So shhhh, pretend you didn't read this. It's too long anyway. My mom died yesterday... very sudden, and far away.... and words are just fingers pointing to illusions and skittering away... and this is a time for me when illusions don't work at all, and I'm forced, alas, to exit the Boar's Head, Falstaff's woolen eye coverlets trailing behind me like the last few strands of my latest and last cocoon.

Pre-Code Capsules: THE MAD GENIUS, UNION DEPOT, WATERLOO BRIDGE, THREE FACES EAST, DANGEROUS CORNER

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THE MAD GENIUS
1931 - Dir Michael Curtiz
***1/2

TCM finally showed The Mad Genius (1931), a film I've wanted to see for so many years I all but gave up. I'm a huge Svengali fan (here's the proof) and now I remember why. It fills a gaping hole in my collection, provides the sordid pre-code Barrymore 'impresario-and-theatrical protege' cross strut between the same year's more cinematic and dreamy Svengali and 1934's Twentieth Century. Indeed they all follow the same plot, one more than familiar to show biz types: a middle-aged but still dashing impresario seeing the potential greatness out of a dopey young bumpkin and dragging it out of them while meddling in and/or dominating their love life. In this case it's man-on-man action, with Barrymore as Tsarakov, the club footed son of a ballet dancer and a Russian duke, tortured with genius and longing for dance. We first spy him doing puppet show ballets in the rain before the thighs of little Frankie Darro leaping away from his abusive Cossack father catch his eye. Tsarakov and his long-suffering assistant (Charles Butterworth) spirit young Darro off in their gigantic carriage to conclude Act One. It was originally a play and you can tell by the way the dialogue spells out the big ambitions and triumphs and chicanery rather than just illustrates them, but who cares since Barrymore's doing the dialogue in his measured  yet over-the-top Russian accent, the sets are by Anton Grot (who also did Svengali's) and they are gorgeous expressionist feasts for the eyes, and the dialogue is psychopoetically self-aware, in the best scathing self-analytical tradition? 


The second act takes place ten years later and all pledged greatness has already come to pass, sparing us any boring training montages. Darro's grown into that perennially sulking leading man Donald Cook, now the greatest male ballet dancer of his time, and our once-bedraggled Tsarakov is drenched only in fur and ladies. Tsarakov keeps him supplied with women and champagne but is always on the look-out to stop him falling in love with some naive marriage-minded Debbie Reynolds-type, wisely so. And when Marian Marsh turns out to be just that type, craving the kind of wedlock and fealty which pleases the censors (invariably the type crept in, like a fungus harbinger of the code to come). Tsarakov must end it! For, as Lermontov well knew in The Red Shoes, putting romantic love ahead of art is death for a dancer. But as in that film the maestro gets his strings tangled trying to separate them and ends up tripping up, and then getting his boy back by reminding Marian Marsh of the third act of Camille and sending her off into the diamond circlet-proffering mitts of some louche lord.

Sure it's an age-old story but the censorship-as-nature's-tyranny parallels are nonetheless clear: these innocent lovers are the harbinger of the Nazis, of Joseph Breen's racist, sexist draconian code rubric, of goddamned Norman Rockwell-cheeked mailmen and freckled youngsters and blandly healthy age-appropriate lovers singing 'sweet' style-songs (you know, the half-pint Irving Berlin-on-Benadryl imitations for the Christians who thought Glen Miller was too black). Gone will be the debauched old givers of diamond bracelets and fame in the classical arts. Out with demimondes and in with wives in bobbed hair making breakfast while the baby cries and the man heads off to menial labor, laundry on a line stretched across the window leading out onto a garrett roof --all the crap that so appalls poor Humbert in the final act of Lolita.

Lolita sells out to biology's pedestrian fascist squalor
But though there's some of that in The Mad Genius, it's still too early in the pre-code era for it to swamp the decadent expressionistic corruption. Barrymore's outside the stuffy bourgeois costumed towers of MGM, so his Tsarakov doesn't mope when his star runs off, just gets royally blitzed on champagne and takes up with the newest chorus trollop (Carmel Myers, above). 

I'm a big fan of Marian Marsh due to her Sgt. Pepper era-predicting look in Svengali: the oversize gendarme coat, Dame Darcy bangs and long straight blonde hair, her sweet pixie face so perfect for hypnotizing... she's like the counterculture 36 years early. Here that anachronistic hipness is gone. That great blonde straight hair cropped unflatteringly in the style of the time and she's got big gangly legs when she dances, like she's been studying the bowleg flapper wobble of Ruby Keeler instead of a swanky Ballets Russe pirouette. Carmel Myers reminds me of one of my own past Trilbies, though, so I'm a fan. Ah, the debauched libertine life has treated me well. The having kids and laundry lines thing pays dividends I'm sure, which we playas never care to imagine, and just as the shelf life of a dancer is very limited, and the life of a pre-revolutionary Russian dance impresario with a rolodex full of debauched libertine nobles doomed to die on the altar of art so too louche bachelors inevitably just lonesome old men shuffling to and fro from the Strand Bookstore while family men bask in the alleged comfort of grandchildren. Allegedly. 

That said, director Michael Curtiz knows we didn't come for sappy young love or Frankie Darro or regret, we came for Barrymore and blondes, and Curtiz is one of the best at zeroing in on what we want to see--in this case Anton Grot's trippy art direction (including a giant pagan god stage show finale), pre-code luridity, and Barrymore's crazy eyes-- and just implying the rest. For example we get Tsarakov's junkie stage manager/conductor Sergei (Luis Alberni) cracking up before the big show, delivering a raving Dwight Frye-esque rant, expressionist Anton Grot mood pouring the pre-code horror all over him, on and on ranting about the incessant screaming of his frayed nerves playing the same music over and over, the thud of dancer's feet, etc. he's literally falling apart like Peter Lorre at the M, Tsarakov gives him a pretty strong lecture about the joys to be had once cold turkey is endured, but then we see Sergei shoot up in the shadows and suddenly he's striding out onstage ready to go on with rehearsal as calm as a cucumber! It got a huge laugh out of me, and probably out of the play's sophisticated audience. It's a very rare moment of joking about heroin addiction, soon addicts like him would be as verboten as sleeping your way up the social ladder and getting away with murder.

Ach, these Philistines, they always get the girl in the end while the mad geniuses die crucified on the altar of their own grandiosity. So best make sure Anton Grot made the altar for you, let Barrymore loose upon his part like a hungry socialist wolf upon the neck of old world Europe, and let the moral majority suck up the banal happiness of the romantic age-race-gender 'appropriate' pair bond while they can. Ben Hecht cometh and Lily Garland is no Trilby, or my name isn't Oscar Jaffe

WATERLOO BRIDGE

1931 - Dir. James Whale
****

From a play by renowned Algonquin wit Robert E. Sherwood comes a startling, touching saga that has a great kinetic stream-of-rainy London nighttime momentum, atmosphere thick with James Whale's signature mix of midnight expressionism and cozy warmth. Roy (Douglass Montgomery) is an inexperienced Canadian soldier on his way to the front who runs into Myra (Mae Clarke) on her way down to the prostitution gutter, both while trying to help a dotty old Apple Annie-type down into the air raid shelter. Soaking wet, confused, cold, each noticing the other's kindness, they share some food in her cold water flat while the colorful landlady hovers outside waiting for Myra to convince Roy it's his own idea to pay her rent (though it's James Whale, the old lady isn't hovers around waiting for Myra to seduce this green recruit into paying her rent isn't Una O'Connor).  He's so excited to meet an American during an air raid and they get along so swimmingly that the whole first chunk of the movie flows almost in real time. and Mae Clarke especially has never been better, tackling Sherwood's complex creation without resorting to Vivian Leigh ostentation or Harlow harshness. Love blooms quickly, after all, in wartime: marriage and combat pay making sure he doesn't die a virgin and she doesn't end up a streetwalker.

It's hard to fathom, but there it is, an American struggling with the pressures of a class thing. "Some of us are lucky and some of us aren't," Roy says. "That's just the breaks?' He's Canadian, so why the hell would she want to get class-conscious with a man who will most likely die a virgin otherwise? It all makes her that much hard to bear when she starts acting noble, believing the bullshit patriarchal line about her own lack of worth on the open market. Clearly Whale doesn't believe it, nor Robert Sherwood --they love this girl and we do too, and we like the kid, too. The way Montgomery plays him is years away from the usual smirky adenoidal morons of the pre-code era so often embodied by, say, William Gargan or Charley Farrell. You can tell Whale really sussed out their attraction for them, and like most actors, they respond like plants finally getting properly watered. It's Mae Clarke's big show all the way, though, and we see how easily she might have become as iconic as Stanwyck or Harlow if the material stayed this good. Her voice crackling with alternating currents of tenderness and bitterness, body recoiling from the sordid ease with which she bilks the kid out of his bankroll, Clarke is totally stunning, and the Myra's shady past is alluded to without direct stating fits perfectly both Roy's genuine innocence and her jaded gifts with the female art of deception. It's interesting she played the 'good girl' for Whale in FRANKENSTEIN the same year. In a sense, she's the monster here, though she's the only who believes it. It was BABY FACE and RED-HEADED WOMAN a few years later that would declare the girl didn't have throw herself into the path of a dropped bomb to spare herself the shame of having to tell her lover she's no good, just no good that's all.


To me, the beauty of this film can be summed in the above image - the pair soaking wet from rain and longing and lost and afraid, neither having planned for this crazy love that overtakes them, ruining both their ruined lives in the process. They almost look like twins in the warm bath of their emotional turbulence, reflected in the times around them.  Now, today, if there's prostitutes we certainly don't see them as the stars of movies --they might be independently wealthy sexual adventuresses, or traumatized wives and daughters forced into white slavery, or druggy chic self-described sluts, but never just working girls earning rent through fleecing virgin soldiers on their way to go get killed in the trenches, boys who didn't need the money anyway, where they were going. Today, in a post-KLUTE world, call girls can be heroes or victims or both, but never just full fledged lead characters struggling with their crippled self-esteem before a backdrop of war and without 20/20 hindsight. The great fez-wearer Frederick Kerr (above left) is also carried over from FRANKENSTEIN (or was it the other way around?) for some welcome comic relief as a semi-deaf duffer in the country estate, Bette Davis is in the 'cool younger sister' mode, who likes Myra just fine. Director Whale and Sherwood were both veterans of the WWI trenches, so there's some savvy of the slow grinding death spiral of daily death-wading folded into the British fog.

UNION DEPOT

(1932) Dir Alfred E. Green
***1/2

The best thing about the early First National-Warner's stuff is, you just never know--up to a point--what's going to happen next, especially when the focus is on an array of things going on in a train station, a scene so crowded with extras so good at seeming like they're hustling for trains we can't tell if it's not real, not a documentary. We're treated to an array of comings and goings and bag checks, all centered around two genial vagrants on the make, one of whom (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) magically winds up with a drunken Frank McHugh's bag, which happens to have a suit in it that fits Fairbanks perfectly, and a wad of bills in the pocket, and the only reason he got that was because he had lifted a train conductor's coat, literally, via a stick through the men's room window. So a chain of events is underway and neither he nor we know where it's leading.

So now Fairbanks Jr. and his pal Guy Kibbee are doing pretty well, to the point Doug attracts a chippie, then shines her off while eating a nice steak dinner, which we really feel since he's been so hungry a few beats ago. Anyway, circumstance all coheres around a counterfeiting plot and a nice violin case MacGuffin, and there's a white knuckle finale train yard brawl, Fairbanks leaping down on his quarry from atop train cars, and men being continually judged on their clothes and wallet instead of what's in their heart and fist. There's also some pre-code slams, especially when Blondell goes with Fairbanks to a private room, ready to sleep with him for train fare even though it's her first such transaction. Her fluttering mix of fear, desperation, and feigned élan is like nothing you've ever seen before or since. She also has a pretend-blind stalker pawing his way along after her, and that plus the counterfeiter getting his wallet lifted make it nail-baiting enough I shouted curtly at my girl when she tried to talk about bacon preparation right at a key moment. And I love bacon.

DANGEROUS CORNER

(1934) Dir Phil Rosen
***

Melvyn Douglas stars as a bit of a rogue in a publishing concern that--and this would be considered uncool by the early code--is co-ed-owned and operated by a group of men and women, sharing duties equally, mixing business and pleasure and turning it all into a kind of cocktails and ritzy MAD MEN-style client seducing constant. The women don't have to choose between career and romance as it's all seamlessly interwoven, noted with some interest by their best-selling author client, an Agatha Christie-type who's visiting New York to sign a contract. A blown radio tube leads to conversation about a missing chunk of cash meant to be a retainer for a different author, but the cash disappeared awhile ago and they've been avoiding dealing with it. Eventually the truth comes out but maybe sleeping dogs should lie, and maybe they still can.

One wonders, though, in the end, what the point of it all is. Did playwright J.B. Priestley need to subtextually validate why he stayed in the closet or chose not to public with his mistress? Either way it's all very mature, the idea of women being totally men's equal in every facet of their shared business is marvelously progressive, and the romantic roundelay of everyone married to the wrong person all comes to the fore pretty fast. Luckily the cast is up for the challenge and then there are numerous twists and the ending is a gotcha of the sort I normally don't approve of, but which works here as a kind of suggestion that killing yourself might just involve 'skipping' into alternate dimensions, gradually becoming immortal by living several variants of your own life all at the same time, and death just shrinking the number of available dimensional planes down farther and farther, until one's next lives have already begun so you can let the last one of the old ones go, i.e. quantum suicide.

