Natasha (1/31/09)


Dogs are children that always die young.


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And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out (1/20/09)


No. Really. Words fail me.


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He’s on his way (12/25/08)


The Spirit. [Frank Miller, 2008. From a series of comic books written by Will Eisner.]

Dauntless tough guy Gabriel “Wille Zur” Macht [The Spirit, to you], who though he avows himself one of the living dead has apparently paid heed to the proverbial advice about leaving a good-looking corpse, bounds like a gazelle over the rooftops of a Sin City landscape, silhouetted against a perpetually crepuscular sky flecked with gently falling atmospheric snow, fedora clamped unalterably in place, coattails fluttering behind him like a cape [or, yes, the wings of a dark angel], bloodred tie flapping in the wind — combating crime-with-a-capital-C in, uh, Central City, and attempting to little avail to thwart the nefarious schemes of his arch-enemy and nemesis Samuel L. Jackson [aka The Octopus], a baleful scientific mastermind whose minions include a dimwitted but invariably cheerful set of cloned henchmen and an apprentice evil genius bearing a startling resemblance to Scarlett Johansson, and whose Forbidden Experiments seem to have included the Frankensteinian accident that rendered both himself and his Manichean opposite invincible and immortal — though, at least in the case of Our Hero [“What year is it?” someone asks — “This year,” he helpfully replies] somewhat addled.

Macht does seem to be obsessed, to the extent that he is capable of focus, with the question of why his dirt nap has been interrupted, and in a steadily less interesting series of flashbacks revisits the life before his death, in which as a cute but rudderless lad of the tenements he wooed his childhood sweetheart on the front steps and dreamed of growing up to be a cop and a nobody just like his old man. Fate, alas, had other, more interesting ideas, and before you could say “What a bummer” the lovebirds’ fathers had managed to kill each other by meaningless accident, she’d left this stinking town never to be seen again, and he had muddled on into a career as a policeman and his assignation with the Angel of Death — aka Lorelei, and played fetchingly by Jaime King.

Macht is indeed irresistible to women, Death Herself included [“You ever meet a skirt you didn’t chase?” asks the sourfaced old police captain][did I forget to mention him? still you knew somehow; somehow you knew], and the distractions provided by Ms. King, Ms. Johansson, Sarah Paulson, Stana Katic, and Paz Vega may suffice to explain his erratic attention to the mysteries of the afterlife and the riddle of personal identity. — Which makes a certain sense: it is the libido, after all, which lives beyond the grave, though memory and the conscious capacity for self-examination do not. Not that this would ever be mistaken for an essay in evolutionary biology. — But at last his longlost girl returns, now [didn't they do this in Ghost Rider?] grown up into Eva Mendes; who is, in keeping with the logic of the Spirit-world, an internationally famous jewel thief, come to the metropolis to contest with Jackson possession of a couple of treasure-chests containing [no shit] the Blood of Heracles and the Golden Fleece. — Jackson wants the former to formalize his status as a demigod; Mendes wants the latter because — well — it’s so fucking cool. — After a preliminary tussle, she has what he wants and he has what she wants; complications ensue.

Alas, this doesn’t all add up to much: though we do for once find out just what the mysterious glowing McGuffin beneath the lid of the attaché case is, we don’t ever figure out exactly where we are, what decade it is [the Thirties? only with cellphones], why the Spirit’s familiar is a cat and not a crow [maybe it’s just that they’re easier to wrangle], or what imbecile decided that lines like “Shut up and bleed” and “I’m going to kill you all kinds of dead” were clever.

But whatever questions may remain unresolved, two things, at least, are clear: first, no matter whether Rodriguez can get that long-anticipated sequel out the door or not, the Sin City look is long since over; second, the art of cutting a trailer containing every single good moment in the movie it purports to represent is not dead. Of that, at least, Hollywood may yet be proud.


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Seven stories about Celeste (8/16/08)





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The road warrior (4/14/08)


Little surfer girl:






Choosing a hotel in Santa Monica:






Auditioning for Baywatch at Zuma Beach






At the Millikan library, getting a sip of water before slipping back into the stacks to research the origins of the cosmological constant:






In Monterey, out sniffing for jellyfish:






Lounging in Pacific Grove:






Pricing real estate at Carmel:






Bathing at Big Sur:






Making the acquaintance of a Large Tree:






Back in Monterey hanging with the seals:






Discovering the Meaning of Life [which, we perceive, is mainly about cruising the Coast Highway south of Carmel with the top down]:








Self-portrait of the artist in his motel room:






Tashi in Park City with Dottie, preparing to go forth and teach rich people how to ski:






Absorbing a bit of sage advice:






Sampling the local vintage:






And again, on Dottie’s porch:






Sleeping through Wyoming [the rational choice]:






And back in Boulder Creek:





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Pasadena, capital of the nineteenth century (4/6/08)


Robert Millikan, founding father of the California Institute of Technology, seen here in the company of one of his degenerate progeny — and with W.C. Fields, from whom he was, apparently, separated at birth.


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Another story you can tell against me (4/1/08)


Having, for some reason, attached an unquestioning credence to the prognostications provided by the online weather services I consulted regarding the prospects for dry roads on the morning of the 31st, I reserved a room in Vegas for Monday night and only at the last minute [prompted somewhat by the insomnia natural to my state of anticipation] decided to get up early and leave at five, just in case. A fortunate choice, since the idea of taking the direct route over I-70 turned out to be addlepated at best, and I discovered rapidly that [duh] conditions projected for Boulder, Glenwood Springs, and Grand Junction do not, to say the least, interpolate smoothly to, say, the top of Vail Pass — which I would not have reached at all if I hadn’t staggered into an auto parts store in Silverthorne after several hours en route and bought a set of cable chains which not to put too fine a point on it, saved my life. — By the time I got to Vail itself, of course, it was really just raining, and as I was sitting in a heap of slush trying to get the chains off a Paul Giamatti look-alike got out of his SUV, pointed at the Miata with a big grin, and said, “That’s a great winter car.” — “No shit,” I said.

After which I got to Grand Junction, finally, at one-thirty in the afternoon; looked at the sign that said it was just over five hundred miles to Vegas, shrugged, floored it west on the emptiest interstate I have ever seen in my life, and made it all the rest of the way by eight-thirty. — Whereupon I gained the curious distinction of being the only guy out of several thousand people on the Strip who was out walking his dog at nine o’clock on a Monday evening. Well, fuck them if they can’t take a joke.

All this to let Tashi take a bath in the Pacific.


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You will wind up looking through a pinhole, down upon your knees (2/10/08)


Well, still standing, actually, but the principle remains. — Nor was it necessary to steal her everything she sees: I gave her the old 5300 laptop, some videotape, and a box of old floppies. — Celeste in the finished costume, at any rate.


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What happens in Vegas (1/8/08)


Resident Evil: Extinction. [Russell Mulcahy, 2007. Written by Paul W.S. Anderson.]

In the aftermath of the ecological disaster triggered by the eruption of the T virus from the labyrinthine corridors of the ill-lit underground laboratory beneath “Raccoon City” [I can never get it straight whether this is supposed to be Detroit or not], the remains of the world are populated by zombie dogs, birds, rodents, cute little bunny rabbits, dung beetles, chiggers, ticks, fleas, caterpillars, flatworms, assorted echinodermata, rotifers, kudzu, telegraph vines, really gnarly zucchini, woolly mammoths, and a few dozen Real Humans, easily divided into two classes: the Good Guys, erstwhile homies of Milla Jovovich who cruise around the western deserts in a caravan of buses and SUVs looking to score their next carton of smokes/canned food cache/gallon of gas; and the Bad Guys, a few bent death-worshippers among them but mostly the members of the loathsome conspiracy of mad biochemists who precipitated the first catastrophe who continue with light hearts sunny smiles and consciences unburdened by any apprehension of responsibility to plot in their underground bunkers the engineering of the next one, which somehow is going to put everything right. [“Real men go to Tehran,” mutters Dick Cheney darkly from the holographic murk surrounding the Ernst Stavro Blofeld Memorial Conference Table.] Meanwhile in defiance of the laws of thermodynamics armies of the undead continue to shamble everywhere about the collapsed countryside, even though [a] there aren’t any live people left to eat and [b] they never really eat the people anyway, just chew on them reflexively [no zombie digestion, no zombie metabolism, no gas station restrooms of the living dead] to satisfy some kind of oral fixation. — But, who cares, whatever they are, they just exist to allow Milla to kick their asses anyway — with passing reference to Mad Max, Poltergeist, The Birds, the Ozymandius moment of recognition in Planet of the Apes [check out the ruins of Vegas buried by the shifting sands], George Romero, Hong Kong, George Romero, Hong Kong, George Romero, Hong Kong, and Alien Resurrection. Which means we can expect in the next installment Milla will be marching at the head of an army of her cloned sisters on the master command center hidden under Tokyo — with, if they want my input, a giant zombie lizard at their side. The girl is good, but even she can’t knock down buildings with her tail.


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“How do you kill mud?” (1/7/08)


X The Unknown. [Leslie Norman, 1956. Written by Jimmy Sangster.]

When a crack in the Scottish highlands abruptly opens into the pit of Hell and an evil amorphous lava creature from the earth's core oozes out — melting the faces from the skulls of passers-by, sputtering like an electrical short-circuit, and raising no slender possibility of general cataclysm — it poses a pretty algebraic riddle for Science and the Military, as represented by lean veteran atomic researcher Dean Jagger, who frames hypotheses, performs experiments, and builds rayguns, and the British Army, which sets off explosives, sprays napalm and machine-gun fire, and flies about in helicopters shouting frantic orders through static-laden walkie-talkies. — Their preliminary efforts to contain the faceless monster and its ravenous appetite for radioactive sustenance prove futile: no smidgen of radium is safe, no smear of uranium secure; and when the beast discovers the nuclear reactor conveniently situated in the neighborhood, fell consequences loom for their picturesque fellow north-Britons, among whom are numbered wailing peasant women, cute innocent children, and concerned clergy. — Sudden shrieks among the strings, the chatter of the Geiger counter, and the high-pitched whine of Jagger's ultrasonics accompany the chase as Men in Labcoats and Men in Uniform pursue the solution to this riddle; which demonstrates, conclusively, the relevance of mathematics to the national defense.


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Swamp thing (7/25/07)


Evil Breed: The Legend Of Samhain. [Christian Viel, 2003. Written by (at least) Viel and William R. Mariani; though Viel claims systematic interference from everyone associated with the production and says “I swear we were getting notes from the receptionist at Oasis who had screenwriting aspirations.”]


You may have heard this one before: a party of “college students” [no great surprise, they all look much older], consisting in equal parts of dim but muscular hunks and improbably bodacious young women, embark upon a sightseeing tour in the Irish outback which leads them with the unfailing aim of unconscious compulsion past dead trees fetid marshes and muttering choruses of superstitious natives signing themselves against the diabolical to a lonely manse improbably situated in some kind of gothic bayou; where they decide to take up temporary residence despite their misgivings — predictably numerous, since the participants in this dangerous cinematic experiment are, in the best traditions of postmodern horror, fluent in the conventions of the slasher flick; not that this serves any purpose other than to render them that much more exquisitely conscious of their predicament as one by one their eyes glaze over and they wander off alone into the deep dark woods to poke their noses into picturesque Druid ruins and barns with creaky floors amply furnished with sharp implements, and having copious quantities of sexual intercourse for which they must inevitably Be Punished; here by some kind of mutant product of incest who looks like moldy hamburger and can apparently be in several places at once [though the frame intrudes into the picture here, and it is obvious that this is not a manifestation of the supernatural but the consequence of bad editing.] — We have the opportunity to study clever cutaways to internal organs, inspect Very Big Knives, stumble through candlelit catacombs, and verify with mathematical rigor that female survival time is inversely proportional to cup size. — Moreover, we note that the famous-pornstar cameos here not only reinforce belief in the traditional equation of porn with violence against women, but, weird but undoubtedly true, under the logic of the slasher flick seem to imply that they’re being punished for having had sex in other movies.

Which is way too postmodern for this hippie. I think I’ll walk away from this one right now. — Anyway there’s this flick that’s mysteriously appeared on my hard drive that seems to be telling the story of my life as it happens, and I need to make some popcorn and make derisive comments about it while I watch it. — “Sex sex sex, that's all you two can think about — it's getting really boring.” No shit.


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It’s a jungle in there (7/14/07)


Mean Girls. [Mark Waters, 2004. Written by Tina Fey; based loosely upon Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman.]

Homeschooled honey Lindsay Lohan, like Tarzan raised in Africa, and only returned to civilization [or Evanston, Illinois, at any rate] to enter the educational system for the first time at the age of sixteen, is thrust wholly unprepared into the parlous environment of the American high school, a teeming hothouse fraught with predatory beasts, slithering constrictors, noxious insects, and flesh-eating plants; whose watering-hole, a lunchtime cafeteria, is turbulent with the contentions of alien tribes with inscrutable rituals, skins decorated in bizarre patterns, weird scarifications, strange modes of dress, bizarre rites of initiation, wild native dances, and savages prone at unpredictable intervals to fly into Dionysian frenzies in which they all run out and try to stick spears in one another. — You know the drill. — Here in keeping with the inexorable laws of motion pictures she falls immediately for a boy who doesn’t seem to know that she exists [obviously he was not studying the same camera angles I was], and, rendered witless by culture shock, succumbs to the influence of a strangely familiar triumverate of überbimbos, here known as The Plastics [Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amnda Seyfried]; engorged with the ensuing rush of popularity, she embarks upon The Hunt, explores a dark universe of Bad Diet, learns and perfects the Jingle Bell Rock, and arrives presently at the traditional Prom Night Crisis, whose resolution brings peace to a troubled land and reconciles one to another the warring tribes of the Dark Continent, and Lindsay with her Inner Nerd. — Heathers Lite, in other words, rescued from banality only by the remarkable talents of Tina Fey [who might consider tearing herself away from television to write a few more movies] — and, of course, by the fact that Ms. Lohan, her well-publicized travails notwithstanding, is very, very cute.

Though admittedly she grows less cute by the minute; indeed, one now has the feeling that when she hurls upon the guy she is trying to impress, it isn't homage to Wayne and Garth. — It is, in fact, tempting to speculate about the possibility of a new version of A Star Is Born: one in which the two protagonists eat magic Chinese fortune cookies and switch bodies, the younger descending into alcoholic disintegration, hounded by a dramatic chorus of paparazzi, while the elder climbs the ladder of success. — Best of all, though a writer's strike may loom, this thing will practically write itself.


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Popping downers (6/5/07)


The Fountain. [Darren Aronofsky, 2006.]

Death is the path to the light: a moral with which auteur-Conquistador Aronofsky clubs the viewer over the head as relentlessly as alter ego Hugh Jackman pursues the Fountain of Youth/Tree of Life/cure for brain cancer/path through the nebula into the dying star about to be reborn as a nova, down long corridors to the blinding white light at the end of the tunnel [which, the production designer admits, they did finally give up and slimed with goo, the better to make it look like a birth canal]; the meanwhile gorgeous Rachel Weisz continues to die pluckily — perhaps while writing the novel in which all this is going on, though that part isn’t clear [and of course doesn’t matter.] — Beautifully designed and executed, one must admit; but though Bo Diddly could write a song on a single chord, you can’t write much of a melody on a single note.

Quibbles: the transparent spherical spaceship though beautiful isn’t as completely original as the authors seem to think, see Edward E. Smith, The Skylark of Space, 1927 [this was, in fact, the very first interstellar spaceship to appear in fiction]; again, the general path-to-the-source through a radiant nebula though marvelous in its realization is, as the authors doubtless know, essentially an elaboration of Doré’s illustration of the conclusion to Dante’s Paradisio.

One must, however, admire the tenacity with which Aronofsky brought this project back from the dead after it had apparently flatlined in Australia in 2000 [and is the movie then a metaphor for itself? — oh, never mind.] If only Terry Gilliam could have such luck; we might see Don Quixote yet.


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The girl can’t help it (5/11/07)


Sleeping with Bad Boys. [Alice Denham, 2006.]

The Sixties. The Fifties. They came after the Forties. They began. They ended. What did they mean? What could one phenomenally stacked Southern girl know? I pushed my 38-DD headlights out and gave the mousey gray men in the green eyeshades my fourteen-hundred-watt smile. Their puny members quivered in their bourgeois boxer shorts. Their cameras went off prematurely. Outside gunshots announced the assassinations of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse. “Let us go then, you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky,” I murmured. “Like a patient etherised upon a table,” Lemmy Caution replied. His throbbing Ford Galaxie hummed down my darkened boulevards, glistening with lubricious neon. “We’re on a journey to the end of the night,” Charlie Parker agreed, dying abruptly of an overdose. Not to be outdone, Mailer drained another bottle of bourbon. “The white Negro must dare to walk the plank,” he said. He ripped the clothing from his Jewish-dumpling body, and naked rode a unicycle back and forth upon a tightrope stretched between the bestial and the divine far above the unforgiving pavement of anonymity. “I sing the body dielectric!” he exclaimed. “I advertise myself!” His were not, I perceived, the Olympian testicles of Hemingway. I ignored them, and the question they presumed. His wife took umbrage nonetheless. She stripped and attempted to smother me with the sacred melons of the writer’s spouse. Robert Evans took notes and sold the treatment to Doris Wishman for Chesty Morgan. Suddenly James Dean, William Gaddis, and E. Howard Hunt made their entrance. Gaddis had exquisite cheekbones and the biggest dick, though I quarreled with the conceptual premises of The Recognitions. I disrobed and they cast lots for my garments. I realized suddenly that I had to write, no matter what the world might think. “Let’s fuck and then you can cook and do my laundry,” said the one in the funny hat. “Quiet,” I said. “I’m working on my ‘a’s.”

The Sixties. The Fifties. James Dean hurtled off the road in his Porsche Spyder. This never would have happened if he hadn’t dumped me for that notalent Italian bitch. Bettie Page was shameless. Was there anything that slut wouldn’t do? Katherine Anne Porter had great boobs, even though she was seventy-six. The Mamie van Doren of her day. No, Mamie Van Doren was the Mamie Van Doren of her day. Never mind that, there was war in Vietnam. Astronauts circled the earth every ninety minutes. Literary giants circled my pudenda every ninety seconds. Brando, that enigma. I drenched myself with Mazola and, nipples ruby-red as laser beams, posed wrestling a giant octopus. Sucker marks darkened my aureolae for moons thereafter. Bettie Page would have done a threesome with a squid and a sperm whale.

The Fifties. The Sixties. The members of the camera clubs drooled upon their bibs, and left their lenscaps on. I did paperback covers. I did movie posters. I did comic books. I was Aelita, Queen of Mars. I was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. I was Azusa-Pacific, Queen of the Khyber Rifles. I was all of the Girl Gun Runners of Saigon, except the one in the upper left. I was Secret Agent X-15 of the OSS, though Saul Bellow agreed with me that X-27 would have been better. Number ruled the cosmos, said Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Eros ruled the human imagination, said Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud. Folly ruled the hearts of men, said Renaissance humanist Erasmus. Failed promise and the search for lost time ruled the five and dime, said Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean. I posed for Nugget Gent Bent Swank Rank Dank Crank Stud Schtup Schwing Boing/Boing and El Kabong. “My presence in this narrative is a statistical improbability,” said mathematician Patrick Suppes. “My presence in this narrative is a symptom of the emergence of a higher consciousness,” said LSD advocate Timothy Leary. “My presence in this narrative is a logical necessity,” said article-omitter Alice Denham.

James Baldwin. Slight. Sensitive. Gay. Black. Not white. Not gray. Strasberg. The Method. The Lack Thereof. Philip Roth was insatiable. I worked on my ‘g’s.

Pictures of me began to appear on postcards everywhere.

Pictures of me appeared on billboards in the heartland. The Bible Belt revolted and seceded from the Union. Having developed a taste for armed insurrection, they seceded from themselves and came back. Nobody noticed.

Pictures of me were projected onto the Moon by NASA rocket dweebs who had no girlfriends. Fascinated, we smoked many more cigarettes and drank much more whiskey.

The East Village. Could that be William Randolph Hearst? He seemed fragile somehow, weighed down by age and the burden of his millions. I feared that if I dropped his name I might break it.

Hemingway. Yes. The bullfights. And then he shot himself.

Money came. But then it went. Historians debate the significance of this. Sex clubs opened. The universe expanded. Pictures of me radiated outward into the cosmos, borne upon the cosmic winds. With magnifying glass and infrared lantern I dusted my diaphragm for fingerprints. The butler did it. I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth. You know, that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth. “I do not find/The Hanged Man,” she said. “Fear death by childbirth.”

Jack Kennedy nailed everyone but me, though Michel Foucault argues it would have been the best thirty seconds of his life. “Still, one must imagine Sisyphus is happy,” said Albert Camus as he expired in an automobile accident. Simone de Beauvoir invented the Second Sex. Science labored to discover a Third and a Fourth. Undaunted, I continued to investigate the First.

I was not a kept woman. I could not be a kept woman. I would never be a kept woman. I would not, could not keep. My shelf life was inadequate. I accessorized poorly, and shopped not for ball and chain. Collars made my neck break out in a rash. I read Dostoevsky and listened to Bartok. They would have loved my tits.

New York in the Fifties. Paris in the Twenties. The solstices. The pregnant pauses. Which was Geist, which Zeit? When I ask not, I know; when I ask, I know not. If my clothes fell off in the forest when there was no one there to watch, would the photographs be sold to the usual venues? to Cavalcade, Escapade, Stag, Bachelor, Dude, Duke, Ace, Modern, Ancient, and Medieval Photography, True Action, Equally Valid Opposite and Equal Reaction, The Journal of Molecular Biology, The Paris Review, Male, Men, Nude on the Moon, Soldier of Fortune, Planet Stories, True Detective, the Philosophical Review?

Alexander Grothendieck. I never heard of him, nor did I attend his legendary Seminarie de Geometrie Algebrique, where shutters would have clicked as men refused to take me seriously. But he would have brought me to the casting couch in his office at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, and declared his right to do mathematics in my every topos. His chalk, I am confident, would not have gone soft upon the blackboard of a woman who dared to be his equal.

We smoked, We drank. We bulged. We invented bulging. Our jeans were so tight I discovered my clit. “That’s it over there,” said Gore Vidal. “It dots the ‘i’ in ‘Levi-Strauss’.” “No,” said Ad Reinhardt, “it’s the thing at the end of the row of buttons.” He painted it black as a joke. As always the critics didn’t get it.

We drank to excess. Men were allowed to drink more than women, because they did not suffer penis envy, with the possible exception of James Earl Jones. The Forties. The Thirties. The Jazz Age. The Age of Bronze. What were they thinking? We picketed Anthony Scalia’s office for abortion rights. Too bad we didn’t fucking bomb it. The Sixties. The Age of Reason.

Richard Alpert. The war, the drugs, the age of liberation. “You are all a lost generation,” said the woman of great wisdom. “Well, maybe just a really stoned generation.” Faulkner. Yes. But what about this kid Truman Capote? Historians weigh the relative significance of their dicks. Uncharacteristically bashful, nude sunbather Henry Miller covers himself with his hat.

Joeseph Heller. He wasn’t famous yet. Then he was. “Why haven’t we ever balled on the top of a Ferris wheel?” he asked me mournfully. “You’re married, Joe,” I said. “And think of the scheduling difficulties.” Nodding hello to the Lion Tamer, the Horse Whisperer, the Dishwasher from the Wailing Wang, Hurricane Carter, playing upon his blue guitar, and other members of my three o'clock. “Oh well,” he said. “what the hell.” He danced a jig and left the room walking on his hands. Outside, more gunshots. Nixon was attempting a military coup. Meanwhile sexual intercourse had recently been invented and it showed much promise. I finished the first half of the alphabet and called Hugh Hefner on a whim and said I’d flash him my high beams if he’d publish it. “Sure baby,” he said, using a screwdriver to adjust the expression of his face. “Look what I have under my robe. It rhymes with ‘guerilla insurrection’.” Sure enough in Bolivia Che Guevara was striving to raise the consciousness of the peasants. Where would it end? Hefner was dispassionate and metronomic and methodical and substantial and boring and possessed of an accountant’s soul though since a publisher potentially a means to an end and had a great stereo. He adjusted his staying power with a set of sockets and a pipewrench. I watched myself search for adjectives in the mirrored ceiling of his seven-acre bedroom. My father had a heart attack. My mother hated me. My father had a heart attack. My mother hated me. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” said my darling whitehaired Dad as his arteries cemented shut. My mother hated me. “Wny don’t you get a job, and marry a wealthy newspaper magnate,” she asked. “I can’t,” I said. “I have to write. It is my destiny, my kismet, my raison d’etre.” She shrieked her incomprehension. I worked on my ‘q’s. The long loops indicated genius. J.D. Salinger published Franny and Zooey. The short loops suggested a predilection for the reverse cowgirl position. My mother was a psychotic bitch. Mailer wondered why we were in Vietnam. My apartment was two hundred thirty-six and a quarter square feet. Catch-22 sounded better than Catch-18. Though I would have preferred two to the catchier fifth power. Rod McKuen published Song of Myself. No, that was someone else. Rod McKuen was not Whitman. Whitman was not F. Scott Fitzgerald or E. Power Biggs. I worked on my ‘t’s and then on my ‘a’s again. A background in ballet helped. Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend answered the door in the nude and put us up for the night. Lyndon Johnson was disgusting. “You are an adventuress,” said the man of the hour when he beheld my spectacular rack. I strove to remember what man, which hour.

The Fifties. The Sixties. And then more decades. The end.


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Sympathy for the Devil (3/28/07)


Sympathy For The Devil. [Jean-Luc Godard, 1968.]

Rough sledding even for the most dedicated Godard fan: a series of cartoonlike Marxist parables, interleaved with footage of the Rolling Stones in the studio recording — well, you guessed it. The song, naturally, is repeated so many times that one might become heartily sick of it, were there not so much else here to induce nausea: mindnumbing revolutionary tirades, read aloud in that inimitable speech-at-the-Party-Congress style that made it imperative for two generations of fellow-travelers to develop the ability to fix waxen expressions of attention upon their countenances while sleeping in their seats with their eyes wide open; the ritual spraypainting of moronic slogans about the urban landscape; black guys in berets machinegunning white women in a junkyard [admittedly still funny, but only because rap video has rendered the militant pose even more ludicrous]; and a sort of spy-novel voiceover which purports to describe the exploits of an assortment of characters — Nixon, Franco, Princess Grace — plucked at random from the headlines of the day. — Godard does add a bit of porno-novel narration which serves to spice things up considerably, but inevitably you feel you ought to inform him that this is just the kind of shit that would have had him sent down into the countryside for re-education [or worse.] — Meanwhile the Stones, sex and drugs momentarily forgotten, studiously ignore the cameras and — sober, chainsmoking, bent over their guitars — labor unceasingly to perfect their opus.

The moral, obviously, is Darwinian: you look at this and see instantly that the Stones look like mature professionals; the revolutionaries, like witless amateurs. And this tells you everything you need to know about why rock and roll survived, and The Revolution did not.


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Photographs of my girlfriend naked (3/25/07)


... The Lecoq thing sounds like the Shaolin monastery for theater; I picture wise old kung fu monks whacking you alongside the head every time you fuck up. But anywhere you can learn to juggle can’t be all bad ...


... I do, actually, know how to talk to dogs; though I’m not up to speed on the latest theories on the evolution of language. Obviously a lot can be conveyed without grammar, vocabulary, etc., making it a philosophical puzzle why exactly all those things are necessary; though in some sense they must be. — There was a lot of speculation in the early [pre-talkie] days of film about whether it could form the basis of a universal language; the great theoretician in this area was Eisenstein [famous author/director of The Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, etc.], who had a very elaborate conception of editing [or montage — the French word here has a specific connotation different from the English, at least to the film geek] as the combination of images a la Chinese [or at least Eisenstein’s idea of Chinese] to assemble complex ideas from simple ones without reference to words; the idea being that there is some pre-existing “language of images” that everyone already understands that spoken/written languages implicitly refer to. Or something like this. — The contemporary descendant of this line of thought would probably have something to do with mirror neurons, but, the urge to bullshit notwithstanding, I won’t make it up off the top of my head at the moment. Maybe tomorrow ...


... when Walter Benjamin conceived the Arcades project, he submitted a request for support for research to the Institute for Social Research, relocated [as of 1938] from Frankfurt to New York, and sent them three chapters about Baudelaire as a preface. Adorno wrote back to turn him down, saying “Your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell.” ...


... why I was interested in alchemy is a long weird story, [mainly] dating from my [semi] Pure Hippie period, during which I pissed away many happy hours smoking the Killer Weed and playing with a Tarot deck. There’s an elaborate symbolic apparatus associated with this, related to alchemy and the basis for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. [Which is about a Fool. — on a Hill, come to think of it, meaning that Paul McCartney probably had the whole thing figured out before I ever got to it.] Jung made the most elaborate investigation of the symbolic content of alchemy of anyone I know. — The best book now about the occult sciences [though it’s completely tongue in cheek] is Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum; which reminds me of Wittgenstein’s famous remark that a philosophical work could be written entirely in the form of jokes ...


... in re hyperactivity, I’m hardly immune; having today, for instance, composed a lengthy vehement letter to the New York Times in my head while walking Tashi down the creek, answered a question about movie trivia for the benefit of a mathematics professor and sent him a couple of puzzles I was thinking about, written a couple of computer programs that don’t quite work and need to be fixed, read a bit in an anthology volume about film studies, and done what little I can to get you into a graduate program in theater. And I still haven’t gotten around to what I was supposed to be doing, which was to send an irate letter to a lawyer about some Serious Business I simply don’t want to think about. If only I could harness my powers for good ...


... I’m not exactly flogging myself for being a prick. It’s just the familiar principle that, when you haven’t any other butt for your jokes, use yourself. Anyway I’m a hundred times harder on myself when I’m writing. It’s like ballet: you do it; you look at yourself in the mirror; you swear at yourself; you do it again. If you’re lucky, eventually you won’t suck. Or at least not suck so much ...


... As for the wandering-scholar problem, this is ongoing. A short attention span, I figure, is the price you pay for originality; the key is to maintain a kind of balance between periods of letting your mind wander and periods of focussed concentration. Interruptions are counterproductive, obviously, and I count all forms of Serious Business as interruptions. Thus my annoyance with the legal hassle ...


... Meanwhile, it stopped snowing finally, the sun came out, the heat turned off, and I’m sure before I know it it will be ninety-five degrees again. Against my usual habits, I composed a haiku to commemorate winter:

Shit shit snow shit. Shit
Shit snow. Snow shit snow shit. Snow
Shit snow. Snow snow. Shit.


Tashi says hello.


____________


But I’ll go you one better if you’ve got the nerve (2/16/07)


The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift. [Justin Lin, 2006.]

My loathing for Paul Walker having overcome my love of movies about fast cars and beautiful women, I missed the intervening installment, but return here with light heart and renewed spring in my step to the perusal of the ongoing saga of illegal street racers and their absurdly bodacious campfollowers. — Nor am I disappointed:

Slow-talking but in all other respects preternaturally swift Alabama lad Lucas Black gets tossed out of high school after an exciting albeit predictably destructive afterschool race in which his trailertrash Monte Carlo smokes the upscale Viper of the star of the football team — striking a blow in the war between the classes, of course, and making a suitable impression upon the feckless jock’s shameless-coquette cheerleader girlfriend, but, alas, trashing several acres of residential construction, both cars, and his front teeth in the process; with the result that he finds it politic abruptly to relocate to another continent.

After a brief interlude, accordingly, we find our hero on the other side of the Pacific, a bornagain army brat living with his estranged military father in the fabulous megalopolis Tokyo — capital of the mysterious East, neonlit like a pachinko parlor 24/7, and, apparently, the site of the longest-running hiphop video of all time — and home, therefore, to a numberless Asiatic horde of microskirted hotties in tall glossy black leather boots, who alternate Shaking It to Nipponese boogie/rap with bending over impossibly shiny exotic cars the colors of turbocharged jelly beans, aiming either their luscious thongberibboned derrieres or the hooters that always seem to be on the verge of popping out of their pathetically inadequate halters with unerring precision at the [understandably hormoneaddled] camera — and, also, of a new and daring breed of street racers all versed in the occult science of drifting, a technique of precision highspeed power sliding [spinning out under control] which allows the initiate to negotiate mountain roads, city streets, parking structures, etc., with considerably enhanced speed and efficiency — and, more to the point, looks incredibly cool.

Herewith, naturally, the scenario assumes the familiar form of the martial arts movie: our obnoxiously overconfident though unquestionably talented hero suffers a preliminary humiliation at the hands of the wicked Drift King; is taken under the tutelage of a mentor figure who schools him unrelentingly in the black art of driving in a continuous state of skid; pursues an unattainable female who can be his only if he conquers his nemesis; learns a few words of Japanese and discovers he can stomach sushi if he smothers it with ketchup; gets bounced off the walls by an enormously fat Sumowrestler dude covered with indecent tattoos; loses his mentor in a phenomenally exciting but ultimately fatal street race through downtown Tokyo [actually LA tricked up to look like Tokyo, but why quibble]; makes the obligatory descent into the Underworld — here the dens of the Yakuza, ruled by the great Sonny Chiba, who is as always himself worth the price of admission; and attains the culminating triumph in a final suicide run several vertical miles down an oxcart track descending Mount Everest — for which, in keeping with a slightly different but no less important set of conventions, after hotrodding around in flashy Japanese iron for most of the picture he saddles up in the inevitable iconic Shelby Mustang [Hattori Hanzo steel] to defend the honor of American racing and the venerable tradition of the muscle car against the Yellow Peril. — So watch your ass, Driftkönig: you won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve.

The characters, in short, are cardboard stereotypes; the plot is a mechanical contrivance; the backgrounds are mostly CGI; the grimaces of the actors as they knot their jaws and grip their wheels and pretend they’re doing something extraordinary and dangerous are bogus, and filmed in the studio. — But the cars are beautiful [or were, at least: they must have wrecked about a hundred of them], the stunt drivers prodigiously gifted, and the burning rubber real enough that you can smell it. And that’s enough for me.

And, indeed, this third chapter goes far enough toward resurrecting the spirit of the original that Vin Diesel himself [in a gorgeously restored Buick] consents to a cameo at the end; bestowing his blessing upon the proceedings, and speaking the implicit moral that this might be a good place to stop. — Speed is not all there is to racing, after all; you also have to know enough to quit while you’re ahead.


____________


Further adventures of Tom Cruise (2/14/07)


Mission Impossible III.I. [J.J. Abrams, 2006.]