THREE FACES EAST

(1930) Dir. Roy Del Ruth
***

With her weird Betty Boop-shaped head, Joan's sister Constance Bennett has always had a rare who-gives-a-fuck ease with sex and cinematic luxury, suggesting a girl who actually lived in the manner and custom of tony Art Deco decadence before, during, and after her stint as a star, rather than just playing the parts. She's ideally cast here as a WWI German spy whose handler is Erich Von Stroheim, posing as a butler in a British lord's mansion in order to monitor the dispatches to the front. Bennett is sent in to pose as the wartime fiancee of the lord's killed-in-action soldier son, to open the safe and get news of how many American soldiers are coming into the war to lift France and England's sagging spirits. The result are some tense and sexy scenes of her snooping around the mansion in the dead of night, and it all looks pretty sparkling for a 1930 film. Both Bennett and von Stroheim have perfect prep school diction, so they're perfectly matched to the primitive sound equipment, and as the spy master who falls hard for Constance, we don't blame von Stroheim one bit, nor does he lose our high esteem as a result of his groveling. Who could resist her in all those fine glistening silks, bosom and hips heaving in the studio moonlight as Englanders in pajamas stir into action at the strange noises she's made opening the safe (like a female Raffles). And best of all, there's no mention made at the end or elsewhere about the daffy young officer who professes his love for her; he's forgotten as soon as the mission is complete. Damn right. Director Del Ruth wisely focuses instead on the tragic arias of Erich von Stroheim--in a role perhaps heralding his eventual iconic bit as Norma Desmond's butler in SUNSET BOULEVARD--and the Hurell-like shimmer of Bennet's magnificent legs as she peels off her silk stockings after a hard night spying.

William Powell's Retrograde Psychedelic Amnesia: CROSSROADS, I LOVE YOU AGAIN

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Amnesia is always a great topic for the movies, furnishing a built-in self-reflexivity vis-à-vis the movie watching experience itself. We all start any movie an amnesiac (unless it's a sequel or based on a book we've read), instinctively sizing up clues as to what's what and who's where and why when. As far as narrative identity, we start the film lacking the whole backstory of each character, and we could wind up identifying with, rooting for, or against, nearly anyone until finally the good and bad pieces sort themselves out. In two very different and worthwhile amnesia movies, the comedy I LOVE YOU AGAIN (1940) and the noir mystery CROSSROADS (1942), William Powell plays an amnesiac bounder who suffered a radical personality change when was hit on the head, ten or so years before the film begins, and its left him a staid stalwart and sober citizen, the opposite of our beloved rogue Nick Charles. In LOVE, he receives a second bump on the head and returns to his past bounder self; in CROSSROADS, the bounder self awakens to find him. Either way, if split-self compartmentalization be the music of a sober AA paragon constantly re-telling tales of his wild and drunken past, split on.

I LOVE YOU AGAIN was the big break that launched the Powell amnesiac trend, a rollicking comedy that Powell aces in a complicated leading role opposite his perfect cinematic mate, Myrna Loy. The drab wartime fashions and broad gray palette the indicate that comedy, not art direction is the order of the day. CROSSROADS, on the other hand, is a Hitchcock by way of Sirk noir melodrama, all long Siodmak midnight blacks and murky Parisian novel plotting. In film, William Powell's conk on the head-amnesia brings an initial run of sobriety and loyal decency - and getting hit on the head again might mean a reversion to his criminal side. To give away more would spoil them, spoil the post-modern amnesiac cinema frisson, but just know that in LOVE he starts out as Larry Wilson, a small town tea-totaling bore on a cruise who gets conked on the head diving overboard to rescue a drunk Frank McHugh. When Larry wakes from his conk in his stateroom, it's not as old staid Larry but his original self, George Carey, a charming, quick-thinking grifter much more like the William Powell we love. Realizing his interim self, Larry, about whom he remembers nothing, might be rich, this George Carey--with eyes alight and body careening around the stateroom--makes plans to loot his bank account, assisted by Frank McHugh, who turns out to be a fellow con man and immediately has the good sense to latch on for the ride. I love this early scene because Powell plays it like I used to feel during those early sophomore year psychedelic trips (right), where all my old worries and dull habits melted away and I was alive to the possibilities life offered when fear and torpor were suddenly dissolved, pacing the dorm room like it was a new dawn, my old self a thing of the past, an old husk of a cocoon. It felt like morning regardless of the actual hour. ELECTRIC LADYLAND blaring, and a hitherto unknown part of myself emerging like a paisley butterfly from my cracked-open forehead, me terrifying the flakey brother slowly drinking all my beer over in the corner on my groundscored couch; I even walked out of my dorm and left the building, with my door unlocked and wide open, music still playing on my turntable, all lights on in the dead of night, so free was I of all concern. Naturally, I wasn't robbed. I couldn't be harmed as long as I was so high up. Here Powell exhibits that same aliveness, for nothing wakes the soul more than being delivered from its signifiers.


Returning to Larry's home town, McHugh posing as Larry's doctor to explain why "Larry" must have lots of rest and be excused if he acts peculiarly, as in not recognizing Myrna Loy waving at him when he gets off the train. "He must have lots of alcohol!" Larry's ten years of sobriety he doesn't remember as Carey was surely good for his liver. Now he can get back to processing THIN MAN-level toxins. But will George's attraction to Loy get in the way of this noble plundering and deep elbow-bending? It's pretty funny when he meets her on the dock and can't tell who she is, the wife, girlfriend, random stranger, or does she just thinks he's hot, the way Kay Francis did in ONE WAY PASSAGE? It turns out she's in the process of divorcing him because his old self was so sexually inhibited and boring. She's unaware he's now this other character from before they were married. George is everything Larry wasn't, but he can't tell her he changed lest she wise up and deny him Larry's riches. Can he meld the two and become a less chicanerous but not boring whole self? Can he, in short, drink moderately?



In the end, if he's a much closer approximation to his savvy souse of the THIN MAN movies than a noble bore, he's the very man for her. But let's face it, having such a drunken rogue as a husband requires indulgence, tolerance, and her own level of booziness to not get mighty fed up. Once can only imagine what the nights are like when there's no murder to solve. If Nick's hollow leg was like mine, sooner or later that thing is just filled and it can never be emptied.

I Love You Again (1941)
It's interesting too because they're both getting older, so Loy's no-longer-patient wife is less able to embody those tolerance tropes. And you can tell their rapport is strained because they have such affection for each other as actors it hurts to see them hurt themselves hurting each other. Drinking men Loy's age slide into sobriety, moderation, or an alcoholic ward with Bim and his little turkeys in straw hats. They seldom get a second chance to detox their liver for ten years before they, as we say in AA, turn from cucumber to pickle, and there's no way to turn a pickle back into a cucumber. For an actress whose been granted-- or perhaps burdened--with excessive MGM-brand dignity to make her romance with either version of Powell believable, Loy's had to mellow, and so they seem like Nick and Nora Charles if Nick joined AA and got super boring and preachy for ten years and Nora was so sick of how unfun-Bobby he'd become she filed for divorce and started dating the local Bellamy, but when Nick relapses she loves him again and hence the title! His co-dependent stammering and soft-shoeing and trying to get her drunk make a weak wooing combo, but it all starts to work, as the magic of booze always does, until it finally doesn't, and takes off its loving mask to reveal the cold sadistic demon beneath. But who can't forgive a little torture when even if just for a moment the true bliss?

Love Crazy (same year; same dress? tries too hard)
This movie is awesome so it begs the question, why haven't I seen it sooner? I've drunk more bourbon watching THIN MAN than most people drink in their entire lifetime. But I got I LOVE YOU AGAIN confused with the far lamer LOVE CRAZY, another Myrna Loy-William Powell comedy of remarriage, which I watched back before I had read Stanley Cavell and knew what to look for and so disliked it, and still haven't been able to get into DOUBLE WEDDING, which I was so bummed out by LOVE CRAZY, I got confused and thought all non-THIN MAN Loy-Powells were as wartime watered-down as Garbo's TWO-FACED WOMAN (also 1941). I shouldn't have been so brittle, I could have been drinking to so much more! Shrooming, too. For LOVE YOU AGAIN's giddy stateroom awakening from stale Larry to foxy George is as about as succinct an encapsulation of dorm-at-dawn sophomore year peaking as I've seen in some time.

There's a bouncy script  and some great bits that just fly by: Frank McHugh staggering around the ship bar in the opening scene shortly before falling overboard, a patron at the bar notes McHugh appears intoxicated. "wha'd he say?" asks Frank McHugh -- "intoxicated," the bartender's drunk himself so it sounds like "he toxicated.""He did that?" McHugh asks appalled--- and you realize he heard 'he toxicated' which sounds brazenly gaseous. There's also some snazzy rousting of Herbert (Donald Douglas) Loy's dimwit new boyfriend  (i.e. 'the Bellamy') while she and Larry are in the midst of divorcing, and man, what good, dirty writers could do with the old trope about 'coming upstairs to look at my snapshots' or in this case, taxidermy ("I'll never stuff another squirrel as long as I live!") In some ways it's like the screwball version of BIGGER THAN LIFE!!

But the THIN MAN chemistry is like a faded rose, and that adds a vibe of sadness --we've come to rely on their sophisticated co-dependent chemistry to invigorate our ever-threatened conceptions of an ideal marriage. We loved how Nora would pretend to be sore at him for his constant drinking, how relieved we were in she smiled that wry pixie nose wrinkle half-smile to indicate she's just as pro-alcohol as he is after prepping us for one of those drab buzzkill wife sermons so common to lesser romantic mysteries (such as in RKO's attempt at the THIN MAN formula, STAR OF MIDNIGHT --see "Without a Slur"). So it breaks our heart to see how Loy has given up on on tea-totaling Larry so long ago, for we know alcohol is the spinach for this marriage's Popeye, and he's near dead from iron deficiency). So it becomes intrinsic to him to inflate the old give-and-take back to life, to avoid being bumped on the head certainly and most of all to strike it rich with a phony oil deal though it takes him forever to figure out. Many areas of small town life are milked for comedic goofusness, including a Boy Scouts award ceremony, the department store razzing for being cheap in the past, a reminder why so many of us live in big cities, where no one ever knows your name and an American is judged not on the color of his stripes or his ability to sublimate sexual desire into tiresome Norman Rockwell community-building, but on his wit and in-the-moment alacrity. In real life this guy would have been a powerful bad hustler. He's got a great set up for some confident flim-flam, but Frank McHugh hustles circles of quick-thinking around him, and Edmund Lowe glowers impressively while he sets up the submerged phony oil can.


In LOVE, Powell the grifter wakes up from a nine year coma of being Powell the staid bore; in CROSSROADS (1942) that same (slightly cooler) bore's a diplomat in Paris who woke up with amnesia after a bad boat accident ten years earlier, and so can't account for much of his grifter gangster past -- but he's been his new self long enough he's married a gorgeous European gal (Hedy Lamar, never prettier), and become a trusted success. A letter arrives requesting money owed by his old shady self, a self he has no memory of, and the intrigue begins. Just as each personality didn't know anything about the life of the other in I LOVE YOU AGAIN, here we have the grifter emerge only in the court depositions of the old molls and jakes who come out of the woodwork to be cross-examined in what may be the coolest most intelligently written court scene ever (Parisian, naturellement). By jove, there's none of the excess legal jargon that clouds the pens of lesser hacks. Claire Trevor is the savvy showgirl grifter shadow to Lamar's playful Grace Kelly-esque younger wife; then there's Basil Rathbone leading nose-first into the proceedings, leaving us to wonder if blackmail's just another word for you owe me money but you don't remember. How convenient.


Right off the bat, CROSSROADS lets us know we're in strange country: a brazen student at his witty lecture seduces David (Powell) in a car it later turns out to be his wife, a fun jest that casts a weird glow over the rest of the film, like he could be playing the same game on the audience and his friends from the get-go, and a lawyer here is even smart enough to ask how long an actor might stay in character before he officially becomes that character, as in common law marriage or naturalization. At an hour or less (ala Lamar's ruse) it's just sparkling play amongst sophisticated people; at over an hour its theatrical acting; at over a month it's dissociative identity disorder (DID); at over five years it's retrograde amnesia. Longer than that, it's who the person really is; now the old, original self is the act.

Helping matters is the out-of-time feel of the figures from David's past (when he was Jean Pelletier). Lamar seems modern like a Velvet Underground version of Grace Kelly in REAR WINDOW but the mysterious woman claiming to be Jean's old flame (Claire Trevor -left), wears her hair piled high like she just drifted in from the 19th century; and in her shadows lurks the aquiline silhouette of mighty Rathbone, stalwart heavy of Victorian mellers. The wet soundstage impression of a noir Paris muddies and blurs (maybe its TCM's print) like ink gouache across a....oh, man, but Heidi's pretty.

Also showing up is Sig Ruman as a bad doctor, Frank Bressart as a good one, and there's lots of great navigating the language and class barriers and Babel towers, like a blind man feeling for the bathroom in the dead of night. The script is maturely engaging and thought provoking without needing to rely on cheap thrills, soap or sentiment. David regularly makes smart decisions we normally don't see his brand of noir protagonist make.

The mature noir chain to LOVE YOU's bouncy Runyon pendant, CROSSROADS might not be as lively but it's got its own weird midnight beauty and might have my favorite Lamar performance. And to think I avoided both films for years because I got them mixed up with DOUBLE WEDDING and LOVE CRAZY, both of which I saw and was gravely underwhelmed by.

Hey, it's not my fault, it's the dumb titles and similar plots. Without the THIN MAN structure, the chemistry of Loy and Powell often overflowed and swamped lesser vehicles, especially if dragged under by frilly post-code censorship and daftly interchangeable, meaningless titles. LOVE CRAZY was made after I LOVE YOU AGAIN, with a similar comedic plot (acting insane to prevent a divorce). CROSSROADS followed, more serious, sans Loy, but with a similar amnesia formula, further adding to my split self confusion upon reading the blurb (i.e. mixing up LOVE YOU AGAIN with LOVE CRAZY, then CROSSROADS with I LOVE YOU AGAIN).

 So there you go the whole story of two films about assumed identities and fading marriages rekindled by lively alter-egos, and me, a viewer so confused by their bland titles that I waited to see them until this latter period in my film watching life. Don't make the same mistakes I did and let fuzzy blows to the head or drugs to the pineal fuzz your roll into the suicide split screen duplicate machine. Powell makes the jump with mere conks to the noggin. Can you do less? The screen shall split you whole if you don't mind first surrendering your individuality in the service of a grand war. Does that mean relapse, or just a feigned slur? Sometimes drunkenness isn't the same thing as not being sober. This is one of those times. It's called the movies.

10 Reasons DREAMCATCHER (2003)

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Whenever it gets super snowy and chilly as it has recently I think of DREAMCATCHER, the unreasonably maligned gonzo sci fi disaster-masterpiece from the minds of Stephen King, William 'Adventures in the Screen Trade' Goldman and Lawrence 'Big Chill' Kasdan. Sure it's not great, maybe it's not even very good, but it's got a gonzo self-determination that transcends so many traditional horror and science fiction annoyances I can forgive it near about anything. Right now for example I'm watching half-watching THE GIVER, a hungerer after the teen dystopia market that may as well have been written by a computer. I wanted to see it to continue my teen dystopia thread from a few months ago and see what kind of magic Jeff Bridges could whip up, but it was so glaringly simplistic I felt cheap just for having it on. And so I exhumed this piece from my drafts folder instead, for there's no doubt that DREAMCATCHER is written by humans.... who freely aim not for the teens, or the adults, not the elderly but... ex-stoners in the middle of their fourth midlife crises? Wherever and why ever, I salute its far out gonzo glory. It may miss the ball a few times, but at least its swinging for the parking lot instead of the LCD dugout.


1. ESP altruism as children - The boys get their talents by first rescuing the 'special needs' human Duddy, and then using his and their powers to locate a missing girl. The dreamcatcher is visualized as a web that connects them and each develops a psychic special power - and remain connected by the threads of their psychic energy, which gives them a collective courage. I felt my heart soar when the littlest kid picks up a rock and says hell yeah I want to fight, even if the the guys way bigger than all of them torturing poor Duddy behind the woodshed. He picks up two rocks and is ready to go down swinging because he's sickened by the sight of their sadism and how it reflects on these guys - they even say no doubt the fastest one in their group is going to run home and tell his gossipy mom. No hesitation about ratting them out, never considering making it a playground thing rather than a genuine offense. I subscribe to the adage in Over the Edge that a kid who tells on another a kid is a dead kid, but assault of big on small kids is a different matter entirely.

Most these sorts of film, the Stand by Me and so forth are totally about growing up "normal" oddball kids, the one fat dork, the thin little nerd who be good on computers, the older hunk with a drunk single dad, the token black kid with no real personality other than being black, etc. - but these four dudes who we see in flashbacks to their formative elementary collective ESP Dead Zone moments, are a believable group of friends, genuine badasses who give each other extra strength, and they stick up for the little guy, even if they're even littler. This one little kid just picks up a rock to even things out, and is totally ready to jump in and fight guys twice his size. It's how sticking up for someone else can give you lion courage unavailable for ordinary self-defense, and it's world's away from most of the rote bullying we see in childhood movies. These scenes of childhood aren't rushed or slowed, not given DP-craftsmanship autumnal glows, et al. they don't need that shit because they're legitimately well done. I don't mind if the film is exploring very familiar Stephen King territory (the ESP or psychokinesis of The Shining, Carrie, FirestarterThe Dead Zone etc.), Howard Hawks did the same thing! Keep riffing on what works, keep exploring but using what you know how to do as a base.


2. Donnie Wahlberg as The magical mentally challenged-psychically savant Duddy - Unlike so many magic mentally challenged kids, this one is never seen as somehow backwards so much as 'sidewards,' i.e. once you 'speak' his language you realize he's a genius. And I know how these kids can trigger psychic awakenings because one happened to me with this kid, Victor. Learning how he thought, what he was trying to say, while I was still way out on a psychedelic acid awakening. I got what he was trying to say and he got all excited because most strangers couldn't understand his garbled syntaxes, but I could in my state. I would delight him by acting all normal and straight when other people were around but when it was just us too I'd play music and dance on the couch like a five year-old maniac. He'd be in paroxysms of happiness, and in return he cast some weird mystic spell on me - where I knew as long as I avoided negative thoughts and my first thought each morning was positive I would exist in this state of transcendent gratitude. Plus, Donnie W. really disappears into the role giving Duddy a comprehensiveness as a character that's worlds away from "Gotta watch Wopner" or "Life's a box of chocolates."


3. Gonzo goofball Resolve - the whole thing with Lewis inside his inner filing room shouting out the window as the alien who possessed him sets about eating people - some people might call that a way too literalistic drawback but I say hey, this film is going for distance (1), and it doesn't care if you think it's dumb. A lot of horror movies work better in an audience, but I can imagine seeing Dreamcatcher with the wrong crowd being a pretty miserable experience as all the exasperated sighs and confusion take hold. But without critics in the room, and no cash or drive time outlay, it's weirdness can stretch its legs.

4. Starts in the middle of a covert alien war, sparing us all the doubt on the part of the military's willingness to accept what's going on. And I dig the alien invasion in the snow motif, which recalls Hitler's big Battle of the Bulge campaign, i.e. wait until it's super snowy to catch them all unawares.


5. It's like reading a real Stephen King novel:  With twists and turns and each character doing their thing, and encountering a military presence in the midst of another skirmish, lots of snow and New England charm, all very Kingly. And rather than constant crosscutting it plays little mini-chapters between characters. It takes it's time and spreads itself over two hours and fifteen minutes, which since it's on streaming is just fine as it can be watched like a Stephen King novel... in chunks where you occasionally put it down, but it keeps you reading because you have no idea where it's going except deep into the blood-strewn snow of King's New England. Like most of his fiction it might be a little overdone and not have a strong ending, but more than any of his other filmed works, DREAMCATCHER really captures the internal monologue conversations, pop culture situated references, prosaic four letter New England cut-the-crap-itude, and pressure cooker fear generators so intrinsic to his enduring popularity.


6. The aliens can do just about anything and look like Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors on crystal meth when they're not in The Thing x Invasion of the Body Snatchers disguise. Plus they are not without a self-aware sense of humor: they can come right up your ass or down your throat like a combination tape worm / moray eel / ALIEN face hugger, and plant not just one little monster egg, but a writhing legion.

7. Lawrence Kasdan bringing wily, witty profane 'Big Chill'-ish dialogue and black humor to a zippy script. 

8. Duddy's mom: Rosemary Dunsmore creates a nice aura of loving gravity and courage around her son in her one big scene. Knowing her son is dying and that he might die by the end of the weekend, but she's aware that he's called upon in service of something higher even if she can't quite understand what that is."Okay, go save the world," she says as they mount their stolen military black Humvee. How rare is it that a mom can be so chill about sending her critically ill mentally challenged son off into the freezing cold to battle some abstract alien menace on what will certainly be a one way trip? Kasdan and King are fans of horror and know just when to have characters step up to the Hawksian heroics plate even if it flies in the face of Hollywood's treasured 'logic of the heart' and all its tedious inside-the-box moral inevitability. Mrs. Duddy knows this is a boy's movie, so don't bother trying for a BSAO, stand the fuck back and let the kids play through. It's the most heroic gesture in a movie full of them.

9. The great cast also includes: Jason MALLRATS Lee; Timothy THE CRAZIES Olyphant, Thomas "I just want my kids back" Jane; Donnie SIXTH SENSE Wahlberg; Damian HOMELAND Lewis; Tom THE RELIC Sizemore and frickin....

10. the Zu Warrior eyebrows of Morgan "Passin' Water" FreemanThere's usually a sense that either the military is good or bad depending on the political orientation of a film but here they are both good and bad and the natural likable gravitas of Morgan Freeman is cast against type as a man who's been dealing with these aliens for the last 25 years and is thinking globally to the detriment of the infected locals, all of whom he wants to kill off to be sure the disease doesn't spread. A less draconian superior is called in and so there's two military factions one good and one dubious, or too harsh for most. There's a great moment when the aliens are acting all childlike and innocent and Freeman's like doooon't trust them. He might be wrong but he's so very right, just like DREAMCATCHER itself!

Last but not least is the groovy snow blanket creating just the right mood of preternatural stillness and you have a flawed gonzo classic I enjoy a lot more than the critically acclaimed 'kids together experiencing weird small town events' King adaptations like STAND BY ME. It's got the loopy flashback-laden middle-of-the-action, slow built-to-nowhere structure of one of King's novels, weird and wondrous cast and a plot that, like other 'Ten Reason' entries THE THING (2011), GHOSTS OF MARS (2000), and DOOMSDAY (2008) ping-pong pinballs past so many classic genre film bumpers it becomes a whole new kind of beast/s


NOTES: 
1. "Going for Distance":  a common drunken Syracuse treehouse expression from 1987-91, i.e. to puke as far away from oneself as possible, while standing, head held high, rather than bent over a toilet like some common scrubwoman - but then also extending to mean not holding back in genral, burning up all your stashes and telling your old lady to go home and go to bed because you're staying up all night, all the next day, and forever, until -'poof' magically you wake up on some floor or couch somewhere. An example of going for distance might be Lennon and Nilsson's "Lost Weekend" 

Young Jack in the Post-Poe Po-Mo Hellman Hole: THE TERROR, THE SHOOTING

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The legendarily muddled Roger Corman Poe-ish Gothic horror THE TERROR (1963) famously came together spur of the moment when, supposedly, Corman still had two days on Karloff's shooting schedule on THE RAVEN (1963). Not wanting to waste them, Corman shot some stuff of Boris walking around in what remained of the castle sets for THE RAVEN, trusting a film could be built around it with minimal effort and cost. He was right about the minimal, but that's the film's shaggy dog-eared charm. Francis Ford Coppola went up to Big Sur to shoot some exteriors, and then later, Jack Hill as writer and Monte Hellman as director came along to reshape, rework, and reconfigure, shooting in and around Playa del Rey, Leo Carillo Beach, and what was then the AFI. So there's a lot of hands in the mix here, with the final product being enigmatic as intentionally as possible while hitting all the traditional bases.  The final product is more than the sum of its parts, but whose authorial voice is it that results when the 'more' is factored? Corman's usually wry, hip but never anachronistic Gothic "voice" isn't here, and Coppola's style isn't really noticeable any more than, say, Dennis Hopper's might be on THE TRIP), and Hill's balls-out stealth feminist drive-in moxy isn't there, but Hellman's vanishing point identity and existential narrative-dissolution is. And in the context of j subsequent enigmatic masterpieces, THE TERROR fits beautifully, perhaps even situating his two later acclaimed existential works THE SHOOTING (1966) and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) within a more immediately graspable mythic context then they might have if seen solely as examples of their respectively associated genres, and vice versa.


The Hellman style wasn't yet a recognizable 'thing' in 1963, but after seeing his more well-known works you feel that innate "Hellman-ness" formed in THE TERROR's dreamy 'edge of forever' tide pools, the ambiguity of relationships and the fluidity of identity, especially where "the woman" is concerned. Hellman's female characters tend to control the action around them almost unconsciously, yet they themselves are often void of distinct personae except as surfers of the oceanic unconscious, archetypal currents billed in the credits as "the woman" or "the girl." This anima ambiguity perfectly fits the ghostly figure played by Sandra Knight in THE TERROR as she appears to lost Cavalry officer Lt. Andre Duvalier (a young Jack Nicholson) at various points along the shore or cliffs, sometimes luring him to a would-be doom, or to maybe sometimes in her other form as a falcon, or she was the falcon the whole time and asked the sky witch for human legs, or she's a ghost or a girl who thinks she's a ghost in the middle of an elaborate revenge. While you could lump that concept in with NIGHT TIDE, THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA, THE SEA WITCH, THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER, i.e. low budget horror films that use a girl and some waves (both super cheap, especially if one is your girlfriend) as a low budget Bergman art-horror hybrid, you'd be selling the talent of Jack "SPIDER BABY" Hill and Hellman short, who were coming in for the second half of a project begun by Corman as a straight Poe-ish Gothic, with Coppola adding an old witch and the idea that the ghost might just be a hypnotized daughter (Hill and Hellman rather than twisting further toward normalcy brought it farther out, into the suggested transmigration of souls, the transitory nature of the flesh, and the relentless corrosion of time's ocean tide whiplash.



Part of the weird effect THE TERROR has on fans such as myself, is that it never seems to tell the same story twice. In order to understand how and why, you just have to dial your focus out and consider the film's post-release history, the differing hands at the helm being just one aspect. THE TERROR fell into Public Domain a long time ago, and ever since has shown constantly, first on local TV in the pre-cable era, then on $5 video tapes, then nearly every 100 movies for $10 DVD horror collection on the market. And since there's no quality control, the film often appears edited for time, with out-of-order (or missing) reels, faded color, cheap VHS tracking issues (carried over onto cheap DVD burns), scenes cut and added from different prints of different quality, etc. If you're a classic horror fan you've seen THE TERROR dozens of times, maybe never even intentionally... and seldom all the way to the end, making it perhaps the benchmark for what fantasy and horror fans call dream (or nightmare) logic. Because it's so atmospheric, and fun--especially considering Nicholson is so young and sometimes confused--it's endlessly re-watchable even if you're not really watching. You can fall asleep to it real easily, and dream your way right in.

Young Jack with then-wife Sandra Knight - THE TERROR;
Middle Jack with Maria Schneider - THE PASSENGER
This has helped, of course in making the film 'great' in the sense that you can watch it a dozen times and never understand it or have any idea you've seen it before, and it never gets boring (or exciting - it's perfect), making it a great gateway drug to dream logic extremists like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. And if you're a filmmaker of any caliber it's a call to arms, because it's an example of how in our mind fills vaster voids than bigger-budgeted auteurs can etch, and absence of coherence is the same as just enough, and our unconscious savors the randomness our conscious minds resist. And I don't mean that with any disrespect. From the loftiest Kubrick enigmas to the accidental Brecht of your child babbling at you about a film they saw in school while you watch TV commercials with the sound muted, that's it, that's the end of sentence. For true artists find the third route, neither right nor left, but purple; not forwards nor backwards, but red, and balloon, and Jeff. And it is thus that man can become totally lost in between, where dreams cohere and dissolve above the sordidness of conscious ass-dragging desert, a cloud of slow-mo exploding books lapping into seahorses, and against all this might a Napoleonic officer be separated from his regiment and wind his way among the staggering primordial cliffs of Big Sur, California.