Cruise is blown to goo. Two hundred years later scientists clone him from a smear on the bottom of somebody’s shoe and revive him. A monstrous homunculus in the form of L. Ron Hubbard rips itself out of his chest and runs amuck, with a zillion teeth and acid for blood. Paramount is overrun. Trapped after getting their asses kicked, a small desperate band of critics regroup. Terrence Rafferty says “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” They do so. The studio is reduced to a smoking crater. Cruise is blown to atoms. The end. The end. The end. The end.


____________


Be true to your school (2/8/07)


Jet Li’s Fearless. [Ronny Yu, 2006.]

When some loud braggart tries to put me down
And says his wushu’s great
I say Now wait a minute
What’s the matter buddy, ain’t you seen my kung fu?
It’s Number One in the state.

So be true to your clan now
Just like you would your girl or guy
Trust in your wushu now
And let your bare feet fly
Be true to kung fu.

I got my Shaolin habit like the dope monks wear
It won’t get stuck in my crack
When I get chi a-pumping
I got my head shaved in half and a pigtail that runs
Clear to the small of my back.

So be true to your clan now
Just like you would your girl or guy
Trust in your wushu now
And let your bare feet fly
Be true to kung fu.

On Friday we’ll be jacked up for the death-waiver match
We’re gonna kick some ass
With mantis eagle claw fist
And afterwards be rolling with some bitches and hos
We’re gonna burn some gas

So be true to your clan now
Just like you would your girl or guy
Trust in your wushu now
And let your bare feet fly
Be true to kung fu.


____________


Should you decide to accept it? (1/14/07)


Mission Impossible III. [J.J. Abrams, 2006.]

On the eve of his marriage to absurdly cute but absolutely clueless medical professional [Scarlett Johansson, Lindsay Lohan, Jennifer Garner, Sofia Vergara, Kate Bosworth, Katie Holmes, no it’s] Michelle Monaghan, erstwhile Secret Agent Extraordinaire turned IMF instructor Tom Cruise is dragged out of retirement by curiously affectless bureaucratic spook Billy Crudup to mount an emergency rescue of his onetime prize pupil, talented but green novice spook Keri Russell; who, her attention having lapsed at some critical juncture during an attempt to penetrate the operation of terrorist facilitator and Evil Genius Philip Seymour Hoffman, now languishes in durance vile in an abandoned factory in Berlin, surrounded by barbed wire, broken glass, moonscape, minefields, a midsized army of mercenaries, maneating IRS agents, and a moat full of crocodiles.

Pro forma initial protests notwithstanding, our nominal hero saddles up, rounds up Posse 3.0 [Ving Rhames, Maggie Q., Jonathan Rhys Davies] while strapping on his bulletproof jock, and rockets to the rescue, charging recklessly through a hail of bullets into the enemy citadel, dropping the hapless Evil Mercs like tenpins, and making an exit with typical panache by diving out a window three stories above the pavement girl in arm while the building explodes behind him.

A helicopter chase ensues! through a German windfarm! blades turning slowly like the fatal flapping arms of Laura Palmer’s ceiling fan, while Cruise with missiles bursting all around him attempts emergency brain surgery with Swiss Army Knife and electroshock paddles to remove a bomb the diabolical Hoffman, that incarnation of Doctor Evil, planted in Russell’s skull. Just as Cruise is about to apply the paddles — her head explodes!!! blowing the engine out of the helicopter!!! and they crash ignominiously and flying helicopter and windmill blades hack the luckless Cruise to sushi.

No, just kidding. Cruise escapes and returns with the carcass to headquarters to get his ass chewed by Maximum Spook Laurence Fishburne [I told you he’d be next], necessitating the improvisation of another, somewhat more ingenious, caper, in which the charismatic lodestar of our cinematic attentions and his merry men penetrate the formidable security of the Vatican and kidnap Hoffman from a diplomatic reception at which, evil mastermind that he is, he is acquiring information vital to his ongoing pursuit of the McGuffin, a mysterious object known as The Rabbit’s Foot; about which we never learn much save that it is far from lucky and probably some kind of monstrous biological weapon. [See the previous episode.]

Alas, as they are making their escape their getaway Lamborghini explodes! no, that was part of the plan — no, an asteroid steered out of distant orbit by evil Jesuit astronomers recruited by Opus Dei strikes! evaporating the IMF team and leaving nothing but a smoking crater behind! over which bent priests in cassocks decorated with strange insignia sprinkle holy water and speak a brief benediction thanking the God of Fascist Catholicism for eliminating this loathsome insect from the silver screen.

No, just fucking with you. Cruise and his posse make their getaway with Hoffman in tow and fly back to the United States, where while ferrying the prisoner across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge — enemy aircraft strike! riddling the convoy with machinegun and missile fire, and annihilating the IMF team while they free Hoffman. Cruise escapes momentarily and is running toward a van to get a missile launcher to bring down the strafing jets when — giant robots appear! descending from the heavens and marching in military formation down the middle of the span, trampling the fleeing Cruise and stomping him into a thin layer of pink goo as they all take turns one by one stepping on his carcass. — After Risky Business, after The Color of Money, after Top Gun and Minority Report, to end so ignominiously... it brings a tear to your eye and a fart to your shorts ... .

No, just making it up again. Cruise and his posse escape, but the evil Hoffman is carried off by his henchmen, kidnapping Monaghan while they’re at it. As he gnashes those famous big white teeth, Cruise is captured by his own side and, suspected to be a terrorist himself, tossed into an airplane and flown to a prison in eastern Europe where he is waterboarded, treated with electroshock, stripped naked and forced to pose for humiliating Polaroids in which hillbilly bimbos leer at him while pointing at his shrivelled weenie, and implanted with microchips which whisper to him day and night of the hopelesness of the human condition should mankind not heed the healing word of L. Ron Hubbard. Reprogrammed, Cruise is returned to his native land, where he makes his way to Hollywood and insinuates himself into the highest councils of the motion picture industry as a mole, a Manchurian Candidate planted to turn Hollywood to the service of an obscure religious cult. In a series of increasingly bizarre public appearances he establishes himself as a pain in the collective ass and a menace to rationality and the heritage of the Enlightenment. Finally in a crescendo of aberrant behavior he embarks upon a widely publicized quest to find a leading lady for his next action movie, in which after making weirdly inappropriate proposals to two or three dozen of the most alluring and talented starlets in Hollywood he succeeds instead in alienating all of them by his hamhanded attempts to convert them to his bizarre pseudoreligion. Marginalized and viewed by everyone as unbalanced and dangerous, he compromises his position as the biggest action star in the world and loses his production deal at a major studio, necessitating some fancy footwork to maintain his bankability as a major star.

No, this is too ridiculous; obviously I’m making all that up too. No, Cruise is momentarily incarcerated but effortlessly outwits his superiors and, erstwhile sweetheart of Delta Phi though he may himself have been, escapes with prejudice from the headquarters of the secret spook fraternity, jumping a flight to Shanghai to rescue his swooning bride from the ever-more-nefarious Hoffman. Swinging on vines from tree to tree through the dense foliage and gigantic gnarled trunks of the Chinese rain forest, he summons his faithful elephants and leads a charge into the compound of Terrorist International [traded publicly on the Hong Kong and London exchanges after a wildly successful IPO orchestrated by bent financiers with French accents], where he corners Hoffman and faces him down in a triple Chinese standoff. At the last moment Hoffman rips his mask off and reveals himself to be — Philip Rivers! quarterback of the San Diego Chargers, and someone who has had a hardon for Cruise since All The Right Moves. And, ripping off their masks in turn, his henchmen are revealed to be — Philips H. Screw driver! Richard Philips Feynman! Philip of Macedon! Philip Morris! Philip K. Dick! Phillipo, Duke of Bohemia! Philerupwithregular! Philip Glass! Mister Philipflop! and Philip Roth! who brandish machineguns and riddle the carcass of the hapless Cruise with depleted uranium rounds from Gatling guns firing ten thousand rounds a minute!! Surely this is the end of the disgusting little parasite.

No, this would be too easy. No, the momentarily daunted Cruise backs away slowly into an apparent culdesac, where he seems to be cornered — but then abruptly makes his escape! basejumping out the window ninetynine stories to the pavement. As he plummets past the shining glass of this gleaming symbol of the Chinese rise to hegemony, grinning the famous madcap grin of the cinematic daredevil audiences the world over know and love — his progress is arrested at the thirty-third story! by a giant strip of Human Flypaper set out to guard against this very contingency by — Billy Crudup!! whose traitorous intentions are now at last revealed. Dismissing Rivers and his posse to an athletic date with destiny on the other side of the globe, Crudup straps Cruise into a gigantic restraining device modeled upon the Frankenstein laboratory tables and prepares to jolt the hapless action hero with twenty thousand volts of electronic frontier justice. “Cables ... fifteen dollars,” says Crudup with evident unctuous satisfaction. “Large alligator clips guaranteed to be exceptionally painful when clamped onto the subject’s genitalia ... ten dollars ... storage battery and handcranked generator ... one hundred fifty dollars .... the look on the face of the meathead action star when he realizes you’re about to barbeque his gonads with electric current ... priceless.” Throwing a switch, he toasts Cruise and puts an end to the career of the obnoxious little twerp for good and all.

Hahaha, just making that part up. No, Cruise’s posse picks this convenient moment to crash through the windows and rescue him. Cruise guns down Crudup and rescues Monaghan, and as they are walking through the park and he explains that he doesn’t really work for the highway department — she cackles and says, “I know, you moron.” Ripping her mask off, she is revealed to be — Scarlett Johansson! leader of a conspiracy of Hollywood starlets who have banded together to put an end to the slimy little maggot. Materializing all around him in the fog of the London slums, they are revealed to be — well, everybody we rattled off in the first paragraph, and a few supporting bimbettes from the Hawaiian Tropics bikini contest besides. — “Your doom is upon you!” cackles Johansson, showing that her dramatic range extends easily to Deranged Villainess — “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” Surrounding the terrified symbol of the patriarchy with a slowly closing circle as they chant “One of us ... one of us ...” the avenging-angelic starlets whip out their carving knives and a few yards of dental floss and, in a brief but horrendously gory surgical procedure, splice the business end of a plastic Jenna Jameson doll into the void left by the removal of the genitalia of the screaming Cruise!! who expires of mortification as he realizes the impact his new status as transgendered action hero will have upon his earning potential.

No, just kidding again. The digital alarm clock goes off as it hits six o’clock and we realize that it’s Groundhog Day, and that Cruise, a vain and offensively overbearing weatherman, has been doomed by the true villain of the piece Punxsutawney Phil [not a mere groundhog, of course, but the projection into this dimension of higherdimensional beings] to relive the same day over and over again while he is repeatedly stabbed, shot, run over by trains, hit by cars, thrown over the edge of a cliff, tossed into a quarry hardened into concrete and poured into the foundations of Giants stadium, struck by meteors, and clubbed to a pulp and then flattened by roadgraders into a microscopic layer of protoplasm over which the USC marching band parades while playing “Louie-Louie”. Staggering as this realization overwhelms him, Cruise gasps out his disbelief that this can represent the truth of any motion picture in which he might appear. “The truth?!” Jack Nicholson screams at him. “You can’t handle the truth!” as his Marines haul Cruise away to the dungeons of Gitmo to be assraped by cave trolls.

No, I’m still fucking with you. Cruise staggers from his last assignation with the evil Hoffman clutching his skull, in which bombs have been implanted. Between clenched teeth he instructs Monaghan how to revive him with acupuncture needles after stopping his heart with electric shock. Grounding himself in a metal pan of saline solution, he takes the paddles. The lights dim! He slumps to the floor!!

Practiced now at rapid discorporation, Cruise flatlines easily and flashes back to a past life in the middle ages when he was one of a merry band of vampire hunters led, somewhat improbably, by Michael Madsen, riding on horseback through greenwood and vale in chainmail boots and leather jerkins sporting Prince Valiant haircuts waving swords in the air stacking shishkabob strings of the undead upon their spears. Kristanna Loken is just about to rip her shirt off and compromise the PG-13 rating the authors have somehow bribed the MPAA into giving them despite this unrelenting blood and slaughter, when — he awakes! revived upon the operating table by Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts, and now looking just like Kiefer Sutherland, unshaven and with long gray locks. Summoned personally by the president, he must embark upon a desperate mission to save the country from a paralyzing series of terrorist attacks. No one is who he seems, wheels spin crazily within wheels, an impossibly convoluted plot reveals a descending chain of conspiracies nested one within the other like Chinese boxes, the Constitution is imperiled by the schemes of powermad rightwing fanatics, an inexhaustible army of Arab lunatics everywhere threaten to blow themselves to smithereens for a pack of cigarettes and the promise of Paradise, every babe is put in peril, each cliffhanger is topped by its successor — and our hero possesses a certain gravitas we find lacking elsewhere; an existential sense of responsibility. We sense that he is weighed down by the burden of his actions; that he feels that he must do his duty, but knows that in so doing he embraces his doom.

And, you know what, this looks a lot better. I think maybe I’ll take some time off and watch Kiefer instead. And forget all about what’s-his-name.


____________


Roach motel on planet hell (1/4/07)


Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. [Phil Tippett, 2004. Written by Ed Neumeier.]

The heroic endeavors of gorgeously obnoxious Hitler Youth Caspar Van Dien, Denise Richards, and Doogie Howser having not, apparently, sufficed to conclude the interstellar war between Bugs and Men, as this second installment commences we discover yet another coeducational company of infantry stranded on yet another desolate and unforgiving desert planet surrounded by yet another ravenous horde of giant cockroaches; with, manifestly, no hope of evading annihilation — at least until somebody fortuitously recalls the proximity of an abandoned fortification to which the beleaguered party can [why not say it] bug out. Here after an undignified but not wholly unsuccessful retreat they discover amid the ruins erstwhile hero become Severe Attitude Problem Richard Burgi languishing in the brig — left behind, it seems, as an appetizer for the bugs, after an unusually acute attack of insubordination caused him to terminate his commanding officer with extreme [albeit, we gather from the albatrossian string of dogtags Burgi wears around his neck to remind himself of his duty to the dead, wholly justified] prejudice. — The war, it seems, has run a fastforward from Normandy to Vietnam; the freshfaced recruits to the Terrestrial Wehrmacht whose exploits we followed in the first installment have metamorphosed into bonetired dogfaced veterans; and fragging superiors who sacrifice the lives of their troops to advance their empty dreams of martial glory has become a moral imperative.

His spotty resume notwithstanding, Nurgi exudes a certain unshaven [though doubtless odiferous] masculine charm, which makes him, unquestionably, the Nick Fury of the piece [though it’s actually the hardbitten chick sergeant who chomps on cigars]; and the first firefight predictably provides an excuse to haul him out of his cell and put him in charge of the defense of the Alamo — which doesn’t look entirely hopeless, until a party of stragglers stumble in out of the perpetual dusk [“It’s been six months since I’ve seen the sun,” someone has already remarked] with strangely disturbing smiles on their faces, tell a curiously unconvincing story to explain their miraculous escape from the alldevouring insect legions, and set to work at once seducing the garrison — the better, it transpires, to infest them with bugs! the latest strategem of the cunning insect enemy, who have, it seems, studied those unending Alien reruns on the galactic cable channels and come up with the idea of laying eggs in their mammalian victims which hatch into an arachnid form that takes control of its host after eating its brain [I guess they’ve seen Dark City too] — a plan that will allow them to infiltrate human space and devour their enemy [messily, as the first few experiments demonstrate] from within; and prove once and for all that love, faith, hope, individuality, and internalized skeletal structure are evolutionary dead ends, and that the future belongs to the faceless Horde.

Not coincidentally this is also a plan that allows the story, which — lacking the money for real spacewar, and lacking the talent, apparently, to cut together the shots of the grunts firing their weapons aimlessly into the air with the CGI of the [curiously lethargic] bugs waving their forelegs around in any way that might create the impression that there was actually a fight going on — was going nowhere as an action movie, to reinvent itself as a claustrophobic greenlit tale of horror in which Dudes Besieged by Monsters die one by one in ways that are spectacularly disgusting [not to give too much away, still, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a severed head tossed into a microwave before; and designated Femme Fatale Kelly Carlson provides a startling new interpretation of the concept of sucking face], in a dimly atmospheric steelwalled setting that recalls a doomed submarine.

Convention then demands, alas, that the heroics of Burgi must be unavailing, and only the designated Ripley, apprentice psychic Colleen Porch [pregnant, of course: Alien movies are about motherhood] can survive.

So: everyone dies [and no one pleasantly]; Burgi, in life a candidate for the gallows, is posthumously made over as a recruiting poster by the Federation’s propaganda merchants; and the moral no one need speak aloud is not simply that war is everlasting hell and that those who direct its conduct are evil narcissistic fiends, but that the monsters within that gnaw their way out to devour our brains and take control of our actions are the lust for martial glory and the secret longing to abandon the burden of individuality and submit to the manipulation of authoritarian puppetmasters — to become as the bugs.

The authors [who until they pulled their genre shift were looking like hapless bozos] thus neatly disinherit themselves of the weaknesses of the first installment, which somehow managed to incorporate all the bad parts of the Heinlein original [not his weakest but certainly his most dangerous novel, an unapologetic paean to fascist militarism — and for just that reason, weird but true, frequently parodied: cf. e.g., Harry Harrison’s Bill, The Galactic Hero] while unaccountably leaving out all the good parts, viz. the quasirobotic suits of armor the troopers were supposed to fly around in, and trying to patch the holes in the story with mindless reliance on CGI — and simultaneously provide themselves with ample grossout opportunity, for which they show much more talent and enthusiasm. — The result is just as silly as the first one was, but the characters here are far more engaging and the sentiment infinitely less offensive; making this, strange though it must seem, a more entertaining and probably a better movie.


____________


True stories (11/7/06)


Borat! : Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. [Larry Charles, 2006. Written by Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer, Todd Phillips. Performed by Sacha Baron Cohen.]

The roving goodwill ambassador from the land of outdoor plumbing, horsedrawn automobiles [120 miles a week and you can eat the old engine when you get a new one], and that famed tourist attraction the annual Running of the Jews, while visiting New York on a journalistic embassy is initiated into the mysteries of the television remote by a helpful hotel employee, absorbs his first episode of Baywatch [though surely this strains credulity: Baywatch has been syndicated in 140 countries and seen by over a billion people], gets a good look at Pamela Anderson in her red water panties, discovers that his life’s ambition has now become to make romance explosion on her stomach, and embarks on a pilgrimage to Malibu through the very heart of American darkness, driving an ice cream truck and accompanied by his stalwart producer Azamat — and, naturally, the invisible camera crew who record his many observations of American life and manners.

Of course nothing can be more educational than a good documentary, and from this one we learn: that Kazakhstan is the greatest of countries, because all others are ruled by girlies, and have not such good potassium; that there trophies are handed out to the best prostitutes [viz. Borat’s sister]; that the female of the Jewish species is [like Burroughs’ Martians] oviparous; that though in the best of all possible worlds one would want to bring all of the Marx Brothers back from the dead, one can make do with Chico and Harpo combined in the same person; that it makes a certain sense to wash your face in the toilet; that you can jack off in public in front of a department store window lingerie display and not immediately get arrested [though, see below]; that Pamela Anderson has the asshole of a sevenyearold; that women have brains smaller than squirrels; that the GM salesman really does know where the pussy magnet is located on the Hummer, but he isn’t going to tell you; that when this is a Christian nation again, they’ll hang all the queers; that you can tell if a guy is a terrorist by his mustache; that a rodeo crowd in Virginia seems to have been perfectly willing to believe that the American objectives in the campaign in Mesopotamia are that George Bush should drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq, and that not so much as a lizard should survive to inhabit that stinking desert for the next thousand years; that this same crowd nonetheless failed to see the humor in Borat’s singing a parody of the national anthem, and spawned a mob that tried to lynch him after the show; that a garage sale is the best place to look for gypsy’s tears; that the best gun to defend yourself against a Jew is probably the nine millimeter; that a tortoise is not a dog; that you can’t coach speed, but you can coach etiquette [at any rate in Alabama they try]; that scientific insight is not advanced by changing every variable at once, and, therefore, it is difficult to tell whether the dinner party of tightassed Southern white morons is most scandalized by the fact that Borat’s uninvited companion is black, that she’s a prostitute, or just that she’s so fat; that humor is nonetheless advanced whatever the reason; that though it is socially acceptable to show photographs of your relatives to break the ice with strangers, these should probably not include pictures of your son’s dick, no matter what pride you may feel that he grew three centimeters in the last year; that incidentally this doesn’t seem to compromise the R rating; that bags of pubic hair are not negotiable currency outside central Asia; that it is impolite to borrow someone else’s stash of Baywatch memorabilia to jack off, at least without permission; that if the real estate bubble had not already burst, the spectacle of Borat and Azamat running into a mortgage brokers’ convention stark naked to wrestle one another before the podium probably would have stuck a pin in it; that though there is nothing funnier than a naked fat hairy guy’s disgusting ass being ground into your face, it may prove difficult to get the odor of his testes out of your mustache; that there was someone left on the face of the earth who hadn’t seen Pam blow Tommy on a rented yacht; that Pentacostal Baptists are beyond parody; that this is indeed another fine mess you’ve got me into; that the way to win a woman’s heart is to throw a bag over her head and carry her off by main force; that, well, no, maybe not; that there’s no place like home; that the old Monty Python gag about running the credits in a foreign language is still funny; that the bag of fecal matter Borat carried back to the table from the bathroom at the dinner party in Birmingham was provided by someone else, who is duly noted in the credits; that you can still pack a theater, even for the Tuesday matinee, if the movie is good enough; and that Michael Moore cannot possibly top this, and might want to hang it up.

The particular genius of this, of course, the marvel at which your jaw cannot fail to drop, is that Cohen and his collaborators did not so much write a script and then travel to shoot scenes on location — though there is a [musically accentuated] dramatic arc with a familiar shape, it is at best schematic — but rather formed the conception around a previously-established character, and then acted it out; i.e. this is not a fictional narrative in the usual sense, but the documentary record of a piece of performance art, a lengthy and obviously risky improvisation. — People have talked a lot about guerilla filmmaking, I mean to say, but this is without question the first time that I have really seen it. — So it is not entirely surprising to discover: that warrants were issued for the arrest of Sacha Baron Cohen; that his producer spent a night in jail in New York and his assistant director literally chewed up and swallowed the sheet listing the names of the crew before the eyes of the police to prevent them from arresting anyone else; that Cohen was on other occasions interrogated not only by the police but by the Secret Service; that a dozen police cruisers once surrounded the ice cream truck, but Cohen outwitted them and escaped; and that the FBI trailed the production across the country — because, of course, they were “suspected of being terrorists”. As, in due course, we shall all be.

“America have most beautiful womens in world,” says Borat. “It also capital for democracy and porno. I like! I so excite to do my movie!” — Me too. — And fuck David Brooks if he doesn’t get the joke.


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A-whaling for to go (10/11/06)


Drawing Restraint 9. [Matthew Barney, 2005.]

The celebrated artist Herr Barney and his even more celebrated paramour Björk are ferried separately to a Japanese whaler, subjected to elaborate ritual preparations for a wedding ceremony at the hands of a retinue of solemnfaced attendants, and then, partly as an expression of solidarity with our oppressed cetacean brothers but mainly in the spirit of good oldfashioned Surrealist fun, consummate their union by hacking one another to pieces with whaling knives.

Which left me, of course, whistling “I've got you under my skin”, and reflecting once again that surrealism is largely the visual expression of dumb puns [cf. the locus classicus, Bunuel/Dali on “cut”]; and noting that, first, Greenaway was much funnier on cannibalism, but, mainly, second, that the underwater camera angle on the resulting gobs of blood and giblets floating in the water is deliberately meant to suggest an equation of the slaughter with a lava lamp.

And, in fact, the whole thing reads like a series of such equations, some ironic, some not: cannibalism with intercourse; the organization of industrial workers with a form of dance; commercial whaling with the natural way of life of the hunter [thus the Japanese with Eskimos]; lemons with tits [and bathing with cooking]; minimalism with music; shaving with the pruning of encumbrance; the weirdest hairdos since the Leningrad Cowboys with shells; the conches strapped to the lovers’ backs with guitars; the ritual tea [served in shells] with seaweed; an enormous gnarly coprolitic lump of ambergris with a gigantic dork; whale with ship [a toy ship is harpooned, two ships pass the giant ambergris dork from one stern to the other in a sort of parody of rear entry]; ambergris with pearls [vomited up by the antitechnological girl pearldivers]; sea with sky; ice with assorted varieties of gelatinous fatty gloppy mess; said glop subjected to a kind of oversized cookiecutter with wedding cake; artistic talent with a talent for self-promotion; and [at 140 funfilled minutes] length with depth.

Which meant that I was myself attempting to derive the equation of artistic rapture with dozing off until I discovered the babe sitting in the row in front of me — who was sporting a pretty funny hairdo herself, come to think of it, some sort of topknot with pencils running through it like skewers — and forgot all about Björk. — Suffice it that the chambered nautilus continues its alltime record stay at number one on the charts as metaphor for the labyrinth; and that, since Barney’s cinematography and editing are relatively colorless and uninspired, we must expect his ideas to bear the artistic burden here. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them to drag this picture through two-and-a-half hours of Art Movie Slow Motion. — As a five minute music video, this might have been a work of genius. But as things stand, somebody needs to explain to this dude that brevity is the soul of wit.


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Babes in the woods (10/5/06)


The Witches Of Breastwick. [Jim Wynorski, 2005.]

With many, many apologies to John Updike:

Unhinged by recurring dreams of three improbably topheavy Druid temptresses who rip off what little clothing they possess during a firelit pagan ritual and then abruptly terminate an incipient orgy by rendering him a [mortally tumescent] human sacrifice, hapless meathead Matt Dalpiaz tosses not-exactly-flatchested-either wife Monique Parent into the rumble seat and motors off into the California mountains in search of the truth concealed behind the veil of appearance — or, failing that, the mother of all melon patches; and, after a brief pause to boink his spouse among the redwoods, makes a great show of surprise when his car breaks down in front of an isolated mountain cabin — where, knocking on the door to seek assistance, the disoriented wayfarers discover purported writers Julie K. Smith, Stormy Daniels, and Glori-Anne Gilbert energetically researching a historical novel [a roman a treble clef] in the Jacuzzi.

The trio are, as one must expect, the embodied images of our hero’s dream girls; complications predictably ensue, most of them involving sudden loss of clothing and feigned frantic humping on any available surface, and Wynorski methodically enumerates the combinations of five people [six, counting Woman of Mystery Who Bears a Warning Taimie Hannum] taken two and three at a time — which means, given the inevitable bias toward heterosexual activity, that Dalpiaz here must handle about twenty gallons worth of mammary glands in the line of duty [a rough gig, but, after all, somebody had to possess the skill codes appropriate to the job; or then again, maybe he just bribed the producers] and repeatedly screw his face up in feigned coital concentration while the bimbos take turns bouncing up and down upon his lap — sneaking those side looks at the camera that seem to have become the standard means of putting postmodern quotation marks around fake fucks.

All this is supposed to have something to do with an immortal Wiccan spirit with enormous hooters [Antonia Dorian — whose principal notice in the trailing credits is, nonetheless, as “director’s mistress” — Wynorski’s way of flaunting the perks of the B-movie auteur] who returns repeatedly from the grave to wreak revenge upon the descendants of her ancient enemies by fucking them to death.

At least I think it was that. I confess to being more than a little disoriented myself. — And no wonder. — “Were these in your dreams?” asks Julie as she pulls her shirt off. — Sheesh. — Well, they are now.


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Death by water (8/28/06)


Scoop. [Woody Allen, 2006.]

The simplest theory of comedy is that it originates in the collision of fantasy with reality. Which makes every comedian at bottom an empiricist, and renders it curiously paradoxical that Woody Allen has so frequently managed to come off like a closet spiritualist. This has usually seemed less a matter of metaphysical principle than a dramatist’s gimmick [more or less as the gods in Homer look to the modern eye like a kind of shorthand]: Shakespeare might, e.g., have pissed away two or three expository acts letting Hamlet gradually puzzle out the facts of his father’s murder and the necessity of revenge, but chose instead the more economical device of confronting the prince of Denmark with the dead king’s ghost; similarly though one might affect Freudian prolixity about the maternal origins of [male] Jewish sexual neuroses, it is more succinct [and much funnier] to ruin your protagonist’s rejuvenated sex life anew by letting him throw open the bedroom window to discover his departed mother’s visage hanging inexplicably in the skies over Manhattan like Halley’s comet or the Goodyear blimp. — And thus, also, we have the literal appeal to Deus ex Machina in Mighty Aphrodite, the turn-of-the-century spiritualistic mechanisms in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the aliens showing up to speak the conclusion in Stardust Memories [the only gag that actually works in that wretched piece of shit], the guy walking out of the movie screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the frequent encounters not simply with the recently deceased but with Death Personified [a character for whom Woody has an obvious fascination] in Love and Death.

— And the strange but ingenious and amusing device with which this narrative commences: ace British journalist Ian McShane, a veteran of Nixon’s enemies’ list, a man who once bribed his way out of a beheading at the hands of the Taliban, the life of every party-after-the-war, and the nemesis for a generation of anyone who ever tried to hide an uncomfortable truth, has just finished drinking himself into an early grave; and is taking that last boat ride across the River Styx through night and fog to The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns, when, striking up a conversation with one of his companions, a charming young lady — too young, surely, to be here — who until her untimely demise had been personal secretary to Hugh Jackman, handsome scion of the British nobility generally assumed to be destined for political greatness, he discovers she’s convinced Jackman poisoned her when she was about to unmask him as the notorious Tarot Card serial killer; meaning that only here, on the ferryboat to Hades, has McShane been tipped off to the biggest story of his career: the identity of the 21st-century Jack the Ripper.

Obviously he simply cannot let this matter rest, even if he has to come back from the grave to pursue it; accordingly, he jumps ship [whether the silent hooded sickle-bearing helmsman notices this or not isn’t clear], and makes a ghostly apparition during the London show of lowrent stage magician Woody Allen [whose act is predictably lame but who boasts an admirably fluent lowlife line of patter], dropping the bombshell on audience volunteer and aspiring Woodstein Scarlett Johansson — a pushy and fast-talking but thus far rather poorly focussed wannabe who, it has already been established, is more than willing to fuck her way to the top, but is having difficulty figuring out exactly whose zipper conceals the springboard to success.

The revelation serves to unite Woody and Scarlett as an ersatz father-daughter pair, and makes them constantly squabbling partners in an investigation which owes less to the cinema of suspense than to screwball comedy [Rosalind Russell is indeed mentioned, and there’s no doubt but what Scarlett could be that good], during which they take the shortordercook’s tour of the life of the upper classes — passing on the foxhunt [though a younger Woody surely would have jumped on this one], but taking in private clubs, fancy dinner parties, country estates whose gardens contain sculpted shrubberies so absurdly elaborate that one must conclude these are people so rich that they keep Edward Scissorhands on retainer, and fathomless mansions with galleries full of ancestral portraits, endless hallways, bottomless stairwells, innumerable servants, and many many Evelyn Waugh characters with Oxbridge accents drinking cocktails and chatting one another up about affairs of moment; and providing Woody with the opportunity to drop some of his best lines in years [starstruck erstwhile dental hygienist Johansson on meeting Jackman: “You have wonderful enamel” — Woody to Scarlett on the principles of investigative journalism: “You worm your way in like a roach” — Woody on religion: “I was born into the Hebrew persuasion, but as I got older I converted to narcissism” (he’ll shoot his next feature in Boulder) — Woody to Scarlett when she admits she’s contemplating marriage to Jackman: “You come from an Orthodox family. Would they accept a serial killer?” — Woody on why he can’t live in London: “It’s not just the language problem” — Woody on his paranoia: “Not everything in this world is sinister. Just practically everything.” — Scarlett to Woody on his obsessive pursuit of Jackman: “What are you putting in your Metamucil?” — Woody pretending to be a journalist investigating the latest victim of the serial killer is asked what paper he works for, and says the Washington Post; then claims to have been “the short one” in All The President’s Men — Woody to the passengers on the Ship of the Dead: “Don’t think of being dead as a handicap.”]

Inevitably Scarlett hoses the irresistible Jackman — who turns out, naturally, to be both guilty and innocent [not necessarily in that order] — and the secret though concealed in a basement is not [another Hitchcock reference, see Notorious] in the winecellar per se, but in an adjacent locked climate-controlled storage room where the future Lord keeps his collection of Stradivarii.

At the last McShane’s shade can rest in peace: the wicked are punished, the ambitious are rewarded. — Woody’s character gets killed off almost as an afterthought, but it doesn’t spoil the triumph of his heroine — because, the buddy relationship notwithstanding, he’s the expendable comedy sidekick here, and he knows it. — Though he has for a long time been the best vehicle for the delivery of his own material, Mr. Allen is a writer first and an actor second. And for the first time he seems comfortable with this realization. — So this is Scarlett’s movie, not Woody’s. Which is as it should be. — The director is the magician, all right. But the magician’s best trick, as Woody seems finally to realize, is gradually to make himself disappear.


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The Jung and the restless (8/23/06)


Steppenwolf. [Fred Haines, 1974.]

A relatively straighforward attempt at a cinematic translation of the Hesse novel — in which the protagonist, an overserious and [therefore] chronically depressed intellectual in his late forties, is introduced to the Weimar equivalents of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and some flashy shit Hesse picked up in analysis with Jung about the fundamental multiplicity of the personality — flawed by very imperfect dubbing, not especially imaginative cinematography, and unusually inept attempts at hallucinatory surrealism which [having been shot in video, which was then probably supposed to look avant garde] have dated very badly and now look unforgivably cheesy. [It’s an interesting question whether modern CGI would make this better or worse, but, thank you, I really don’t care to see anyone try.] — But with, admittedly, a perfect cast — the great Max von Sydow [the right man at the right age] as Harry Haller, the exquisite Dominique Sanda as Hermine, the glittering Pierre Clementi as Pablo, and the suitably voluptuous Carla Romanelli as Maria — some amusing animation a la Terry Gilliam to illustrate the Treatise on the Steppenwolf, and at least one ingenious bit of pantomime between Harry and Maria to act out their argument about what he’s going to do after he comes home and finds her waiting in his bed.

Above and beyond the obvious protest that no great novel has ever made a decent movie [and no great movie has ever been made from any other than a bad novel], the particular problem that I have with this is, of course, that I know the story by heart [having read it two or three dozen times] — and, more to the point, it is, literally, the story of my life, page for fucking page, note for fucking note — and it is, accordingly, impossible for any cinematic rendition of it to satisfy me.

But then I have to pause and ask myself what this reminds me of; and it is, of course, Harry’s own reaction [not badly rendered by von Sydow here] to what he considers an offensively bourgeois portrait of Goethe which decorates the parlor of an erstwhile colleague who has sold out to the forces of reaction — a kind of tantrum, a sudden explosion of repressed feeling on the part of a fundamentally impatient man who has grown unspeakably tired of disguising his contempt for, his despair at, the folly of the fallen human world around him — an overreaction for which Hermine quite rightly takes him to task, and which motivates, in part, the lecture he receives from Mozart, representative of the artistic Immortals, on the necessity of being able to separate signal from noise: of being able to hear the music, say, of Handel, through the static and distortion of a radio broadcast; of being able to sense the divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hewn though we inevitably must find them. And to learn to laugh then at human folly; beginning with the folly that you find within yourself. — So, sure enough, the movie isn’t all that good. But if you listen closely, you can hear Hesse in it. And after all, that doesn’t suck.


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Get Kraken (7/21/06)


Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. [Gore Verbinski, 2006.]

Pursuant to a nefarious scheme hatched by the wicked corporate suits of the East India Company to, uh, put an end to all fantasy, or conquer the eighteenth-century world, or something, Evil Lord Tom Hollander makes his appearance on the picturesque Caribbean isle where we thought naively we had left our heroes Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley to live happily ever after — as indeed they might have, had the grosses not proved so spectacular that the inexorable laws of motion picture economics demanded Jerry Bruckheimer engineer a sequel — produces warrants for fabricated charges of aiding and abetting greasyhaired dudes with threecornered hats and gold teeth, and tosses our starcrossed lovers into the clink; the better to blackmail Bloom into tracking down Johnny Depp aka Captain Jack Sparrow — the only man, apparently, who can deliver into the greedy hands of the Home Office the eponymous Dead Man’s Chest; which, we discover presently, has been tucked away on a suitably well-hidden white-beached isle lost in the now-familiar endless romantic expanses of tropical sun and pellucid water [patrolled regularly by bloodthirsty cutthroats, painted aborigines in war canoes, and tentacled monstrosities], and contains the still-beating heart of Davy Jones himself [Bill Nighy, nighon unrecognizable in squidface][didn’t anybody here see Oldboy? this isn’t funny any more] — captain of the legendary Flying Dutchman, master of yet another motley crew of CGI-augmented dead men, and owner of the rights, apparently, to Johnny’s soul, thanks to an improvident deal struck thirteen years earlier whose due date has now arrived.

Thus impressed into service once again, our heroes dutifully buckle up their swash, and, after a couple of hours of fairly entertaining adventures during which Johnny is decorated with the dreaded Black Spot, elevated to a god among cannibals, and gets in touch with his inner Good Guy, Orlando finds his father [Stellan Skarsgard; seaweed is a good look for him] aboard the ship of the dead, Keira ships out disguised as a boy [how Shakespearean], Naomie Harris does a most excellent turn as a Voodoo fortuneteller [cf. The Matrix], and the world record for Most CGI Teeth And Tentacles [previously held by the giant octopus in Deep Rising] is smashed by John Knoll’s merry men at Industrial Light & Magic, all concerned find their way to the ultimate [well: penultimate] swordfight on the, uh, Treasure Island. — Another sequel having been preordained, this can settle nothing: the scenario ends on an ellipsis; and everyone is now, has been, or will shortly be dead [though of course this is never terminal.] But the needle of the franchise, like that of Johnny’s magic compass, still points unerringly to the Heart’s Desire: sun, surf, sand, shekels, swords, sorcery, and lots and lots of suckers. And, though I’m not entirely sure how the writers plan on getting us out of the predicament in which they’ve left us, I sense, at a remove, the unacknowledged influence of the Firesign Theater; and expect that, after a few rousing choruses of “Yo ho ho and a bottle of hemp”, they’ll figure out how to haul this ragged bark to port. — Meanwhile, get me the number of their dealer: the Flying Dutchman left me cold, but I loved that swordfight on the rolling waterwheel; Keaton himself could have done no better.


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Coming of age in Samoa (6/27/06)


The Wild Women Of Wongo. [James L. Wolcott, 1959. Written by Cedric Rutherford.]

Have I at last come across a movie so bad that even I can’t sit through it? Don’t be ridiculous:

In an eternally sunkissed Eden somewhere in the boundless paradise of the South Seas, a tribe of buxom babes who wear skins but mysteriously sport Fifties makeup and hairdos have all by some cosmic coincidence simultaneously arrived at the age of consent when a mysterious Stranger clad in black leather who speaks in Latin hexameters rides on his Harley out of the East. Doffing his signature aviator shades, he stares soulfully into the eyes of the beautiful [and absurdly zaftig] Princess Aringarosa and sets her clitoris abuzz and her very ovaries alight by quoting racy passages from Gregory Corso, winning her heart and lubricating the nether passages of her reproductive plumbing upon the spot; though not without inciting the envy of the brutish Prince Offal, a vile pig without breeding or manners to whom against her will she has been betrothed since infancy. In a dramatic trial by dragrace the two rivals rocket down a torchlit straightaway to battle for her hand, both hurtling over a sheer cliff which looms over the ocean when neither will chicken out. A long moment of suspense intervenes before a single figure is seen to clamber back over the edge. Though for the space of a heartbeat he seems to be the other, it is the Stranger. The Princess runs to his side and embraces him, grinding her hips into his, as he stares moodily over the cliff into the crashing surf below. “He was a swine,” he says. “But he died like a Mandingo warrior.” A Viking funeral is staged for the deceased. Huge funeral pyres are lit upon the beaches as the flaming casket is towed out to sea by an escort of war canoes and released into the equatorial currents to wander in world-girdling Ocean until the gods shall will its release into the allencompassing outer void. The stranger recites an elegy in an ancient tongue which is well received if not particularly well understood. The natives sing plaintive surfer ballads, hurl the ritual Frisbees of Farewell, and roast weenies over open driftwood fires. A roar is heard in the distance. A vast armada of Harleys arrives via the Polynesian interstate. “My posse,” says the Stranger to the Princess. “I only hope there are enough of your sorority sisters to go around.” The ensuing orgy proves that there are, but just barely. As the tropical sun rises over the detritus of the funeral wake, a new generation of Wild Women has been engendered, and the genetic heritage of the Wongonians has been perpetuated.


— No, that couldn’t have been it. — No, it must have been this:


In a picturesque ruin reminiscent of Angkor Wat, crawling with strange iridescent beetles and giant serpents, hidden in the depths of the Polynesian jungle and referred to by the natives with superstitious awe as the Temple of the Dragon God, a priestess bearing a startling resemblance to Susan Sontag, albeit with bigger hooters, holds her regular Thursday office hours for the benefit of students and other members of the Temple faculty who wish to consult her on the great philosophical issues of the day. Questions are put to her about the plurality of worlds, the topological structure of spacetime, and the nature of the phase transition to consciousness in the higher vertebrates and the possibility of inducing it in inhabitants of the state of Texas, all of which she answers with preternatural fluency and a supple brilliance which dazzles her auditors. But finally a simple village witchdoctor schooled in postmodern voodoo comes forward and asks for the “answer” to the “great ‘question’” of “‘life, “the universe, ‘and “everything”’”’”.

“That’s it!” she exclaims, as gongs resound, neon lightnings flash and crackle, and a rubber duck descends from the ceiling with a hundred-dollar bill in its mouth while she lights a cigar and adorns her upper lip with a greasepaint mustache. “You’ve asked the Secret Question!”

She presses a lever hidden beneath the mantel of the strange pagan fireplace that takes up the west wall of her office. A bookcase slides away, revealing a dim passageway leading into the heart of the sacred mountain, down which she leads the party by the light of flickering torches held aloft above their wondering faces as they regard with astonishment the strange hieroglyphic inscriptions and marvelous cave paintings which adorn the walls, into a hidden chamber deep within the earth, where a gigantic stone idol fashioned in the image of the head of John Malkovich is suspended in the air by alien antigravity plates [according to tradition, she explains, hubcaps stolen from the chariots of the gods] and speaks lengthy prophesies interrupted frequently by belches of incense. The stories change every fifteen minutes, but include the tale of an Irish student educated by the Jesuits who wanders the streets of Dublin lecturing his companions about the application of Aquinas to the aesthetic question, the adventures of a merry band of Greek mariners caught up in a waterspout and carried off to the Moon, and an existentialistic interpretation of the Oklahoma State game originally authored by Johnny Cocktail after a quart of Southern Comfort and too close a reading of L’être et le néant.

Energized, no doubt, by too deep a draft of the strangely intoxicating incense, the witch-doctor makes bold to ask the graven image his question. The idol scarce hesitates in its answer: “It is not,” it declares, “forty-two.” The witch-doctor protests that this is not a legitimate reply. — “Why not?” asks the idol. — “The question requires a positive response,” says the witchdoctor. “For, after all, there are no negative facts.” — “What?” asks the idol, in tones of incredulity. “If I assert, for example, that there is no elephant in this underground chamber, you would maintain that this is not a statement of fact?” — “No,” says the witchdoctor, “because — ” — “Bah!” exclaims the idol, moving about the cavern and looking behind the graven images which decorate the walls and beneath the stone tables which are spaced about the floor, “is there an elephant here? No! Is there an elephant here? No! Is there an elephant here? No!” Continuing to zoom about the space with increasing speed and ever more erratic navigation, it turns over rock after rock and triumphantly displays the absence of an elephant in every instance. “Let me know when you’re willing to concede the point,” it says to the witchdoctor. — “Never,” says the witchdoctor, “for the discussion is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding.” — “What?!” exclaims the idol. “You maintain, then, that somewhere in the room, beneath this stone pillar, for instance — ” — plucking it out by the roots as it speaks — “an elephant must exist?” — “No, of course not,” protests the witchdoctor. “For — ” —

But here the discussion is at an end. For the pillar in question was the central support of the roof of the cavern. Which collapses, completely and instantaneously. And the rest is silence.


— No, that wasn’t it. — No, I think it was this:


An artist at the height of his fame wearies of his Parisian life of wine, women, and blue-noted song, sublets his garret, disperses his bling, cashes in his municipal bonds, and packs off for the South Seas, where he determines he shall live upon the beach and commence an ambitious project, a gigantic installation titled Gidget Goes Gaussian, fundamentally, to be sure, a fairly straightforward study of polymorphous perversity, but on so vast a scale that the work will be unquestionably be visible even at interstellar distances, and will thus serve to depict the varieties of human sexuality in graphic detail for the benefit of geek astronomers on other planets who spend their alien nights studying the Earth from afar because they can’t get laid. Shipwrecked as he nears his destination, he is carried by wayward currents for long days and endless nights upon a floating trunk containing his possessions beneath the riddling subequatorial skies, playing demented solos on the ukulele, reading subliminal messages in the patterns of the stars, and stumbles ashore finally on the lost island of Goona, gaunt, unshaven, sunburned, more than a trifle daffy, and looking for some reason just like Frankie Avalon and talking like he’s been badly lipsynched. Here he meets a tribal council of fat ugly stupid dudes who never shave and a lot of women hanging out in grass huts who are all so stacked that he has to wonder how they manage to balance on fewer than three feet. Strolling off into the interior to clear his head, he comes across Princess Whatsername indulging herself in a nude underwater swim in a sheltered grotto, relieves her of the attentions of an alligator which has taken an inappropriate interest in her delectable flesh, and proposes marriage, or at least a commingling of assets, forthwith. Negotiations are proceeding apace between the attorneys of the interested parties when suddenly a giant ape emerges from the sea and seizes the bride-to-be and lumbers off into the jungle! never to be seen again. — No! it swims back out to sea and wrestles the Kraken! — No! it leaps onto the nose of an ascending rocket ship carrying the genetic heritage of the planet into outer space and saves the world from destruction! — No! it morphs into a handsome young officer with a cruel smile and a dueling-scar who ruins her and she hurls herself into the path of an oncoming train! — No! after a carchase over the Golden Gate Bridge, a crash, an explosion, a vertiginous fall arrested by a fortunate last-second grab, and an awful moment in which she hangs by her fingernails above a yawning abyss while listening to a couple of mismatched buddy detectives crack wise about her predicament, she swings away on dangling cables into the Pacific sunset! yodeling arias from Verdi and vowing never to watch the late show again.


And that must have been the end. — I think. — In any case, for now this seems like more than enough.


____________


Doing the Vatican rag (6/17/06)


Angels & Demons. [Dan Brown, 2000.]


A gruesome murder. This could only be the work of — the Illuminati!

Boston to Geneva in 64 minutes.

My God, he thought, I’m in the land of Oz.

The war between science and religion.

Vittoria Vetra?

Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.

And then he fucked her. — No, not him. The other guy.

“Recently she disproved one of Einstein’s fundamental theories by using atomically synchronized cameras to observe a school of tunafish.”

...an experiment to prove Genesis...

...Portuguese men-o’-war trapping antimatter between their tentacles...

Fooling the retinal scan with a severed eyeball. [Gaah.]

...a quarter of a gram ...

Giving the eyeball a decent burial.

His intellect seemed to be the product of an icy divorce from his inner spirit.

“My father could argue two sides of a Möbius strip.”

The pyramid on the back of the dollar bill. Again.

A Mickey Mouse watch.

The cradle of modern civilization. And at its core...a ticking bomb.

Il conclave.

The white smoke is for loading and unloading of passengers only. No parking.

Langdon had often wondered if there was a huge crate of stone penises somewhere.

Held hostage by an armed man in pajamas.

Churchill had once told reporters that if English agents had infiltrated the Nazis to the degree the Illuminati had the English Parliament, the war would have been over in one month.

Guy de Maupassant had once written that the painting looked like something painted for a carnival wrestling booth by an ignorant coal heaver.

Her almond-scented hair tossed lightly in the breeze.

A trumpet fish floating vertically in seagrass.

Hail Mary, Mother of God... [Sic.]

Waiting for a bunch of old farts to elect their next chief old fart.

The toughest librarian on earth.

Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.

503?

Substantiate or suffocate.

The media is the right arm of anarchy.

Langdon recalled that much of Galileo’s legal trouble had begun when he described planetary motion as elliptical. [?!!]

The path of light is laid, the sacred text.

A symmetrical meter based on the sacred Illuminati numbers of 5 and 2!

“You know Madonna’s last name?”

The air inside the Pantheon was cool and damp, heavy with history.

Christianity as a product of memetic recombination.

Woodrow Wilson gave three radio broadcasts in 1921...

“There is a power so organized, so subtle, so complete, so pervasive, that none had better speak above their breath when they speak of it.”

Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.

Television interviews with Woodrow Wilson were uploaded to YouTube and he posted denunciations of the Illuminati on his blog.

Air, Langdon thought. The second element of science. See the Periodic Table for confirmation. Ask Mendeleyev.

I just took a leak in the Pope’s toilet.

An iciness raked her flesh.

The scene before them was so unexpected, so bizarre, that Langdon had to close his eyes and reopen them before his mind could take it all in.

...the horror to which Vittoria would soon awake...

The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations.

She was not as beautiful as the women he bought, and yet she had an animal strength that excited him.

The evening breeze slowly cooled his ardor.

‘Cross Rome the mystic elements unfold!

Glick had acted as any dedicated reporter would — without honor.

Although CERN had lots of accelerators, their logo showed only two. Two is the Illuminati number of duality. Although most accelerators had only one injection tube, the logo showed five. Five is the number of the Illuminati pentagram. Then had come the coup — the most brilliant point of all.

As the soul becomes enlightened...it takes the beautiful shape of the dove.

Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.

Put the girl in peril.

She would service him again. The ultimate submission. Then, at the moment of his own climax, he would slit her throat.

Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.

...on the floor Langdon saw something that almost stopped his heart...

“Houdini knew yoga.”

Gott wird ihn beschützen.

...what promoter P.T. Barnum said...

“This is terrible for antimatter!”

The villain expires, with the last words: “G-give this to the m-media... .”

Time was running out.

[The runway was too short for the giant ship!]

... unveiled in its diabolical genius....

...the science of entanglement physics...

Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.

As the light roared out in all directions, the unimaginable occurred.

Americans falling from the sky?

“It’s him!” the nurse exclaimed ... “And I recognize his tweed coat!”

...aliens harvesting his testicles...

God is the energy that flows through the synapses of our nervous system and the chambers of our hearts!

The Pope fathered a child.

Time seemed to have lost all meaning within the four walls of the chapel.

“You’ve never been to bed with a yoga master, have you?”

Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.



The subject [of Ossian] having been introduced by Dr. Fordyce, Dr. Blair, relying on the internal evidence of their antiquity, asked Dr. Johnson whether he thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems? Johnson replied, “Yes, Sir, many men, many women, and many children.”


____________


Great helium (6/14/06)


The Lost Zeppelin. [Edward Sloman, 1929.]

On the eve of an expedition by dirigible to the South pole, intrepid commander Conway Tearle discovers his supposedly-devoted wife Virginia Valli sucking face with illmannered lowborn cad Ricardo Cortez at the absurdly elaborate dinner party the local contingent of the Four Hundred are throwing to send them off, shattering his equipoise [and a large metaphorical vase into which he reels in consternation and dismay], and creating a love triangle whose apex remains in Washington while the two other vertices journey across ocean through storm stress and parlous stock footage to the very ends of the earth; where, after a brief victory lap around the buttocks of the world, they turn about and actually make a few hundred miles back to the north before their airship’s engines falter, its surfaces ice up, and [“falling...falling...falling...” taps out the radio operator in poignant Morse] it augers into the unforgiving Antarctic landscape. — Meanwhile, of course, Very Important People In Uniform monitor their transmissions back at the home office, and the guiltstricken wife sits wringing her hands in her drawing room listening to bulletins detailing their progress toward catastrophe on a radio the size of a grand piano while her servants supply her with copious quantities of tea and crumpets.

Presently the survivors stagger out of the wreckage and sally forth to fall one by one into conveniently-situated crevasses, until none remain but the captain [stoic to the last], his rival [rapidly going to pieces], and [the bitch that he can trust] the captain’s faithful dog. When a scout plane happens across the lost adventurers and can carry only one of them back, well, you can guess who decides to sacrifice himself nobly for the betterment of mankind. At least temporarily.

There’s something irresistibly charming about all this retro tech: the beautiful big open Twenties cars, the enormous radios with their huge knobs and glowing vacuum tubes, the airship itself, obviously inspired by the famous Graf Zeppelin, which circumnavigated the globe [on William Randolph Hearst’s nickel] by air — around the world in 21 days! — only a few months before this picture made its debut; the furlined flight suits, the goggled leather flying helmets. But the relentlessly overmannered dialogue — typical of that dismal interval between the introduction of sound and the discovery [thankfully not long-delayed] of Jimmy Cagney, and what Americans really talked like — is a constant reminder that membership in the upper classes was, in this era, coded by bogus British accents and the ponderous carriage and labored mannerisms colonial wannabes thought would make them seem like Really Old Money; and serves to leave, in this case, the summary impression that a big shiny phallic gasbag piloted by a big shiny phallic gasbag has sailed off to a frozen Pole to shrivel and expire. — Not the precis or the epitaph that I, at least, would want to leave behind me.


____________


A beautiful mindfuck (6/10/06)


The Da Vinci Code. [Ron Howard, 2006. Written by Akiva Goldsman, from a novel by Dan Brown.]

When the curator of the Louvre is found dead on the floor of his own museum — naked, adorned with a pentagram, and with his limbs fanned out like Leonardo’s famous drawing of the Vitruvian man and a cryptic message scrawled in blood beside him — stalwart representative of CSI: Paris Jean Reno calls on Harvard professor and renowned Symbologist [whoa, does that sound heavy] Robert Langdon/Tom Hanks, either to weigh in with an opinion or [in view of his prior acquaintance with the deceased] to take the fall, it isn’t clear which.

As Hanks stares aghast at this grisly spectacle, at any rate, major-babe “police cryptologist” [no shit?] and granddaughter of the deceased Audrey Tautou bursts in upon the scene, bonds with our hero forthwith [Forrest Gump meets Amelie: here is a marriage made in heaven], conveys to him sotto voce the outlines of the rapidly-burgeoning plot against him, and, after the first of their several escapes — a rather perfunctory carchase notwithstanding [how can you stage a carchase in Paris without driving down those stairs?] — accompanies him in a strangely unhurried tour of the art-historical highlights of Paris and London — strangely unhurried, since our heroes are harried the while by a network of conflicting conspiracies which seems at first so vast, so all-encompassing, that everyone on the continent of Europe must be working for one side or the other if not both at once — though it reduces, presently, to a contest between the Dark Lords of the Sith, aka the Catholic order Opus Dei, here represented by Darth Bishop Alfred Molina [master] and Darth Albino-Assassin Paul Bettany [pupil], and the Jedi Knights Templar aka Priory of Sion, a secret society which seems to be handling legal affairs for the estate of Christ. [Or something.] To this last predictably Everybody Who Was Anybody has belonged, notably Da Vinci himself, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, [Athanasius Kircher, Benjamin Franklin, Christian Huyghens, Dante Alighieri, E. Pluribus Unum, F. Scott Fitzgerald, G. Gordon Liddy, H. Alexis Zarkov, I.I. Rabi, Joe Bob Briggs, Knute Rockne, Lindsay Lohan, Mary Shelley, Norman Bates, Otto von Bismarck, Sir Philip Sidney (and other heroes of that kidney), Quentin Tarantino, Roger Rabbit, Salman Rushdie, Tex Avery, Ultra Violet, Vladimir Putin, Willy Wonka, Xander Cage, Young Frankenstein, Zeppo Marx], and [most recently] the art historian whose illuminated stiff we stumbled over in the opening scene. [I think this is supposed to explain why he was murdered, but don’t ask me how.]

Hanks and Tautou doggedly burrow their way to the bottom of a stack of puzzles — most purportedly devised by Leonardo himself and involving the interpretations of the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper and the passwords [mysteriously not in Latin or Italian but in English] that unlock the Da Vinci version of the Enigma machine — to the treasure buried beneath them all, which turns out to be the nature and location of the Holy Grail: one of those Secrets Entrusted Only To A Few which cannot be revealed without threatening the foundations of Christianity, the viability of the international financial system, etc., etc. — indeed [given Dan Brown’s rather shaky grasp of scientific principle] probably the stability of the elementary particle vacuum and the continued existence of the universe.

All this might be more impressive did it not so strongly remind us of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum — albeit without the intellectual playfulness and postmodern irony that rendered that work so memorable, and minus most of the occult encyclopedia Eco managed to incorporate into his plot, viz. the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, the immortal Comte de Saint-Germain, the Illuminati [though Brown seems to have polished them off in the last novel] the Freemasons [though he’s supposed to get to them in the next], the Kabbalah, etc., etc.— Not to mention the obvious influence of the numerous adventures of Indiana Jones, from whom the authors with evident malice aforethought have borrowed themes, situations [e.g. knights buried in the catacombs], camera angles [recall how we discovered that “X marks the spot”, e.g., and compare the corresponding shots here], and even speeches [cf. not-entirely-trustworthy scholar Ian McKellen’s peroration to Hanks regarding the distinction between studying history and taking part in it; this is just the bent archaeologist in Raiders, “the Ark is History”] — though not, alas, chases by car truck boat blimp and runaway tank, evil Nazis, castles with hidden rooms, buried temples boobytrapped by forgotten gods, earthquakes, hurtling over cliffs, walking on air — i.e., the entertaining parts. — Indeed the only guy with a whip here flays himself, which certainly takes all the fun out of it. — And I still cannot believe these bozos passed up the chance to stage a chase through the sewers of Paris: can’t anybody here play this game?

Unkindest cut of all, the same themes of the secret of the catacombs [the magic underground], ancient brotherhoods [Freemasonry, the Templars], and the nested set of Chinese puzzle-boxes at whose center lies the buried treasure — among others — were all if not more ably handled then at least better packaged to sell popcorn by National Treasure. And though admittedly the Fibonacci numbers would never enter into a Jerry Bruckheimer picture, he does know how to make an action movie.

Which this, alas, is not. Indeed what passes for action in this turgid opus consists mainly of talking heads trying to pass off whole metric tons of leaden exposition as dialogue: “This must refer to the Eiffel Tower —” — “located on the Seine River in Paris —” — “ancient capital of the French empire, with a population in 2005 of 2,144,700” — “and the location of the Louvre, the most famous art museum in Europe” — etc., etc. — For once one must feel relief the romantic leads don’t get it on.

And the Big Reveal, the revelation of the innermost mystery — not to give away anything unknown to the novel’s sixty million readers — is that a very mortal Nazarene married and fathered children; married, in fact, the reputed prostitute Mary Magdalene, and founded a royal dynasty whose descendants can be traced to this day — against whom the oneholyCatholicandapostolic Church, sensing a threat to its very existence, has been ceaselessly conspiring; and that the current heir apparent to the estate of Christ is, in fact, Ms. Tautou herself. — In other words the burden of this absurdly elaborate contrivance of a plot is a conclusion most of us were able to draw on our own long since, namely, that Audrey Tautou is proof of the existence of a benevolent God.

Nonetheless this ridiculous spectacle has provoked no little moral and theological outrage. For there is, after all, the forbidden suggestion that Jesus had sexual intercourse; not to mention the implicit attempt to restore the feminine principle to the godhead, the accusation [even if fictional] of a coverup dating back a couple of millenia, the challenge to the authority of the Church [even if that monolithic power has long since been divided and diffused], and the not entirely inaccurate characterization of Opus Dei as a bunch of fascist whack jobs who like to whip themselves.

But the reaction is absurd.

After all, no one really knows whether Jesus chose to do the horizontal bop, and if so with whom. It all happened two thousand years ago. And whatever did happen was immediately seized upon by a horde of manipulative scumbags to advance their own agendas; and they’ve been energetically fucking with it ever since.

It is, of course, their spiritual heirs who are screaming blasphemy. And as usual they have everything backwards.

Because it doesn’t matter about the loaves and the fishes, the water and the wine, the lame getting up to walk, the blind gaining eyes to see, even the Resurrection.

Because about all that, who knows? [Ms. Tautou daintily tries her weight upon the water, wets her foot, shrugs a Gallic shrug, and smiles an enigmatic smile.] — Indeed who cares? — I have seen miracles, the fall of the Berlin Wall for instance, and they have left me no wiser than before regarding the nature and properties of the Deity.

No. What rings most true, what stands out even at the distance of two millennia, is the part about the Master’s disciples scurrying for cover at the first sign of trouble and leaving him to suffer on the cross alone. Kept company by a couple of his female relatives, and the hooker that he saved from stoning. That part I believe, that part makes sense. And really I don’t need to know any more.

For if love alone could save the world, this is where it would have to begin: with the lepers and the outcasts, the downtrodden, the pariahs; with the pimps and the bitches and the hos. With the girls who work the pole. That is what is beautiful about the story of Magdalene, and that is what saves this otherwise silly sack of shit from utter risibility: the beautiful closing shot of Hanks, his final puzzle solved, framed within the inverted pyramidal structure that now decorates the Louvre, suspended, as it seems, in a geometrical matrix, between the heavens and the earth — praying over the grave of the patron saint of hookers. One can imagine no more elegant tribute to the inscrutable vision of the Divine Architect, who has embedded the carnal mystery in a vast articulated enigmatic dream of mathematical form — in a riddle no one has yet deciphered.


____________


Come fly with me (4/11/06)


Stealth. [Rob Cohen, 2005. Written by W.D. Richter.]

The triumphant march of naval aviators Jessica “Pardon my C cup” Biel, Josh “Don’t think, drink” Lucas, and Jamie “Please, no pictures” Foxx toward ultimate victory in the Global War On Terror — which, conveniently, turns out mainly to involve hotdogging around in 21st-century fighter jets faster than the speed of sound dropping precision ordnance on Bent Ragheads wherever they may be found [the targeting coordinates of Muslim irrationalism now having been precisely identified, lit up on glowing blue computer screens, zeroed in on the crosshairs of all those omnipresent hovering spy satellites] — is interrupted when their crusty old [but disturbingly ambitious] commander Sam “I need the paycheck” Shepard introduces them to their new wingman, a robot aircraft with a ten terahertz quantum computer for a brain whose meteoric speed, instantaneous reflexes, pinpoint precision, turnonadime maneuverability, imperviousness to g forces, and hollow metallic voice identify him as their logical successor in the relentless evolution of speed, firepower, and mindless machismo. Complications must naturally ensue, and it will come as no surprise that a stray lightning bolt grazes the robot’s braincase and toasts its sense of selfrestraint, turning it into a mad uncontrollable force for evil who refuses to open the pod bay doors, is chased through matte paintings of the woods by mobs of angry villagers, takes refuge in the hut of a kindly old blind woodcutter who plays the violin, and retains the services of a prominent law firm to demand that the renegade hacker who wrote its source code build it a mate. Our heroes must then of course ride to the rescue of civilization, chasing the mad roboplane all over Asia, doing even more barrel rolls on the deck dodging North Korean ackack shooting the lights out of Russian MIGs bailing out in flames running with the Devil busting out of the joint, etc., etc. — All of which beats hell out of getting your ass blown out of a Humvee on patrol in downtown Baghdad; and, guess what, photographs better too.

Superficially, then, the scenario seems to suggest that the real danger lies not without but within, that our own mistakes are our worst enemies, that trying to solve every problem by trying to come up with some kind of hightech fix is bound to backfire, and that we must conquer the roots of terror in ourselves before we fly off to shoot up the world; that the ultimate danger, as Designated Philosopher Lucas puts it, is that war will be turned into some kind of video game.

But all this, obviously, sails out the window at the first glimpse of Jessica Biel in a flight suit, and we come away instead secure in the knowledge that, no matter who exactly the nameless faceless enemy may be, and no matter why he chose to renounce good and tread the path of unmitigated evil, his existence, plainly, is more than adequate excuse for a vastly amplified defense budget, more and shinier new gadgets, and bigger and better tax cuts for major Republican campaign contributors.

(And one should note, incidentally, that the scene around which the trailer was constructed — one in which Ms. Biel splashes beneath a picturesque waterfall in a blushing baby blue bikini — is, indeed, the high point of the film; and like adolescent sex lasts about thirty seconds.)

Sample dialogue: “There’s no blood in those quantum veins”; “War’s terrible, it’s meant to be terrible”; “We have things those computers can never have, like instincts, and feelings, and moral judgment...I just don’t think that in war the actions should ever be divorced from the consequences”; “He downloads songs from the Web” — “Oh yeah? how many?” — “All of them”; "My mandate is to survive"; “If it [the fictitious war-game scenario — you remember: Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, hacking at 300 baud, let’s play Global Thermonuclear War] is not real, why did they implant it in my brain?”; “Just tell me you love me, you pussy.”

Which might continue, but, shit, I think I’m going hypersonic.


____________


L’alpe d’wheeze (8/10/05)


Determined to prove to myself that good sense remains forever beyond my grasp, I set off again the other day to climb the nearest minimountain on my bicycle in midninetydegree heat, and, after a lengthy pause for rehydration at a scenic overlook [marked, as these things for some reason always are, by the roadside notice “Scenic Overlook”] which does indeed provide an excellent perspective on this city of carnal policy, took a minor detour on my way back down the hill to cut through my old neighborhood [one of my twenty or thirty old neighborhoods] and check out a movie shoot which some enterprising location scout decided to drop this week in Boulder. Finding an impressive armada of trailers, trucks, lighting apparatus, cables, generators, etc., in evidence but no cameras deployed, I took a couple of minutes to chat up an assistant assistant assistant director who was stuffing his face at a buffet table set, on the evidence available, by very upscale caterers, and discovered that, sure enough, everyone was At Lunch, and not due to return to work for an unspecified period. Meanwhile half the Boulder police force was hanging around trying to look like Security, awakening that sense of unease we of the lesser breeds feel in the presence of The Heat, and deciding me against the lengthy stakeout which might have satisfied a few of my remaining points of curiosity about major motion picture productions, e.g., does the focus puller get to ride on the dolly like the camera operator during a tracking shot, or does he have to run alongside? [Surely that wouldn’t make sense, but there are, after all, class issues involved.] So I passed on my chance to leer at Jennifer Garner and taunt her with her memorable line from Dude, Where’s My Car?, i.e., “You guys are sucky boyfriends”, and no doubt get her to autograph my ass with her foot, and continued on my way. — Only later did I discover that she too was on the Tom Cruise hit list, perhaps before even Scarlett, certainly before the hapless Katie. — And did I mention the bombshell Spanish maid from Big Trouble, Sofia Vergara? Was there anyone Cruise missed?


After this there was a really bad all-Latin afternoon on the jazz station and I reverted to classical listening. Well, I’m fickle.


Perhaps you noticed the recent op-ed piece in the Times on the history of payola. I found it interesting, if not exactly surprising, that this has been a universal practice roughly since the dawn of time, and was unaware [not having given the matter much thought] that the famous scandal of the Fifties was mainly a kind of show-trial exhibition designed, with malice aforethought, to club to death the infant Rock and Roll in its cradle and advance the cause of cleancut whitebread artists like Pat Boone. [I guess this antedated Pat’s metal period.] — The main moral you carry away from this analysis, as from so many others, is that the music industry [so-called] consists for the most part of an army of middlemen who seize upon every opportunity to line their own pockets at the expense of both producer and consumer. No wonder they’re all terrified by the digital revolution: their days, obviously, are now numbered. And good riddance.


The Island was silly but amusing; I haven’t had the stomach for FF. Mainly I seem to be waiting in vain on stuff I can’t realistically expect to come to the multiplex: The Aristocrats; Wong Kar Wai’s 2046; Mr. Herzlinger’s documentary about his Quixotic effort to try to get a date with Drew Barrymore. [What a curious genre Michael Moore has pioneered.] — Terry Gilliam’s interpretation of The Brothers Grimm opens in a couple of weeks; this might not suck.


Looking over the proposals reported in the Times, it is somewhat reassuring to see that under the pressure of repeated public humiliation at least some of the NASA guys finally seem to understand where they went wrong with the shuttle, and now grasp the essential elements of a solution: a heavy-lift unmanned booster [with nearly the payload capacity of the old Saturn 5, and using a variant on the original engine] based on proven technology, and a separate manned vehicle which reverts to the old well tested idea of sticking a [cheap and essentially disposable] capsule on top of the rocket where ice, foam, stray bolts, pocket change, etc., can’t fall on it and accidentally force a billion-dollar writeoff. Unstated but probably playing a significant role in these decisions is the embarrassing realization that the Russians [who as I heard it long since either stole the plans or reverse-engineered the design, built a prototype, assessed its cost effectiveness, laughed hysterically, and stuck with what they had already] did the right thing in passing on the expensive giant-spaceplane idea, which is why at the moment they can fly to this ridiculous space station we insisted on building and we can’t. — The guy quoted states the essential point exactly: the shuttle is an impressive piece of engineering, but way the hell too complicated ever to be reliable. — Whether or not NASA can now run their operation as cheaply as the Russians do [three hundred million a year, no more than twenty or thirty million to build each capsule] is of course doubtful, but at least this novel lurch toward sanity marks a step in the right direction.