Karloff, making three movies at once just by standing there
And all that is my way of defending the loopy narrative of THE TERROR, which answers unasked questions with more questions. So it's the daughter of Isla being hypnotized into seducing her father to kill himself by posing as her own mother, whom he killed 20 years ago... did I get that right?... Or was Erick Ilsa's lover who posed as count after killing him in an effort to assuage his remorse? And she's the ghost because... he killed her too? As she and the count were having an affair? And the witch is the girl's mother who brought her spirit back to wreak revenge or is she Erick's mother? Is young Jack like one of those smitten lovers who winds up alone as his vampire lover vanishes in the waves at the end of a typical Jean Rollin vampire movie? Supposedly Sandra Knight's Helene isn't really 'Isla, the Ghost of the Baroness von Leppe' but Eirk's real daughter (or wife) whom he tried to kill and so an old witch keeps her around... hypnotizing her? But who is Karloff, then? The servant or the Baron? Substitute a dotty old handyman for the witch, and that's the plot of the similarly elegiac Monogram Lugosi film THE INVISIBLE GHOST, another Public Domain title we all saw constantly back in the 70s and which made no sense at all for kids too young for 'nightmare logic' --in other words, we didn't need our linear narrative preconceptions disrupted, we were still trying to form them!
One patriarch's madwoman in the attic is another man's ghost on the lawn
So, yeah, there's a lot of contradictions and cross-current enigmas, but that's when semiotically inquisitive post/modernists like Monte Hellman come alive. And the final cumulative impression of THE TERROR when you finally do see the whole film, after all these centuries, on remastered Blu-ray, sober as a judge, at a beauty contest, with a cracked AA chip he's trying to bet in a poker game, is a weird bittersweet reverie on death, memory and how film disintegrates when washed in a salt water flood tide lapping up against moldy stone.


Because in the end there is no right answer to what's really going on or who these people are, and that's the film's charm, that's Monte's modernist difference. Every thread doubles back on itself, refusing to pick a side, until the strange and haunting ending, where it's just yet another beautiful girl's youth and beauty slowly peeling away in the Big Sur tide to reveal the ancient foe, eternity's ancient ally, time's twisted waxwork skull as the soul flies free as a predatory bird in the Bergman dawn. When all is revealed as melting clay returning to the sandy foam of the Pacific, then the world will be seen as it really is, not meaningless but so packed to overflowing with meanings and counter-meanings and alternative deconstructions and author intents and last minute story changes that all meanings are there at once, exposed on the forked rocks. Ironic then that it had to be pulled from the sludge, cleaned up and digitized before we could savor its analog tactility.

from top: TERROR, SHOOTING, TERROR, SHOOTING, TERROR, SHOOTING
If "Monte Hellman's THE TERROR" still doesn't resonate with a profound metatextual dimension, consider its ambiguous 'collapse of identity' aspect as not accidental, but as creating an ancestry, a back story, for Hellman's acclaimed existential western THE SHOOTING (1966). It was Hellman's first western, and he filmed it back-to-back for Corman (but without Corman's influence or presence), with the more recognizably 'genre-specific' RIDE THE WHIRLWIND, out in the Utah desert. With colors recently remastered for the Criterion Blu-ray, under the eye of Hellman himself, the two films look better than they probably ever have, even on drive-in screens (where they were created to be, as a cowboy double feature). They were the first films Hellman had made in the States since working on THE TERROR (he made two films, also starring Jack Nicholson, in the Philippines--where life is cheap, and so is Corman--in the interim), THE SHOOTING especially echoes THE TERROR in the way the characters seem adrift somewhere between life and death, outside the normal confines of civilization and its conforming consensual notion of cause and effect. It starts in a recognizable location, but there's never any 'town' with a sheriff, nor bar fight, nor whore house; only alien primordial terrain, characters hoping their forward movement will mask their amnesia (i.e. like Karloff's character in THE TERROR, Warren Oates here may either be a twin or actually is his own brother, and one regularly wonders if even he knows the difference).


It's this terrain-based amnesia that makes THE TERROR and THE SHOOTING readable as parts one and two of a very strange textural existential genre meltdown Hellman trilogy (along with 1971's TWO-LANE BLACKTOP), a strange mirror to Antonioni's trilogy of BLOW-UP (1966), ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) and--also with Nicholson--THE PASSENGER (1975). In TERROR,  the plot twists are layered back on themselves, then unwound back to separate fibers as if time's moving diagonally backwards while moving up and down the shore, in and around the castle, as Young Jack continually tries to find the mysterious woman, demanding answers from Old Karloff when even the writers might not know. THE SHOOTINGs movement is out into the white blank of the desert, until its far too late to turn around (or reach civilization), all Warren Oates' common sense outvoted by a headstrong nameless "woman" and a smirky gunsel dumb enough to buy her damsel act; TWO-LANE BLACKTOP also has a nameless young girl (Laurie Bird) making trouble for some men otherwise involved in wandering the landscape, but this time in cars, no vengeance, just a race for pink slips. A marked step up in art house complexity from THE SHOOTING (which was itself a step up from TERROR), BLACKTOP manages to keep in almost constant motion along America's back roads and highways without going farther than a few inches inward or outward, or anywhere: Oates is now a GTO driver who sees each new hitchhiker as a chance to change his backstory; and the "Driver" and "Mechanic" have no backstory at all, it was slowing them down, so they tossed it overboard. When the dust finally settles on 70s cinema, it will be TWO-LANE BLACKTOP that wins the pink slip AFI road movie run, all else is vanity. (See Stillness in Motion: CALIFORNIA SPLIT / TWO-LANE BLACKTOP).

Mystery Woman thy nameless Hellman 

Sandra Knight as ?? ("Helene / Isla The Baroness Von Leppe")  - THE TERROR (1963)
Millie Perkins as ?? ("Woman") - THE SHOOTING (1966)
Laurie Bird as ?? ("the Girl") - TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)
The plot of SHOOTING involves Warren Oates as a tough as nails gold miner laboring at he and his brothers' claim in the middle of the Utah Nowhere. One of his brothers has rode on out of there like blazes after maybe running over a kid or something the night before Oates returns - it's never entirely clear. So when a mysterious woman (Millie Perkins) shows up offering to pay royally for his service as a guide across the desert to a nearby town (where the brother may have went), Oates agrees to handle it, but is he the one who did the thing she's going to go avenge, whatever it is? Is he really going to let them shoot his brother? The vagueness of motivations is clearly intentional, which makes us wonder if the TERROR's was too. Which came first, a love of open-ended existential landscape wanderer identity-collapse (fueled maybe by Antonioni's 1962 film L'ECLISSE), or the need to situate Corman's low budget and off-the-cuff 'shoot first make sense later' raw material in some kind of framework? Did Julian Schnabel break a dish by accident, and decide to use it in a painting, or did he break the dish on purpose? Answer: chartreuse. 

"The Patients and the Doctors" (detail - c. Julian Schnabel)
By the end of Hellman's trilogy (I've dubbed it the "The End Trilogy"), we know for sure that he's finally reached the 'break with breaking' as TWO-LANE BLACKTOP runs into an abrupt and final apocalyptic projector jam celluloid burn, the ultimate fusion of experimental, narrative, pop culture, and metatextual Mecha-Medusa media formatting. But it's been a long road to that apotheosis along two fronts, the meta one being a result of the first two films enduring decades of public domain (or in SHOOTING's case, pirated) dupes, and BLACKTOP encountering legal troubles due to lapsed royalties on a Doors song heard for less than a minute on some guy's radio as the boys drive past the entrance to the drag strip.  In THE TERROR the decomposition and erosion of Helene's face (or rather, Corman's drizzling carmel syrup on her to save money on make-up effects) mirrors the billion year-old erosion of the stones the Utah desert and its scorching emptiness in THE SHOOTING, which mirrors the vacant highways of BLACKTOP, that's textually, but the metatextual mirror is the ever more blurry and washed-out duping, now recently replaced by gorgeous remastered Blu-ray. The vistas in THE SHOOTING are now staggering, dwarfing the people traveling through them while mirroring their actions or vice versa in the way the stars predict our fates (or vice versa).

THE SHOOTING: In nice remastered form
Average blurriness for PD dupe: THE SHOOTING (1966)
I remember seeing the shitty SHOOTING Madacy disc awhile ago and imagining how great it would look if ever seen in the proper formatting and with colors restored instead of the muddy muffled blur it was on that crappy disc (Madacy may you die a thousand deaths). But now that this has been done and I have both Blu-rays, I can't help but feel that they, too, miss something that those blurrier 4:3 crops had, the protective fog feel of the crumbling, outmoded non-digital reproduction, the protection from real life offered by the abstracting bath of video to video to video to video, that oceanic whip of disintegration, the law of the universe, until all is white as snow and wan and gone... but our imaginations fill in the fog.

From HD to PD: THE TERROR (1963)

If I had the artsy time, I would edit a 'dissolution edition' of THE TERROR into a cohesive 'unfinalized' cus, I'd make an edit that starts for the first half hour or so with the new widescreen HD remaster, then devolve to the widescreen new DVD, then the old shitty dupe full screen DVD, and so on down the ladder of quality and formatting... until it's as impossible to see as those old dupes of dupes that Max and I made in college, while drunk, from our two connected VCRs and then never watched, and eventually threw away. I think, then, it would all make sense, kind of like Bill Morrison's DECASIA, but in reverse:


What initially appears to simply be a surface effect that is not a feature of this world rapidly begins to suggest otherwise: that the decay we see twisting faces, burning bodies, and cutting holes in the world is not just the effect of time on nitrate film stock, but rather an inherent feature of the world itself rupturing the imaginary divide between then and now. The ravages of time apparent on this film are also the decay inherent in the world it depicts, and a part of the world that produced these images." - Michael Betancourt [Dread Mechanics: The Sublime Terror of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) - Bright Lights 1/14/15)
In other words, it moves into Hellman existential country, the dissolving coherence of the image mirroring in nitrate clouds Hellman's vanishing point ambiguity. I'd add that the Blu-ray of DECASIA itself might be factored into this. Very old celluloid after all decays in very trippy ways which on Blu-ray are impossibly beautiful, abstract in ways no lifetime spent on After Effects or Final Cut could match. The compromise of the media formats of lesser quality in the century between the nitrate of the '10s and the Blu-ray of the other '10s aren't as aesthetically gratifying: streaky, not aesthetically pleasing or artsy in the DECASIA sense. In fact there's just such a video! VHS GeneraTion LOss! It has its own weird poetry...this is my generation!!


But even that wouldn't be complete,
the madness doesn't end there.
Clips from THE TERROR
would be used again, intertextually,
by Peter Bogdanovich.
It's what plays on the drive-in
during the Aurora-esque shooting spree of


And so, THE TERROR's exquisite cadaver
refracts further than its border.
There's no melting Knight can end
Post-Modernism's funhouse mirror runoff.
Only Orlok/Karloff coming down off the screen
to cane crazy Bobby can stall the carnage.
Even then, no end,
any more than an ever-forking 
hydra capillary river, which
Even dried to the bed or flooded to the hills,
never unspools in full


but permutes long past 
its original intentional
meaninglessness, its 1920s gallery opening
purpose. Its refraction's
Long since ceased to shock,
and still its taloned hawk truth
affixes anchor barnacles
to the Big $ur Prometheus.
Her Him groaning, sloshing up into his crevasses!
How twisted deep the hawk's talon shadows
between his glossy, mossy rocks,
his liver, like the liquor, is gone
but still post-modernism's waves lap dance on.

That means, too, it can still do its job,
and if you have the stereogram-staring patience,
the perfect meditation-intent-determination-entheogen
and-paranoia combination, on the perfect night
at the perfect showtime...

you can still free yourself with fire.
BLAM BLAM!
BLAM!

(you shoot into the light)

You are for.....given

The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA (1996)

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The American holiday trifecta has already passed its first hurtle, Thanksgiving. Now the sluggish traffic and unruly Wal-Mart tazing begins in earnest and a skittish mummified shamanic Pisces like me turns naturally inward, for movies are the best way to avoid holiday shopping lines. All those commercials that try so hard to become a patronizing life coach for Americans: "we don't settle for anything less," and "we're always pushing just a little further" like they already know you, like a narc would if he suddenly appeared at the edge of your circle. You don't know us, pal, and we already got the score on you from the roommate of the last kid you busted. So stay inside, like an urban hermit, and savor the unenlightenment, the peaceful darkness of the amniotic sac couch bog, and then just wait for nature to take it's course, that's my life coaching. One century soon, some decadent Warsaw university students will dig you up and put you in a nice preservative solution isolation tank, rummage through your bags and find your secret stash of mushrooms both psilocybe and 'flybane' (i.e. fly agaric or Amanita Muscaria) and then eat them, so they can bond with you, and warn you about the crazy woman fixing to devour your soul, SZAMANKA (or She-Shaman) is her name... and like so many hot girls in cold climates, she's fucking crazy. 


Speaking of crazy, those shrooms: Amanitas are currently legal, and it's easy to see why if you ever tried them. Too many can make you feel poisoned, not enough can make you feel like you're not getting off - and just the right amount gets the colors enhanced and the sweaty glow feeling of being connected to the world, but they also make that world smell like urine. Maybe they were better in Poland or Siberia, 2,500 years ago, because the anthropologist played by Boguslaw Linda in SZAMANKA sure digs them (literally and figuratively). But even he learns the hard way: once you've submitted without fear to the full stripping away of persona layers, divested yourself of all attachment, unmade the trappings of self, remembered your own birth, bathed in the white light of pure love, and forgiven everyone everywhere. Then what? No one gets you, your fiancee thinks you're nuts, and the people who do get you wear sandals and patchouli and garlic and look anemic from not eating meat.

So we need Mexico's Alejandro Jodorowsky, America's David Lynch, and Poland's Andrzej Zulawski to guide us in a holding pattern 'til the rest of the world slowly catches up and we sink down into the post-Thanksgiving depths of Mordor Xmas. I save SZAMANKA for when I'm delirious or have been in the cave so long I've forgotten there's even an outdoors at all. Zulawski doesn't even need to show us anyone actually taking the drugs, the shit's in the celluloid.


I first discussed Zulawski's SZAMANKA in conjunction with Carrie Matheson and Claire Forlan's awesome Dewar's ad! while back in November of 2012, during that previously discussed enlightenment breakthrough awareness state: "from boxes heart-shaped shapelessness, bags tossed as rubbish into the Warsaw mud, flown, Angus, darlin' - rather, a punk-en down Dalle Betty Blue-blackend bird spazzing through anthropology classes as her lover pilfers thousand year-old psilocybe and Amanita Muscaria mushrooms from a mummified shaman's pockets. Each wodka shot or peanut butter-covered stem tracking each punch and drunken stumble dream pie like meth and coveralls to grinding mechanical factory sex atop crumbling swamp corpse; grinding academics in their dancing and beer spillage and moving far away from the needle tip distance twixt the ancient fungal shaman's last expression train down through more more the turn style jumped, coiffed, jumped back through and gay references hurtled like Jack Benny's Polish theater troupe bombed and built anew under which in the shelter Zulawski slept as a child. (more)


I dig my crazy jive poetry from two years ago, finding references to everything from T.S. Eliot to SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS to the obscure Lou Reed song, "Billy," but I wouldn't write like that again if I could try. I'm too jaded. I was on a holy fool pre-apocalyptic role back this time in 2012, as seen in The Scrooge Satori, all without a single mushroom, And I would never have made the TO BE OR NOT TO BE connection in my current cave-bound form. Yet when else is a Polish theater troupe the main character of a comedy film set and shot in 1942 Hollywood? Before you answer, quick imagine Roman Polanski skittering like a rat through the Warsaw sewers while Germans shell the city above and Russians wait on the outskirts, until the Resistance is wiped out, so they can step in an Iron Curtain the place. What a bum deal. Poland gets screwed double, so who can blame them for being depressed?