This article followed on the heels, as it turned out, of my accidental discovery of a commissioned NASA history of the shuttle program buried in the stacks of that online equivalent of a musty usedbookstore, blackmask.com. Reading this study, which as the first of three volumes deals only with the prehistory of the project and its progress through the decision by Nixon to fund it, is a real revelation.

First [as actually I still remember from my childhood], most of the wishlist for manned space exploration was dreamed up by Von Braun in a series of articles in Collier’s in 1952 [the inspiration for Walt Disney’s television show circa 1954, and also for George Pal’s 1955 movie The Conquest of Space] — i.e., a space station, a fleet of shuttles, and expeditions staged from Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars — and [save for dropping the classic rotating-wheel idea] hasn’t changed since. In the meantime, however, the rationale that knitted the whole scheme together has vanished.

It was obvious from the outset, for instance, that radio retransmission would be, in modern parlance, a killer app. But when Clarke first described communications satellites in the Forties he took it for granted that they would require continuous maintenance, and would, therefore, have to be manned; mainly to have somebody on hand to change the vacuum tubes. [Von Neumann in “The General and Logical Theory of Automata” (1948) projected a practical upper bound for the size of an electronic computer of about ten thousand tubes, because they burned out too often to build anything bigger.] Even when Von Braun first described a toy [because unmanned] version of his space station in the early Fifties, he assumed that the effective lifetime of its electronics wouldn’t be more than a couple of months. But already by 1958 Vanguard managed to stay online for six years; so much for the need for a shipload of technicians with spare 6L6GCs and soldering guns.

Again, though it was always assumed that being able to look at the weather from orbit would revolutionize meteorology, it was somewhat less obvious [since television was in its infancy] that you wouldn’t need a meteorologist looking out the window to make the observations. And though everybody always wanted to put telescopes outside the atmosphere, nobody thought they could be automated. [Nor could anyone anticipate that outgassing, etc., make the vicinity of manned spacecraft a very bad place to operate a telescope, and that you want to put it in a cold quiet orbit all by itself.]

As for the military applications, these were at first supposed to include actually dropping bombs; but missiles assumed that function. The other obvious task was reconnaissance, but [as it turned out] this was also immediately automated, and the first spy satellites were orbited in 1958. [It took a dozen tries to get everything to work, but they got on the job right away.] Real film [recovered periodically by re-entry capsule] was, however, used for at least another decade, which made the idea of on-demand launch and recovery attractive to the Air Force — and, as it turned out, two critical parameters in the design of the shuttle as we have it today, the size of the cargo bay and the delta wings which present a large surface that must be protected by heat shielding, were determined by the perceived need to be able to launch and recover Big Birds and to be able to make single-circuit photoreconnaissance polar orbits and then veer a thousand miles off the established flight path to return to Vandenburg — not possible with the otherwise more practical small straight wings. So as it turned out the shuttle as it finally materialized had already been rendered obsolete by the perfection of the CCD array, sometime between the moment when the design was frozen and its actualization. Of course bureaucratic momentum carried it forward anyway.

As for what robotics has done for planetary exploration, all that is obvious now that we’ve all seen the surface of Mars and the rings of Saturn, but when Von Braun was dreaming everything up it wasn’t clear that you could even send Morse code across the solar system, let alone drive a rover by remote control and watch it on television.

So after all is said and done we end up orbiting astronauts to study the effects that weightlessness has upon them [and no need for that if you plan on spinning the spacecraft on a long mission, as even the op-ed columnist in the Times saw right away] and doing a bunch of silly high school science fair experiments that would hardly have filled an episode of Mister Wizard; who, however, didn’t piss away a billion dollars on every show.

In fact the only sensible rationale that remains for manned space flight, after everything else has been automated, is just the one that NASA most energetically resists, namely, tourism and/or adventure travel. [Why they should resist is an interesting study in institutional psychology, and rests, I think, on their fear of losing control of the narrative of space exploration; which is precisely what most pisses me off about the whole organization, but never mind that now.] — And in re this, apparently the Hilton chain, circa 1970, had plans to build an orbiting hotel as soon as the cost of putting cargo into orbit got down to five dollars a pound; a goal which at that time seemed within reach.

Bringing up the second, rather depressing, point, that though I’ve seen a number of plausible postmortem analyses by disillusioned space cadets which blame the fact that everything ended up costing a hundred times the original estimates on the inefficiency/incompetence of NASA, they don’t say anything that wasn’t anticipated by the guys who wrote the specs for the shuttle in the first place. Commercial aviation was always their model, 24 hour turnaround was the seemingly attainable objective, and, after extensive analyses, they decided on reusable engines and recoverable boosters and reusable thermal tile protection [as opposed to some kind of replaceable ablative shield] for an aluminum airframe [as opposed to some more expensive combination of titanium and other exotic metals] because these choices were supposed to save money. And, probably most important, they saw that the combination of electronic sensors and computer monitoring should allow onboard checkout, and eliminate the need for the 20,000 technicians who attended each Apollo launch. Since the simplest way to estimate the expense of operating an aircraft is just to count how many support personnel are required for every flight [even for the SR-71 Blackbird, e.g., this was only about forty], it would seem that they started out, at least, with a grasp of the crux of the matter. — On the other hand, since I saw some manager quoted as boasting in re the safety issue after the Columbia disaster that it took a million signatures to get a shuttle flight off the ground, obviously they lost sight of it somewhere. [One must suspect with malice aforethought, since the simplest description of the raison d’etre of the shuttle program as it now exists is that it is a full employment program for flight controllers.]

How exactly they veered off the rails is an interesting question. Were they just wildly overoptimistic? Were they so blinded by enthusiasm that they lost sight of engineering reality? Are any of the shuttle design requirements actually attainable?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I suspect what happened was that they took a number of problems they thought they’d solved in isolation [reusable liquid-fueled engines did exist, e.g.], observed that there seemed to be no fundamental difficulties with scaling up the solutions separately [in running similar engines at much higher pressures, e.g.], and then assumed they could add them all together. But apparently something here is not linear.

[In fact it almost seems as though they looked at the X-15 program, which ran off a string of 200 successful tests on a fairly rigorous schedule, noted that it flew to 350,000 feet at speeds up to 4500 miles per hour, and then said, Well, all we have to do is multiply by four in each slot.]

With the benefit of hindsight reusability looks like a chimera, because maintenance becomes so difficult you end up practically having to rebuild the orbiter after every flight; it seems more straightforward to use simple disposable modules instead, in particular solid- not liquid-fueled boosters [on which there doesn’t seem to be any upper limit on practical size: motors with thrust equivalent to the Saturn 5 were tested successfully in the Sixties, and it was thought at the time that they should easily scale up at least another order of magnitude.][The size of the existing shuttle boosters was determined by the maximum diameter of cylindrical sections that can be shipped by rail, i.e. 13 feet.] — Also if you keep rebuilding something, there’s an opportunity for the design to evolve; and the only argument that justifies blowing so much money on this kind of thing [though you never hear it stated clearly] is as a sort of pure technological research — i.e., doing something outrageously difficult on the assumption that you will, as it were, derive useful corollaries in the process. [Thus the justification of the Apollo project, after the fact, was often said to be that it encouraged the development of integrated circuits, miniaturized computers, advanced materials, Tang, etc.] — Otherwise you end up trying to sell the idea that doing the same thing repeatedly is a sort of [dull] experiment in itself; which sounds a lot like what the justifications for the shuttle program have become. — The reductio ad absurdum being the space station, which is the grand gesture of postmodern science, an experiment with no subject save itself; and the latest shuttle flight, which has mainly been about studying the shuttle. [I assume not many will take interest in all the publications they’re generating for the Journal of Foam Insulation.] You might as well justify taking the same test over and over again on the grounds that you were learning valuable lessons about marking marks on paper.

Which brings us to the third and most dismaying point: if you read the history, which degenerates with alarming rapidity from a fascinating tale of engineers’ dreams into an endless repetitive nightmare of committee meetings, political maneuvering, and design decisions dictated by the OMB, you discover that all of the ideas you hear proposed as alternatives to the current system — the scramjet and its liquid-air variants, the littler spaceplane [aka Dyna-Soar or X-20], even the nuclear rocket engines on which any realistic expedition to Mars would have to be predicated — were proposed, designed, built, and tested in the Sixties, and then abandoned and forgotten. — Inevitably you’re overwhelmed by the sense that having passed through the Golden Age of the Sixties and the Silver Age of the Seventies, we are now arrived in a dismal Age of Brass; and there are destined to remain.


The Times Magazine on “machinema”: “Players’ relationships with constant, blood-splattering violence is a common subject in game art. Last year, the 31-year-old artist Brody Condon produced an unsettling film that consisted of nothing but shots of himself committing suicide inside 50 different video games.” — How remarkably Gibsonian. If only Kurt Cobain had had this means of expression.


Excepting only Ken Higgins, the guy I have known with the most quotable dreams was a graduate student in philosophy with whom I hung out in my university-janitor days who used to stagger into his work-study job every morning with a spectacular hangover and regale me with the latest bulletins from his remarkable party life. Since his quotidian reality [or at least — which says the same — the chemically-engendered delusions which formed the substance of his waking life] embraced excesses like Mazola parties at which drugaddled bimbos ripped their clothes off, lubricated themselves like greased pigs, and hosed all comers in a coke-induced frenzy, his fantasy life per se was relatively mundane, and ran to textbook examples of wish-fulfillment — e.g., the dream in which his dissertation committee ordered pizza delivered during a meeting, and, wanting more of it for himself, he’d killed all of them so that he wouldn’t have to share. — Realizing that I cannot measure up to this daunting standard, I offer nonetheless the following, which seems to have run through my head before waking the other day: I am taking an interview at Los Alamos. The first guy I am supposed to talk to walks me through the offices of his “differential geometry group”, where I recognize somebody I used to know in high school to whom I am too mortified to reintroduce myself, and then seizes some excuse to continue the audience “off campus” at a coffee shop, where, I discover, he intends that no one can overhear him as he denounces me and my bogus resume at the top of his lungs. Fortunately in the middle of this scene the Third World War breaks out and the citizens of the [curiously anonymous] city panic and start looting the shops and shooting one another. My interviewer, who was going postal anyway, tries to kill me, but I kill him instead in selfdefense, and, after an interpolated episode in which for some reason I turn into Bruce Willis and do an unmotivated shower scene with a fully-clothed depressive female, make my way across town with a shopping cart foraging for supplies carrying with me the severed head of my victim, like the head of Medusa, figuring apparently that this will either intimidate the mob or turn potential assailants to stone, I’m not sure which. [Sometimes, in a postmodern turn, I seem to be carrying a photograph of the severed head instead, but this is equally efficacious. Or does it seem like a photograph because it is like the reflection in the shield of Perseus? something I can look at directly, unlike the head itself. This might bear examination.] Escaping the city, I wander the highways a while in a purloined car, but make my way finally to a rendezvous with you at a motel, where it is by now the next morning and you are [against my protests] planning to go to work. You ask in all innocence how the interview went, and I begin to explain; but the effort of trying to remember something that happened earlier in a dream as usual awakens me, and I discover myself lying on the couch watching an ancient tape on the VCR on which Penn and Teller [the former, of course, doing all the talking] are introducing a movie, none other than Plan Nine From Outer Space. — Thus the deanimated living lead us by a convoluted passage to the reanimated dead.

[What is the problem with trying to remember something in a dream? I think the theory is that the mechanism that turns short- into long-term memories is shut off when you’re asleep, and turning it back on wakes you up. Of course this makes you wonder how dreams can be recalled at all, and suggests, as introspection seems to confirm, that the process of as it were linearizing the dream narrative is something that happens while you’re waking up afterwards; or, in the case of the Freudian’s patient, on the analyst’s couch.]


Carville appeared on the Imus show Monday morning and, in the process of conveying his stupefaction at Novak’s widely-publicized on-air meltdown, repeated the Judith Miller rumor with the following, typically neat formulation: she has not a First but a Fifth amendment problem. — He also suggested that there is much unrest in the Times newsroom over the code of silence, that a number of reporters may want to talk or leak, and that Fitzgerald may be planning on further subpoenas aimed at providing them with the opportunity. — Who are we supposed to be pulling for here?


Well, enough of this merry sport. — And off on a voyage to Girls Gone Wild Island! No rules! No parents! No clothes! — Where were all these sexcrazed coeds when we were in school?


Later.


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Nietzsche’s theory of the gangster movie (1/24/05)


The criminal and what is related to him. — The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a somehow freer and more dangerous environment and form of existence, where everything that is weapons and armor in the instinct of the strong human being has its rightful place. His virtues are ostracized by society; the most vivid drives with which he is endowed soon grow together with the depressing affects — with suspicion, fear, and dishonor. Yet this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration. Whoever must do secretly, with long suspense, caution, and cunning, what he can do best and would like most to do, becomes anemic; and because he always harvests only danger, persecution, and calamity from his instincts, his attitude to these instincts is reversed too, and he comes to experience them fatalistically. It is society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or almost necessarily; for there are cases in which such a man proves stronger than society: the Corsican, Napoleon, is the most famous case. The testimony of Dostoyevsky is relevant to this problem — Dostoyevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal. This profound human being, who was ten times right in his low estimate of the superficial Germans, lived for a long time among the convicts in Siberia — hardened criminals for whom there was no way back to society — and found them very different from what he himself had expected: they were carved out of just about the best, hardest, and most valuable wood that grows anywhere on Russian soil. Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of men so constituted that for one reason or another, they lack public approval and know that they are not felt to be beneficent or useful — that chandala feeling that one is not considered equal, but an outcast, unworthy, contaminating. All men so constituted have a subterranean hue to their thoughts and actions; everything about them becomes paler than in those whose existence is touched by daylight. Yet almost all forms of existence which we consider distinguished today once lived in this half tomblike atmosphere: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer ... As long as the priest was considered the supreme type, every valuable kind of human being was devaluated ... The time will come — I promise—when the priest will be considered the lowest type, as our chandala, as the most mendacious, the most indecent kind of human being ... I call attention to the fact that even now—under the mildest regimen of morals which has ever ruled on earth, or at least in Europe — every deviation, every long, all-too-long sojourn below, every unusual or opaque form of existence, brings one closer to that type which is perfected in the criminal. All innovators of the spirit must for a time bear the pallid and fatal mark of the chandala on their foreheads — not because they are considered that way by others, but because they themselves feel the terrible chasm which separates them from everything that is customary or reputable. Almost every genius knows, as one stage of his development, the “Catilinarian existence” — a feeling of hatred, revenge, and rebellion against everything which already is, which no longer becomes ... Catiline — the form of pre-existence of every Caesar. —

[transl. Walter Kaufmann]


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Existence precedes essence (1/17/05)


Kapo. [Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959. Written by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas.]


An Italian neorealist’s retelling of a true story about a prison break at Treblinka: unspoiled young Jewish girl Susan Strasberg (presumably recruited for this part because she had played Anne Frank on Broadway) comes home from her piano lesson one afternoon in Paris to discover the Nazis carting her parents off to the camps; panicking, she breaks away from the neighbors trying to restrain her, chases the truck down, and is carried off herself to a holding pen where she must witness sentence passed by the judges of the Nazi underworld and stand by helplessly as her family is condemned to the ovens. When by a stroke of fortune a prison doctor helps her assume the identity of a dead gentile and she herself is shipped instead to the labor camps, the brute randomness of her own luck only appalls and overwhelms her. She stares into the abyss; it stares back into her; her heart turns to stone. She sells her still sweet young body to the SS, becomes a prison trusty (the kapo of the title), and undergoes a metamorphosis, at once remarkable and abhorrent, from deadeyed beaten prisoner to Daughter of Ilsa, marching with an arrogant Prussian strut at the head of a troop of female slave labor with a riding crop in her hand, barking orders in the language of the master race. Though she harbors no illusions about the character of the Germans or their prospects for ultimate victory, the moral dimension has been rendered meaningless, and she embraces the role of a fellow traveller, to ensure her survival in comfort; until a fresh crop of male prisoners arrive from the ever-advancing Eastern front, she falls despite herself for a handsome Russian lad, and decides to aid him and his comrades in the escape they plan as the Red Army nears and the Germans prepare to machinegun their prisoners and bulldoze them into a mass grave.

This can only end badly. But there is a really magical moment near the denouement, at the very instant when Ms. Strasberg realizes that if the prison break is to succeed, she herself must die, when she stands near the electrified fence, gazing out at the now-unattainable world beyond: the light changes, and the clouds stand out in a suddenly more distant sky, brute existence illuminated by a radiance which is not simply that of the in-itself. — Prince Andrey lies on the hill of Pratzen, fallen with the flagstaff in his hands, gazing at the high gray clouds creeping quietly across an immeasurably lofty sky; between them the blue limitless infinity. — Life in itself is rarely beautiful. But the art of the cinematographer can make it so.


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The day the highlands stood still (1/14/05)


Devil Girl From Mars. [Dwight MacDonald, 1954. Written by James Eastwood; from a play by John C. Mather.]

After a catastrophic war between the sexes necessitates an interplanetary raid to kidnap terrestrial studs to replenish a depleted gene pool, Martian Mean Girl Patricia Laffan and her trusty sidekick Johnny — a giant robot! with an electronic brain! —- descend in their flying saucer upon a lonely inn in the wilds of Scotland, where riddling Fate and the exquisite sense of dramatic symmetry of the screenwriters have assembled an Addled Landlady, a Harried Barmaid, an Escaped Convict [yes, he was Wrongfully Accused], a Mysterious Babe Traveling Incognito [the well-traveled Hazel Court], an Absentminded Professor, and a Warweary Journalist to receive her.

Here while the robot rotates her tires and adjusts her plugs and points, the zaftig Ms. Laffan [fetchingly turned out in dominatrix leathers] marches down the gangplank to lord it over the shrinking earthlings, who gape in awe as she drops an impenetrable bubble of invisible adamant around the property, disconnects their telephones, knocks out their power, does some fancy shooting with her rayguns, and lectures them disdainfully [prospective love slaves or no] on the inferiority of the human species.

Their attempts at escape must obviously prove futile, since that would have meant building another set [there’s nothing quite like a limited budget to ensure the enforcement of the dramatic unities], but the company regroups around the bar to engage in an orgy of melodramatic soulsearching: the barmaid is sweet on the con, the woman of mystery falls for the journalist, the professor is torn between the thirst for knowledge and the need to repel this alien menace, the proprietess keeps walking around making pronouncements like “there’s nothing like a good cup of tea in a crisis,” and every few minutes somebody falls prey to Martian hypnosis and starts intoning a dismal zombie speech about Fields of Wheat, or something.

But presently the repairs are completed, and Ms. Laffan seizes the likeliest candidate for a high sperm count [the all-too-expendable con, of course] as a trophy of the chase and takes off to continue barhopping. Alas, before you can say “Klaatu barada nicto,” something goes awry, whether by chance or by design I didn’t quite catch, and the saucer blows up; providing redemption for the con, I suppose, but a major letdown for the male geek population of the Earth, who might otherwise be looking forward to leaving this lame planet and flying through outer space with cool alien babes who like them.

This unpromising summary notwithstanding, the flick is inexplicably charming: maybe it’s Ms. Laffan and her Buck Rogers meets Bondage Barbie costume, maybe the goofy giant robot, maybe the cool Caligari interior of the flying saucer [where was that steam coming from?], or maybe just that there’s a little Zoltan in all of us, I don’t know. I do, however, find myself wondering what happened to the scenes in which Ms. Laffan lounges in the bathtub smoking fat Havana cigars and forces the humiliated Earthmen to sing torch songs a capella before she allows them another drink; and, indeed, why a saucerload of Martian critics didn’t land in Hollywood, take a bar full of inebriated screenwriters hostage, and lecture them sternly on the dire consequences that await if we continue to allow our radio and television transmissions to pollute the interplanetary ether and our old gangster movies to escape into outer space. The devil from beyond, after all, is never quite a match for the devil within.


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Incense and peppermints (1/3/05)


Psych-Out. [Richard Rush, 1968. Written by Betty Ulius and Hunter Willet.]

Bummed out and brought down by her plastic culture and her tawdry past, runaway gamine Susan Strasberg comes to the San Francisco of the Summer of Love in search of her errant brother Bruce Dern — a longhaired and bearded dropout who has, apparently, taken a few too many draughts of the Electric Kool Aid which was the vintage of that famous season, decided to be Jesus, preached the gospel of peace and love overrecklessly to various of the uptight and uncool in Golden Gate Park, and incurred thereby the enmity of a redneck lynchmob determined to make war not love; from whom, apparently, he is now in hiding. An easy conclusion to her quest thus frustrated, she falls in with psychedelic guitarist Jack Nicholson (shirtless and ponytailed with leather vest and what looks like an ankh hanging around his neck) and his merry band of hippie comrades, checks in at the quaint Victorian mansion which serves as their crashpad, submits to a fashion makeover at the Salvation Army which renders her a particularly fetching embodiment of the Zeitgeist, and enters into the adventures typical of the time and place — putting on The Man by pelting Him with flowers, playing lightshowlit concert gigs for crowds of cheerfully spastic zombies with eyes as big as saucers, staging impromptu pagan rituals in the park, imbibing wisdom at the feet of bogus gurus (this just in: we’re all still playing games), narrowly escaping a gangbang in the junkyard at the hands of red-state atavists in hardhats and letter jackets, stalking through a hallucinogenic Walpurgisnacht fueled by STP, and doing another of those famous psychedelic love scenes that in that distant age of cinematic innocence provoked many a stoned boner in the arthouses along the Sunset Strip. — Indeed, every motion is accompanied by tinkling bells, no ray of light falls upon the set without first being refracted through cut glass, lenses keep slipping out of focus even in the absence of obvious metaphorical intent, and everywhere you look there are people humping. Thus passed life in the heroic age.

This opus was produced by the redoubtable Dick Clark, creator of American Bandstand, and its numerous eccentricities suggest the identification of a distinctive authorial voice: the musical interludes (by the Seeds and the Strawberry Alarm Clock) are execrable (Clark had a tin ear and was always strangely clueless as to what was hip and what was not); the dialogue is weirdly offkey (Dean Stockwell expires theatrically with the words “Reality is a deadly place...I hope this trip is a good one,” which dumbstruck viewers were still quoting with incredulous derision well into Reagan’s first term); there is a fair amount of sermonizing, as you might expect of a selfappointed Ambassador to (and from) America’s Youth; and some wouldbe Chekhov on retainer was allowed to decide that the scenario would have greater dramatic resonance if Ms. Strasberg were impaired in some picturesque fashion, say, if she were deaf. — After this the idea of letting her hook up with a musician must have seemed Fraught With Portent (as Bullwinkle used to say), and the insertion of a bit of heavyhanded exposition to reveal this to be less organic congenital affliction than the result of psychological trauma (meaning, naturally, that — by an application of the once ubiquitous Leary Fallacy — a major drug experience might reverse it) must have seemed natural. — Well: here was somebody’s brain on drugs.

On the other hand the (entirely accurate) impression you carry away is that though poverty is burdensome, drugs are potentially dangerous, free love is generally a convenient excuse for guys like Nicholson to nail anything with a pulse, and it probably isn’t a good sign when you wake up in the morning with little critters crawling all over you, the hippie experience on the whole was liberating and uniquely exhilarating. — So (as we said in the old days) it has a good beat and you can dance to it and (since the kids can relate to the words) you have to give it an eighty-five.

Moreover despite some inevitably hamhanded attempts at realizing the drug experience (to the best of my knowledge there was no real progress in the cinematic treatment of hallucination between Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann and Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing, and this effort falls short even of Corman’s contemporary The Trip — which Nicholson wrote, and which also featured the indispensably radiant Ms. Strasberg), this is one of those cases where the picture is, as it were, less important than the frame; it now exhibits a marvelous allure which transcends the (necessarily limited) aims of the authors and their time and place, because whoever really was in charge handed a camera to the great cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs and let him wander around the Haight capturing real hippies in their native milieu in the evanescent moment of their flowering — making it, in its singular texture and mise-en-scene, in its representation of posters, panhandlers, vans with psychedelic paintjobs, barefooted freaks dancing spastically to unheard music while onlookers nod and clap with arhythymic enthusiasm, a historical-preservationist document of great charm and power. — So he did his thing, and they did theirs, and the way they came together, well, it was beautiful. Man.


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Antiquarian pursuits (11/19/04)


National Treasure. [Jon Turteltaub, 2004. Written by Jim Kouf, Cormac Wibberly, and Marianne Wibberly.]

At a critical moment in this protracted treasure-hunt — after deciphering yet another code, and unravelling yet another riddle — the protagonists agree that the meaning of the palimpest under examination is that at a given hour, the shadow of the Liberty Bell tower in Philadelphia will point at the precise brick in an old wall which hides the next in an apparently interminable series of clues — which will lead, they expect, to the location of a fabulous treasure which has been lost for centuries.

The problem seems to be that this hour is now just past — a vital issue here because, in keeping with the long-familiar bipolar conflict structure [perfected, as was everything else, by Hitchcock] which governs their situation, both the cops and the bad guys are at their heels, and opportunity is fleeting. Fortunately Designated Geek Justin Bartha picks this moment to step forward and point out that the message was composed before the advent of Daylight Savings Time — yet another idea, it is immediately noted, which originated with Benjamin Franklin, though it was not adopted until the First World War — and they still have a few minutes to make their appointment with destiny.

Unfortunately, as, for instance, any astronomer for the last several thousand years, say, the designers of Stonehenge, or, for instance, anybody who has ever seen one of the numerous movies in which this has been a plot point, e.g. Journey to the Center of the Earth, or, well, anybody at all, might have pointed out to the writers, the apparent height of the sun at a given hour at some given place upon the globe, and the corresponding location of a shadow, varies with the season, and the specification of a time of day would, accordingly, be meaningless, without the additional specification of a time of year.

I say this by way of reassurance that my judgment has not entirely lapsed. — Nor am I, incidentally, so sanguine as to suppose that Nicolas Cage could jump off the deck of an aircraft carrier without breaking his neck, Diane Kruger could be a government librarian [presumably Miss Musty Archival Material 2004], or that the Freemasons could dig a hole to the center of the Earth in the middle of New York City, even in the seventeenth century, without somebody noticing all those wheelbarrows coming out of the back door of the church. — A Jerry Bruckheimer production inevitably makes great demands upon the willing suspension of disbelief.

But, such quibbles aside, this is nonetheless an extremely entertaining escapist fantasy, which inevitably begs interpretation as the Bruckheimer reading of Indiana Jones: winningly deranged tombraider-wannabe Cage, a historian and sleuth with an impressive [albeit apparently wholly unmarketable] obsessive mastery of the historical trivia of the American Revolution — and descended, as the prologue explains, from six generations of dedicated conspiracy buffs — has arrived, as the principal action commences and we discover him trekking through the trackless wastes of the Arctic, on the verge of the solution of the grand mystery which has obsessed him since childhood — this, the location of the legendary treasure of the Knights Templar; who are supposed (in song and story) to have taken the opportunity during the Crusades to have looted the Temple of Solomon, and amassed a fabulous pile of swag [presumably including, e.g., the Maltese Falcon] dating back to the Pharaohs, and hidden it from the Pope’s bagmen, sometime in the fourteenth century — which evidence, he is confident on the basis of a Clue passed on by a dying man [the theatrically-expiring last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence] to his great-to-the-fourth grandfather on the steps of the White House in 1832, is to be found in the wreck of an antique New England whaler buried in the Arctic ice.

Unfortunately, as his disapproving [because frustrated in his own pursuit of the brass ring] father Jon Voight [not quite Sean Connery, but not bad either] has already made clear in the expository prologue, the six generations of conspiracy buffs from whom Cage has inherited this quixotic quest were too busy hunting hypothetical fortunes to acquire any real one, meaning that his expedition to the polar wastes must be funded and equipped by ethically-challenged zillionaire Sean Bean; and when, in the first of several episodes of busting into a sealed dusty environment occupied by dessicated stiffs with lots of murky atmosphere to shape every source of light into a dramatic shaft and by diffusion provide threedimensionality in the mise-en-scene, a carved and curiously articulated meerschaum pipe turns up which points unequivocally to the existence of a treasure map on the back of the original [and, of course, utterly irreplaceable] Declaration of Independence and Bean promptly proposes to steal the founding document of the Republic, Cage is too obvious in his opposition; and, after a brief argument in which stray gunshots set fire to a hold full of barrels of gunpowder, is rewarded for his pangs of conscience by nearly being blown to pieces [remarkably, this is the only explosion in the movie]; setting up what seems like it ought to be the grand central caper of the scenario, Cage’s attempt to thwart Bean’s attempt to steal the Declaration by stealing it himself.

But as it develops this is only the first in a series of puzzles and pursuits, in which Cage and Bean and their respective posses [pursued by the FBI in the person of that embodiment of tenacity Harvey Keitel] race from point to point to point again — suggesting, as fox-who-could-not-get-the-grapes Voight keeps explaining, an infinite regress of clues within clues; and, indeed, the pipe leads only to the treasure map on the back of the Declaration — which leads to a message encoded in the Silence Dogood letters composed by Benjamin Franklin as a teenager — which leads to a pair of triplewhammy 3D bifocal granny glasses [secreted in the brick pointed to by the shadow] — which leads back to the Declaration — which leads to the Trinity Church on Wall Street — which leads into musty catacombs of immeasurable antiquity — Washington to Philadelphia to New York, with assorted other clues hints signs and portents delivered by the American currency [for Masonic symbols are everywhere, and everyone seems to be wearing one of those rings.] — Indeed, the whole suggests that the authors read Foucault’s Pendulum, and took extensive notes, but somehow didn’t get the joke.

As for the fabulous treasure, well, naturally they find it, and it’s as big as the world: the Citizen-Kane warehouse at the end of Raiders, containing all the lost treasures of history — not just the Maltese Falcon, not merely [we must presume] the Ark of the Covenant, but the stolen treasures of the Pharaohs, the starspangled jockstraps of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and probably the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs [which will turn out to be diamond, or Kryptonite, or something.] — Because this is the Bruckheimer version of an Indiana Jones movie; not an Indiana Jones movie per se. — In an Indiana Jones movie, one would, of course, have the fabulous legendary treasure, the pursuit punctuated by the solution of a series of puzzles, the opposing conspiracy. But in the end our hero must renounce the prize, because it is something larger than he is, indeed something larger than the story itself, something which transcends not only the narrative but the very logic of possession: the Grail, the Lost Ark, the Sacred Stones. What the story rests upon, its fulcrum, as it were, cannot enter into it; for the same reason that Wittgenstein said the meaning of the world must lie outside it. The prize, like the vanishing point in a painting, must always recede before us; it can never be attained.

In Bruckheimer movies on the other hand we expect closure: that Cage will not simply save San Francisco from an attack with biological weapons, but receive as his reward documents that contain all the darkest secrets of modern history; that Cage will steal fifty cars in one night and get to keep the fairest of them all, the fabulous Eleanor; that Cage will crawl out of a spectacular plane crash on the Vegas strip and hand his daughter the stuffed bunny he’s been lugging around for two-and-a-half acts of random gunfire and mindless violence. — No prize can be too great, no challenge too preposterous, no babe too bodacious: nothing can go too far over the top; above all, nothing can be transcendant.

So the resolution looks odd, but you have to suspect that Bruckheimer’s gut is as usual onto something, and has led him where the audience wants to go. Because, after all, the idea of Indiana Jones, a hero who though indelibly American actually knows something about the history and culture of foreign countries — even speaks their languages — looks, well, liberal, and probably Jewish; an important consideration in a historical moment in which xenophobic nitwits from the Bible Belt munching Freedom Fries are punching all the buttons on the dashboard of the Ship of State. So why not make up this fairytale about a boundless treasure known to the founding fathers of the Republic? monies they might have been able to use to fund their insurrection; thus diverting attention from the embarrassing fact that the American Revolution was well on its way to failure before that ubiquitous universal genius Franklin succeeded in charming financial underwriting out of the perfidious French. — And abandon the usual international travelogue and turn it inward: build the plot around a kind of product placement for the Chambers of Commerce and historical societies of Washington, Philadelphia, and New York [Boston does get a cameo near the end, but it’s at best a bit part: too blue a state to be trusted with the lead], and try to make it seem natural that the wealth of ancient Egypt, the wisdom of the Temple of Solomon, the contents of the Library of Alexandria, and the objectives of the greatest conspiracy in history should have been directed to the creation of the American nation: the darling of destiny, the teleological End of History, the City of God.

Ridiculous, of course. But as Bruckheimer knows better than anyone else, if you throw enough money at a dumb idea, something is bound to stick. After all, it’s all about the Benjamins.


____________


Seven letters on politics (11/12/04)


(9/17/04:)

Undoubtedly you’re onto something in re the verbal/conceptual permutation of “weapons of mass destruction”; it suggests that the administration’s policy is founded on a sort of systematic malapropism, even dyslexia. This would explain much.

My stomach hasn’t been equal to the task of following the CBS fiasco blow by blow; though I am, naturally, familiar with the principal conjectures. The Rove theory does actually sound plausible to me, meaning that despite my best efforts to plaster myself with ideological Coppertone I’ve probably been out in the political sun too long. — In a [very] weak moment I watched a couple of minutes of Matthews on Hardball the other night, during which he pooh-poohed the whole thing as a tempest in a teapot and [as usual] rudely interrupted his “guests” to remind them that all reasonable people, i.e. himself, had long since concluded that what Bush did thirty years ago is irrelevant today. The fact that the originals of the documents in question either were or were not plucked from the dumpster [and if not perhaps transcribed?] when Bush’s operatives visited Guard headquarters in 1997 to purge the record preparatory to his run for president, i.e. that the coverup is quite recent and obviously relevant to the present behavior of Dubya, seems to have sailed over the heads both of Matthews himself and all the contributing commentators, pro and con. [I.e., not simply did he weasel out of the draft while pretending the opposite, he’s still trying to weasel out of admitting that’s what he did. This says that he lies to the public and to himself; and doesn’t that explain everything.] If I were really paying attention, I would be in despair. — I did also manage to notice, in the space of another minute or two, that Senator Graham [not Florida, the South Carolina guy] though very critical of the administration’s Iraqi policy nonetheless performed perfectly the signature rhetorical gambit the administration’s apologists have employed to insinuate the relevance of the war in Iraq to the “war on terror”, i.e., mentioning 9/11 in one sentence and Saddam in the next without explicitly stating any logical connection. Thus without actually lying they succeed in intimating Saddam was responsible; and sure enough, the poll numbers on this misapprehension are still over forty percent. — What did they do? take everybody in the Republican party to Camp David for the weekend and drill them on the bait and switch until they all got it right?

Sky Captain did not disappoint; it came off as something like anime, with a bit of live action and the actors inserted. It owes something to Lucas, but mainly represents a fresh [and I think better] reading of Lucas’s sources. Beautifully executed. By all means check it out. — Point of trivia: right at the outset one of the victims of the mad scientist trying to take over the world passes a message to Gwyneth Paltrow in a copy of Newton’s Principia; at the very end, in the closing credits, acknowledgment in dutifully made to the publisher for permission to show the cover of their edition of Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy [so complete now is copyright paranoia in Hollywood] — but, typically, “Principles” is misspelled; so much for relying on the spellchecker.

I too favor a remake of Duck Soup, but not as fiction but reality: let’s give up on the United States as a bad marriage, and split the county into red and blue moieties. These would be called, naturally, Sylvania and Freedonia respectively, and it is a very amusing exercise to fill out the details: I fancy the Marseillaise as the Freedonian national anthem, for example. After he gets out of the hospital and gets a pulse back in his pants, I think Clinton is just the man for the Groucho role: with or without the greasepaint moustache, there’s no doubt he has the leer. And of course there’s no doubt we’d all go straight to war; in truth we’re at war already, it’s just that we’d be admitting that this is the case. — If we sign onto the program as early endorsers now, we may have a chance later to toss those all-important first tomatoes at Margaret Dumont. Give it some thought.


Later.


.............


(10/10/04:)

Odds and ends:

I’m glad to see IBM finally put the Japanese back in second place where they belong. But why did it take so long?

Mattick has an interesting article in the current issue of the Scientific American on his ideas about genes that code for RNA and their role in developmental biology.

A note on VH-1: it can’t be an accident that though I frequently flip past the channel during the appropriate programming hours, I always seem to see the same video over and over again. Do they even change it once a month?

You may have noted that the Times magazine Sunday before last was unusually good. I particularly liked the piece on Wong Kar Wai, the Godard of Hong Kong; probably the greatest director in the world that no one’s ever heard of.

I hadn’t looked forward particularly to Dylan’s autobiography, but the critical notice in the Times won me over with a single quote: Dylan on the burden of his own past: “It was like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat.” — Obviously he hasn’t lost his way with words. I’ll have to check this out.

Having long since concluded that what is actually said and done in the presidential campaign is almost wholly inconsequential, that all that matters is how everything is spun, and that I cannot abide the principal spinmeisters, I’ve done my best to ignore the debates and their fallout; though I did note that Der Spiegel thought Kerry killed Dubya, and said the Wall Street Journal was so embarrassed by Bush’s ineptitude that they didn’t even try to spin the result on the editorial page afterward. — Unfortunately [though personally I’d be perfectly happy to annex Berlin and get rid of Oklahoma] the Germans don’t get to vote. — Was Bush really wearing a wire? this ought to be grounds for impeachment. [As if.]

Of course, surfing for images the other night I stumbled across a right-wing blog and discovered that Kerry plans to transfer control of the American military to the French. — Well, better them than the Texans.

Rumor has it Robert Rodriguez had hired the famous fantasy artist Frank Frazetta [creator of all the old Burroughs paperback covers, and, I might add, all my computer desktop wallpapers] as production designer on A Princess of Mars before his dispute with the Director’s Guild led to his removal from the project. This was an interesting idea. — Apparently Kerry Conran has succeeded Rodriguez. This may be an even more interesting idea.

In re The Motorcycle Diaries [which is, as you may have gathered, remarkable]: a little Peruvian kid guiding young Che Guevara and his travelling companion around an ancient city tells them the natives distinguish the architectural achievements of their own ancestors from those of the Spanish as the products, respectively, of the Incas and the Inca-pables; I guess there are translatable puns. — I’m still trying to figure out why Che is suddenly hot again; is it just that, unlike the other gods of the New Left, he really was a great man?

I still haven’t seen Shaun of the Dead, but it amused me to see that the rave reviews inserted pro forma into the newspaper advertisements came not from the usual obscure critics [“Unparalleled brilliance!” exclaims L. Garbonzo of the Boulder Litterboxliner] but from Stephen King, Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, and George Romero himself. An interesting precedent.

Still hasn’t arrived: I [heart] Huckabee’s. — David Russell has won my loyalty in perpetuity with Spanking the Monkey and Three Kings, even if he is crazy. — Naomi Watts trivia: her father was tour manager for Pink Floyd.

Never one to fail to follow a trend many moons after everyone else has picked up on it, I downloaded a copy of Mozilla Firefox the other night and discovered to my astonishment that it actually works: Netscape Navigator 1.0 at long last. — Of course, nothing seems to run Java applets properly any more, except perhaps Internet Explorer; what a revolting development this is.

Jon Stewart let the news footage of Allen’s crew toasting one another with champagne to celebrate their winning the X Prize run for a moment without comment, and then, to my immense amusement, started hoarsely screaming “The nerds have won the pennant! The nerds have won the pennant!” Well: I guess they have. — In the early Sixties it took the wizards of the Skunk Works only a couple of years starting from scratch to design and build the SR-71 Blackbird; is this kind of thing still possible, or is the heroic age of aeronautical engineering over? The romantic in me would like to think that it is not. We’ll see.

On a whim I dug my copy of Ratner’s Star out of storage and read it again. DeLillo certainly had his moments. — “I draw a blank.” — “What kind of ignorance am I dealing with here?” — “How many kinds are there?” — “As many as the mind of man can catalogue. Don’t they teach ignorance in school anymore?” — Well, now that you mention it —

Later.


...........


(10/17/04:)

Well, the way the Bush insider scornfully dismisses the objections of the elitist coastal crowd as irrelevant since “reality-based” seals the argument for me; but obviously not for everyone else — simply because, for them, it isn’t an argument at all, and never was. Clearly the liberal delusions about the electoral process representing a rational choice by the enfranchised masses based on a judicious evaluation of positions and facts mean nothing in this modern age of asymmetric ideological warfare. What a fucking nightmare. Not only have we seen the end of the Age of Revolution in our time [1789 — 1989, requiescat in pace], but also, apparently, the end of the Enlightenment. — Isn’t this just about the time that the battletested noses of the Jewish people start to twitch, and they renew their passports and put their money into gold? — Let me know which way you’re all going. I’m going with you, and I promise to convert.


Don Imus on the silence of Fox News on the O’Reilly scandal: “‘We report, you decide’ — [derisive laughter] — Eat me!”


Later.


;;;;;;;;


(10/21/04:)


Though I left off my childhood loathing of the Yankees roughly around the time they acquired Reggie Jackson, I’ll have to admit I took heart from their meltdown, which I chose to read as an augury of the chances of a certain Massachusetts senator whose fortunes we’ve been following of late.

As it happened I watched the game while reading Wittgenstein’s Poker, which finally I found in a usedbookstore. This was, as per all reports [e.g., yours], very entertaining, though it’s difficult not to distill from it the moral that a violent argument over whether or not there was any real point to all the other violent arguments the two of them had made a career of is pretty much what you’d expect from a couple of guys who, the authors’ diligent research confirms, essentially never got laid. — It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much Rashomon-like ambiguity in the story. The only one who flatly denied that anything like the incident took place was Geach, who was [a] a witless dick and [b] like the rest of Wittgenstein’s disciples, autobrainwashed on the subject of the Master. I imagine Wittgenstein did brandish the poker, though Popper probably didn’t get off his snappy comeback until after he’d left. That would have been a bit too cute; after all he wasn’t Jon Stewart.

The favorable portent of the success of the Bosox notwithstanding, I covered my ass while shopping and, true to my word, picked up the first of the three volumes of the Penguin edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. [“It was at Rome,” said Gibbon, “on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.” For some reason I was a few days off.] — A classic specimen of English prose, a monument to the Age of Reason; and, of course, where we’re going, an invaluable guide.

Later.


.........


(11/3/04:)


[Cocktail enquires why he’s still in the country:]


In truth, I am somewhat at a loss to explain my mental state; have I ever been this dismayed by the result of an election? if not, why not? After all, I survived the reign of Nixon and the ascension of Reagan, which seemed, at the time, to be nearly as bad as this. Maybe it’s just the unhealthy zeal with which I’ve scanned the periodicals in the post-9/11 era, which means that I have an alarmingly detailed picture of what the administration intends to accomplish with a second term: packing the courts with right-wing zealots [the guy who wrote the brief defending the use of torture and claiming the irrelevance of the Geneva conventions has already been promoted to the federal bench; I shudder to think who they have lined up to succeed Rehnquist], socalled “tort reform” which will, as a practical matter, ensure that nobody without money will have any legal recourse against anybody with money ever again, a fundamental realignment of the tax codes in favor of people who have money already at the expense of people who still have to make it, a new-and-improved version of the Orwellian Patriot Act which will, among other things, make it possible for the government to revoke somebody’s citizenship and deport him without providing any explanation, prodding the FCC once again to allow media consolidation on an unprecedented scale, inevitably favoring the interests of the likes of Rupert Murdoch and ensuring that no political opinion to the left of Tom Delay will ever be heard on the airwaves again, and the systematic dismantling not simply of the New Deal of the second Roosevelt, but the environmental and antitrust legislation of the first — and, in fact, after minor obstacles like the separation of Church and State have been removed, the undoing of the principal accomplishments of the Enlightenment and the European Age of Reason. At this point there’s nothing to stand between the Rove cabal and the accomplishment of their ultimate purpose, which seems to be something like putting all the wealth of the nation in the hands of a few thousand people and trusting the church to keep the rest in their place — i.e., turning America into Saudi Arabia. The fact that they’re so fucking inept in the conduct of the “war on terror” only makes it all more likely: it is appalling how easy our trusted “allies” the Pakistanis have made it for loonies, e.g. their own intelligence services and their friends in Al Qaeda, to pass out nuclear weapons, and really it only seems like a matter of time before some Islamic nutcase drawing on a Saudi bank account drives a van into the middle of Manhattan and sets one off; which will mean martial law in perpetuity and the permanent end of civil liberties in this country. Meanwhile even though the whistle was blown on Poindexter and “Total Information Awareness” the intelligence services are busily compiling the databases that will provide them with the list of persons to be detained in event of national emergency; and it would, of course, be disgraceful not to find one’s name upon it. — Of course none of this matters to the electorate, of whom I think at this point more than half don’t know that the Earth goes round the Sun, let alone why their paychecks are shrinking or who bombed the World Trade Center.

Generally I think of Australia. Somebody suggested Iceland. Europe isn’t a bad idea still; they have universal health insurance and privacy rights. Canada is an obvious first stop. For that matter there may be as many as a million expatriate Americans living in Baja now; of course that means property values are going up. — On the other hand maybe the most sensible thing is just to move to California and start agitating for the state to secede from the union. — But rest assured I’m thinking about it.

Great comeback by the Bosox though. If only some of it had rubbed off on Kerry.

Later.


...........


(11/5/04:)


[Replying to a series of points:]


I want to say “No thanks, I’m trying to quit,” but I guess I have to respond. My first, and most fundamental resolve, is to quit reading the paper and watching anything on the television except movies [I dug out my old tape with Linklater’s Slacker and Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Hunters on it this evening; what a great double feature]; the principle is that of minimizing stress, because there’s no use worrying about what you can’t affect. If I had a lot of money I might think differently, but then again even George Soros didn’t have enough. So maybe the best idea after all is just to emulate the example of the ostrich [the patron saint of the administration’s policy on climate change] and stick my head back into the sand; where conceivably I may yet find enough quiet to think about things I can actually solve, like the inverse problem for the lambda calculus. It’s not like I haven’t made an adequate number of dire predictions of the imminent decline of the empire. If nobody else gets it, fuck it, I give up.

Unresolved questions: did anyone verify the results given by the Diebold voting machines by comparing them against exit polls? I heard some independent groups were going to do this, but [see above] I’m loathe to investigate. — Did Sinclair really broadcast the antiKerry documentary all over Ohio on the eve of the election? just one more argument in Rove’s mind, I’m sure, for pushing media consolidation through the FCC in the second term.

In re the rest:

[a] Ordinarily I’d agree that eventually the joy ride ends and they run the country off a cliff and an enraged electorate rises from its stupor to throw the bums out. But the war already blew up in their faces and they’re getting away with it. One would think that the strategy of covering up when you get caught out in a lie by telling a bigger lie can’t succeed forever [Lincoln, you can fool some of the people all of the time, etc.; compare also the Gambler’s Ruin], but it hasn’t happened yet. Anyway they don’t have to fool you, or me, or Maureen Dowd, or Krugman, or the editors of the New Yorker, or anybody with a scientific education, or anybody who can actually remember anything that happened more than fifteen minutes ago [which excludes all television journalists save Jon Stewart]; and they certainly haven’t. All they have to do is fool a majority of the people in a majority of the electoral college, which seems to be pretty easy for them. [I can’t take seriously the chorus of pundits who are busily explaining that the problem is that the Democrats are out of touch with the majority; the problem is that the majority are now out of touch with reality.] — When the economy blows up, which in the laissez-faire state of nature they’re hellbent to restore happens every twenty years like clockwork, maybe then the electorate turns on them. But in the brave new world of global interdependence what does that mean? If manufacturing leaves and capital leaves and foreign-born talent starts going somewhere else [cf. the abdication of Steve Chen reported this week in the Times], does the country recover? And isn’t that just what the religious right really wants, anyway? [If a return to the nineteenth century requires a return to a nineteenth century standard of living, well then, so be it.]

Probably if the Democrats still controlled Congress Bush would be long gone: the really amazing thing about the record of the administration, particularly after what happened to Clinton, is how many lengthy and embarrassing investigations have not taken place: Halliburton, the Cheney energy consultations, the prewar intelligence fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the misconduct of the war, Delay’s manipulation of the Texas redistricting, Ashcroft’s excesses, etc. Even the 9/11 panel let them off easily because it was constrained to be “nonpartisan” — a word which, thanks to the disadvantages imposed by intellectual honesty, means something to the Democrats and absolutely nothing to the Republicans. Unfortunately at this point I can’t envision the circumstances under which the blue team could regain the majority; but if they did, for instance, win in 2006, I’d be a fervent advocate of impeachment proceedings.

[b] When they put us in the camp, it won’t just be for a month; just ask those people who are still trying to find out what happened to their relatives in Chile and Argentina. Patriot Two will allow the government to revoke your citizenship and deport or detain you without explanation; Poindexter got canned, but there’s still an army of happy little trolls hard at work datamining to put together the master list of the Usual Suspects to be rounded up in event of national emergency, and as I’ve said previously, it would be a disgrace not to be on it. — The delicate psychological question is, are they really looking forward to that next catastrophe, the nuke in Manhattan, say, that will allow them to get away with this? As usual I wonder what Nietzsche would say. I think the answer is: consciously, no; unconsciously, yes. [Was there not a suspect relish in the way that Cheney pronounced the warning “We’re going to get hit again?”]

[c] The Democrats can’t broaden their base unless they relearn the art of lying with a straight face on the principle that the end justifies the means. This is not made easier when, e.g., even the intelligentsia all go along with the Republican accusation that Kerry is dithering whenever he makes some calculated statement on this basis; never mind that he, unlike the opposition, is trying to keep the pernicious tendency on a short leash. Bush of course meanwhile can say whatever he likes, because the presumption is he doesn’t have to be consistent. — More proof that the right wing braintrust have cracked the code of the political media, and can manipulate them at will. — The pundits are all still sadly shaking their heads over the loss of credibility at CBS after the National Guard memo turned out to be a [qualified] forgery; meanwhile Fox trumpeted the unsubstantiated claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth 24/7 without the slightest pretense of objectivity. If you don’t believe in facts, I guess, you’re under no obligation to check them.

Of course how you lie about the main point at issue, i.e., taxes, is beyond me. Rhetoric must promise something for nothing. In principle this means lower taxes and more government services; in practice [i.e., what “lower taxes” means once you’ve broken the code] what suffices is a positive net balance of payments in your own congressional district — the amount of money flowing in from the government has to exceed the amount flowing out. If you examine the data the blue country loses heavily in this regard [California most of all] and the red country wins. [This means the blue and red countries are respectively the red and black countries, I guess.] — Gingrich’s district before he retired received more money per capita than any other; it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Delay’s now held this distinction. This proves that if you’re completely irresponsible you can not only campaign for but legislate lower taxes and still insist on enough pork to keep your district in the black.

[d] The recession will have to take the Chinese down with it. Otherwise they’ll take up the slack. — Anyway the Saudis have been carefully calibrating their production for decades now to ensure that prices stay high enough to keep them in gold-plated bathroom fixtures and low enough that alternatives aren’t seriously explored. — Their economy, at least, is fairly easily managed.

[e] If this goes on another year or two, recruitment will tank and the Army’s morale will suffer irreversible damage. — Meanwhile the Al Qaeda recruiters are consciously promoting the Iraqi jihad as the war that will topple the American empire, just as Afghanistan toppled the Soviets. Indeed something like this could actually happen. — It’s amazing the extent to which the argument is still about Vietnam. The Bush/Cheney axis still devoutly believe that was a noble episode in the crusade against Communism, lost only because of a stab in the back. [The Pentagon of course knows better.] The somewhat deeper observation that pseudosuccess in Vietnam would only have encouraged a series of colonial wars which would have bankrupted us just as Afghanistan bankrupted the Soviets somehow lies beyond their grasp; though fortunately it was clear enough to Bill Casey. Note that every time they’ve regained power since the Seventies they’ve started plotting a new version of Vietnam to prove that they were right; it’s now conveniently forgotten that the principal concern of the Reagan braintrust was trying to find some excuse to go to war in Central America — “this time we do it right” — and then, hopefully, invade Cuba and get even for the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. Fortunately they got no farther than Grenada and Panama. — Has anyone ever pointed out to these morons that the colony in Cuba was an enormous financial burden on the Soviets, and that if they’d been suckered into picking up a few more such dependents they would have gone broke that much faster?

[Note on the Iraqi insurrection: this, too, as it turns out, is being funded by the Saudis. It’s certainly interesting that an irresponsible left-wing propagandist like Michael Moore keeps coming up with the right answers. Isn’t it.]

[f] Feyerabend under pressure from the administration at Berkeley at last gave in and gave examinations in his class in the philosophy of science; one question was “How did Thomas Aquinas explain the coldness of the devil’s penis?” When Arafat finally gets his dick out of the posterior of Palestine, someone can write a treatise about it. In Latin, of course.

[g] No sex except for procreation is the traditional position of the Catholic church, and thus, of course, the only consistent one, if you buy any of these arguments at all. We really ought to try to make clear which party is for, and which against, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Why do I now constantly have the feeling that somebody is trying to screen Pleasantville by running the film backwards?

Religion really is employed as the opiate of the masses, and the powerbrokers always regard themselves as being exempt from the rules. Thus the behavior of the Saudi princes off the reservation, O’Reilly, etc. — Was it widely remarked that when Gingrich had an extramarital affair he insisted on oral gratification rather than intercourse so that he, just like Clinton later, could maintain deniability?


As for the correlation of the liberal vote with population centers, this is natural. Greater population density entails more interaction with other people, which necessitates mutual tolerance, and a greater need for public infrastructure and government services. Urban dwellers understand automatically that they have to pay more for the benefits they derive from city life; they also understand that the higher incomes they can earn in consequence more than make up for it. — This is also a fundamental reason for the difference in perspective between Europe and America, and the reason why mass transit is more efficient and cost-effective in Europe, etc. — Also professional talent is attracted to population centers, and the intellectual vote is still overwhelmingly liberal. As a scientist discussing the antiscientific bias of the administration pointed out in the pages of the New York Review of Books the other day, the only political debate among his peers [biotech millionaires and all] had to do with whether a vote for Nader was completely wasted. — Everyone understands this, of course, but somehow it has become fashionable to claim that the traditional right-wing antipathy for intellectuals is justified because this better represents the spirit of the people. This is ridiculous. The country is rich because of its intellectuals, not in spite of them; and they aren’t in Kansas. Above and beyond my earlier remarks about the correlation of American Nobel laureates with the 2000 election map, I noted a couple of months ago, for instance, that of the two hundred or so Guggenheim fellows listed in a congratulatory full-page ad in the Times, ten or fifteen were foreigners, perhaps ten [if you didn’t count the four from Boulder and the five from Austin, residents of blue counties] came from the red states, and about a hundred and eighty came from the urban centers of the blue states. This is not an accident.


The real problem with taxes, which urban dwellers seem somehow to understand but no one else will try to, is that they aren’t linear as a function of the population; there’s an additional term of some kind, perhaps quadratic [well; probably a series of higher-order corrections], that represents the correction for higher population density. It’s obvious when you think about it that the more people there are, particularly the more people there are in a finite amount of space, and the more things that they do, the more complicated life and human interaction become and the more complicated are the requirements of even minimal regulation. But of course politicians don’t think about it.


Morons may dominate the electorate, but one cannot envy Bush’s superior ability to connect with them. That way lies madness. There has to be a better way.


Suggestion for the Democrats: pull out an old copy of the Contract with America and, with all the cynicism with which it was originally proposed, endorse it. — Two useful sources of embarrassment: the balanced budget; term limits. The point of the latter, of course, was to remove the advantages of incumbency, which then favored the Democrats; turn about is fair play.

Another suggestion: if the evangelicals really do acquire a majority, it’s all over. Maybe the most appalling realization of the last couple of months is that I’ve started to identify with the situation of the Iraqi Kurds, who face absorption into an Islamic state when the Shiite majority assumes power. An argument for federalism there and, interestingly enough, here: why not embrace the principle of decentralization? repeal the national income tax, and restore the autonomy of the states. Then we can all move to California or New York, and ignore Washington.

[Variant: start a movement to annex Canada into the United States. Right away we add ten more blue states.]


Unresolved question: who really has the majority? if you add up the Democratic votes for Congressional candidates and the Republican votes. — Note the Gerrymandering Theorem: the maximum proportion of a Congressional delegation you can obtain by redistricting with x percent of the voters is 2x percent of the delegation [proof obvious.][The interesting question is actually the topological one, whether you can accomplish this while maintaining the requirement that districts be connected regions.] How relevant is this to the present situation? I don’t know about Texas, but this seems a useful way of looking at, e.g., Pennsylvania.


It’s maddening how much this catastrophe has been aided by blind luck: the bad luck of 9/11 that elevated Bush from an automatic lame duck to “a war president”, the plane crash that killed Wellstone at a critical juncture and handed the Senate back to the Republicans, the extended hurricane season that kept Kerry out of Florida while Bush was handing out disaster-relief checks, etc. Of course every catastrophe is aided by luck.


The great irony is that in this age when every ambitious young lad can aspire to the stature of Doctor No, and a mad scientist really can destroy the world, it isn’t a physicist or a biologist that does it, but Karl Rove. Ah, the horror.



Not familiar with Joy Division; apparently my loss. Really fond of Alban Berg, weird but true [check out his operas]; Schoenberg is too formal. Intrigued by Sirius, but not yet a subscriber. Also by the notices for the Dylan memoir, but I haven’t read it. The Prisoner [assuming you mean the Kafkaesque Sixties spy drama] I still remember as the best serial I ever saw on television. I spent the weekend before the election reading Gibbon sporadically and watching a Marx Brothers marathon which included everything but A Night in Casablanca [no loss, as I recall]; I even have Copacabana on an old tape, as it turns out. As a result I keep drawing parallels between Bush and the Emperor Constantine, and I can’t get “Lydia the Tatooed Lady” out of my head. No wonder my vote doesn’t count.

Well, like all New Year’s resolutions, this renunciation of politics probably won’t last. But I’m going to try, damn it. You have to give me that.

Later.


.......


(11/12/04:)


[In reply to more political remarks:]


Ah, the agony. I tried to ignore the body of this for a couple of days, but the temptation is irresistible. — Another relapse. — Well, it isn’t that bad. I’ve kicked harder drugs than politics. I’ll quit again tomorrow. Honest.

In re Bush’s recovering-sinner pose: this really disturbs me. The problem with it is illustrated by an old bumper sticker another one of my sisters [more than one went through this phase, alas] used to have on her car: Christians aren’t perfect; just saved. I was forcibly reminded of this reading the description in the Times magazine of Karen Hughes’ reaction to a reporter’s cross-examination on some incident or other, some political occasion on which Bush used unChristian language off-mike: though the reporter and Hughes had both been present and heard what Bush had said, and though the reporter wasn’t making a particular issue of it, she kept insisting that Bush had not sworn at anybody, because he didn’t swear. Somehow in this connection it emerged that people like the reporter simply didn’t [in Hughes’ estimation] understand the fundamental point that it didn’t matter, really, what people like Hughes and Bush actually did, because the only important thing was that they were saved and they would be forgiven. — So therefore, I guess, Bush could swear at somebody and it didn’t really happen [so Hughes could lie about it], because the Lord would forgive him [her] his [her] minor lapses. — Or major lapses. — Or anything, actually. — The difficulty here is a sort of equivalent, in the ethical domain, of the reductio ad absurdum of teleological explanation: whatever happens, happens because God wills it. This eliminates entirely the intellectual obligation of attempting an explanation for anything. Similarly, if whatever you do is okay because you’re one of God’s elect and even if you make a mistake the Lord will forgive you, this eliminates personal responsibility and you can do anything you like. — So one of the really good ideas of Christianity, the idea that if you sincerely repent your sins you can be forgiven, is perverted into an eternally-renewable get-out-of-jail-free card. — Note that this does not work in the context of, say, Catholicism, which stresses the use of reason; Aquinas, e.g., believed before everything else that God could only will that which was rational. But in the context of irrationalist fundamentalism it works just fine: what God wills is entirely arbitrary, and whether you can keep track of His whims from one moment to the next is irrelevant [because impossible]; all that matters is a willingness to follow orders. All that tiresome analysis of right and wrong and cause and effect and action and responsibility is eliminated, and you’re left with the comforting realization that whatever you do is all right, because you do it, and you havve been saved. How wonderfully convenient.

[Curiously enough I’ve observed a similar incapacity to recognize personal responsibility in Boulder Buddhists, but I don’t know or care what theological arguments they think they’re relying on or whether they’re peculiar to the products of the Naropa Institute.]

In re issues: obviously they’re overrated. The intelligentsia and the press [when they’re taking themselves seriously] pretend to make a great deal of them, as if the attention span of the electorate were really equal to a rigorous debate, but in the age of celebrity journalism and the fifteen-second sound bite and the running joke on VH-1 that even what happened last week might as well be ancient history, who are we trying to kid.

Odd you should mention Davy Crockett. It dates me almost exactly to confess that he was one of the first and greatest of my heroes. This may be why I never wanted to be a cowboy, though I did at one point want to be the Deerslayer. — On the other hand, mostly I wanted to be Flash Gordon.

As for religion in politics, invariably what is said about this is pernicious bullshit. I don’t recall what I thought of the Berrigans [except that they didn’t fit the traditional authoritarian Catholic template very well, which probably seemed like a positive development], but it didn’t begin with them and at this rate it will only end in catastrophe. Politics is about power; nobody expresses an opinion in public unless he wants to influence, and usually control, what other people think and do. The American mullahs differ in their aims not in the slightest from the Iranian mullahs; they just haven’t been as successful. Yet. — The danger is that people are always looking for a reason to cut one anothers’ throats. In general they can’t find an adequate excuse in differences of opinion about, e.g., the role of the Fed in setting interest rates, but religious issues are another matter entirely; after all, God is telling you to do it. — The lack of historical perspective here is frightening. In Europe right up until the year 1700 it was considered completely normal for people to slaughter one another over the issue [cf. Swift on which end of the egg] of whether or not the body and blood of Christ were physically present in the sacrament of the Eucharist; as a matter of course people were drawn and quartered and their heads put up on pikes, and burned at the stake for heresy [we just passed, nota bene, the four hundredth anniversary of Bruno’s incineration for maintaining the plurality of worlds.] After that, and particularly after the spectacle of the jihadlike English Civil War, which provoked the interest of some intellectual heavyweights, e.g. Locke, in political philosophy, reasonable people came to the conclusion that enough of this was long since enough, and made it the first principle of the Enlightenment that theology and politics had to be separated; roughly for the same reason that it isn’t a good idea to mix nitric acid and glycerine. The separation of Church and State is a corollary of this realization, and that’s why it’s codified in the Constitution. — Well, all that is over now, and God help us. — In particular I have no idea how we’re supposed to be imparting an understanding of these principles to the Islamists, who are uncivilized in exact proportion to their failure to understand them, when the American mullahs are hellbent to turn the clock back to the Dark Ages.

In re the red/blue = rural/urban divide, this is a long and interesting historical essay. I know of one lengthy study of the antecedents of film noir that traces the roots of the myth of The Wicked City back to the beginning of the nineteenth century; and I’m sure you could continue to Bunyan, or Maimonides, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, if you were sufficiently persistent. So far as I’m concerned the fundamental conflict is between all the things I value, i.e., reason, freedom, creative expression, mutual toleration, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and distributed parallelism, and the forces of irrational repression, fear, paranoia, and the Orwellian enforcement of the von Neumann bottleneck; not even Dionysian opposed to Apollonian, but Eros versus Thanatos. — The city is human possibility, and the advocates of repression fear that. Everything else is detail.

Current political realignments notwithstanding, I still think the demonization of “the liberal” is meant to connote not simply “urban sophisticate/degenerate” but also “Jew” [the quintessential alien], and intimates jihad. I don’t put a lot of stock in those Sunday Times put-it-in-perspective pieces that try to trace the roots of current events through what is apparently supposed to be a hermetically-isolated American history back through de Tocqueville to the Puritans, but the Red scares which followed both the World Wars, for instance, followed this pattern; and the specific episodes with which I’m familiar in depth, e.g. the Oppenheimer case and the Hollywood witch hunts, had very obvious antisemitic subtexts.

As for the electronic voting machines, at this point I’d be willing to give up this pretense of democracy and just let the damned machines choose. Of course then there’d be an argument about who gets to program them. But better that than this refusal to recognize that the electorate is being programmed, and who is doing it.

And the Marx Brothers reissue is being followed by a W.C. Fields boxed set. — I interpolated The Bank Dick and Never Give A Sucker An Even Break into my election marathon, and I must say my admiration for Fields has not lessened. — Give me an unrepentant drunk any time.

Later.


____________


Beau Brummels (9/23/04)


As an afterthought: doesn’t Chris Isaak channel some related spirit?

Really I know nothing about Chris Isaak, except that the Chinese bombshell Bai Ling used to be his girlfriend. This is, however, more than sufficient reason to be envious.

Bai Ling played the role of the evil mastermind’s principal henchman in Sky Captain. This allowed her to repeatedly kick Jude Law’s ass, which she seems to have enjoyed immensely.

The closest thing in look and feel to Sky Captain in Thirties scifi movies was actually William Cameron Menzies’ adaptation of Wells’ Things to Come. That had brilliant production design [Menzies was the production designer of record for, e.g., Gone With The Wind] but didn’t work very well as a movie, maybe because Wells himself [who understood nothing about the cinema and repeatedly published scathing denunciations of things like Metropolis] was determined to have it "done right" and had a lot of influence on the production.

The whole planet now knows that Spielberg is planning a remake of War of the Worlds, with Cruise in the lead and [should God fail to be merciful] sequels already anticipated. I don’t know what to think of this.

War of the Worlds was not, for some reason, adapted before the George Pal version, though there were a couple of intriguing near-misses: DeMille contemplated a silent-epic version in the Twenties, and Hitchcock [?!!] apparently approached Wells about the rights sometime in the Thirties. But somehow these deals fell through.

The thing that piqued my interest about Waugh’s Vile Bodies, incidentally, was a reviewer’s throwaway mention that one of the numerous parties that comprise the narrative action was held on a Zeppelin; a device DeMille seems to have immediately stolen for Madame Satan [1930]. Gad, what a concept.

And, speaking of the wreck of the Hindenburg, how about this Kerry campaign? I’m rapidly reapproaching my natural equilibrium point with regard to politics, i.e., an attitude of absolute alienation and total disgust.

But no doubt I’ll be able to shrug this off in time. — Laugh laugh, I thought I’d die. It seems so funny to me.

Demonstrating the great oneness of all things, or just that my mind is running in circles.


____________


The way up is the way down (7/4/04)


A note on the direction of time [ignoring global considerations]: you think of the reason it goes one way and not the other [properly: not both ways at once; after that the distinction between past and future is just a matter of labels] is just the reason that, once Humpty Dumpty’s had a great fall, you can’t put him back together again. But isn’t this just a question of computational difficulty? It’s easy to break Humpty into pieces, but it’s a difficult combinatorial puzzle to figure out how to fit all the chunks of eggshell back into one smooth surface. In fact you could look at the decomposition as the verification of a proof that Humpty consists of that set of pieces, and the reconstruction as the process of finding that proof. The latter, obviously, should be harder. So this is the connection of the direction of time to P/NP.


____________


Golden protest (7/2/04))


How many toads must a man choke down
Before you acknowledge his pain?
How many times must the toilet bowl swirl
Before it’s all flushed down the drain?
Yes, and
How many Bushes must we re-elect
Before we find one with a brain?
The answer, my friend
Is blowing out your ass
The answer is blowing out your ass.

How many beers must fraternities swill
Before all the breweries run dry?
How many dicks must sororities suck
Before they’ve unzipped every fly?
Yes, and
How many morons must inhabit the White House
Before we’ve gone too far awry?
The answer, my friend
Is blowing out your ass
The answer is blowing out your ass.


How many times must a man whack his pud
Before it falls off in his hand?
How many times must a man wipe his ass
Before he’s scraped clean by the sand?
Yes, and
How many times must a man curse the fates
Before he accedes to their plan?
The answer, my friend
Is blowing out your ass
The answer is blowing out your ass.


____________


Here comes everybody (5/24/04)


Van Helsing. [Stephen Sommers, 2004.]

Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. Lightning meets the castle battlements. The Mob meets The Burning Windmill. The laboratory of the alchemist meets the ghost of Kenneth Strickfaden. Dracula meets a gaggle of evil goggled munchkins. The freelance ogre-hunter meets the Hunchback of Notre Dame meets the old sawing-through-the-floor routine from Horsefeathers. Heckel and Jeckel meet Mister Hyde. Universal meets Warner Brothers: cartoon Gothic. Leslie Nielsen meets the Ayatollah. [No, that was The Naked Gun.] The Wandering Jew meets the international Jesuit conspiracy. Spy movie exposition meets the magic lantern meets the metaphorical interpretation of photography as vampirism. Bond meets Q [meets R, meets S, ... .] The crossbow meets the Gatling gun. The Foundling whose Strange Ring must provide some Clue to the Mystery of his Origins meets the Comedy Sidekick. The fog machine meets an inexhaustible supply of full moons. Transylvania meets the Hindu Kush. A long leather jacket and a floppy hat meets a really severe corset and a pair of boots with very impractical heels. Vampires meet harpie bombshells whose clothing keeps falling off. Murnau’s shadows meet the entire cobweb production of a small Asian country. The invasion of the body snatchers meets Alien meets a plague of little bat monsters. The left hand of God meets the right hand of the torturer; the human storage battery meets Count Rugen’s Machine. The metaphor of ripping his skin off to reveal the beast within meets [nay, collides with] the realization that all this bullshit psychology might as well be a glimpse into the tormented soul of Bugs Bunny. Stagecoach meets Raiders of the Lost Ark. Through the Looking Glass [meets The Matrix meets Stargate meets...] meets Dracula meets the Wolfman. Frankenstein meets the Tin Woodman meets the Scarecrow meets the Wicked Witch of the West meets the realization that this isn’t Kansas meets the magic red shoes meets the yellow brick road meets an inexhaustible flow of cliche. The Tomb Raider version of Angkor Wat meets the lair of the white worm. Garlic meets breath mints. Absinthe meets the pocket flask. Revolver meets silver bullets. Arrows meet holy water. The Magic Syringe meets the clock that takes forever to strike midnight. The Rock meets Triple H for the Transylvanian title. Kevin O’Connor meets the role he was born to play. And, guess what, only the monk gets laid.