Am I going somewhere with this, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? Shamans are waiting for you to exhume them! Did you hear in the news that a 747 recently crashed in a cemetery in Poland? The Polish officials have so far retrieved 2,000 bodies! (1)

SZAMANKA (1994), aka SHE-SHAMAN, is one of them. Great judicious synthesizers underwrite Andrzej Zulawski's uber-bizarre panic movement-ish meditation on the nature of primitivism, Neanderthal train sex momentum, insanity, eating brains to gain wisdom, and the lack of mores or coherence in 90s Warsaw. And the script was written by a woman, Manuela Gretowska, who co-founded the Polish Women's Party and ran for office... in Poland! Badass, so best believe it's way darker sexually than even Zulawski would normally go. But thanks to his own 'maturer' madness, he makes a pretty good movie around it, way better than that punk Jean-Pierre Leaud was making in LAST TANGO IN PARIS (below, overlaid by me with a Bosch detail for easy decoding).


I mention this because Zulawski and Gretowska clearly know SZAMANKA is a lot like LAST TANGO IN PARIS, and that star Iwona Petry looks and foams at the mouth like Beatrice Dalle in BETTY BLUE which, lest we forget, ends with Dalle going totally crazy, getting electro-shock, and winding up smothered with a pillow ala ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. As with Bertolucci's film, Zulawski's crazy roving camera chases sexy nutcase Petry running everywhere--onto trains, off of trains--upstairs and down--and at times there's obscene perverse men leering from every corner and it begins to almost seem like some perverse sexual nightmare, ready for a Kali mantis like Beatrice Dalle's in her holy trifecta - BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE.   One of her lover's pals notes of some people being "God's fools, with souls so big there's no room for brains," Iwona Petry's "Italian" is at least smart enough to realize they're talking about her, and to knock over their table accordingly. So while Boguslaw Linda goes on his lecture, she's illustrating his tales of Neanderthal shamanism by mouthing a display case and "careening through the streets of Warszawa like a culturally inept marathon runner who's afraid of clowns" (2). While Linda pursues a doctorate in medicine, she's going to engineering school at the same school, so it's a metaphor to the division of labor and culture in Poland, and of woman's sexuality as something so archaically Precambrian as to devour the entirety of Apollonian civilization in a single sparagmosticated brain bite.

Her hotness making her a one-woman cliff for Warszawa's leming males, it's as if she's constantly trying to keep them at bay by behaving in a way that turns even the staunchest stomach; she also foams at the mouth, eats cat food out of her landlady's cat dish, and in short behaves like a proper panic movement-era primal screen actress undergoing convulsions like one feels on, say, too way way much acid. Four times what you usually take, I guess, is enough to get you to that level of walking down the middle of the street with no pants on, screaming at the top of your lungs, each root of hair in your scalp tingling like fiberoptic tendrils pummeling signals past all your normal blinders and defenses; from every web string of time and space, sensory impression magnified to the point of distortion, contradicting the other impressions, so that you literally hear your own thoughts talk to you in the roar of a passing truck or the bark of a dog and everyone you see looks like melting Cubist seventh dimensional sculptures. And it goes on like that for upwards of six hours (or if on DOM or STP, up to 36 hours). The only salvation is benzos, or whiskey... lots and lots, like you're a raving bull elephant huffing Ketamine in a vain attempt to put yourself under before being slowly clockwork fed through a paper shredder. Sometimes open mouth kissing display cases, salting your clothes, peppering your hair and spraying perfume on your lettuce, will at least help you break free from the normal behaviors of your social and cultural position, behaviors now revealed to be little more than straitjackets pulled past suffocation tightness.

this is your brain on drugs

Zulawski's been there, too. Petry and Linda know all the tricks, and maybe so has Gretowska, I'd imagine, because in SZAMANKA even engineering lectures fuse sexual-reproductive organs into the discussion in a way that would probably blow Cronenberg's mind.
"Zulawski said the animus inspired by his film was mainly directed at his uninhibited actress. The press “hated her and destroyed her, and she disappeared.” He has not made another movie in Poland since: “This country is still in the Middle Ages.” - J. Hoberman NY Times March 2nd, 2012 (my birthday!)

Still in the Middle Ages. I agree, half of America is right there with them, and as Petry's performance is clearly meant to have a certain 'the whole Cro-Magnon Thing passed my evolution by" -style idiot savant savage ambivalence, she's a living contradiction to all the Texas Board of Education--and by extension the International Film Critics Circle-- holds dear, he said, reading aloud from his notebook while running it under water in the sink, then dripping the blue ink all over her naked body. Clearly, he (Boguslaw Linda) is tripping balls. But it's for science! And he doesn't need a frickin' medical hothead standing by overacting like Charles Haid (in ALTERED STATES), or even a shot of him actually taking the mushrooms. He's just suddenly on them, and we have to guess when he's under the influence. He doesn't even need to mention reasons. But he says what they are eventually: he just wants to find the shaman in modern paranoid schizophrenics, realizing that "drugs, hunger, danger, darkness" - were all enough to keep all primitive humans in a paranoid schizophrenic state of delusional pleasure-pain, i.e. at that every hair a luminescent antennae to a thousand contrasting and contradictory signals too-much acid vibe. To find the nugget of truth, Boguslaw starts slowly devolving along the same lines, craving that mystical union with the power of what he does yet know via any ceremonial sex magic or 2,500 year old mushrooms he can find. And like all Zulawski films I've seen, no narcs.


In that sense, no one does it quite as shamanistically correct as old Andrzej Zulawski --Jodorowsky is too vulgar, Emir Kusturica too whimsical, Lynch too straight, and Gilliam too bent. None are the types to take "fucking flybanes" at their science lab and pitch a doctoral thesis to their advisor and future father-in law while rolling around on the floor in the hospital chapel. In other words, to offer fusion of the dramatic, forward-thinking, mystical, druggy, and socio-political all without whimsy, vulgarity, weird-for-weird's sake-ism, or any semblance of humor... or drama... Because Poles, like their Russian neighbors, just don't give a fuck. They sidestep altogether the things that trip up America--for all its talk of freedom--in unhackable tendrils of churchy censorship and narratives in morasses of need to explain things to the rubes in the cheap seats. These students don't need to worry about narcs or rubes like we did. If they find some shrooms in the ancient pocket of the exhumed shaman, they're going to do them. And wait for the shaman in the dish to make the first move. And they're going to hide that they did them from even us, so you have to know what the signs are. And the signs are indistinguishable from 'everyday' Warsaw life in the 1990s.


Dude, I've been on all sides of that equation, everyone except the mummified shaman. And that, according to my spirit guide, is what's waiting in fall 2015. Because let me tell you, without our space mushroom brothers as co-workers, we'll never get off this rock in any conveyance other than space ships. What's it gonna be, big dollar-intensive conveyances just to wind up back with Jessica Chastain in the Pre-Raphaelite TREE OF LIFE shirt reflection, where we could have been all this time through some simple deep breathing meditation and/or a handful of nonlocal mushrooms? By the power of Terence McKenna, I can validate that psychedelic mushrooms are standing by in petri dish agar solution somewhere, ready to work hand in stamen with the next generation of psychonauts, and the future's alien skies are limitless... just make it past the Scrooge tomb slab, the hottie primitive from the Middle Ages eating your brain on drugs as it sizzles apart in the heated pan of pure consciousness, and the cops inside the marrow of your bones. Maybe the dollar-intensive conveyances would be better, frozen forever 'til some far gone destination, comfy in the couch-like peat bog of the 'old freezarino' out in deep space. But not even INTERSTELLAR sleep lasts forever. No matter how long they drag it out, the exhuming from the bog of cine-dream will inevitably occur, and one will wake up to house lights, as the terror of an empty screen once more reflects like a DOS prompt on your empty helmet. Fucking flyboys...

NOTES.
1. Old Polish JokeS
2. The great Yum-Yum, House of Self Indulgence (5/30/13)

Growing up ALIEN: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, THE TERROR WITHIN

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I was a young kid when ALIEN(1979) came out, too young to see it in theaters and VHS wasn't out yet and we knew it would be edited to death when it finally came to the ABC Movie of the Week, so it was all but lost to us, except through the blanched faces of the adults who'd seen it. We could try to read the novelization, maybe, but we weren't up to that level of reader comprehension. When we were finally able to rent it on VHS a few years later, we were still terrified every step of the way. We watched it together, two families, as an army, rented along with COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER and watching that first, like going on a merry-go-round while gaining strength for the big coaster.

And yet, the whole thing with the robot gurgling white liquid and being reactivated took me out of the suspense-generating, all-consuming dread, as if that dread was so rare and delicious I resented Ian Holm taking me out of the zone--I'd forgotten all about the alien threat while he was doing his whole milk spew thing. I couldn't help noticing the alien patiently waited to attack again until that whole scene had played out. And what was the deal with going back for Jones, the damn cat? They didn't even have that cat in the film until they wandered out in the loading dock.

Still The stomach burster was unforgettable, but especially on the pan and scan, a lot of the great composition was lost. We were used to that, of course and if we didn't see it in the theater we didn't know what we were missing.

Then: the summer of ALIENS (1986), and I had just finished my freshman year at Syracuse. My girl and I still had to kind of get our courage up-- the whole point of the gore and trauma was to get us scared of seeing more of it, scared every moment and around every corner. The first stretch involving space soldiers investigating the complex kept the theater I saw it in on pins and needles. But by the end, our collective fear of the boogeyman had been stretched once too often, and as a result had militarized us. Now when I see Ripley running terrified down Nostromo corridors I feel nothing as far as suspense. Not having to worry about the physical threats awaiting the final girl is a relief; repetition-compulsion disorder had proven its worth. Ripley was weaponized -- "Let her alone, you bitch!!"

By the time of ALIEN: RESURRECTION in 1997, just trying to generate suspense from aliens stalking humans seemed pointless, and Ripley being super tough was just par for the course. She was now half-alien herself, but any declaration of 'you bitch' could now be only directed at herself, and there was no longer any recognizable human in the cast, replaced by French director Jean Pierre-Jeunet's METAL HURLANT-style cartoonish bizarro world exaggerations. I saw it on Christmas Day in 1997, where It was so overwrought with set design and liquid reflection, the only cool scene at all is of the always welcome and super-cool Michael Wincott discussing payments and acquisition of sleeping cargo for hosts while having a cigar and drink with military commander Dan Hedaya (below). But even there, Jean-Pierre Jeunet makes sure Hedaya's eyebrows are even more disturbing than usual. There's no shred of identifiable normal to latch onto - just layers of exaggerated CITY OF LOST CHILDREN-style over-artsiness.


Then there's the alien itself. In the first film it was truly other -- there was nothing remotely like it, nothing we'd seen before - not even remotely close to any of our species except in the most preliminary or advanced of stages. But by RESURRECTION it was just another smart mammal, making noises that sounded like pitch shifted lions, barking dogs and braying donkeys all at once-- the stages in the original design by now so familiar as to be more nostalgic than uncanny.

Galaxy of Terror
That's just human culture though, ALIEN's over-exposure-disseminated fear level drainage was inevitable. Throughout its long gestation there have been imitators and films that it in turn imitated, to the point John Hurt even shows up in SPACEBALLS (1987 - below), less than ten years later, and gives birth to a Vaudeville-kicking alien, a kids' movie by all accounts -- so an alien bursting out of a stomach goes from R-rated shock to PG-rated joke in under ten years.


Copy cats abounded too, James Cameron even got the job for ALIENS partially based on his success with turning out a lot of atmosphere on minimal dollars as art designer for Corman's ALIEN-imitating GALAXY OF TERROR (1981). Which makes sense, as a lot of the baroque majesty and sheer alienness of Ridley Scott's original is gone for Cameron's sequel, replaced by an erector set military gun locker aesthetic and cool feminist weaponization ala TERMINATOR. But not all films in the ALIEN imitation canon lost the Ridley Scott look, and ALIEN itself is just a very strong central link in a vast web of motifs that have been simmering for 60 years. Time enough for a space pod to carry your frozen body across the vast expanse between 1965 and 1989 for example, and with that...

---
PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965)
Dir. Mario Bava
88 minutes
***
Some films know just how to ease you into twilight sleep. Your unconscious mind uses the impressions from the soundtrack and dialogue as paint brushes to conjure alternate vistas as you dream yourself right off the couch and into the molasses chill of something like Bava's space fantasia PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. If you love dreaming your way through patches of otherworldly fog, eyes agog with the colors purple and red, ears lulled by the whoosh of space engines and throbbing moans of ancient races, unearthly winds, and second chakra ignited via badass proto-punk leather space uniforms with yellow piping, PLANET should be your destination. And the clear points of inspiration for Alien are numerous: for one thing, we don't have to deal with the usual origin story that sinks so many unimaginative sci fi films (such as most of Ib Melchoir's other scripts), i.e. we don't have to see the space ships taking off from Earth; there's also an ancient race's crashed ship sending an SOS that turns out to be a warning, or something.


Only FORBIDDEN PLANET before it knew that we could start from a very alien place and not need origin stories; the humans even fly in a saucer UFO instead of a phallic rocket, and we don't need to know why. PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES picked up on that - the crews here aren't even necessarily human or from Earth at all, and it doesn't matter. There's a mysterious SOS signal calling two craft here to a strange planet, where they discover an ancient crashed spaceship with dead giant aliens now reduced to calcified bones that make them look like they were giant elephant men, a bit like the huge space jockey looks in ALIEN, and there’s also a great ending which in its way harkens to the theatrical ending of ALIEN: RESURRECTION.