Questions: why didn’t Sommers just turn this into a musical? Hugh Jackman can sing and dance. — Is this ghost-riders-in-the-sky bullshit the dumbest ending since The Birth of a Nation? — Will Sommers give up finally on trying to top that rotting-Mummy effect? the monster is pretty cool, but the effort that it cost him is all too obvious. — The last time you plunged off the edge of a cliff into a bottomless abyss, did you keep bouncing off cables conveniently strung all over the place on your way down? this isn’t even a Tarzan movie, it’s a fucking Roadrunner cartoon, you keep expecting people to step out over empty space, hang in the air for a moment while they do a doubletake and look at the camera, and then get sucked out of the bottom of the frame with an audible whoosh. — Isn’t it interesting how a vampire’s image doesn’t show in the mirror? it suggests that a soulless creature which subsists parasitically on the vital forces of the living has no real identity. — Not unlike the vacant scenario of this soulless movie, come to think of it. But, forget it, enough is enough.


____________


Rock around the clock (10/24/03)


The Rundown. [Peter Berg, 2003. Written by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt.]

There’s an awkward moment, shortly after the requisite Dramatic Hush [“It’s quiet...it’s too quiet...”] falls over the South American jungle hamlet ruled by evil imperialist mineowner and Mad Pharaoh of the Amazon Christopher Walken, as his mercenaries assume their positions, cock their AKs, and wait for the good guys, The Rock and Seann William Scott, to make their entrance and commence the apocalyptic shootout that will free Revolutionary Barmaid [no really] Rosario Dawson from their clutches, liberate the indigenous tribes Walken has enslaved and forced to labor in the gigantic terraced entrance he has opened into the pit of Hell, and retrieve a priceless Spielbergian archaeological artifact stolen by Walken’s henchmen, in order that its powers may be turned to good — when, in what is apparently meant to be comic/ironic anticlimax, instead of the expected avenging gunslingers, Mad-Hatter Scottish bush pilot Ewan Bremner suddenly materializes out of nowhere and is discovered strolling down the main drag into the center of town, playing the bagpipes. It is precisely here that you realize that Peter Berg cannot resist putting quotation marks around his final action sequence, because he simply does not realize that he isn’t Quentin Tarantino; and that somebody is going to have to explain it to him — somebody much more patient than I am, who will be willing to repeat everything loudly and slowly, probably a great many times, until the message finally is absorbed. And then, if he still doesn’t get it, bust a cap in his ass.

Until this relapse reminded me of his prior sins I had nearly been willing to forgive the author of the abominable [but, admittedly, appropriately-named] Very Bad Things, since until he veered off the rails he hadn’t been doing a bad job of telling a rather entertaining story: The Rock, represented here as a reluctant but very professional badass [named, improbably, “Beck”] who has been impressed into the service of an unsavory mobster, having established his bona fides by walking into a nightclub and stomping a roomful of professional football players to collect a gambling debt from a dilatory quarterback with a weakness for speculation, returns to the office to beg his employer for dismissal from his obligations, only to hear the old familiar “just one more job” speech from Mister Big — who, it develops, wants our hero to fly into the wilds of the Amazon to retrieve his ne’er-do-well son Scott, a Stanford dropout who has, it seems, wandered off to look for lost cities in the jungle just when he is needed to provide a human sacrifice, or something. After running this errand, perhaps, The Rock will be permitted to retire from this stressful and essentially unproductive career as collections samurai and allowed to pursue his heart’s desire, which is to open a restaurant [“small, no more than ten or fifteen tables”], and do what he really wants to do, i.e., cook.

Sighing mightily, our hero acquiesces, and launches himself into the heart of darkness [not actually Brazil but Hawaii: the producers considered shooting on location but backed off after their scouting expedition was waylaid by real bandits][ah, everyone’s a critic], where in quick succession he meets the principals, establishes that all-important action-flick-buddy love/hate relationship with Scott [Ms. Dawson, naturally, serves as apex of the triangle, not that there’s much room for romance in this scenario], is confronted with the all-important motivational conflict between professional necessity and the realization that if Scott [doing a fairly amusing Stifler interpretation of Indiana Jones] is allowed to dig up the lost treasure he has finally located it will bankroll the oppressed masses in their righteous uprising against Walken, sails through the air in a Jeep, rolls down a mountainside, dives [of course] over a waterfall, beats up all the bad guys in a mining-town bar and all the good guys in a jungle clearing, and hangs ensnared upside down from a tree while an enraged monkey tries to hump his face.

There are some unusually inept quotes from Spielberg [the collapsing-room treasure-vault scene in particular was very poorly designed], an overuse of shakycam closeups in the fight scenes, a rather overextended moment of truth when the Rock has to, as it were, reach for his spinach in the final shootout, and a lot of gratuitous cutaways to Walken mugging for the camera when the director ran out of other ideas, but the fights are nicely choreographed [the Tarzan-homage rope-swinging sequence in particular], and, though I am very reluctant to refer to the apparent compatibility of the two principals as “chemistry”, they do work well together, and it’s difficult to resist the temptation to speculate what premise might serve as basis for a sequel.

Mainly, however, I carry away the memory of a charming moment when The Rock and the rebel leader, having pummeled one another into mutual respect, argue through a translator whether Ali could have beaten Tyson. The rebel is skeptical, but The Rock successfully presses the affirmative case, and the dispute ends in an amicable chorus of “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” — apparently the only English phrase known in this corner of the globe. This is entirely plausible, because the legend of Ali is indeed universal, and at the height of his career he was the most famous man in the world, known and idolized by far more people than idle poseurs like the Pope and the President of the United States. It is also, in a way, self-referential, as Brendan Fraser discovered when he arrived in Morocco to shoot The Mummy Returns and found out that none of the natives knew or cared who he was, but all of them wanted to meet The Rock: Mr. Johnson, thanks in no small part to his native gifts but mainly because of the globe-girdling reach of Vince McMahon’s media empire, is now internationally famous; and his continued rise to movie stardom is, accordingly, inevitable. Unlike other contemporary expressions of historical necessity like the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the market domination of Windows XP, this should prove entirely enjoyable to watch.


____________


Bang bang, her baby shot her down (10/18/03)


Least appetizing trailer of recent weeks: for the forthcoming remake/reinterpretation of The Alamo. In the unlikely event that I sit through this, you can bet that I’ll be rooting for the Mexicans.

Kill Bill. [Quentin Tarantino, 2003/2004.]

In a brief pause between the first and second acts of an epic three-act swordfight in a Tokyo restaurant [“The House of Blue Leaves”] which reduces a small army of masked and blackclad Yakuza neosamurai to a heap of twitching body parts in a midsized lake of very scarlet blood, Lucy Liu [holding the advantage on defense] and Uma Thurman [pressing the initiative on offense] smile coolly at one another and exchange a few pleasantries regarding Uma’s progress toward her objective of killing all of Lucy’s retainers and exacting a wildly melodramatic revenge upon Lucy herself; and conclude their dialogue by reciting in chorus the curious formula — passed off [in the screenplay] as a girlish ritual left over from their carefree days together as members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad — “Silly rabbit. Trix are for kids.”

This illustrates the glory and the misery of Quentin Tarantino.

The glory, because he has this marvelous absolute childlike possession of the furniture of his past, of every constituent brick of his mental architecture, every fragment of trivia, every banal scrap of melody and witless line of dialogue from every mindless television commercial, every twist of every plot of every lowbudget kung-fu chop-socky slugorama, every mannerism of every forgotten star who ever drained his pocket flask and lurched drunkenly across a drivein screen toward an assignation with a giant spider. Every ephemeral moment of every exhibition of every artifact of the wholly disposable culture that has grown like a mutant slime mold on the surface of our civilization, found its way onto film and into the medium of television, and been radiated outward into the empty vacuum of interstellar space, lives on in his imagination and can be instantly recalled; and no one, accordingly, can better resurrect the uncanny moments of unexpected beauty buried in this all-encompassing entropic dross that would otherwise be lost. His tastes are absolutely democratic, his vision thus catholic and universal.

The misery, because like Borges’ protagonist Funes, whose intelligence was erased by the terrifying perfection of his memory, he is not infrequently overwhelmed by the totality of his recollection, the completeness of his eidetic powers of recall, and cannot distinguish good from ill, significant from insignificant, the nugget of gold that is revealed when the shit is scraped from its surface from a lump of shit simpliciter. — He cannot subtract. — In consequence his mental space is not arranged with the elegance of the Japanese garden to which Uma and Lucy repair for their final showdown, but in a random jumble, like the cluttered attic of the compulsive packrat; and his allusions display a distressing tendency to veer away from any semblance of relevance to his narrative purpose into a kind of junkyard fetishism of the found object.

Both the glory and the misery of the celebrated auteur are on display in this opus, the first of two installments of a long [when completed probably about three and a half hours] but unfailingly fascinating exercise in a classical form, the saga of revenge, whose cinematic avatars have in recent years included John Boorman’s Point Blank and Alex Proyas’s The Crow.

The conventions of this genre require that the protagonist, like Monte Cristo, return from death [or a convincing simulacrum thereof] to exact a terrible serial vengeance upon the conspirators who murdered him, hunting them down and dispatching them one by one: an avenging angel, remote, pitiless, and implacable. [Uma to Viveca Fox: “It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack, not rationality.”]

And here indeed Ms. Thurman, [referred to as The Bride or Black Mamba, and not, for some reason known only to Tarantino, by the most authentic of the names on her fourteen passports, Beatrix Kiddo — in fact he insists on making a mystery of this and ostentatiously bleeping it out whenever someone utters it], represented as a member of a squad of assassins [Viveca Fox, Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah — essentially the “Fox Force Five” of Pulp Fiction, and you can practically hear the quotation marks] led by her mentor and lover the eponymous Bill [David Carradine], having left the reservation and attempted to marry and retire when she discovered herself pregnant [with, we learn in the opening shot, Bill’s own child], has been executed by her peers along with nine innocent bystanders in a grisly massacre on her wedding day in an El Paso chapel, hugely gravid in a white gown; and though left for dead has miraculously survived, though the bullet in her head has left her in a coma that has lasted either four or five years, depending on which version of the story you believe.

Awaking suddenly by apparent descent of the Holy Spirit [the sting of a mosquito: either an inversion of Emily Dickinson, or, more likely, a reference to some biker flick no one else has ever heard of][the return of the avenger from the dead is always miraculous, suggesting divine intervention, and he/she is often — though not here — accompanied by a familiar or companion who represents the rooting interest of the gods in his/her success — e.g. the Crow itself, or the mysterious stranger who advises Lee Marvin], she wastes the attendant who has been cheerfully auctioning her body off to fellow narcophiliacs while her spirit wandered the empyrean, confiscates his garishly-appointed pickup [’the words “PUSSY WAGON” written along the flat-bed hatch door in a pimpy font’, the author specified, and the production designers were happy to oblige him], and sets out to send her erstwhile colleagues sequentially to hell.

The action is designed in strict accordance with the conventions of the Asian exploitation cinema: its authenticity is ensured by the guidance of the ubiquitous Yuen Wo Ping and the participation of the legendary Sonny Chiba, who forges Uma’s sword and delivers the requisite martial-arts-master’s lecture on the Way of the Samurai with formidable gravitas; and it is accompanied by self-consciously systematic abuse of what Tarantino refers to as the “SHAW BROTHERS ZOOM” into huge Sergio Leone gunfighter’s-stare two-eyeball closeups [the shot which most directly illustrates the plausibility of the conjecture that the widescreen aspect ratio was unconsciously chosen to match the spacing of the human eyes], a lot of obnoxiously loud spaghetti-western theme music [which, to be candid, I could have lived without], and lots and lots of wildly exaggerated comic-book violence [not, it should be emphasized, as bad as has been represented: it was little noted that the much-lamented violence of Pulp Fiction all took place offscreen, and the same to a considerable extent holds true here; the most gruesome moments are not so much revealed by the camera as implied by artfully composed quick-cut montage] — which, in the case of the flashback detailing Ms. Liu’s rise to the Yakuza throne, morphs quite literally into an elegant passage in anime — the characters mouthing, the while, many yards of the famous Tarantino dialogue — which, let’s be clear, does not represent the way the way these people would actually talk to one another [any more than a real circle of assassins would be so neatly accessorized with cute handles like “Cottonmouth” and “California Mountain Snake”], but rather the way that Tarantino talks to himself: the way that Tarantino talks when he’s trying to impress himself with his erudition, the way Tarantino talks when he’s trying to gross himself out, the way Tarantino talks when he’s trying to scare himself, the way Tarantino talks when he’s trying to sound black, und so weiter. Fortunately Tarantino is a great talker, and all this is entertaining as hell; but let’s not pretend that it represents some kind of breakthrough in verisimilitude.

In the course of these adventures the usually radiant Ms. Thurman [regarded by many, viz. Tarantino and myself, as the most beautiful woman in the world] though she inevitably emerges triumphant gets shot, stabbed, mauled, pummeled, raped, rolled in dirt and drenched with blood, and [in short] repeatedly gets the shit kicked out of her — which seems, actually, less some kind of sadomasochistic expression of an erotic obsession than the impulse of an eightyearold boy to beat up a pretty girl to show that he likes her; did Von Sternberg ever do this to Dietrich, after all? — But let’s not pry. What the author and the object of his desires do in the privacy of several thousand multiplexes should be their own business.

The details of character and place are as always brilliantly vivid: the hospital attendant’s pussy wagon and his tattooed knuckles a la Mitchum [“B.U.C.K.” on one hand, “F.U.C.K.” on the other], Ms. Fox’s suburban retirement in [a private cough behind the hand here] Pasadena, Chiba’s insubordinate assistant, Liu’s meticulously individuated posse of Yakuza badasses [featuring, e.g., the world’s deadliest Japanese schoolgirl]; and the familiar Tarantino device of shuffling the temporal order of the narrative and telling most of the story in flashback is exploited to very good effect [particularly in the second half of the story, as will subsequently appear.] — Coaching Uma and Lucy to speak their own dialogue in Japanese was an excellent idea; and is in itself, of course, a deeply-felt homage. — And, incidentally, readers of the screenplay who may have wondered whether “the most disgusting jar of Vaseline in the history of cinema” would live up to expectation will not be disappointed.

On the other hand, as noted above, there are a lot of weird false notes — calling “Revenge is a dish best served cold” an “old Klingon proverb”, e.g., or the way that Uma makes a list of her targets with a felt-tipped pen in a spiral notebook [Bill’s name last, and in red], and crosses them off when they have been dispatched: would she otherwise forget? [And what will she put on the seventy-nine pages she’ll have left over?] — The main thing that puzzles me, actually, is a casting issue: the Deadly Vipers should, logically, all be women; it looks as though Madsen was demoted from Chief to Indian when Tarantino was seized by the idea of casting David Carradine [a Seventies icon, of course, and this is typical] as Bill, and I’m having a hard time making sense of this decision. Perhaps the author’s wisdom will be clearer in the sequel.

The cinematography, the work of Oliver Stone’s right-hand man, Robert Richardson, is far better than in any previous Tarantino opus [Pulp Fiction in particular had a deliberately cheesy look]; though it may be ironic that most viewers will recognize Richardson’s signature devices from Natural Born Killers, which Tarantino wrote but later disavowed.

The martial arts choreography is excellent, though Yuen Wo Ping now gets so much work you have to wonder whether his product is being cheapened. Of course, Picasso also had a problem with being too prolific.

Qua action movie, Tarantino quite consciously set out to make a statement here, and indeed the results are impressive; though not, someone has to break it to him, as impressive as the work of his friend Robert Rodriguez, let alone the great Hong Kong masters like John Woo and Tsui Hark. — This is a gift, and you either have it or you don’t. — What Tarantino does have are gifts for plot, character, and dialogue, and they’re certainly apparent here. Quibbles aside, no one else can be as interesting, and the principal complaint you can make of the author of this film is that he doesn’t make more of them.


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The happiest dog in the world (8/7/03)


Quite unexpectedly over the course of the week preceding the Fourth of July my nine-year-old Australian Shepherd Boris, a blue merle of hitherto indefatigable vivacity, took ill, showing an uncharacteristic loss of appetite and energy and an inability to swallow anything that he did not nearly at once regurgitate. That Saturday he deteriorated rapidly and passed through the hands of three veterinarians in the space of ten hours; the last of whom, finally, persuaded me with a lengthy and horrifically graphic lecture on the consequences of massive kidney failure of the necessity of euthanasia after it had become apparent to the hospital staff that I would, otherwise, sit there on the floor of his cage in a puddle of puppy shit patting his head all day and all night for the rest of his miserable life, or mine, whichever came first. So they’re right once again, that love isn’t stronger than death. I guess I always knew it wasn’t so.

Though a gradual degeneration of kidney function remains a possibility, the most probable cause of his premature demise is some form of accidental poisoning; by antifreeze, perhaps. The freakish character of this mischance notwithstanding, I may never let a dog drink from a mud puddle again.

Boris is survived by his sister Natasha, a black Aussie of identical age and [modulo differences of sex and the mellowing effects of her current chubbiness] vivacity. The two of them were born on March 14, 1994, which the cognoscenti will recognize as the 115th birthday of Albert Einstein; I always regarded this as a favorable omen. They have never previously been separated. She is, understandably, confused, and shows a tendency to look around on our walks, wondering where her brother is. I find this difficult to witness.


The good thing about obtaining dogs in pairs is that they keep one another company. The bad thing is supposed to be that they pay more attention to one another than they do to you. But Boris and Natasha, though they played with one another constantly, were always unusually attached to me. Boris in particular suffered from a pronounced separation anxiety: he would follow me around the house from one room to another, even into the bathroom. For a long time I had trouble locking them in when I left to go to work: they’d jump out the windows to follow me; or, if they couldn’t escape, howl piteously, exciting the anxieties of the neighbors. — Once when I had borrowed a pickup for one of my frequent moves I left them behind in the old place while I transferred a load of junk to the new one. When I returned I let them out and Boris immediately disappeared; I discovered when I hauled the next piece of furniture out that he had gone straight to the truck and jumped into the cab through the open window, and was sitting on the front seat, determined not to budge, lest I leave him behind again. — Finally I solved this problem by going back to my old job as a newspaper carrier and driving all night for a living, which meant that I could, literally, take them with me everywhere. The job sucked, of course — the reductio ad absurdum of the downward progress of my career arc, seven days a week in the middle of the night getting hosed by petty criminals turned managers who giggled at their own lies and drooled down their bibs — and I suppose I should have been miserable, but my feeling then as now was that, however resistant to amelioration my own circumstances, still, one must change what one can for the better in the world, and even if I were being clubbed into narcolepsy in the economic gulag I could still make sure that my dogs were happy. — And in fact they loved riding around watching me heave newspapers into the welltended shrubbery of the idle rich. And that made everything better. — Of Boris in particular I always thought that, so long as we were together, he was the happiest dog in the world.


There is a general perception that the study of artificial intelligence encourages a belittling of human capacity, and a reductionist and mechanistic view of mental and spiritual life. But really the opposite holds: the more you wonder how machines might be made to think, the more you learn to marvel at the mysteries which inhabit even the simplest mental capacities: the function of memory, the recognition of objects, the formation of intentions, the mechanism of self-awareness; as for that matter it is still baffling how living organisms can run so far off thermodynamic equilibrium, or reproduce themselves. — The question seems less why things are as they are, but why there is anything at all, and not nothing. — And thus the more you appreciate the intelligence of animals, and the more you realize that there is a continuum in nature, and that, if not all things, if even not all sentient things, still certainly all conscious panting things have souls. — It does not seem unnatural, then, that the bonds between yourself and your pets should be stronger than any between yourself and any of your fellow-humans, and that they can become your best friends and the closest members of your family.

It is frequently suggested, of course, by the people who make it their business to Suggest Things, that there is something defective in such an arrangement, and that an attachment to a pet is an inferior substitute for human attachments. But then it is often suggested that human attachments are inferior substitutes for attachments to God, King, Country, Dialectical Materialism, or the Rosicrucians, depending on the agenda of the selfappointed advisor; and, anyway, all this completely misses the point, which is that there are as many ways of being involved in the world as there are conscious entities taking part in it, and that no path to enlightenment is particularly to be preferred to another. Or, that if there is one such, it lies beyond human capacity to distinguish it from its alternatives.

That is, from the perspective of one who could take in the whole chain of Being at a glance, dogs might appear less significant in the Scheme of Things than humans are; as humans may appear less significant than angels, or aliens, or aphids or Astarte. But what is this Scheme? and who knows it? save God or Douglas Adams, and both of them are supposed to be dead. From the perspective of one who dwells within the chain, the differences between species are less significant than the differences, as it were, between being and nothingness. And any attempt at imposing an order upon the [putative] chain seems ill-motivated, artificial, and arbitrary. — Though my dogs have, for instance, fallen short of my own linguistic capabilities, they have other capacities which I lack, and in any case the gap in question seems rather less than, say, the relative difference in musical talent between myself and Mozart; let alone the yawning gulf in mathematical ability separating the average numerical-illiterate from Alexandre Grothendieck. — What can be stated exactly and to some extent quantified [as, e.g., the Hamming distance between two genomes] is genetic variance; and, though certainly there are genetic dissimilarities between humans and dogs, these are relatively inconsequential — indeed, the genomes of men and flatworms only differ by a factor of two — and an argument from lack of strict identity won’t bear examination: after all, the human male has less genetic material in common with the female of his own species than he has with the baboon [something which many of us had already figured out without benefit of genomic analysis.]

The point here is that Nietzsche, as usual, had it right: if you insist on drawing distinctions, then you may as well call Gauss and Goethe supermen, and dismiss the rest of us as beasts of burden; if you look for similarities, on the other hand, then men and animals are cut from the same cloth and have most of the same capacities, and, presumably, the same rights and feelings. — The dialectical relationship between these points of view is difficult to describe, but it’s worth noting that the last conscious act of the author of Zarathustra, before his final breakdown, came as he was walking through the streets of Turin and saw a coachman flogging a horse: dashing out into the street, he threw his arms around the animal’s neck, trying to protect it; and then collapsed. — After that the rest, as they say [David Lynch would say it in Spanish] was silence.


I’d intended to breed Boris when the opportunity arose, to ensure, I guess, that part of him would always be with me; thanks mostly to bad timing, this project came to nothing. I wonder, inevitably, whether it might at some point be possible to clone him, but I don’t know when that will happen, and it is not yet obvious whether cloning is actually the biological Xerox that one would want it to be. Because what I want, really, is some way of bringing him back, and that probably doesn’t exist.

And you expect this, after all, because our lives are bounded and the very fact of our self-consciousness and its relation to memory even without reference to the apparent sources of temporal asymmetry in physics [the second law of thermodynamics, the choice of the retarded Green’s function in radiation theory, the expansion of the universe, the breaking of CP invariance, the reduction of the quantum-mechanical wave packet] entails an irreversibility to the passage of events: things happen, and they pass, and we cannot bring them back. The moving finger writes, and having writ. You can’t go home again. You know the drill.

On the other hand the fact that the past is not accessible to present consciousness in the way that, say, Nepal is, doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Reality consists of events, as Russell said. Or moments. And not all of them suck.

So it is that I remember an extraordinarily clear Sunday morning in early Fall when against habit I stayed up after coming home from one of my night jobs and went walking up the Mesa Trail through Chautauqua Park with my old Aussie girls Franny and Zooey: the sky was cloudless and that deep and vivid blue unique to Colorado, the air was crisp and clean, the temperature was perfect, and we walked up the old road along the mountainside it occurred to me suddenly that, if there were some kind of Mohammedan paradise that preserved one forever in a simulacrum of the pleasures of the flesh, that it would have nothing to do with uniting me in carnal bliss with the young Ursula Andress [this realization came as a surprise], but that it would be just this, walking with my dogs in that particular place at that particular moment on that particular day.

This was one of those moments Joyce called epiphanies, when, as it were, the Holy Spirit descends upon you and all the noise and clutter and complication cancel out and you see the scheme and structure of the world in a flash: integritas; consonantia; claritas. I saw that the world is what it is, when it is. And that that is enough.

So though the spirit of Boris is not exactly omnipresent, a little wingéd doggie-angel hovering above my shoulder watching over me, or waiting for me, necessarily, in some happy hunting ground to which I shall presently repair when I too fall off the end of my worldline, still, the principle that he represents — a certain Platonic idea of playfulness and vivacity, a complement to my own spirit, whatever principle I represent — is — how to put this — valid, and has no temporal signature attached to it.

So, for instance, there is this: one afternoon early in the summer of 1994, when the creek had been near flood tide for weeks and thrown up sandbars in the middle of the current that remained after it subsided, I took Zooey, by this time an old lady, out for a walk along it with the puppies. It was a hot day, even down along the water, and we paused frequently to allow them to take baths; and, finally, at a large pool near the mouth of the canyon we lingered for the space of half an hour while they played in the water. It was here that they invented an extraordinary game of Amphibious Assault: Zooey and Natasha got out of the water onto a sandbar ten or fifteen feet in extent and played the defenders, running around the shoreline and barking at attempted breaches of security, and Boris, incredibly, splashed around the perimeter of the little island all by himself, dashing on and off the beach — inventing and playing the part, I saw to my amazement, of the Marines. I laughed helplessly at this spectacle; I have never seen the like.

It might have been on this occasion that he leapt into the water as we walked back and burrowed in the bed of the creek until he dug a rock out with his teeth, and brought it home as a trophy: the first and last time I saw a dog adopt a pet rock.

For the most part, however, he collected tennis balls, which he carried home and used in other games of his own invention. — I could never persuade him to fetch, until he had amassed a sizable collection of these and had discovered playing catch with himself, flipping the ball around with his teeth and chasing it, and then decided that this was enough fun that he should involve me in it. After that he would bring me a ball and try to get me to throw it to him when he wanted to convince me it was time to take a walk. As always, it was an open question who was teaching what to whom. — It will now be my duty to liberate them all by tossing them one by one back into the creek. Maybe they’ll run to the sea; maybe some other dog will pick them up and carry them home. I don’t know. Let the Great Spirit sort it out.


Wittgenstein ended his famous Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung [aka Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] — a work which attempted, at least, to formulate the limits of what could be expressed in language — with the beautifully cryptic and oft-quoted remark, Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen — which Pears and McGuinness render, What we cannot speak about, that we must pass over in silence.

The positivists read this, not badly, as a denunciation of classical metaphysics; and, indeed, Wittgenstein lost little love for Aristotle or Kant, let alone Hegel.

But though part of his intention was, certainly, to draw a line between scientific rigor and pointless speculation, between what can legitimately be expressed in language and what cannot, Wittgenstein made it very clear this was as much to protect the significant inexpressible from the profane attentions of overliteral scientific knownothings as to expunge it from discourse; that he thought, in fact, that all the important things in life lay beyond the reach of language, and that their understanding was not enhanced but rather damaged by witlessly babbling about them.

That is, if language is the means we employ to express the structure of reality, then the form of this expression, and what is expressed, are not part of it: the picture cannot show its own frame. [This is in a way the exact antithesis of the idea of The Matrix.] Then in particular Der Sinn der Welt muss ausserhalb ihrer liegen: the sense of the world must lie outside of it. — You might have the feeling that you could somehow see what this ought to be — there is the inexpressible, he said — but this was beyond the grasp of syntax, a thing that might show itself but could not be said. — In fact his own explanation of the relation of language to reality could not, on this account, be legitimately expressed in language; and, accordingly, he admitted that his own work was, strictly speaking, meaningless [though nonetheless useful because therapeutic.]

To all this the logician Frank Ramsey — quite as brilliant as Wittgenstein, and generally funnier — responded “But what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.”

Ramsey had most of his side of the argument right, but in this particular choice of words he was just a trifle too clever for his own good. Because there are things that lie beyond the power of expression, the meaning of life, for instance. But even though you can’t say what this is, you can certainly whistle it. Or, even if I can’t, Mozart could.

Not that it’s really all that complicated. There’s an old Shaker tune, called, appropriately, “Simple Things”, famously adapted by Aaron Copland for his Appalachian Spring, which contains all the wisdom I have gathered in the world. It advises us, as everyone knows, that it is a gift to be simple, and a gift to be free. And that when we find ourselves in the place just right, it will be in the valley of love and delight. — If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, says Wittgenstein, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. — Which is where my dogs are, and where they remain: in the valley of love and delight.


Ah, my girlfriends should have been so lucky. — Time to take Natasha for a walk.

Later.


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Vril: the power of the coming race (8/2/03)


“My host then proceeded to question me as to the habits and modes of life among the races on the upper earth, more especially among those considered to be the most advanced... I touched but slightly, though indulgently, on the antiquated and decaying institutions of Europe, in order to expatiate on the present grandeur and prospective pre-eminence of that glorious American Republic, in which Europe enviously seeks its model and tremblingly foresees its doom. ... [I dwelt upon] the excellence of democratic institutions, their promotion of tranquil happiness by the government of party, and the mode in which they diffused such happiness throughout the community by preferring, for the exercise of power and the acquisition of honours, the lowliest citizens in point of property, education, and character. Fortunately recollecting the peroration of a speech, on the purifying influences of American democracy and their destined spread over the world, made by a certain eloquent senator (for whose vote in the Senate a Railway Company, to which my two brothers belonged, had just paid 20,000 dollars), I wound up by repeating its glowing predictions of the magnificent future that smiled upon mankind — when the flag of freedom should float over an entire continent, and two hundred millions of intelligent citizens, accustomed from infancy to the daily use of revolvers, should apply to a cowering universe the doctrine of the Patriot Monroe.”

[Vril: the power of the coming race. Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1871.]


The only thing about this that seems out of date, actually, is the idea that you could buy a Senator for a mere twenty grand. I haven’t checked the morning quotations, but I’m sure that now it takes at least a hundred.


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Drop dead gorgeous (7/6/03)


Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines. [Jonathan Mostow, 2003.]

Though it is hard enough to fathom the motivations of contemporary aliens, e.g., Texans, one cannot help but suppose that the malign machine intelligences who rule the world of the mid-twenty-first century must have been thinking something about the third time being a charm when they dispatched killer android Kristanna Loken through a temporal vortex to the present day to try, once again, to terminate-with-prejudice future Heroic Leader of the Human Resistance John Conner before he can grow up to oppose them.

It is relatively easy, on the other hand, to divine the intentions of Jonathan Mostow, who here takes the reins of this franchise from the otherwise-occupied hands of erstwhile director but now King of the World James Cameron: obviously, having carefully studied the reasons for the phenomenal success of the original Terminator, he is here attempting to reproduce its structural perfection; and so far as I can tell succeeds.

Indeed, after materializing after hours [bathed in cinematographer Don Burgess’s best imitation of Cameron’s famous signature electric-blue nightlight] in a whirling nexus of ball lightning in the display window of an upscale Beverly Hills clothing store — when the going gets tough, etc. — the arresting Ms. Loken emerges stark naked, stepping over melted mannequins and shattered glass, walks coolly across the street, appropriates a Lexus convertible from a dumbstruck matron, and rockets off down Rodeo Drive in search of her quarry; and rubber never really stops burning until the closing credits.

Though she has this time an extended shopping list, her principal target is, of course, Conner; who as here depicted by Nick Stahl is [Tina Turner to Mel Gibson/Mad Max] just a raggedy man, distressed and marginalized and much in need not simply of a fashion makeover but an attitude transplant — since, as becomes apparent in one of the scattered pauses for expository dialogue, he’s never believed the promised Day of Judgment was really averted, and is haunted by dystopian nightmares [shiny silver robots with red glowing eyes lit by more electric blue] of the wars between men and machines — in which, had the heroics of T2 proved unavailing, he would have been destined to star.

It develops that these forebodings are justified, as Arnold explains after he in turn materializes and introduces himself to Ms. Loken by running her over with a truck [since she possesses the liquid-metal rejuvenation capabilities of her predecessor Robert Patrick, this provides only a temporary respite from pursuit]; and, after our main man pulls once and future girlfriend of the savior of humanity Claire Danes from the wreckage of her veterinary clinic and tosses her and Stahl into a getaway vehicle, the forebodings of everyone who suffered through the lengthy lectures in The Matrix Reloaded aka Predestination 611 would probably also be justified by ongoing meditations on the themes of time, fate, freedom, determinism, and the unavoidability of the preordained apocalypse, save that these are, fortunately, continuously interrupted by gunfire and explosions while Arnold and Kristanna harry one another thru the oft-ravaged landscape of southern California [familiar to us from many previous action movies] in a variety of pickups and SUVs, a camper, a motorcycle, a fire engine, a host of police vehicles remotely controlled by Ms. Loken using her newly-minted occult powers of robot mesmerism, a big truck on which is mounted a wildly swinging crane, a hearse [chopped down during the chase to an appealing sporty-convertible option], and a Winnebago.

After a couple of hours of recreational property damage they all arrive at a supersecret desert facility, in which, guess what, the ever-clueless military-industrial complex has been busily programming the killer robots that are destined to destroy us all: can everybody say Kaboom?

The effects are interesting, but of course not groundbreaking, as were those of the second installment in the series. Regarding the cast: Mr. Stahl, unfortunately, follows Edward Furlong, who left a very distinctive imprint, even as a juvenile, upon the role of Conner; and his attempt at a knockoff of Kiefer Sutherland is not particularly successful. [Not that this is a bad idea: if they do try another episode and need an older, battleweary Conner, Kiefer is their guy.] — Ms. Danes does remarkably well fastforwarding the classic Linda Hamilton morph from Fay Wray into Michelle Yeoh. — Ms. Loken makes a vivid impression, to say the least, and I must admit the opening sequence briefly gave me hope that they intended a reprise of the memorable performance of Mathilda May in Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce [1985], as an alien vampire from Halley’s Comet who lays waste to London without ever figuring out the purpose of clothing. Alas, that would keep the teens out of the theater, and so no such luck; suggesting that this will be one of those cases in which the cheap straight-to-cable R-rated ripoff of the concept turns out better than the original. [As for the porno version, which would doubtless turn on the potentialities of that raygun she has built into her right arm, it would be indelicate to speculate.] — Arnold is as always Arnold, and as always I found myself emotionally involved in that all-important search for the right pair of Terminator shades. May his fashion sense never falter.

It would be churlish to wonder aloud at this point why the malign AIs of the future don’t simply dispatch a team of killer robots to terminate the writers already at work on the next installment; and anyway, I must admit, I’m curious to see how the scribes are going to dig themselves out of the smoking crater in which they’ve buried themselves with the apocalyptic grand finale which here appears to put a period to the franchise. — The star, however, will not be back, because he’s going to Sacramento to terminate Gray Davis and solve the budget crisis. — And those legislators had better look out: Arnold says talk to the hand.


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Angels hard as they come (6/27/03)


Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. [McG, 2003.]

From the first moments of the opening scene of this hyperkinetic opus — when, entering a rustic tavern in Mongolia packed with hirsute barbarians clad in skins [you can nearly smell the rancid yak butter], we discover in quick succession Drew Barrymore slamming down shots a la Karen Allen with a fat sweaty guy who’s trying to drink her under the table, Cameron Diaz [affecting an unusually silly Swedish accent] riding a mechanical bull a la Debra Winger, and Lucy Liu engaged in a kung fu dustup a la Keanu in bullet time, and segue nearly at once to a carchase across the top of what appears to be the very dam which provided the springboard for the famous swandive at the beginning of Goldeneye — a chase which ends, as any student of Bond would expect, when our heroines hurtle off a cliff into empty space and skydive into a passing helicopter — the determination of the authors to ruthlessly plunder the recent history of the cinema is apparent; and, between this introduction and the conclusion — set not simply at the Hollywood premiere of a terrible action movie, but at the Hollywood premiere of the sequel to a terrible action movie [“Maximum Extreme Two”] — which, its putative star [Matt LeBlanc, in character as Lucy’s boyfriend] boasts cheerfully, is supposed to have chewed up a dozen writers on its way from concept to execution — there pass before our eyes an avalanche of references to, quotations from, and sendups of previous popcorn movies — not excluding, obviously, this franchise itself — accompanied [evidencing not simply the eye but the ear of the erstwhile music video director McG] by a veritable Hit Parade of tunes [accompanied where feasible by dance numbers], and seasoned with an unceasing barrage of dumb gags nearly up to the daunting standard of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.

Indeed the premise is not very different from that of the Mad Max movies: rather than a crew of lunatics in colorful costumes careening around the Australian Outback in a variety of absurd vehicles cannibalizing the wreckage of a fallen civilization, we have here a crew of lunatics in colorful costumes careening around greater Los Angeles in a variety of expensive vehicles cannibalizing the tradition of the Hollywood action blockbuster. — The protest that this represents some kind of barbaric ripoff of a priceless cultural heritage is absurd: when the Goths sacked Rome, it might have been a tragedy; but if they’d sacked Las Vegas, it would have been a joke.

And, in fact, this is very very funny: called upon to thwart a scheme to steal some witness protection lists [cf. MI2] which have been encoded upon titanium rings [why they picked titanium I’m not sure, except that according to some new theorem of Movie Physics — take that, Archimedes — it is supposed to float in champagne], the Angels spring into action, not realizing at first that this caper is merely a diversion perpetrated by puppets whose strings are plucked by Evil Mastermind Demi Moore, former Angel turned to the Dark Side [“I was never good,” she protests, predictably: “I was great”], famed Nobel laureate in astrophysics and bedside astrologer, Girl with the Golden Guns — and, incredibly, thanks to a four hundred thousand dollar total-body makeover [supposed to have included repeated Botox treatments, surgery to finetune the size of her breast implants, liposuction, collagen injections, miscellaneous skin treatments, teeth whitening with porcelain veneers, and the services of a nutritionist, a personal trainer, a yoga instructor, and a kickboxing coach], the most bodacious babe in the whole movie. — It illustrates the technique the authors have perfected to explain that Demi is introduced after a brief sequence in which the Angels, by way of trying to solve a murder, fastforward through an episode of CSI [hilariously machinegunning television copspeak], reprise the autopsy scene from Silence of the Lambs, and, finally, discover traces of sex wax on the corpse which [cf. Point Break] direct them unerringly to the correct beach; where the bikiniclad Ms. Moore emerges from the waves, board in hand, looking like a Botticelli concept for a Beach Boys album cover. — Between this entrance and her final exit [plummeting through a stage trapdoor into the eternal fires in the best tradition of the Damnation of Faust] Ms. Moore finds occasion to peal out in an antique Ferrari and a Shelby Cobra, and our heroines find occasion to impersonate extreme motocross riders, professional wrestlers, monster truck drivers, roller derby girls, disco fools [repeatedly], arcwelders a la Jennifer Beals, strippers, dominatrices, Samurai swordsbabes, and Spiderwomen, and make the acquaintance of a variety of secondary villains, including Drew’s former boyfriend [from her metal period] “Irish mobster” Seamus O’Grady [Justin Theroux, mainly doing De Niro in Cape Fear but with tattoed knuckles a la Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter], Drew’s apparent future boyfriend [“you always fall for the bad guy,” they explain to her] the Thin Man from the last installment [Crispin Glover], and Luke Wilson [sort of], who is moving in with Diaz and threatening that those wedding bells may break up that old gang of, uh, theirs.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of ethnic misdirection, John Cleese makes an appearance as Lucy’s father and Bernie Mac [the new Bosley] is introduced as Bill Murray’s brother [the one who plays Clue in the ’Hood.]

I suppose one might object that none of this [save perhaps that scene where veterinarian Diaz presides over a calfbirth] is particularly believable; but does it matter? I’m reminded of a line from Joe Versus The Volcano: Tom Hanks has arrived in Los Angeles for the first time, and, as Meg Ryan is driving him through the city, she asks him what he thinks of it. “It looks fake,” he says. He thinks about this. “I like it.”

And who am I to quarrel with that. Check this out.


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A greening comes across the sky (6/23/03)


Hulk. [Ang Lee, 2003.]

Variations on a theme of Lee and Kirby: somewhat-too-dedicated scientific Boy Wonder Eric Bana and his coworker and estranged girlfriend Jennifer Connelly [now typecast, I’m afraid, as the significant other of the mentally disturbed Great Man] are, notwithstanding their problems with emotional distance, forging merrily ahead into the scientific unknown at Berkeley, trying to advance the application of some sort of gamma-ray-energized nanotechnological goo [green not gray, as the frequent representations of madly-multiplying molecular chaos on their computer screens remind us][and as the color scheme requires — though, nota bene, whatever the traditional connotation of gamma radiation for longtime Marvel readers, it isn’t green at all, of course, but rather ultraultraultraultraviolet] to the repair of biological organisms.

Thus far, alas, they’ve mainly succeeded in finding new ways of making frogs explode; a cause of much anxiety since, in a rare cinematic display of the realities of scientific funding, they have been backed into a position in which they must Demo or Die; or, worse, succumb to the blandishments of the military — represented by romantic rival Josh Lucas, who works for Jennifer’s father, four-star general Sam Elliott, who in the somewhat-distant past fired Bana’s longlost father, Mad Scientist Nick Nolte, who performed a variety of Forbidden Experiments on, among others, Bana himself and then disappeared into prison for thirty years, until reappearing, incognito, accompanied by an uncanny trio of weird mutant dogs who serve as his familiars, on the eve of these proceedings, as the deranged night janitor of the very building in which all this is taking place. [I think that was everything.]

Explaining all this, one need hardly say, requires the deployment of an enormously complicated apparatus of flashbacks, Big Closeups [Ang has a thing for eyeballs], Significant Glances, abrupt dissolves into near-recoveries of repressed memories, splitscreen explorations of multiple perspectives, startling match cuts and shifts in perspective, Daliesque dream-sequences [check out those jellyfish swimming in the air over the desert], and nonlinear narrative montage — as illustrated, e.g., by one scene in which Bana directs a brooding stare at a photograph of Connelly which animates into a flashback in which Connelly in nested flashback tells the story of a dream based on her childhood.

We’re nowhere near the bottom of this seemingly endless recursion when there’s one of those Laboratory Accidents so beloved of the old comic book writers: Bana takes an impossibly-high dose of gamma radiation; and, though he miraculously recovers, begins to display a propensity, when his hairtrigger temper is aroused, to turn into a gigantic green monster of immeasurable strength and run berserk about the countryside. [Well: you read the title on the ticket.]

This allows us to take vicarious pleasure in a great deal of recreational property damage and bear witness to the very satisfying exertion of the righteous wrath of Bana on a world full of assholes — starting with the dickhead romantic rival and working backward through assorted other threats to Connelly to the root of all evil, the great insensate and uncaring bureaucratic mechanism that is the Army — which, naturally, almost immediately tries to Take Charge of the Situation and sequester this new Secret Weapon in a picturesque underground laboratory in the desert [Area 51.5, I guess], where he can be studied and vivisected at leisure; later presumably to be cloned and deployed against Enemies of Freedom like the Commies, the Towelheads, and the Dixie Chicks. — Big mistake. — The Hulk promptly Busts Loose, and, after trashing an armored brigade or two for sport [too bad the Iraqis didn’t think of simply picking the tanks up and throwing them at the helicopters], bounds over a few intervening mountain ranges back to San Francisco; where, after a lot of even more intense conversations full of even huger closeups and illustrated by even more convoluted flashbacks, the analytical quest culminates in the denouement with Bana’s penetration into the inner mystery [almost the recovery of a repressed Lacanian primal scene] which lies at the root of his boundless and bottomless rage; for which the Hulk, as if you had to have it spelled out, is only a vividly realized metaphor.

Admirers of Ang Lee and his principal collaborator James Schamus will recognize a lot of this: the way, for instance, that Connelly abruptly retires to a cabin in an Enchanted Forest very like the one in which Chow Yun Fat and Zhang Ziyi fenced among the treetops, apparently for no other reason save to provide the Hulk with a picturesque backdrop against which to duke it out with Nolte’s dogs; the uncommon intelligence of the treatment of what would otherwise be rather tedious psychodrama [“It was like a dream,” says Bana of his possession by the Hulk — “About what?” asks Connelly, with wholly unexpected acuity — “Rage...power...and freedom,” he says]; and the explicitly mythological final shootout, which ends on a note of ambiguity almost identical to the denouement of Crouching Tiger: Bana floating in water, as Zhang floated on air. — One must eagerly await their next project — which, if they continue to Think Green, will probably be something like the Muppets acting out Thomas Pynchon. [I can just hear Kermit proclaiming that “History is made at night.”]

What they certainly got right was the way that the Hulk moves; incredibly, Ang seems to have donned the motion-capture suit at ILM and acted out the part himself. [Is there anything this guy can’t do?] — They also deserve credit for the desert locations, the quotes from King Kong, and the return of product placement for Apple computers.

What they seem to have gotten wrong is the cartoonish appearance of the Hulk himself, which is intended, obviously, to put quotes around him. I’m not sure whether this was really necessary, but it wouldn’t surprise me to discover, eventually, that this too looks right.

Bana is great, but in his case upward mobility in Hollywood only means gaining the opportunity to allow Brad Pitt to drag his carcass around the walls of Troy. In the meantime check out the remarkable Australian film Chopper [Andrew Dominik, 2000.] — Connelly needs to step away from these wife-of-the-great-man roles and take on something more demanding, say, the role of an major babe who inexplicably falls for a total loser. [Naturally I’m willing to offer my services.] — Cameos by Lou Ferrigno and the great Stan Lee himself; if there were any justice, these guys would be rich.


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The bigger they are, the harder they fall (6/21/03)


Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. [William Beaudine, 1966. Written by Carl Kittleman.]

Mad scion of the Frankenstein clan Narda Onyx, reluctantly assisted by her wussy brother Steven Geray, has here picked a lull in the narrative maelstrom of the Wild Wild West to transfer the family flag and secret laboratory to the Southwestern desert [or at least some matte paintings representative thereof] — where, they have been [correctly] briefed, there will be little interference from meddling representatives of Law Sanity and Order and thunderstorms and lightning aplenty with which to fuel the insatiable thirst for high-voltage electricity of the Forbidden Experiments offending against the laws of God and Nature for which their bloodline is famous.

And, sure enough, no sooner has the curtain risen than we discover them putting the electrodes to a twitching human guinea pig thoughtfully provided by the local Spanish peasant population — who are, we perceive, muttering “Madre Dios” under their breaths, crossing themselves furtively, and glancing fearfully over their shoulders at the abandoned mission which [no gothic castles being available in the neighborhood] the Frankensteins have adopted for their dark purposes.

The experiment, like all curtain-raisers, fails miserably; and, as smoke pours from the ears of their toasted subject, Ms. Onyx curses the inferiority of the materials with which she is forced to work and wishes aloud for more vigorous stock on which to ply the mad scientist’s trade.

By fortunate coincidence, legendary outlaw Jesse James [blackclad and mustachioed John Lupton] and his musclebound accomplice Hank Tracy/Cal Bolder [I don’t know which name is phonier] are cruising through the neighborhood looking for shelter and medical assistance after an unsuccessful attempt to put together a James Gang/Wild Bunch reunion tour has left their career prospects in disarray and Mr. Bolder leaking blood. Pursued by a vengeful posse, the two stumble across a family of peasants who are trying to clear out of the territory before their numbers come up on the Frankensteins’ waiting list, and are directed by gypsy bombshell Estralita to the waiting room of the mad doctor; who is, but of course, always on call.

Jesse’s explanation that Hank shot himself cleaning his gun doesn’t convince Ms. Onyx of anything, but the dimensions of Mr. Bolder’s pectorals speak volumes, and she sets to work straightaway — with improbably rapid results, considering that [genius ahead of her time or no] antibiotics lie far in the future and a leaking chest wound should have put the hunk away from internal bleeding in a Sante Fe minute. — Nonetheless in short order Mr. Bolder is revived and transformed by the lightnings of Zeus into a lobotomized lumbering hulk [not a difficult stretch for a thespian of his talents], Estralita and Ms. Onyx are contending for the hand of Mr. Lupton, and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. — But I’d bet on the gunslinger; after all, this is his turf.

The Spanish and German accents here are so bad that literally you cannot tell them apart, the lab sets are so cheesy that the production designers couldn’t afford real oscilloscopes and had to substitute cardboard boxes with sinewaves painted on their fronts, and the brainwave helmet looks a lot like one of those hardhats you mount beer cans on; but the goofball premise, of course, carries all else before it, and this is, accordingly, one of those true marvels of the cult cinema, a piece of shit with irresistible charm.

As for how this may have come about, it is easy to speculate: a dark and stormy night, an isolated castle on a lonely mountaintop, a single light burning in a tower room; within, a hack, a typewriter, a case of whiskey, a carton of cigarettes, a looming deadline — and the sudden Satanic inspiration to create a monster, a simulacrum of life, assembled from the body parts of dead screenplays.

Perhaps this was it. But one cannot be sure. And, anyway, there are some things man was not meant to know.


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Kermit versus Freddy versus Jason (6/17/03)


The Maze. [William Cameron Menzies, 1953.]

What happens if you shoot a fairy tale and then run the film backwards: soon-to-be-newlyweds Richard Carlson and Veronica Hurst are partying happily in the south of France, chaperoned, one hopes none too effectively, by maiden Aunt and occasional narrator Katherine Emery, when out of the blue Carlson receives a telegram from the wilds of Scotland, where, apparently, his eccentric Uncle has just expired and left him a baronet. Promising he’ll be right back after settling the estate, Carlson takes off, and, well, is never heard from again. After waiting a decent interval for a reply to one of her frequent wires, Hurst [the only character in the scenario with anything resembling initiative or spunk] determines to find out just what is going on; and, Auntie reluctantly in tow, sets off for the mistenshrouded moors. Arriving on the doorstep unannounced, they prevail on the dour retainers to admit them, and find Carlson shockingly aged, withdrawn, incommunicative, unwilling to explain anything, and apparently well-launched on a project to consume the entire export quota of the native whiskey all by himself. Snooping about the nooks crannies dusty stairwells and secret passages of the ruin despite the best efforts of Carlson and his retainers to board her up in her room, Hurst finds evidence of another, mysterious, occupant, someone who for some reason leaves a trail of slime, and, naturally, disobeys the frequent insistent orders never to set foot in the picturesque garden maze laid out upon the adjacent grounds — thus, finally [this is so dumb there’s no point in not giving it away] discovering that the mysterious presence haunting the halls and hopping weirdly around the garden maze is none other than the real baronet of Castle Craven [?!], the [green] skeleton in the family closet, a mutant reminder of our amphibian ancestors who looks like, well, a giant frog. Obviously the reason everyone has been conspiring behind her back to conceal this terrifying mystery from her is that they’re afraid she’ll die laughing.

Despite Menzies’ well-deserved reputation for production design [see his famous 1936 treatment of H.G. Wells’ Things To Come], this is singularly uninspired: a castle set that might have been borrowed from Corman, the Maze itself [which could have been cool, but isn’t], and some dusty rooms where people sit around morosely drinking whiskey and glaring at one another. Everyone keeps walking in and out of the lighting setups in view of the camera, and, most annoying of all, there are a number of weirdly lopsided compositions in which the actors seem to be standing on tiptoe trying to keep their heads above the bottom of the frame while the camera takes an inexplicable interest in the ceiling. Some of this can be blamed on shooting for 3D, but not enough.

As for the unfortunate protagonist, obviously he must have been the unwitting victim of some hitherto-undiscovered conservation principle that says that every time you turn a frog into a prince, somewhere you have to turn a prince into a frog; preferably someplace like the Scottish outback, where maybe nobody will notice. — Indeed: if a frog falls from a tower window in the Highlands with no one there to see it, does it make a splat? Let me work on that and get back to you.


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A perfectly splendid little war (4/14/03)


War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. [Dick Cheney et al. 2003.]

Ah, there’s nothing like a Hollywood ending.

And now, as Bruce Willis and his Howling Commandos accept the accolades of an adoring crowd of — uh, Wogs — your itinerant critic slips out of the theater ahead of the crowd, and, brushing the popcorn from his flak jacket, makes note of his few remaining questions:

[1] Weren’t there similar crowds cheering when the Israelis rolled into Lebanon and for that matter the West Bank? Just what do these people cheer for? indeed, what won’t they cheer for? — Incidentally, what was the supposed logic of those Middle-Eastern talking heads who all immediately followed the admission that Saddam was now revealed to be a brutal pig whose own people loathed him with the qualification “but nonetheless this defeat is a tragic humiliation for the Arab people”? To adapt yet again a phrase I first heard turned in the Stone Age of the mainframe computer, don’t these guys have a problem with their interfaces with reality?

[2] What happened to the chemical and biological weapons? Why do I have the nagging feeling that there will be a loud silence on this point for a week or two, and then Wolfowitz will leak it to Safire that the famous mobile laboratories have slipped out of the country ahead of the posse and are now in............Syria?

[3] In re Safire, incidentally, though I love and revere the guy for what he’s done to blow the whistle on Ashcroft and Poindexter, can you really trust his judgment any more? Didn’t he hit the same dark notes of warning in the arias he’s been singing about the Iraqi mastermind when he was claiming Sadat was just another cynical and ruthless Nasserite and that the collapse of the Soviet Union was just another clever Commie plot [see Christopher Walken in Blast From The Past] hatched by Andropov’s disciple Gorbachev?

[4] Why were they so sure that the chemical and biological weapons existed? of the extent of the program? Wasn’t it just that they knew we gave them to Saddam in the Eighties, back when they all still thought he satisfied the comfortable old cold-war description “He may be a fascist thug, but he’s our fascist thug”? — And what about that long-forgotten anthrax mailer, incidentally? Isn’t there something similar they’re holding back there? — Why are we suddenly hearing these mutterings about the contributions of the French, the Germans, and the Russians to the Iraqi war machine? isn’t this just intended as a distraction?

[5] Would the phrase “winning their hearts and minds” ever have been heard at all, even for those twenty-four hours or so that it survived in public discourse, if anyone in this administration had actually served in Vietnam? Isn’t “death squads” a trifle risky, for that matter? even though Roberto D’Aubisson’s fifteen minutes are presumably up.

[6] They say that the generals are always fighting the last war; but isn’t this just the problem with our liberal brethren? Isn’t it obvious that everyone is still protesting Vietnam? Isn’t this just another depressing corollary of the unfortunate fact dictated by historical accidents of demographics that the academic population still consists mainly of people who got tenure before 1970?

[7] Shouldn’t we give credit where credit is due? Isn’t the Pentagon nearly the only branch of the bureaucracy that ever tries to learn from its mistakes? Since Vietnam they’ve eliminated the draft and instituted the most successful program of affirmative action in American society; since the technical embarrassments of the Eighties they’ve improved their maintenance procedures so that their hightech equipment actually works a fair percentage of the time [compare the three out of eight helicopters that broke down trying to spring the Iranian hostages, or the one out of three wings of fighter-bombers that had to turn back in the strike on Libya]; after fifty years of bullshit on the part of the Air Force, they can now actually hit the targets they aim at; since the first Gulf War they’ve admitted that trying to restrict media access was a mistake, retrofitted most of their arsenal for precision delivery, introduced two or three generations of robot aircraft, and networked their operations to a degree unprecedented in warfare; and between the first and third weeks of the campaign just concluded they managed to adjust their strategy in medias res. Meanwhile NASA is still buying 8086 chips, the Post Office still sorts mail by hand, the FBI can’t send email, the Census Bureau is prohibited by law from performing an accurate count, and it’s an open secret that Trent Lott is not the only guy in Washington who wishes the Dixiecrats had won and the country was still segregated.

[8] Are Cheney’s business cronies really going to make a hundred billion dollars from reconstruction contracts? How much of that will find its way back into the Bush re-election war chest? Is this supposed to be the reply to the French and Russian protests about lost investments: they just weren’t thinking big enough?

[9] Does Kerry even stand a chance? According to this week’s fundraising scorecard, he has about seven million in the bank; Bush already has two hundred million lined up, with much more to come. — Can anybody else run against Bush? Don’t the Democrats have to put up a real war hero against the Republican chickenhawks?


Best director/Best screenplay: hard for an outsider to identify, but presumably some unsung staff colonels in the bowels of the Pentagon.

Producer who will take all the credit anyway: Cheney. The laugh line about retired military officers embedded in television studios is already regarded as a classic. But I’m sure I heard an unspoken threat: we know where you live.

Best actor: the Iraqi information minister. [I think the part goes to Roberto Benigni.]

Best actress: Monica Bellucci as Jessica Lynch.

Best cinematography: predictably, for all that green grainy night-vision footage. This will instantly become a cliche.

Best f/x: though I generally take the Pentagon’s claims with a grain of salt and had not, accordingly, thought they were serious about the multiple-target-acquisition capabilites of the Apache helicopter, I did, in unvarnished and unretouched video, see one rear up and launch four missiles simultaneously; all of them immediately veering off in different directions. Sheesh. — Honorable mention: the footage of the A-10 Warthog circling over Baghdad; it does indeed slow visibly when it fires a burst from its Gatling gun, and it does seem credible that a long burst would in fact cause it to stall. [As for the building it was firing at, I thought that would fall down.]

Guy most emblematic of the masses who labor below the line [as they say in Tinseltown] and never get credit: the dude I was watching in the background while the MS/NBC correspondent hogged the camera to bitch about the sandstorm. He had the engine out of a Bradley and up on a pallet under a tarp while he was working on it; just a little snapshot of the labor involved in trying to keep everything running all the way to Baghdad. Without him, and a hundred thousand like him, they’d all still be in Kuwait.


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The double helix (2/21/03)


This week’s misguided cinematic inspiration [with apologies to Busby Berkeley]: in the middle of an expanse of black and otherwise featureless empty space, the camera circles a gigantic arrangement of showgirls seated at white grand pianos arrayed like the nucleotides of the double helix, with the main strands joined below and separated above for reproduction as new pianos are hauled in out of nowhere to pair off with the loose ends. — I’m not sure of the musical accompaniment, and, typically, my imaginative satisfaction with this preposterous spectacle is tempered somewhat by the nagging realization that on one of the spirals the showgirls and pianos should be rightside-up and on the other they should be upside down. — But, really: Gold Diggers of 2003; how could it miss? with Dick Powell in the role of Venter, and Ruby Keeler as the Proteomic Muse.


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Rocket science (1/15/03)


World Without End. [Edward Bernds, 1956.]

Intrepid explorers Hugh Marlowe, Rod Taylor, Nelson Leigh, and Christopher Dark while performing the first circumnavigation of the planet Mars run into one of those troublesome time warps that seem to clutter up the solar system, and, after a period of intense acceleration during which all the dials on the console twirl round and smoke comes out from under the dash, black out [a narrative device usually introduced to code everything that follows as a dream, but, see below] and come to just in time to discover themselves crashlanding in an alpine landscape on an unknown world. After peering dazedly out the portholes for a minute or two, one of the party points out that they are “experiencing Plus Gravity”, which, in keeping with the tenets of Movie Science, means that there must be oxygen in the atmosphere outside; as they immediately verify by opening the door and sticking their heads out to take deep breaths. [I wouldn’t advise performing this experiment on Neptune.] Venturing forth to explore this alien planet, they descend into green but uninhabited country uncannily reminiscent of the American Southwest and realize presently that they’ve been magically transported five centuries forward in the future light cone and back to the Earth itself, where a nuclear holocaust has exterminated most of the human race and divided the survivors [maybe you saw this coming] into Eloi and Morlocks — though in this version the effete intellectual Eloi cower in the gleaming corridors of a futuristic city underground and the degenerate mutant Morlocks run around the surface clubbing anything that moves with savage gusto. Taking issue with the eugenic implications of this state of affairs, the newcomers, in a series of addresses to what looks suspiciously like the Student Council, attempt to convince the testosterone-deficient male Eloi of the virtues of sun, surf, sand, random gunfire, and economic imperialism; without much success, though they do manage to impress the Eloi chicks, a nubile lot of shameless hussies who prance around in high heels and miniskirts copping feels off Taylor’s biceps and making googoo eyes at his companions. This sexual tension/ideological conflict generates predictable friction, precipitating a crisis which is somehow not resolved in porno holocaust but in a rather silly final battle between the cute people and the cave trolls whose outcome does not exactly confound expectation for anyone who attended an American high school [and which, indeed, could have been staged without loss of generality as a trial by combat between the leaders of rival cliques in a parking lot.] The novelty is that, since the time warp for once really is irreversible, our heroes don’t have to escape at the last minute as the lost city is consumed by an erupting volcano [i.e., awaken from the dream], and, weird but true, we leave them, like Candide, cultivating their garden; and can expect several more centuries to elapse before the victorious pureblooded Aryans start squabbling over the composition of the Prom Committee and nuke one another all over again. — Thus, I guess, the title; or, as Joyce would have put it, high school is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Where are the Ramones when you really need them?

This owes not a little to previous exercises in the bubble-helmet-and-blaster genre, viz. Catwomen of the Moon and Flight to Mars, and in turn influenced later epics, notably Queen Of Outer Space, The Time Travelers, and Planet of the Apes. — Which should probably set up some final wisecracks about the debased genetic inheritance of the mutant Morlocks bearing the same relation to that of their ancestors that this scenario does to H. Rider Haggard, but I haven’t the heart for it. As so often happens, I liked the silly piece of shit despite myself [maybe it was the space opera, or maybe it was just those cheerleaders’ outfits], and anyway I haven’t time to argue: I’m late for an appointment with my guidance counselor.


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Black ice (12/23/02)


Die Another Day. [Lee Tamahori, 2002.]

Bond reminds us once again why we’d all be happier if the British were still running the world: captured when a black op in North Korea is betrayed and goes south, our hero gets tossed into a dungeon and tortured by extremely professional specialists for the space of fourteen months — and, unkindest cut of all, discovers when his handlers finally swap him out that they think he’s been reprogrammed as some kind of Manchurian candidate, necessitating that he go off the reservation to try to track down the mole who sold him out. The quest leads, as the conventions of the franchise require, to a series of picturesque locales, including Hong Kong, Havana, London, and [after suspicion focuses on a diamond millionaire who seems rather too much larger than life] Iceland, and resolves itself in a grand finale [again on the embattled Korean peninsula] in which Bond dukes it out with the evil mastermind in an aerial command post while a giant orbiting laser burns a path through the DMZ toward general war, universal cataclysm, and the triumph of inadequate fashion sense.

Herein we discover the standard elements, including: the villain with the glove [Toby Stephens] coded in some ingenious new fashion as inhuman [thanks to genetic reprogramming, he cannot sleep]; the henchman with a startling physical peculiarity [Rick Yune, with diamonds embedded by an explosion in one side of his face — nearly good enough for an old Dick Tracy baddie]; the opposed pair of gorgeous babes [Halle Berry and Rosamund Pike as either the bad good and good bad or good bad and bad good girls, you figure it out], one of whom, at least, does manage to hold out for a couple of minutes of screen time before she has sexual intercourse with our hero; the chases in unusual vehicles [military-issue hovercraft and some kind of rocket sled]; the real hightech toys [the VR trainer, cellphones transmitting images, PDAs adapted as controllers for satellites] and their parodies [the familiar multifunctional watch and a magical glass-shattering ultrasonic ring]; the reductio ad absurdum of the luxury car [an invisible Aston Martin]; the ultimate weapon [called Icarus: yes, this does turn night into day and is, therefore, the chariot of the sun, and, yes, it is driven by the offspring of a famous father, but, no, the old man isn’t really Daedalus; still, two out of three ain’t bad]; the penultimate weapon [very fancy body armor wired to dish out a hundred thousand volts]; the fight choreography [beginning to look derivative of Hong Kong, but there’s a great swordfight and a cleverly-designed punchout in which the participants have to keep dodging automated laserblasts]; the bad puns [also meted out to Halle and one or two of the bad guys]; the inspired production design [an ice palace in the Arctic which improves on Superman’s Fortress of Solitude]; the creative ways of wrecking flashy cars [here, by dropping them out of a plane]; the big stars in small parts [Madonna as a fencing master — I’ll bet she loved that corset — and Michael Madsen as a boss spook — as best I can recall the first guy in several episodes permitted to light a cigarette]; the filthy lucre [diamonds]; the glimpses of the lifestyles of the rich and famous [at nearly every turn: a rejuvenation clinic in the Carribean, a private club in London, a luxury hotel in Hong Kong, an exclusive reception in Iceland]; the amusing pseudoscientific patter [in re genetic engineering]; the jokes at the expense of traditional high culture [Sun Tzu and Gainsborough]; and a couple of absolutely priceless moments, viz., the opening night shots of Bond and his fellow Seals in black wetsuits surfing into the shores of North Korea [somebody must have seen the Surf Ninjas on the late show], and the improbable spectacle of a barefooted Bond, fresh from the dungeon in ragged hospital pajamas and looking just like Robinson Crusoe with unkempt full beard and long tangled hair, walking coolly into the lobby of an elegant Hong Kong hotel past a gawking horde of affluent Chinese in evening dress and demanding [and getting] the best suite in the house.

As for what didn’t belong: it is difficult to articulate precisely the way in which the Bond films have traditionally been “realistic”, but obviously this has always been the case: when Brosnan dived off the top of the Russian equivalent of Hoover Dam in Goldeneye, it wasn’t Brosnan, and the dam wasn’t in Russia, but there was a real guy, a real dam, and a real fall at the end of a bungeecord recorded by real film in real cameras stationed a couple hundred feet away in the real fabric of three-dimensional space; when Roger Moore skied off the edge of a cliff in Austria in The Spy Who Loved Me and flew away on a parachute sporting the Union Jack, it wasn’t Moore, and it wasn’t Austria, but the fact that they had to go to Greenland to find a cliff high enough and hire a world-class athlete to do the jump and pull the ripcord made the stunt all that much more impressive. And here though you know that the North Korean beaches are actually on Maui and that Spain is standing in for Havana and that the Aston Martin and the Jaguar aren’t really firing rockets at one another in that chase across the surface of that frozen lake in Iceland, you also know that this really is a lake in Iceland and that there really are a couple of madfool stunt drivers out powersliding around having a hell of a good time, and this is enough to ensure the suspension of disbelief, enough to ensure that the proposition “Brosnan/Bond is driving that Aston Martin” will pass the test for make-believe — and, by implication, carry much of the rest of the flick with it. But unfortunately you don’t believe for a moment that Halle Berry [or anyone at all] is actually doing a backflip off a sheer vertical cliff a couple hundred feet into the Carribean or that Brosnan is really surfing on a tidal wave chockfull of pack ice in the Arctic or that Brosnan and Berry are really bailing out of a crashing airplane; in fact all this looks unforgivably bogus. [The icepack-surfing sequence in particular looks even cheesier than the old AIP fakery posing Frankie and Annette in front of rolling breakers on the back-projection screen, which I would have thought impossible.] And the effect is [as Sartre would have said] one of bad faith. — The Bond movies have always represented the gold standard in stunt work — a standard embraced, for instance, by Jackie Chan, and adhered to faithfully by that master of the carchase John Frankenheimer — and have always made what many [e.g. Andre Bazin] have described as an essentially ethical choice about the relationship of film to reality — best explained, paradoxically, by a counterfactual conditional: if Werner Herzog had made Twister, he would have chased real tornadoes. A departure from this standard is disturbing [and as it were debases the currency] because it suggests the kind of deviation from principle that presages the degeneration of a species or genre; or, in contemporary parlance, that the series is jumping the shark.

On the other hand, how else are you going to show a spacebased laser cutting a path through the minefields of the Korean DMZ? maybe they just need to hire some American effects houses and a real Hong Kong fight choreographer.

Or maybe they need hormone therapy, who knows. But what the hell, I loved that invisible car.


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Walk like an Egyptian (12/22/02)


Die Augen der Mumie Ma. [Eyes of the Mummy. Ernst Lubitsch, 1918. “Drama in 4 Akten von Hanns Kräly und Emil Rameau.”]

Excerpts from the juvenalia of Ernst Lubitsch:

A young German painter [Harry Liedtke] on sabbatical in Egypt goes out for a stroll in the desert and, with the unfailing luck of the cinema, immediately stumbles across the exotic and alluring Polish bombshell Pola Negri, drawing water at an oasis. Bewitched by this vision of loveliness, he accosts her, but she responds poorly to his pickup lines and somehow contrives to disappear in broad daylight among the featureless sands.

Meanwhile, back at the luxury hotel where all the intrepid European adventurers vacation, a specimen of VIP royalty [Max Laurence] is enquiring about that famous local attraction the tomb of Queen Ma. The proprietor assures him that this tomb carries a Curse, and points out a picturesquely shattered previous visitor [drooling into a bucket and babbling “Die Augen leben!”] posed here conveniently on the terrace to attract the tourist trade.