The film's got some issues, such as it being hard to distinguish most of the cast from each other which makes the plot--starting just like ALIEN with a search party (here comprised of two vessels) answering a strange beacon's call at a remote inhospitable (but lovingly lit) planet about to be devoured by its dying sun (or something), a kind of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS where the dead rise from their plastic coverings and hot Italian girls in leather jumpsuits (the kinkiest high fashion space crew uniforms ever) become possessed--hard to follow - who's playing who from which ship and who's possessed and/or dead and who's not, etc. But with Bava devotee Tim Lucas' commentary track on the Blu-ray, we learn a lot of the maestro's DIY in-camera special effect tricks, and that enhances enjoyment, and he's well-versed in what actors are playing what characters, including when one character changes actors halfway through. Cheap shortcuts or no, Lucas' reverence of the Bava canon is contagious and its reassuring that no no matter what's onscreen, we know it was intended just that way by one of horror cinema's great artists, so we can kick back and let the soothing space noises... lull us... to... sleep. eep... ... bleep... blip.... blip... captain the coffin's empty, all over again! 

THE TERROR WITHIN (1989)
Dir Thierry Notz
88 minutes

This New World Alien rip smartly trims effects budget by moving the setting to Earth, but  underground in the Mojave desert on a post-plague Earth, where only snakes and wandering mutant gargoyles survive. Aside from some terribly duck-like bills and alarming rows of teeth, the gargoyles aren't quite as ridiculous as most monsters in big rubber suits shambling around after suicidally slow-witted prey.  Their craftiness and invulnerability make them formidable as hell, able to jump out of small spaces while being seven feet tall, as if inheriting all the DNA of both The Terminator and Michael Myers. Like other Corman pics of the era, there's eroticized monster rape to make sure the board gives the film an R, and this allows for a two-for-one shock--1) the pre-PC lurid pulp cover fetishizing of sexy girls having their clothes ripped off by all sorts of claws, ghost hands, or centipede legs; 2) the inevitable unwanted pregnancy, short gestation, and ALIEN-esque cesarian birth. For me, at least, that makes it somehow less traumatizing than if perpetrated by the usual suspects.

Uniforms on the humans are very similar to those in ALIEN and there’s even a Yaphet Kotto-Harry Dean Stanton-esque pair of shiftless ensigns, drinking homemade ‘shine and grumbling about pay raises for “this kind of duty” which by now scans as merely quaint as opposed to appalling. But this is a Corman production, and that means monster rape, and when a surviving human is found running through the Mojave brush, she's sexy, terrified, and pregnant, and thanks to the reticent scalpel of the doctor, her abortion arrives too late and the baby gargoyle comes out and even runs across the room like he's freshly de-Kaned.

Star Andreef vs. Wade
That aside, I admire the ballsy pro-choice angle when Sue (Star Andreeff) demands an abortion and the lady doctor refuses and we're allowed to wonder if it's because she's got designs on Sue's man, the 80s coiffed hero David (Andrew "Kirk Douglas’s telekinetic son in The Fury" Stevens). The doc says the reason is that Sue's too weak to undergo such a surgery, and that there's plenty of time to do it tomorrow, and that it's probably David's baby. Oh man for an alternate future with ultrasound. At any rate, David's the sort who thinks a crossbow in tight quarters is an effective weapon, so his genetics might not be ideal. His hair, though, is perfect.


Most of the cast dies rapidly in their Darwinian order. George Kennedy is the C.O., and his stalwart near-at-the-time-ubiquitous presence always seems to imply there's other stars around, so it's almost okay that there's not. Sexy Sue, meanwhile thinks that if her man's in trouble battling an invincible seven foot tall yet stealthy and rabidly horny monster three floors below, the best way to help is to hop in an elevator, barefoot and unarmed, to come rescue him. But the rapid cast disappearance is only the start of the greatness, because we end up with a wounded terrified under-armed pair of survivors who communicate mainly one a two-way intercom as they try to obliterate a monster mutant whose only weakness is his painful sensitivity to David's dog whistle. The last stretch is just the three of them locked in endless tussle like THE TERMINATOR meets CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON.

And there’s a dog in the film who ably helps out in cool ways (he’s their tracker and early warning system and fearlessly distracts and attacks their foes) and even survives at the end. I'm not spoiler alerting for that, because dogs get a notorious bad break in horror films. When one survives, it's a cause for note... celebration... and an extra star.


So... skewed pro-choice compassion, a reasonably clear idea of where each person is in relation to one another at any given time in the deep compound, and the usual quick rush Corman-brand momentum, it all conspires to make TERROR off-worlds better than most ALIEN rip-offs. If only they hired Thierry Notz to make ALIEN 3, the way they hired Cameron for ALIENS, someone with a knack for doing a lot with a little instead of that cold misanthropic clinician David Fincher, who does so very little with so much.


If I didn't mention ALIEN 3 at all in the introduction, it's because Fincher gutted everything that was great about the first two films, setting the film entirely on a dismal mud planet that could be anywhere in any closed-down prison anywhere in shit-field England, so he can hire a bunch of Brit thespians, shave everyone's heads, and roll around in the mud. So instead of a sexy Ripley or a weaponized Ripley we get an almost gang-raped Ripley who needs to be rescued by a self-righteous Muslim, and the dog, oh goddamned you, Fincher... and for what? So another CGI blur can get thrown in another dumb cauldron of liquid metal? Or something? The ending's straight out of TERMINATOR 2 as I recall. Actually, maybe I need to see it again. I hear the extended 'work print cut' is better, and the alien comes out of an ox instead of a dog, as nature intended. That's not a spoiler, for one is always better off knowing.

I'm prejudiced too, for I remember renting ALIEN 3 from Blockbuster while visiting my brother in Arizona back in '92-ish, and not being able to understand what the hell was going on half the time thanks to bad pan and scanning, and seeing double thanks to a 1.75 liter of Seagram's, many one hits, and the constant interruptions by Fred's dumbass buddies. But hey, that's what it's all about: from a child savoring his terror after enduring COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER in a room full of people as a child in 1980, to the sequel as a college kid on a date in 1986, and now in the dry desert, drunk off my ass, after shooting empties in the backyard with an air rifle in 1992, picking on the dumbass friends of my well-armed little brother and slowly going from excited to bored to angry to just plain drunk. And not a girl other than a bald, androgynous Sigourney either onscreen or off, for no women came to visit my brother, ever. I was never so lonely and miserable as I was in that desert with those lost boys. Damn you, Fincher.


The internet came soon after that, thank god. AOL discs floated in from the mail like holy wafers and connected us to a buzzing phone modem of instant omnipresence. Our modem's alien bang bang-ing connecting noises lulled us into trances, like when we slept suspended in our M.O.T.H.E.R, not knowing what yet what she looked like, not knowing the modem beeping wasn't a distress signal at all... but a warning. Until the inevitable unmasking-- the grim evening she materialized out the Kane white t-shirt ether, and plopped into the opposite chair of our 1995 Astor Pl. Starbucks rendezvous--she was our old freezarino, our empty helmet reflection dream. Afterwards, our whiskered freshwater monster. ++

FARTHER FUTUREWARD:

The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, The Dead Files (10-21-12)

BLACK MIRROR: Handle with Care

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I'm a big fan of 70s-80s sci fi dystopia films because they show a world of space age outfits, modular furniture, free love, gigantic computers--which is reassuring as none of that happened --maybe humanity will triumph over itself after all! But then a show like BLACK MIRROR comes along and sneak attacks me right in the screen-screen-screen criss-crossed world I "live" in (computer at work, cell phone while traveling, TV at home). The world suddenly vanishes behind me, as worlds will once you cross into new ones. Since we don't need to go out anymore, the 'out' ceases to exist. The entire planet becomes indoors; a vast maze of living and work cubicles powered by exercise bikes; full-wall screens instead of windows. Surround sound, surround screens, and everyone shouting and everything paid for by 'merits' we can follow onscreen as they rise and fall with every step (each squeeze of toothpaste a merit,  as does each FF past a commercial). In this crazy world even closing your eyes to an ad costs merits and if we don't have them a shrill noise permeates your 'room' until we open our eyes again, so the commercial can resume. And that's just one grim future outlined on this crazy BBC IV TV show.


In other words, as far as nightmare dystopian parables, BLACK MIRROR is twenty years ahead of its closest neighbors and that it's on Netflix streaming is just too perfect as far as metatextuality. Watch and be warned, though: This show questions the very presence of media in your life in ways I know I, personally, wasn't quite ready for. The show has left a burnished patina of dread to my life; the usual amniotic safety of the widescreen HD image is no longer so reassuring. There's no magic at work, no hallucinations, no monsters in BLACK MIRROR - just sci fi-tinged but believable parables about where we're headed with the light speed advancements in digital media and advertising saturation, and maybe it's already too late to change. Maybe all those contracts we clicked 'I accept' on have quietly stripped us of 'real' self, like watching a commercial for the swinging pendulum from the couch-strapped pit, as thousands of avatars cheer from nearby screens, or the razor coming at your eye in a Dali or Fulci film right as you find yourself having left the last few scraps of 'reality' behind and entered the no-exit image, trapped in a nightmare feedback loop. It's a feeling I had forgotten about, safe in my mediated womb, a feeling I know only from the few times I took way way too much acid back in the 80s. But this show's got my womb all cased out and they're not afraid to cut right in with the cesarian scalpel.

The Channel 4 
If you're new to the series, I'd suggest what I was recommended: Don't start with the first episode of the first season, it's a bit disturbing, disgusting, and ultimately pointless. Save it for last, for one final sucker punch on your way out. Start with the last episode of the first season (there's only three episodes per season, ah the BBC) "The Entire History of You," then move through season 2 in order. ("White Bear" is my favorite), and then the second and then first episode of the first season. I can't tell you much more as they're all best approached cold, as "they" say. The really devastating, unbelievably on-point one is episode two, "Fifteen Million Merits." It still haunts me.


And the most terrifying part: it's all coming true faster than we can stop it. Just pressing this link here to see them on the Channel 4 (or on Netflix for a mere 8 merits a month) implicates you in the problem... I... think you should... wait. No I don't. Never mind and have a lovely day... Run! Their Xmas special with Jon Hamm premieres next week, if you got the BBC 

Retrofuturist Pharma III: The "Metatextual Cigar" Edition: ASCENSION, VENTURE BROS, SNOWPIERCER + the Plastic-Fantastic World of Kim Jong Un

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While the weirdest war of isolated 'fake' reality constructs-- a Hollywood stoner comedy about killing a dictator vs. a dictator whose constructed his own fantasy that's stuck in the past-- we have on a TV mini-series about an 'experiment' in social isolation, Syfy's ASCENSION!

The latest astro-swinger pad fantasia deftly commingles MAD MEN's early 60s cocktail sexist classist intrigue on a BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's space ark, post-modern indoor beaches, nice space views, reclinable chairs, oxygen masks for turbulence (or radiation belts), sexy stewardesses, lower deck resentment of the first class passengers ala SNOWPIERCER, and so on. This ain't no NOAH-in-space ark and this ain't your daddy's space ark. Rather, it is exactly his space ark. It took off in 1963 and neither their sexism nor clothing has changed since. So while we're all post-post everything down here, up there they're stuck at the RIGHT STUFF barbecue. In short it's a ginchier bigger-budgeted better written version of SPACE STATION 76 which came out this year, the same year BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW showed up on Netflix streaming! In short, it really is retro-futurism's time, and if that wasn't enough of a post-modern anachronism (see part 1, and part 2), it's also TWIN PEAKS-y, as the focus is a Laura Palmer-esque girl's murder--that stirs up the soapy sediment as the ship passes year 51 of its 100 year mission to some far-off galaxy.


I got sucked into watching it last night via Syfy showing INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), which never fails to get me teary-eyed and proud to be American, alcoholic, and human, in that order. And sure it's crypto-fascist Reagan-esque dogma, but so what? Jeff Goldblum walking back from their crashed saucer in the white salt flats, his macho fey hips swaggering in that flight suit with the cigar and Will Smith at his side, while a flaming UFO burns behind them? Perhaps the sexiest image of the entire 90s. Smith got the credit, got the 'Mr. Fourth of July' tag, but it's just as much Goldblum's movie. Both are in tippy-top form and bring out new depths in each other, and for once the wives are more than just hovercraft. Prez Bill Pullman's wife (Mary McDonnell --she'd become a de facto actual president in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) is rescued by a a proudly non-cliche'd stripper mom / Will Smith girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox). Goldblum's ex is a presidential aide (Margaret Colin - totally off-brand sexy in oversize flannel shirt tied at the bottom). And everyone gets to hang out together, from the drunkest yokel to the most brassed-up general, with no buffers. And most of all, it's Reagan's dream come true, at last, the nations of the world putting aside petty differences to fight the alien threat.


I was going to change the channel after but ASCENSION cleverly slid into place before the credits of ID could even start rolling. It's its own blast from the past 'we're all one planet now' speeding locomotive or space ship crucible and I was crying too hard by then--'not until the fat lady sings' cigar smoke in my eyes--to find the remote and thus avoid another dippy Syfy-Canadian joint. But having been all up in the retro-futurist thing these past weeks, how could I switch away? I liked right off how they explore the idea of how damaging it must be to one's psyche living an entire life in a giant spacecraft, doomed to never go outside and play, or learn to drive. But on the good side, it's an environment free of urban blight, STDs, and racism, though with a rigid class system of the oppressive sort most white people only ever experience walking angrily past first class to our miserable G27 aisle seat.


Cementing the Syfy connection is the indefatigable Tricia Helfer (Cylon #6- the girl in the red dress on all the posters for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) as an enigmatic head stewardess / politico / master planner (top) who connives and controls her ambitious but weak-willed captain husband like a Lady Macbeth in space. Tall, statutesque, blonde, gorgeous with just enough Nordic alien hybrid to her TV star vibe to make her a fitting TV sci fi cult ruler, she's great but it's Laura Palmer--I mean Lorelai Wright (Amanda Thomson), a Megan Fox-esque bitch sleeping with, apparently, everyone--who becomes the focus. Her mom meanwhile has secrets, too, and the mysterious killer skulks around during radiation storms in a big hazmat suit like the killer in GREEN FOR DANGER. And the black cop (Brandon Bell) struggles to get answers while his scarred mom (?) works at the library that also rents out movies on disc (?) and tells her son to check out the works of Lang and Hitchcock to help him catch the killer. Bonus points! Not a lot, though.


There's an overriding fantasy in ASCENSION, SNOWPIERCER,  NOAH and INDEPENDENCE DAY, which is to smash through the TRUMAN'S SHOW-ish God complex-brand Ed Harris / Kim Jong Un/Jaweh-ishness of our miserable overcrowded lives and feel some direct control of our own destiny rather than being ruled by hypocritical far-off governments. It's an idea common to dreams and science fiction: one day being able to scale back the overpopulated, polluted, fucked-in-the-head society we live in, but not in a fascist brutal fundamentalist Christian or Muslim or Amish or Hassidic or TEENAGE CAVEMAN-style way--to go back instead into the locally sourced and small business past wherein the future was hip as the 60s-70s hetero-white-patriarchy could dream it, to somehow recapture the essence of what we lost as a tribe, we heterosexual white dudes. If we're just old enough to remember some of the shit our MAD MEN-ish fathers got away with in the 60s-70s, we feel resentful we can't get away with the same shit but at the same time we don't even own a tie, let alone need a whole rack of them, so gather ye perks while ye may. But oh me brothers, to have the social order openly privileging us again! To live in a cool space craft and drink martinis served by hotties in sexy outfits while stars spin by outside, isn't it worth it even if we have to wear ties all day? It's like Windows on the World or Crystal Peak, you know... the old "animals could be bred and...slaughtered"skidoo... hard to resist if you're disenfranchised from the tools of the system, como yo. And ASCENSION's pilot has a great twist ending that makes a great metaphor for what Salvia Divinorum is like if you know how to meet it halfway, or LSD or ayahuasca is like if you don't. Cuz who knows what weird things are waiting for us by the time we get to Arizona?



It's space, man... it's in the air. And we are made of dreams dreamt a million years ago by a serpentine morass of intergalactic exile DNA scary enough to make Carpenter's THING shit its pants. And we're still evolving and morphing and spinning madly through the abyss like Prometheus lashed to a giant golf ball that will never see the green.


Another example:  I used to be quietly fascinated by the Cartoon Network show, THE VENTURE BROS., which is like a queer Crystal Peak version of JOHNNY QUEST, with a well-constructed bizarro world retrofuturist vibe in which a bald ectomorph named Dr. Venture is the genius scientist son of the kind of square-jawed super dad space race titan of industry that Tony Stark had, and who's left his son this gigantic retrofuturistic scientific research center, laden with faded modular relics from the early days of the space race. There's a few things that irk me and are why I stopped watching after a scant five seasons, like the insistence on elements of gross bathroom humor that seems needlessly tacked on and which, thanks to my morbidly acute imagination, I can't really endure it unless I'm half-anesthetized upon the Usher crypt table, which luckily is how I spend a good deal of my life. That windy sentence said, if you're the type who can handle scatological humor, and loves retrofuturism , then know that it's on Cartoon Network, ready for the Pretty Polly plucking. There's a hybrid Kissinger-Mary Poppins; a foxy supervillainess with a voice like Harvey Fierstein; a Dr. Strange-ish neighborwho holds ayahuasca parties and keeps close eye on his sexy narcoleptic daughter and whose spirit guide is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin; a sex-changed Hunter S. Thomson working undercover as a female stripper; a bodyguard with a mullet and a shoebox full of Led Zeppelin cassettes; and even a secret sub-basement of mutants presided over by that weird haired haired singer of that old Brit band Prodigy. That's just off the tip of my head. And it's been years.


So savor the rich attention to retrofuturist Johnny Questian detail, the weird streak of faux-closeted gay stuff, and the brilliant idea that supervillains and superheroes have come to terms with their interdependence, and taken steps to ensure each other's continuation. And most of all, let the sweet lull of HD widescreen TV make everything that was old new again, even America... in the early 60s... as seen through Big Brother eyes... of Canadians.

Or super cool South Koreans.


SNOWPIERCER (2013, but released in the states this year) is directed by South Korean son Bong Joon-Ho, who directly addresses the brutal need for mass murder at the core of overpopulation and global warming, and how pulling the plug on the whole damned tub of foul humanity may just be the most heroic thing we can do.

In the film's post-apocalyptic ice age landscape, the only surviving life is crowded onto a giant speeding train that rarely slows down and just races around in crazy circles across the frozen tundra, mile after mile, years measured by laps around the course. Like a solar-powered silver bullet serpent pecking order, the lower classes herded like concentration camp detainees in the rear of the train, fed bricks of gelatinous gunk and subjected regularly to harsh brutality by a police force led by a bespectacled Tilda Swinton. The front of the train holds the elite, and the very head of the train holds the 'engineer' - Wilford (Ed, 'it's all for you, Truman' Harris) who makes the rules and lives high on the hog. The rear is presided over by filthy leftist John Hurt, and his right hand muscle, Chris 'Captain America' Evans.


They stage a revolt, which involves fighting (in Bong's favorite style: claw hammers in tight quarters) from car to car, each new car a shock or surprise as--among other things--the filthy urchins get to try sushi for t the first time, and see just what sort of micro-livestock they've been eating all their lives. It's a brilliant, existential critique of everything from the rigged 'real truth' behind war, to conservative brainwashing, jet set decadence, reproduction's insidious con job, and class warfare. Watch it on your Kindle before boarding your Xmas plane, and see if you don't want to take a swing at one of the first class douchebags you pass on your way to coach. It's better to go down swinging, after all, rather than sitting cramped in your seat for another 30 years and not lighting up your Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum victory dance cigar because they don't allow smoking on planes. You think Kim Jong Un wouldn't light that cigar? The 'No Smoking' sign went out as soon as the aliens attacked, General!


Bong's film didn't really come into any kind of theatrical release here until this year, so I'm quietly folding it in with NOAH, INTERSTELLAR and ASCENSION to make grand points about our longing to get some friends together, pack up, and head off-world, for a chance to begin again while the whole shit-house below goes up in Rekall-implanted digital flames behind us. Witness the latest slimy moves of Wall street and Republicans and tell me they all shouldn't be frozen by reverse global warming or burned in a sea of fire, or at least left behind in a shower of Matthew McConaughey sparks! Instead they'll probably have golden ark tickets and we won't. That's the depressing reality- that even in our imaginations we're third class citizens forced back into steerage, like John Cusak and his 2012 band of stow-away freeloaders. But at least if we're in the right movie we can maybe bash those first class passengers with a hammer real good. As long as we remember to do it onscreen, of course, and have the wisdom to know the difference. 

from top: TOTAL RECALL (Promo); INTERSTELLAR
NOAH even agrees. In Ridley Scott's film, Russell Crowe's plan is for his family to be the last surviving humans, and die out with grace after setting the animals post-flood free, because humanity is a vile plague, with greed and malice fueling a continual destructive turbulence wherever it flourishes.  But even then, his liberal shit of a son is sheltering the vilest of humans in the back of the ship. "My father Enoch told me that one day," Russell Crowe says, "if man continued his ways, The Creator would annihilate this world." Well that's some Creator you got, Russell, blaming all but two giraffes for the crimes of their cagers. This almighty Creator should really look in the mirror, or stick to something like a human-only plague next time, ala the forthcoming TV series version of 12 MONKEYS or the PLANET OF THE APES series, so the animals can roam free down the city streets rather than being cramped up with each other, seasick and with no room to even take a shit for over 40 days and nights.

NOAH's virtual water
Let 'The Creator' suck, then, on our own willingness to wipe ourselves out (at least virtually) before He gets a chance, or can stop us, yet again. Let us get the last laugh and a middle finger raised, the 'victory dance' cigar (or cigar wrapped blunt) smoked before we're wiped out by His humorless petty wrath. If He can't take a joke, it's by jokes we defeat Him. The fat lady sings do do doo dooo.


How bitter the fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to, goes the garbled threats to Sony. But, if terror's all we ever get, then terror better learn to loosen the fuck up. Because we're coming for it, with all the CGI and stoners we can muster. We put the props in propaganda, Kim, and we will bury you in unsold DVDs of THE GUILT TRIP. Activate... Mecha-Streisand... and George Burns forgive us.


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NOTES:

POSTSCRIPT 12-18-14: Sony backed off. The real has been eclipsed by the virtual - and watching it unfold on CNN, followed by BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS and the final episode ASCENSION was a post-modern triple threat that has completely broken my sense of self, America, Don Geiss, and hope. 

Rothrock Rules! YES MADAM!, ABOVE THE LAW, MERCENARIES, BLONDE FURY; Carano Crushes! HAYWIRE, IN THE BLOOD

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It seems we're living in an age where feminist worries about the detrimental effects of sexual violence in the media really have proven valid. Popular cinema is awash in white slavery, sexual sickos, date rapists (the horrible disillusioning for those of us who loved Cosby as a child) and how a dead hooker is now just part of the whole Vegas black-out experience. Was Laura Mulvey right, the male gaze is a horrifying all-consuming evil? Her "Visual Pleasures in Narrative Cinema" essay opened a dialogue on the male gaze but unfortunately spawned a downer academic feedback loop as, in their drive for tenure, liberal arts faculties have sometimes erred on the side of humorless baby stifling. But at least it keeps them off the streets, which aren't safe, if the last million films starring Nicolas Cage or Liam Neeson are correct.

But as winter melts away and pollen and seasonal depression lurks, man need deliverance, need a break from the heavy theory and artsy shizz, and liberal arts guilt. And I'm supposed to go to a damn Laura Mulvey lecture/film screening at 6PM today/tonight (no joke)!  Jim, I'm becalmed, and no avant garde collage detournement deconstructions of 50s Hollywood's feminine ideals can raise me spirits. Not tonight, Josephine!


I'm sure Mulvey will crush it, or whatever term is gender-awareness allowable, but I need to see women literally crush it to feel better instead of worse. Not the usual direct-to-cable bimbos in halter tops running along some Philippine beach with plastic guns in hand, nor dour sermonizers who feel bad about all their violence. I'm talking women who are confident, fearless, and could believably put a hole through a windshield with a single punch....

YES MADAM!(1985)

Dir. Corey Yuen
***1/2

This Hong Kong hyperkinetic comic ballet has as its comic center three bumbling petty crooks who accidentally grab a MacGuffin microfiche, with the ballistic Cynthia Rothrock and graceful Michelle Yeoh as cops trying to get it from and/or protect them. Both women are great, but Rothrock is ballsy and fights like she's really fighting (she was a karate champion). Yeoh fights like she's dancing which is perfectly fine, and her balletic style matches that of most of these guys. She tends to kick a guy then let him recover and kick back and then kick him again on and on, like one might at a martial arts demonstration rather than a competition. Rothrock never gives her opponent time to recover, she just moves in bam bam bam, like a boxer, no chance for her opponent to shake off the previous blow, or even the one before that, until he's down and out for the count. Yeoh is supremely graceful but her kicks never seemed believable to knock over big guys, whereas you can believe even really big dudes would be fall bloody at the feet of Rothrock. Best part is a great climactic knockdown brawl wherein their two styles merge and they bond, and its glass-and-face-smashing greatness elevates the soul. The three doofuses wear on the nerves quickly but you'll believe a girl can fly through a glass window to dodge a guy's kick and then swing around underneath it and kick him through the same hole in the glass all in one smooth flip. And you'll be right: ROTHROCK RULES!

ABOVE THE LAW (1986)

Aka: Righting Wrongs
Dir. Corey Yuen
***

Biao Yuen stars as a Hong Kong lawyer who watches as a Dirty Harry-era scumbag rich criminal gets off scot-free in court by having all his witnesses, plus their children, blown-up and/or shot (by a black guy in an American army uniform); there's an undercurrent of the old British rule being corrupt and the powdered wigs they all have to wear in court look horribly itchy. Yuen winds up pissed off so takes the law into his own hands and goes gunning for the bad guys on his off hours, but where's the 'fu? He's not a very good driver but he's good at close quarters fighting with hired hit men trying to run him over in a third-story parking garage. Cop Rothrock talks about vigilanteism while watching a toy train run its track and the only drawback is the slovenly cop she picks as her assistant; he's one hell of a sloppy gross eater, to the point a sensitive guy like me has to look away. Rothrock though, man, she can fight... so I have to look as soon as he's gone.


The final climactic brawl occurs in an airplane hangar and makes good use of everything from a propellor to an on-airplane fight to the death. Yuen more than holds his own, but its Rothrock--as an HK cop who starts out investigating the murders of all the high level scumbags but winds up on Yuen's side--who really registers. She's not here to make friends, and though she doesn't get near enough screen time, it's enough to make us realize just how much ROTHROCK RULES!

BLONDE FURY, THE (1989)

(AKA Lady Reporter, Righting Wrongs 2)
Director Mang Hoi
**1/2

Lots of the typical HK action-comedy elements, this time centered around an American FBI agent (Rothrock) who works the SF Chinatown beat and has friends in HK, so she's sent back there to crack a counterfeit ring by posing as a reporter. As per usual, all the men are either spastic morons or grinning evil bad guys, crooked pols and cops with shady motivations. Rothrock isn't quite the boxy brawler from YES MADAM! and ABOVE THE LAW anymore. She's more along the Yeoh lines: graceful, acrobatic, agile, but the fights are often sped up slightly more than usual and her kicks don't look like they hurt as bad as they did a few years ago. Now the guys just bounce back up again and the spastic imbeciles with their bugging eyes run hither and yon with equal speed, the main offender being the director Mang Hoi, though we must make allowances for Asia's love of 'big crowd pleaser' comedy, the kind that gets theaters full of all ages people rolling in the aisles but seems labored when you're watching at home with your discerning film snob cronies. Still, the lame jokes make the bumbling crooks in MADAME seem like the goddamned Ocean's Eleven. That said, the two films (this and MADAM! I mean) are a lot alike... this time it's an incriminating file that winds up in the hands of Rothrock's female boss at the paper. Whatevs. Corruption. Stay with the story. There's a great fight on bamboo poles along the three or four stories of a half-finished domicile of some sort. Its DVD is OOP but it's streaming free on the old YT and one day I swear I'll spring for the iOB. 

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HAYWIRE (2011)

Dir Steven Soderbergh
****

Smoky-eyed UFC fighter Gina Carano is most believably ass-kicking American babe since the early Hong Kong Rothrock, but this is no Hong Kong street brawl, this is Soderbergh making up for the outrages of his ill-conceived CONTAGION. Here Carano herself is the contagion and the boys don't have a chance for a cure.  I could go press play and re-see it right now. But I'm at fookin' work. This is Steven Soderbergh's big masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I've probably seen it ten times and I can't get enough.  I wish it had a bigger ending and I sure wish it made a ton of money so he'd make a dozen sequels like those damned OCEANS,


There's so many things to love about this film: the touching military sense of cool in the face of danger that bonds her to her father (Bill Paxton), a former Marine (like her) now writing books on WW2 desert warfare; the cold blue-eyes of Michael Fassbender as an MI6 agent lured into thinking he can kill her easy; the way Michael Douglas as a Washington insider doesn't buy her high level betrayal frame-up, and just encourages her to keep killing her way up the ladder; Channing Tatum as her lover / would-be assassin and their great diner brawl; the confused but smart hipster who gets told the backstory; the cool reflective Soderbergh surfaces to post-modern globalism that only he and a few other directors--Assayas, Liman, Greengrass--can really deliver.

Too bad though, that Carano hasn't been given much other proper material after this. She could be a new kind of Jenn Bourne, instead her best post-HAY work is in the most recent FAST AND FURIOUS epic which allows her one big subway steps battle, where we're supposed to believe Michelle Rodriguez would have a chance against her.

IN THE BLOOD(2014)

Dir. John Stockwell
**

We see the importance of Steven Soderbergh's way of pulling out great depth of dark-eyed beauty from Carano's face and movements, the way she seems to be leaning way back into herself, even while throttling guys in waves of UFC leglock mount moves. Here in IN THE BLOOD all the best moves occur early on in a big nightclub brawl where Carano rescues her husband from Danny Trejo's ho stable. That said, there's sunshine, island mood, and unrepentant violence including some sideways likenings of Carano's actions to those of Shagur in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. She even commits some cold-blooded outright murder, including several cops. I enjoyed that aspect because female action heroines are seldom more cold-blooded than even their most despicable enemies. The story is a kind of THE LADY VANISHES or BREAKDOWN as a zip-lining accident leads to Gina's fiancee's disappearance, and his rich father (Treat Williams) and sister accuse her of killing him for the inheritance. It's up to her to carve a bloody torturous trail through the brush; her particular set of skills ensnaring several mostly innocent people along in her swath. Director Stockwell gave us the excellent INTO THE BLUE and BLUE CRUSH, so he knows his tropical island island action, and TURISTAS, so he knows his gringos on the organ chopping block racism. But has he ever seen a lassie go this way and that way, so goddamned fast? He tries to catch up via limb-shredding and gun fire brutality, but we'd rather just see Gina kick some crap out of some Triads or Golden Tongs and aside from that nightclub scene, there's woefully little fight choreography. The anti-climactic Danny Trejo speech at the end is priceless, though. His island ladies need tourists after all, and when rich white people are attacked, it's no good for anybody's business, especially, it seems, Stockwell's.

MERCENARIES (2014)

Dir. Christopher Ray
**

Zoë Bell has doubled for Xena and Buffy and Uma long enough. She's stepping into her own here (after breaking out atop the Challenger in DEATH-PROOF) and her hair looks great. Directed by the ersatz maniac behind MEGA SHARK VS. CROCOSAURUS, This is the B-chick version of THE EXPENDABLES, with fellow Tarantino alum Vivica Fox, Asian American badass Nicole Balderback and TERMINATOR 3 babe Kristanna Loken teaming up with Bell against a dyked-out Brigitte Nielsen. The unsavory white slaver angle is handled with some level of tact, though a massive machine gun carnage bit leaves a bad taste. There is a lot of mean talk and discovered bodies dealt with via vengeance of a mostly cathartic order and everyone seems to having fun in the boondogle EXPENDABLES tradition, albeit with around a 1/100th of the budget (its director is Fred Olen-Ray's son, as if the word 'Crocosaurus' wasn't enough of a tip-off). Mostly though it's a chance for Bell to kick some serious ass and for Cynthia Rothrock to pass the badass torch and take her seat in the pantheon of action heroes-turned-action movie 'behind the desk' good guy government liaisons who send younger ass-kickers on their dangerous missions. Low budgets never stopped Hong Kong actors from delivering the goods, so why should the word 'Crocosausus' convince these ladies to phone it in? Ray can barely figure out where to put his camera but ROTHROCK RULES Eternal, even when leaving the high kicks to the kids.


FURY, WORLD WAR Z and the Tyler Durden Experience (Great 70s Dads: The Brad Pitt Edition)

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I started writing this post a few months ago during the 2014 Golden Globes, prepared for the usual mawkish acceptance speeches and self-congratulatory montages, but I was shocked instead by how much blubbering was occurring over, of all things, kids. On and on these winners went about how they love their kids, how their kids are shining stars of Bethlehem that transport them safely across the deserts of artistic blocks and emotional meltdowns and give their life's work Myrrh-ish meaning.It was appalling.

Sure, I'm being a curmudgeon, but I have nothing against the kids themselves. I feel for them. Imagine being one of the children of those Globe winners, staying over at a slumber party and everyone's watching of course on TV and noticing your dad is a wussy crybaby who's totally bound to you hand and foot. Christ, I would have packed my sleeping bag and bailed on the spot. Kids have honor, a code! In order to grow into decent human beings these kids need to know you aren't going to fall apart on them, crying and clinging and making them fight for every second of privacy. They want to know that they can move out one day and you'll have some one else to thank, for a change, like your agent!  Or God! Or Brad Pitt, to show you the way a great 70s dad behaves.

The Pitt-staring 2013 zombie disaster film World War Z can help. I  may be the first film to actively redress the ongoing problem of what I call the Dads of Great Adventure, i.e. the ones who wind up with custody of their kids during the apocalypse because it happens to come on a weekend, and so they spend the movie trying to return them to the upscale hottie mom and the bland moneyed stepdad who's everything the deadbeat dad of great adventure is not, to an almost Ralph Bellamy-esque degree. As Gerry Lane in Z, Brad seems to be actively healing the fisher king wound left by these adventure dads. He's still married to the children's mother, and is competent and responsible for the world outside his immediate family as well as for said family, and the wife too, all are taken care of without over-protecting, sanctimoniously belittling, clinging, or simpering (or on the other side, ignoring, spacing, procrastinating, stalling). Pitt's professional compassion exonerates him from the usual sense of proximal guilt that trips up rubes like Cage in Knowing, Viggo in The Road, Cruise in War of the Worlds and Cusak in 2012. More than all of them, World War Z makes a genuine manly effort to show male viewers a kind of post-Fight Club code they can live by without feeling like second class citizens in their own home. Gerry Lane and family (including urchin collected en route) are choppered off to an aircraft carrier packed with refugees, so he can jet off to help a doctor locate Patient Zero. A global journey takes him from South Korea to Israel to a remote medical testing facility in Wales, and finally to a refugee camp in the one place savvy doomsday preppers have eyeballed since 1999 as the place to be in a crisis, Nova Scotia.


The real-life pair of Jolie and Pitt  got started on their global betterment tour when Jolie starred in Beyond Borders. As if continuing that film's message, Brad plays a selfless UN worker who has survived some of the most harrowing places on Earth, so the disasters of this zombie plague don't stress him out the way they do other dads. He has a strong, supportive wife, two glowing children, and great fun family rapport. Over the course of the movie these kids (they adopt another kid whose soon-dead family they bond with while hiding for the night in a NJ tenement), and wife are never really in danger, or at any rate, they don't panic because they trust in their heavenly-faced father. We sense that even when the zombie spittle is flying fast and furious no harm will come to them. In fact those who stay super close to Pitt miraculously survive even as everyone else around them are infected and/or dead. The concern is solely as to where and how Pitt's UN semi-unfazable superdad will solve the zombie problem,


Pitt avoids the issues that plagued the earlier dads of great adventure exceedingly well, regularly making eye contact with people being bitten and devoured but then not helping them or stopping to save them. There's something reassuring about how being a representative from the UN gets you driven all around the world without need for check-in or bag search. Telling moments reveal a savvy about the proximal responsibility issue: the grateful singing of the Palestinians being let into Israel to avoid the plague excites the zombies and drives them over the impregnable wall; The one moment of true Brad danger comes when his wife's phone call rings as he's trying to sneak around sleeping zombies. This is a movie that knows how any glimmer of empathy, proximal responsibility, etc. can set off a chain reaction. Only Brad's compassionate but survival-based mojo manages to know when to cut and run in true triage fashion.


Fury (2014) finds Pitt not saving the world while mom and foundlings wait at a Nova Scotia refugee camp with slippers and pipe, but blasting the hell out of the German homeland defenses with a motley tank crew of uncouth but loyal brigands. A clean-shaven newbie from the typing pool who quivers and quakes and resents Pitt forcing him to shoot an unarmed German prisoner just to show he's O.G. (as he earlier didn't fire on a soldier kids he saw, leading to another Sgt. being killed). We're put inside the mind of this kid (Logan Lerman) and there's some of that distasteful anachronism where he's way too wussy for 1945, hell, even for 1975, but wussy like they only started to make 'em in the post-PC 'declawing' of masculinity beginning around the early 80s. Wardaddy does the right thing in forcing him to kill an unarmed soldier, it's a matter of Pitt and crew's on personal survival the kid give up his squeamish morality and suggesting all sensitive typists (like myself) could use a few months on the front lines of a war with a guy like Wardaddy to toughen us up to the point we can turn compassion into an asset rather than a liability, that we don't hesitate on the trigger when its time to kill. 


We've seen this PC young typist character before, in Saving Private Ryan (played by the ever-mugging Jeremy Davies), though there we also had the chronic complainer (Ed Burns), and the "Wardaddy" there wasn't a mighty Pitt but 'decent guy' Tom Hanks. Pitt had proved he could be wild and liberated even whilst a young scrap of a fella, back in Thelma and Louise, so that's never been in doubt, but even so, here we got some extra layers of toughness as borne out by his scarred and diesel oil-stained face. We see him get kind of cleaned up when a nice little breakfast served up by Pitt and a couple of frauleinsis invaded by the rest of his motley tank corp, and we see Pitt forced into a weird no-win zone between solidarity with his rapey crew and an innate gentlemanly spirit. It's the most tiresome scene in the film, and I'll confess I FF-ed part of the way, but it's almost worth it for the brutal pay-off, which finally brings the sudden deathliness of things to bear for our milquetoast. Eventually the lad even learns when to let a kraut fry to death and when to chop him in half.  Hell yeah, Sgt. Rock loves this movie, wherever he is.


And if the whole last stand thing means that yet again the Saving Private similarities come too close to call, what is so important about Fury is what's not there, no balderdash bullshit about needing to ask a goddamned woman whether or not you 'earned it' and all that trying to find some greatest generation noble cause lollipop at the center of the severed head tootsie roll.

We all knew Pitt could bring the nihilistic badassitude as could Michael Pena (Observe and Report), the real surprises in the crew are Jon Bernthal as the unkempt creep whose iron john energy finally connects with Lerman after the fraulein incident and Shia LaBeouf, whom I've always regarded with some level of contempt, but completely changed my mind with his bible-quoting sonofabitch here. When it comes down to the nitty gritty of sharing last cigarettes and drinks before almost certain doom, it's Shia who really brought it home to me, deep in my socks, the feeling of being fully cognizant of the true finality of extinction, how one's death is pressed right up on the glass and always just a tap away, and of standing firm anyway, fully in thrall of the only thing that can transcend the overwhelming instinct towards self-preservation, devotion to one's team, the crew, the captain, the Pitt, the king. It's something that for all its' greatness the entirety of Band of Brothers was never able to achieve, and yet it's all right there, in Shia, who gets his voice down a full octave and takes swigs of booze so believably (as in, the pain of no chaser, rather than the blokes who drink it like ice tea) that you can smell the fumes inside that tank, adding to the pungent manly aroma of dried blood, sweat, gun powder, diesel oil, and cigarettes.


There's no voiceover in Fury, either, which also sets it above so many of its 'mother, am I a good man?' counterparts. And yhe ending credits are some of the coolest I've seen, with Steven Price's great A Silver Mt. Zion-esque soundtrack blasting over high contrast color-res images of the rest of the war, the idea that we all think that by the time we rolled over the German border the war was already won, but there was still a whole lot of pointless killing and destruction left undone. What I mean is that in Fury war is hell, and in 1945 was mostly over anyway, so the dirty jobs left for doing were somehow double heinous, a pure waste of property, architecture, and lives rather than a noble cause. The war's all over but the signatures, half the soldiers they're fighting are old men and kids, therefore the continued bloodbath has no more meaning or political importance, it's not preserving democracy anymore, it's just slaughter, which makes the relationships of the tank crew that much more important.

Ask the guys in Afghanistan and Iraq what they're fighting for and the answer's always the same: the guy next to them in the foxhole, their buddy, their brother by fire. That's the kind of thing that would sound trite in a voiceover but if a movie like Fury can show rather than tell, then maybe the senselessness itself can make sense. War is hell right up to the end and so is life when the stuff's stripped away. More so in Fury than most war films (since maybe the 1930s) if you're going to survive, you need to become Hell's chosen badass. So here we finally learn what Spielberg only hinted at in his clutching for decency, that every milquetoast has it in him to face death with both barrels blazing if it comes to that, and to let go of burdensome humanity and at the same time find a whole new Nietzschean paradigm. Patton knew it. Kubrick knew it. Pitt's "Wardaddy" knows it and director David Ayers knows it. Scuttlebutt is he had the boys play in a real life morning fight club, to toughen up their faces and get them hardened, amped but low key, weary but jacked, cool but not cold, the way we all wanted to be after Fight Club. Coincidence? No such thing. In filmmaking as in war, the comfort of phony personae is the first thing that must go and the fastest way to shuck it is in a bare knuckle brawl. Whether as Sgt. Wardaddy or Sgt. Aldo Raine, Tyler Durden or Gerry Lane, it's the Pitt persona who's never wavered from that punchy code. He is our tousled lord and king, he is our approximate Arthur, our Kalifornia king. He is Hollywood's ice cream face emperor Joe Black, and all that's standing between us and the terrible apron string hydra called mother. 


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