Naturally this piques the interest of our hero Herr Liedtke, and he goes down to the square in Cairo to try to drum up an expedition or at least to gather intelligence among the native color, who are hanging around in rags turning somersaults and charming snakes and doing ropetricks and all that other shit you expect in the Mysterious [Middle] East.

Obtaining directions, he mounts up on horseback and sets off across the desert for the mausoleum; which, we discover, is a rather rudimentary monument tended by native guide and Very Untrustworthy-Looking Person Emil Jannings [warming up for his later turn as Murnau’s Mephistopheles], dusked down to Egyptian in a sort of smudgeface and clad in some kind of Biblical coat of many colors.

Warming to the arrival of the mark, Jannings leads Liedtke into an underground chamber — where, after trying to lull him into dropping his guard by showing off the hieroglyphics and erotic etchings which decorate the walls, he springs the Big Surprise: a pair of peepholes in a sort of wallmounted mask which are inhabited by living [albeit rather disoriented] eyes.

Though Jannings clearly expects that this revelation will paralyze our hero with terror, the ploy doesn’t work; indeed why it ever did work is less than obvious, since the effect, such as it is, is that of somebody [e.g., a fan of the Colorado Buffaloes] standing in the corner with a bag over his [or, as it turns out, her] head. [Fortunately for the scary-Mummy-movie industry, many technological advances lay ahead.]

Muttering something like “Curses, foiled again,” Jannings tries to jump his prey and bludgeon him into submission, but only ends up getting shot for his pains; one must suppose this tourist trap has brought him better days.

Our hero then busts into an inner chamber and discovers the girl behind the curtain to be the captive Ms. Negri, who explains in flashback that she was carried off by the evil Jannings while bathing [though in deference to the delicate sensibilities of the contemporary audience we see that this was one of those primitive Movie Baths, in which a girl stood in a pond with her dress on — as Nun to God, thus Actress to Camera] and brought back here to be his love slave, or bait, or something; and that she has been a captive ever since, sleeping on a stone bench here in this dank tomb with Mister Charisma drooling all over her.

“Folge mich, Mädchen, ich werde Dich befreien,” our hero proclaims, [German for “Let me take you away from all this”], and they ride off on his trusty steed, leaving the not-quite-mortally-wounded Jannings gnashing his teeth and vowing revenge.

Herr Liedtke takes Negri back to Germany, where, her Gypsy wild-child difficulties in donning the trappings of civilization notwithstanding, she becomes a sensation as a hootchie-cootchie dancer.

Prince Max meanwhile finds Jannings stretched out in the desert negotiating with the vultures, rescues him, and, figuring no doubt that you can never tell when a retainer versed in the occult who can strike down your enemies with the Evil Eye might come in handy, tenders him a job offer; swearing by Osiris that he’ll find the bitch who laid him low, Jannings accepts.

One must expect all this will end badly; though not before der junge Lubitsch manages to thoroughly bore us with many very static studies of upper-class drawing rooms.

The surviving print is not good; and even in pristine condition could not have been terribly impressive because it obviously antedates the systematic use of lighting; moreover the camera work is rudimentary [stand it over here and let everybody walk in front of it], and the editing, primitive. [Griffith’s innovations in these areas were only absorbed by European filmmakers after the war.] Thus technically it is roughly on a par with Feulliade’s Les Vampires [1915]; though hardly so entertaining.

Ms. Negri [later linked romantically to both Chaplin and Valentino] though admittedly striking and certainly athletic, is athletic in the traditional sense — i.e., it looks as though she could line up at defensive end; meaning that, by the standards of the ballet then or now, she is little less than elephantine. — Still, she projects something exotic and uninhibited entirely alien to the Hollywood starlets of the era, and you have to wonder what she could have done with a pole: there is, e.g., a curious scene set to illustrate the difficulty of her European education in which Liedtke enters the room and presents a welcome distraction, and, overjoyed, she runs to meet him and leaps into his arms — quite as nimbly as Amanda Peet greeting Bruce Willis. One simply cannot imagine Lillian Gish behaving this way; even Mary Pickford was far too decorous.

It is disappointing that the author introduces an exotic locale and then abandons it so rapidly, choosing instead to return to Europe and hang around high society. One might compare Lang’s contemporary serial The Spiders [1919] — another romance about intrepid European adventurers in jodhpurs and high leather boots — which does essentially the opposite and has much more action and more inventive camera work. — Moreover though Lubitsch later acquired a reputation for raciness [aka “European sophistication”], Von Stroheim would have made the Mummy’s tomb a front for a brothel, found an excuse for a midnight-at-the-oasis scene in which Liedtke stumbled across Ms. Negri and fifteen or twenty attendant nymphs bathing in the nude, and would have reserved the role of the decadent procurer for himself, smoking cigarettes through a holder with a monocle screwed into his eye and a lascivious smirk on his face: Queen Kelly, with Egyptology and occult subplots. — Indeed it says altogether too much both about Lubitsch and about Hollywood, that this was a guy who was destined to better himself there, while Lang was trivialized and Von Stroheim destroyed.


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Midafternoon of the living dead (12/20/02)


Invisible Invaders. [Edward L. Cahn, 1959. Written by Samuel Newman.]

Plan 9.2.1 from outer space: the untimely death by laboratory accident of nuclear wizard John Carradine convinces fellow scientist Philip Tonge that the environmental impact of atomic testing is unacceptable, and that the indiscriminate detonation of fission weapons will soon pollute earth, air, fire, water, even space itself; a prophecy confirmed in the most bizarre fashion when Carradine's reanimated carcass lurches into his living room and delivers an ultimatum from evil-nanny aliens who have been unhappily monitoring terrestrial progress from the Moon, where their invisible legions are poised to invade our planet should we not forthwith renounce making things go boom. Washington pays this warning no heed, alas, and in a trice the graves of the world empty and a vast army of the undead [apparently all male and wearing suits, like so many gray-flannel Madison Avenue zombies], operated or occupied [but in any case reanimated] by invisible and insubstantial [but "highly radioactive"] aliens, begins to lumber about the continent, laying waste the land, killing indiscriminately, and generally depressing property values. [Insert stock disaster footage here; repeat as needed.] This prompts a party of guys in white labcoats and the usual token dame in high heels and pushup bra to take shelter in an underground laboratory/fallout shelter hidden in the desert, where under the watchful eye of tough-love military badass John Agar they race to discover the secret which will repel the invasion and put the dead back in their graves, the aliens back in their saucers, the genie back in the bottle, and probably the fizz back in the carbonated beverage. And, sure enough, after some illstarred experiments in spraypainting the aliens which only succeed in turning the shambling zombies into shambling mummies, and despite failures of nerve, attacks of jealousy, wardrobe mishaps, and repeated cutaways to the militant undead, who, we perceive to our horror, are all wearing Really Bad Ties, our heroes confound the wouldbe dictators of the cosmos — who must have missed Earth Versus the Flying Saucers at the drivein [though you'd think one of the advantages of being invisible would be that you could sneak into the movies whenever you wanted] — with some flashy sonic rayguns; thus speaking the comforting moral that any menace Science and The Military may inadvertently bring down upon us, they can certainly repel. Or we sure hope so.


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Dixie chick (10/10/02)


Sweet Home Alabama. [Andy Tennant, 2002. Written by Douglas J. Eboch and C. Jay Cox.]

On the eve of her power marriage to trophy boyfriend/John-John clone Patrick Dempsey — son of the castiron-bitch mayor of New York, Candice Bergen, who views with the utmost suspicion the prospect of the interpolation of any foreign female influence between herself and “the future President of the United States” — selfmade, indeed, as we quickly figure out, largely selfinvented career woman Reese Witherspoon makes a hastily-organized pilgrimage to the land that gave her birth to settle a few items of business left unresolved when she blew town abruptly seven years ago to seek her fortune in the fashion industry — notably, an unterminated earlier marriage. Leaving the city that never sleeps to return to the city that has never regained consciousness, she arrives a couple of jumps ahead of the paparazzi and Madame Bergen’s private dicks and sets to work trying to get abandoned husband Josh Lucas [at least it isn’t McConaughey] to sign the divorce papers; and, maybe, with any luck, to persuade her amusingly demented trailertrash parents Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place to climb out of their Barcaloungers and hide under a rock from the tabloid jackals until, say, the dawn of the twenty-second century.

Once here, of course, the Sweet Southern Angel of Alabama and the Dark Urban Angel of New York war for her soul, with predictable result. In fact since the entire dramatic arc of the flick is obvious from the title sequence, if not from the title itself [or indeed from the name “Melanie Smooter”], the real substance of the scenario lies in its depiction of the detail of smalltown life [Garrison Keillor goes South]: the county fair, the re-enactment of the Civil War battle famous only here, the evening passed sitting on the water tower drinking beer dropping the bottles off when they’re finished, the Zen of trailers, the trophy room full of beauty pageant mementos, the erstwhile high school hotties who got knocked up graduation night and turned into baby machines, the lightning strike from a brooding thundercloud as metaphor for the cosmic connection between mystic soulmates [I want to go on and elaborate this in terms of static charge distributions, but never mind], the ritual visit to the roadhouse which can only end with the heroine staggering out to hurl on the front seat of the pickup, the sheriff who [like everyone else in this pregnant clime who passes the age of thirty] is a fount of cracker wisdom, the several renditions of the title song, and the gorgeous antebellum mansions that manage to suggest via architectural subtext that a plantation economy founded on human slavery must somehow have been a Good Thing after all. [Thankfully omitted: insects, humidity, Billy Bob.] — Though I did find myself amazed at the number of variations Ms. Witherspoon was able to pull on that highschool-reunion doubletake of belated recognition [followed inevitably by: the cruel putdown, the subsequent chagrin, the later apology], the only real questions after the three-hanky scene at the grave of her old coon dog Bear [her buried past] are how exactly the abandoned ex will prove himself the worthier object of her affections, and how close to the absolute last minute the wrong wedding ceremony will run before some masked man rides in to the rescue. [Believe it or not, the first time I saw The Graduate I loved it; now I wish that every existing print could be destroyed and all knowledge of the scenario expunged from memory. In this instance, at least, lightning will never strike again in the same place.]

Not very coherent, at any rate, and inhabited for the most part by tired characters and situations. [I make the usual exception for onetime Lara Croft standin Rhona Mitra, who makes a rather belated entrance as the best-looking chickflick sidekick in recent memory.] But, fortunately for the authors, Reese Witherspoon can do no wrong.


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Finny predators (9/20/02)


Idly channelsurfing, I happened across the proprietor of the jumping-the-shark website pitching his new book to some talkshow dork on MSNBC the other night. Apparently sharkjumping has now been elevated to a universal principle and applied to the explanation of the wider world, with illustrations down through history from Caesar’s jumping the Rubicon to Clinton’s jumping the intern. This either proves that the principles that govern television apply to everything, or that everything has now been dumbed down so that it can be explained to people who know nothing but television; I don’t know which.

One example he provided, I suppose an apt one, was the case of Al Gore: after Mister White-Boy-Who-Can’t-Dance decided to court the Spontaneity Vote by smooching his wife at the convention, says our scholar, everything went downhill. This appears to make sense: the theory here is that Gore lapsed when he tried too hard to be someone he was not; and I’ve always thought that this was the worst kind of bad faith [in the sense of Sartre], pretending to be someone that you’re not, and that this explained, for instance, why people who try too hard to reprogram themselves with psychotherapy automatically turn into assholes. [As you like I no doubt first observed when our loudmouthed fraternity president came back from a “sensitivity conference” and — if anything more obnoxious than ever — proclaimed himself a new man.]

On the other hand the locus classicus of political meltdowns was the famous “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” speech, and this was, first, not at all the end of Nixon and, second, came under the heading not of somebody trying to be somebody he wasn’t but quite the contrary revealing himself as he really was: Nixon was infinitely scarier when he took off his mask. — Or should we argue that, as a purely political creature, the “real” Nixon did not exist? that what was frightening about those occasional attempts to reveal himself was that there was nothing beneath the pose? as if when he took the mask off, there was no face behind it, only a void. So that indeed he was trying to be something that he was not, i.e. an authentic person. [I’m sure Baudrillard could explain this. If only I were French.]

Another example he provided was the case of Woody Allen, whom he maintained jumped the shark when he married the child bride. I thought this a very curious thesis. He seemed to identify without a second thought Allen the writer/director and Allen the celebrity; in fact neither he nor his interlocuter hesitated for a moment in making this identification, as if it never occurred to either of them that there might be a distinction between the two. — Has television so completely destroyed the ability to distinguish form from function, appearance from reality? no wonder the postmodernist metaphysics has sprung up to “explain” this.

It’s more than that, actually: there’s some kind of general assumption that reality in general and Woody Allen in particular consists of a set of twenty-second sound/video bites on, say, Entertainment Tonight. Everything is, inevitably, interpreted in terms of some kind of story line [the shortest summary of epistemology is that we make sense of the world by telling ourselves stories about it], but the story lines that can be presented on television are unusually simple and disjointed — serial, you might say: constructed by the repeated iteration of very minimal elementary components.

Thus the public perception of the character of Clinton, for instance, never deepened despite the fact that, when you add it all up, he got much more coverage than Dostoevsky ever gave Ivan Karamazov. Rather, he became something like a recurrent character on a soap opera — a sort of symbol, Slick Willy, like a desktop icon, something instantly recognizable which eliminates the necessity for backstory: he makes his entrance [like Art Carney in The Honeymooners, to a spasm of canned applause] and you know immediately what he stands for; by definition, nothing he can say or do can surprise you. [No matter, incidentally, what he actually does say or do.] — The key is that, unlike Ivan Karamazov, no matter how much you see of the serial character you’re never going to think about him for more than twenty seconds at a time: the bites are windowless monads which can’t be combined, only concatenated. — Thus Woody Allen is turned into a semantic hook that can be inserted into a Leno monologue. How ironic.

An example which our author did not provide, but which occurred to me afterward: when did the American empire jump the shark? — Perhaps here: there’s a beautiful speech, delivered somewhere in the middle of that classic apology for robber-baron capitalism Atlas Shrugged by the very dashing and romantic character Francisco d’Anconia, with which he lays waste to a parlorful of New York cocktail-party intellectuals who have been belittling the idea of merely “making money”. Quite the contrary, says Francisco, this is the noblest endeavor to which a man can turn his energies. Moreover, he continues, it is worth noting, in fact it is profoundly significant, that only Americans have ever referred to work as making money, with the connotation that economic activity is inherently productive, indeed creative. — I don’t think I ever appreciated the depth of this remark until much later, when I read Jane Austen and discovered that Mr. Darcy, for instance, “had” ten thousand a year, and realized that this choice of verb encapsulated the presuppositions of an essentially static agricultural economy in which land was the only form of capital and all significant power lay in a very few hands. — How far we have come, I thought. — Foolishly. — Actually I think this is just it: that sometime in the none-too-distant future some linguistically-minded historian is going to look back on the decline of the American empire and place the turning point exactly at that moment, sometime during Reagan’s first term, when people stopped talking about “making” money and, started, once again, as they have for most of human history, about “having” money.

But the final observation, obviously, has to be that this is what happens to every clever idea, that there comes a moment at which its author can’t resist trying to apply it beyond its domain of validity, and that’s when the Fonz steps onto the waterskis in his leather jacket and renders himself an absurdity. — So this is where “jumping the shark” jumped the shark: when the author commenced a book tour. Ripeness is all.


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School for scandal (9/17/02)


The Unearthly. [Brooke L. Peters, 1957.]

Laid low but hardly flattened by a nervous breakdown, erstwhile fifty-foot-woman Allison Hayes [the New Girl] arrives at the remote country sanitarium of mad doctor John [“To the true scientist, nothing is impossible!”] Carradine for a rest cure; and, though she can hardly be expected to realize that the avuncular procurer who escorts her here has already reported her as a suicide, she might at least take the hint from the howling dogs, the Gothic setting, and the fact that Tor Johnson [still bearing the monicker “Lobo” hung on him by Ed Wood] answers the door when she rings the bell that her personal physician may not have had her best interests in mind. Indeed, it rapidly becomes apparent that, under the guise of treating the anxiety disorders of his patients [nubile young bimbos apparently preferred, see in particular very tasty but alas expendable former Playmate Sally Todd], Carradine is performing [but of course] Forbidden Experiments with the aim of discovering the secret of Eternal Youth; which, unfortunately, keep going awry one way or another, meaning that he keeps discovering instead the secret of Eternal Jaw-Twitching Pizzafaced Drooling Into A Bucket — and, gnashing his teeth in bafflement, must repair to the pipe organ for another therapeutic rendition of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. [Just once, I would like to see somebody sit down for one of these Phantom-of-the-Opera moments at the pipe organ and play Louie-Louie.]

The stage thus set, a guy [Myron Healey] who looks a bit too much like a romantic lead to be, as advertised, an accused murderer on the run, stumbles into the compound, is offered sanctuary conditional on services to be named later, and immediately starts snooping around like a detective — and, at this point, the resemblance of this device to the old undercover-cop-masquerading-as-juvenile-delinquent ploy from High School Confidential and of Carradine’s blonde-bombshell assistant Marilyn Buferd to Mamie Van Doren, not to mention Carradine’s bizarre and indeed terrifying explanation of his quest for immortality in terms of a search for a hypothetical Seventeenth Gland [as if there were not enough already], firm the suspicion that this is yet another allegory of high school; and, sure enough, from here on in the entire plot seems to turn on a love quadrangle involving the competition of Carradine and Healey for the attentions of the curiously passive Ms. Hayes [here playing very much against type as a dim and malleable specimen of Fifties femininity] and the consequent jealousy of displaced main squeeze Buferd [not a nurse but a doctor herself, and therefore, in Fifties typology, dangerously selfassertive], the [lumpy, grotesque, and curiously hairy] failures of the Forbidden Experiments all begin to look like steroid-induced exaggerations of the theme of puberty [cf. the famously metaphorical I Was A Teenage Werewolf], and their subsequent banishment to the sanitarium basement suggests the advertised fate of all those black-leather-jacketed greasers who hung around the auto shop smoking Lucky Strikes and looking at dirty magazines: that’s what will happen to you if you jack off all the time and don’t get an education. — The doom of Carradine [the radical educator] himself is, of course, a foregone conclusion, and the whole thing reads [convincingly] as a solemn warning that though Frankensteinian tinkering with the secrets of Life and Death might be tolerated by the gods, any attempt to meddle with the secrets of Adolescence will meet with swift and terrible punishment.

The dialogue is laced with quotable zingers [“You’ve got it pretty well figured out, haven’t you?” asks Healey. — “I am a scientist!” Carradine replies. “Thinking is my business!”], and there is certainly a moral to be read from the embarrassing fact that the screwball theoretical premise of a B-movie like this looks, actually, more sophisticated than the classical theories of the physiology of the human organism [seventeen glands are quite a few more than four humors, after all.]

But the main impression you carry away is that left by the denouement, in which the cop in charge of the contingent of uniformed representatives of the patriarchy called in to restore Sanity and Order regards aghast the dungeon full of shambling zombies and shakes his head, saying: “It’s a good thing we have institutions that will take care of them for the rest of their lives.” Surely this confuses cause and effect.


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Mehr Licht (9/17/02)


Soigne ta droite, ou Une place sur la terre. [Keep your right up. Jean-Luc Godard, 1987.]

An Idiot named Prince Myshkin bearing a suspicious resemblance to Jean-Luc Godard is awakened at dawn in Switzerland by a telephone call informing him that he has until sundown to produce a feature film, and, if so, all is forgiven. [Why precisely he needs to be forgiven isn’t made clear, but, then, this is the human condition, that you are much more likely to know that you are guilty than to know what you are guilty of.] Needing no further prompting, like many a naive knight-errant before him he sets off on his adventures, carrying a can of film and a paperback edition of Dostoevsky — and, in the best tradition of Romance, encounters a series of characters, symbols, concepts, types, historical allusions, illustrative quotations, aphoristic oneliners, and rhetorical questions [Godard makes no particular ontological distinction among these] including: the Individual; the Man; the principle that conversation between strangers is impossible; a yellow Ferrari; Wimbledon; Andre Malraux [or what he stood for]; the last words of Goethe [in several versions]; the relation of Art and Commerce; the difference between a novel and a novella; a band in a studio [compare the Rolling Stones in One Plus One] trying to write a song [at one point this nearly turns into Rock and Roll High School, but, alas, the inspiration slips from their nerveless fingers]; the existential Angst of those waiting for their boarding passes at the ticket counter and the insensate Kafkaesque indifference of the airline clerk who types furiously at her terminal before them; the Average Frenchman; the Daddy, the Mummy, the Writer; the nature of Angels; the [male] Ant and the [female] Grasshopper [or was it the other way around?]; the Admiral; assorted perpetrators of slapstick who stage a variety of pratfalls; the Countess; a Greek chorus of airline passengers chanting “Hail to thee, ancient Ocean”; their pilot, studying a manual on suicide before taking off [not nearly so funny since the EgyptAir disaster]; the discovery that there are no grownups; the observation that there are so many sobs, for a tune on the guitar; Borges; the failure of May 1968; golf with bimbos; Mickey Mouse; transcendence; an opened window as illustration that Death is the path toward the Light; a little girl with pigtails who has something to do with the transmigration of souls; a hooker with eyes like pearls [she was either Finnish or Dutch]; the repeated assurance that “What happened next is from long ago”; a certain anxiety in re our acquiescence in the detachment of the Earth from the Sun; and the observation that, in nothingness, any creation is a miracle. — This ends, finally, on the beautiful image of the projection of the film itself: light stabbing the darkness in the back; a whispering which supplants the silence. More light, indeed.

Godard somehow kept frustrating my ongoing expectation that he was just about to quote the tennis match from Blowup, but buried every other quibble beneath an avalanche of allusion. — “Ah, who gave us the sponge to erase the horizon?” [Zarathustra, if you’re keeping score: the madman who announces God is dead.] — Indeed, who built the shore so near the ancient Ocean? You tell me, Jean-Luc.


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Rock and roll fantasy (9/9/02)


The Killer Barbies. [Jess Franco, 1996.]

The venerable auteur of sleaze reaches out to the video generation with this tale of the downside of rock and roll: After finishing a gig at which they sing among other hits a catchy tune with the refrain

I love you
I love you
I’m going to kill you
Tonight

those wandering troubadors the guys and dolls of the Killer Barbies pack up their gear, hop into their van [so totally Sixties], and set off across a dark European landscape rather overburdened with mist in search of their next big score. After a few pounds of recreational chemicals and an indeterminate number of backseat blowjobs, they take a wrong turn somewhere in the fog, their van [uh-huh] breaks down, and they find themselves seeking shelter for the night [not that the sun has come out at any point during this narrative, and not that it’s ever going to] at the vast castle, lit throughout by flickering candlelight, of the mysterious Countess Fledermaus, a former star of stage, screen, and the grand opera who is passing the best years of her third century lying in bed with her face rotting off, listening to 78s on an antique Victrola and attended only by her faithful [evil] butler. [“I lost track of time centuries ago,” he says. No wonder: every clock in the place has stopped at midnight.] The decomposing Countess, it rapidly becomes apparent, can only be restored to her youthful health vigor and beauty by consuming the flesh of the young and washing it down with a few hot blood cocktails. Guess what: dinner is served.

With a couple of evil dwarves, death in the act of sexual intercourse, some serious abuse of the fog machine, a naked girl running through the woods in silver boots, lots and lots of plastic dolls, and quotes at length, as if you didn’t expect it, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Basic Instinct. Some people just know how to have a good time.


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The hollow Earth (8/31/02)


The Mole People. [Virgil W. Vogel, 1956; written by László Görög.]

Fire Maidens of Inner Space: on a remote dig in Central Asia, dashing young archaeologist John Agar pulls a mysterious Sumerian tablet out of a heap of ruins and is just translating the curse of Ishtar it contains for the benefit of his colleagues when — an earthquake strikes! — Coincidence? or the wrath of the goddess? — Undaunted, the adventurous antiquarians drop everything when a native lad points toward an imposing sacred mountain [the very epicenter of the recent upheaval] as the source of another intriguing artifact; after negotiating some interpolated mountaineering footage, the party finds itself on a plateau near the summit where a timely avalanche uncovers a commemorative temple erected shortly after the Biblical deluge, apparently the work of some business rival of Noah [Atrahasis, actually, though I don’t recall whether they get the name right.] They admire this for fifteen or twenty seconds before a yawning void opens beneath the feet of one of their number and he disappears down a shaft of indeterminate depth; descending with the aid of their climbing gear to attempt a rescue, they’re cut off by [you guessed it] yet another landslide and find themselves wandering through caverns measureless to man down finally to a sunless sea in the bowels of the Earth lit by an inexplicable phosphorescence which casts an eerie light upon a lost city inhabited by descendents of the Sumerians — completely fitted out with: a witless nobility that falls for their improvised story about being messengers from the gods; an evil priesthood that does not; a boatload of dancing girls in Grecian robes [close enough to Sumerian, what the hell] to provide [somewhat ultravioletly-challenged] human sacrifices to the sun god [absence makes the hierophantic heart grow fonder]; and a slave race of subhuman laborers [the eponymous Mole Dudes] who can undoubtedly be counted on to revolt when the moment is ripe. “In archaeology all things are possible,” says Agar. I guess so.

Absurd but for some reason entertaining; how many silly Fifties scifi movies claimed to take the epic of Gilgamesh as their point of departure, after all? — Reassuring technical note: the inhabitants of the city did not, for once, learn English from our radio broadcasts; rather, Agar and his colleagues are supposed to have acquired a speaking knowledge of Sumerian from studying ancient codices.


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The Extreme Student of Prague (8/9/02)


XXX. [Rob Cohen, 2002.]

This has to remind you of one of those verbal puzzles beloved of the authors of standardized tests: Aston Martin is to GTO as James Bond is to — well — Xander Cage/Vin Diesel, aka XXX — “My friends just call me X,” he explains amiably — an underground hero of extreme sports and veteran of many daring and imaginative stunts [cf. the spectacular trailer], meticulously recorded on video and webcast to an admiring audience around the world, with calculated intent to maximize the embarrassment of the establishment — a practitioner, in other words, of what used to be called guerrilla theater, albeit without all that tedious Marxist boilerplate — who is plucked from the bosom of his posse [cameos here for many celebrities of the X-Games circuit] and run through a rather overlong preamble to the principal action [a ridiculous subplot which ends up looking like an episode of some reality-television show called Who Wants to be a Secret Agent?] by Boss Spook Samuel L. Jackson [succeeding in a natural progression James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman, and, mark my words, Fishburne will be next] — himself, as his all-too-gaudy scars attest, the survivor of extreme activities of a rather different kind. After wasting the first act running around Colombia blowing up drug laboratories, at any rate, Jackson explains finally that he needs a fresh face to penetrate the underworld operation of expatriate Russian malcontent Marton Csokas — a surly brooding and perpetually unshaven gangster who hangs out swilling vodka day and night in an assortment of architectural masterpieces around Prague, surrounded by formidable dudes in long black leather overcoats and trashy East-European models in ripped fishnet stockings high leather boots mutant lingerie and politically-incorrect fur coats, and, should he not like Artaud move dragging behind him a Gothic landscape pierced through by lightning, seems at least to be accompanied everywhere by an existentially thunderous electric-metal soundtrack — in short, exactly the poster boy for Bohemian attitude I’m still only a few million short of growing up to become.

Why the NSA is interested in this guy is unclear [indeed why that house of geeks is suddenly involved in black ops and messy wetware], but X arrives in Prague, positions himself in a village at the base of the mountain upon which Csokas’ castle is perched, and, representing himself as a land-surveyor, launches an interminable campaign to get Csokas’ bureaucracy to recognize his credentials and validate his existence. — No. — Sorry, wrong initial. That was K. — No, in fact Vin effortlessly insinuates himself into the party scene, ingratiates himself with the main man, and immediately starts making eyes at principal gun moll Asia Argento, whose position as Csokas’s main squeeze and as the allimportant Chick Who Stares Intently At The Laptop During Electronic Funds Transfers [no spy movie is now complete without one] may or may not preclude romantic advances.

Obviously none of this would carry farther than an extended Rammstein video, were it not abruptly revealed [by complete and ridiculous nonsequitur] that Csokas, this punk anarchist whose response to the collapse of the Old World Order has been to party like it’s 1999 and move a few hot cars for walking-around money, is also, without apparent motivation, planning to destroy the world with some hijacked chemical/biological weapons. — Camus was indeed the great poet of philosophical rebellion, but he did not mean to be taken so literally when he spoke of “an absurd reasoning”. — Moreover, and this is truly risible, our evil mastermind plans to launch his assault on humanity by strapping some missiles on a robot submarine! which, presumably, will find its way in the course of geologic time down the whatchamacallit to the Elbe to the sea without its batteries running down. Or something like that. — A glance at the map, obviously, reveals why Czechoslovakia has never been feared as a naval power, suggesting inevitably that the authors either didn’t know themselves where Prague was before they flew into town with a shooting script or [perhaps more likely] that they are letting drop some very feeble joke meant to echo one of Diesel’s leaden early speeches regarding the fact that it is a point of pride with Generation X++ that they were educated by the Sony Playstation and don’t know how to read, write, spell, perform elementary computations, or find Central Europe on the globe. — But who cares. It’s all still fun to watch.

After this mad scheme for universal conquest has been revealed, at any rate, X must storm the citadel, rescue Ms. Argento [an agent herself, of course — but you saw that coming], and, after sprinting through an X-Games Decathalon — diving out of airplanes, scaling a gigantic rock wall [apparently the Eigerwand has been moved to the outskirts of Prague], outrunning an avalanche on a snowboard, doing some fancy shit with an improvised skateboard, jumping over a few buildings on motorcycles, and laying a lot of rubber with that gorgeous purple ’67 Pontiac — save the world. — Convey my admiration to Vin and his daredevil stuntmen, and, expect me there for the sequel.

In the meantime, however, besides trying to ensure a modicum of geographical plausibility in the future adventures of our hero, somebody should do something about the dialogue, which was so dry, wooden, and lifeless as to constitute a fire hazard, leave out the unmotivated quotes from The Third Man, try to make up a decent mad scientist and come up if not with a labyrinthine Le Carré plot at least with the one or two twists we expect even in Bond [where was the bent CIA dude? the bad girl mistaken for a good girl?], reconsider the idea that our hero speaks nothing but English, try to make sure all those individuating little character traits are consistent [if Diesel knows a Beretta at a glance, why can’t he find the safety on his machinegun? if he sidles up to the bar and orders fruit juice like a duespaying granolahead in one scene, how can he drink the Russians under the table in the next?], let Diesel rescue himself from his predicaments rather than [deus ex machina, not once but twice] have somebody bust in the door just as he’s about to get smoked, refrain from killing off the evil mastermind halfway through the chase and attempting to bring the action to a climax with a confrontation with an unconvincing robot, and, by all means, check the camera angles: in the wrong light Diesel with shaven head looks exactly like Doctor Evil.

Renaissance babe Argento, who certainly deserves international stardom, seems to have taken this opportunity to open her autobiographical film The Scarlet Diva [which she wrote and directed and in which she starred] in New York; a canny decision, proving that in addition to having attained the status of a European auteur she has also mastered the purely American art of self-promotion. [She’s also apparently a great cook.] — And I don’t know about Vin’s tattoos, but that angel on her stomach is for real.


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Surrender, Dorothy (8/6/02)


Platinum Blonde. [Cybil Richards, 2001.]

The indefatigable Shauna O’Brien [whose prodigiously-inflated hooters now remind us of a semiorganic analogue of the Gaultier conical brassiere] appears in yet another product of the equally tireless industry of Surrender Cinema: a B-movie actress dumps the vain overbearing and obnoxious director of a cheesy erotic scifi thriller for the shy sincere and genuine editor [and wouldbe writer! but of course], who has fallen for her while cutting the shower scene in Zombie Spies From Outer Space. Indeed, why should she not; I sense here a recurrence of that perennial favorite theme, the Polish Starlet. — But is she humping him for real, or only within the film within the film? What is the erotic content of this diagetic space? — These and other metaphysical questions no doubt demanded my attention, but, alas, I fell asleep between acts, and spaced the denouement. Let me know if I missed anything.

“Platinum Blonde” is apparently a reference to a vibrator. — Somewhere on the dial of the ethereal radio, beamed in from the Great Beyond, I hear Jean Harlow laughing.


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Now you see him, now you don’t (7/14/02)


The Amazing Transparent Man. [Edgar Ulmer, 1960. Written by Jack Lewis.]

A curious attempt to graft the head of H.G. Wells onto the body of Christopher Marlowe: after a textbook prison break and a night pursuit by bloodhounds through the woods, hardboiled safecracker Douglas Kennedy, aka [a cough behind the hand] Joey Faust, is spirited away by mysterious blonde Marguerite Chapman in a gigantic tailfinned convertible [a charming reminder that in more ways than one this was an age of excess] and transported in despite of his unanswered questions to a lonely farmhouse in the middle of nowhere [as close as we can come to a gothic mansion here on the Texas plains], where he is introduced to the — Mephistophelean? — James Griffith, aka The Major, a smoothtalking mercenary in a cheap checked suit whose disturbingly bland smile is, clearly, emblematic of the banality of evil; and informed, to his astonishment, that he has been busted out for the sole purpose of purloining fissionable materials, the better to advance certain illdefined projects of probably diabolical intent. Greeting this harebrained proposal with a snort of derision and a few well-phrased objections, he discovers, to his even greater astonishment, that the Major and his assistants propose to ensure the success of the venture by rendering him invisible — and is ushered into the secret laboratory conveniently housed upon the premises, where he makes the acquaintance of thoroughly-bitchslapped refugee scientist Ivan Triesault, aka Dr. Ulof, and treated to an impressive proof of principle which involves twirling the many radio knobs on the racks of war-surplus electronics which line the walls and training an enormous raygun upon a guinea pig. — Sparks fly; thrilling forbidden-experiment flourishes crackle electrically through the strings; the lab animal vanishes. — And at this point, of course, the rest of it really does write itself: Faust signs on to the caper, is strapped to the table and rendered invisible, and pulls a couple of spectacular jobs which only accentuate his native predisposition toward hybris; Griffith lets drop a few alarming hints about his mad scheme for universal conquest [“With my invisible army I can — dare I say it? — rule the world!!”]; his success having provoked a reversal of fortune, the invisible man is confronted with the prospect of his imminent demise [the guinea pig expires! unforeseen side effects! what a surprise!] and discovers remorse just as the continuing irradiation somehow turns him into a gigantic lump of plutonium and [a suicide bomber whose cause is just] he blows up, taking the hidden fortress and the conspirators with him; excepting only the longsuffering German, who makes his escape to speak an epilogue ripe with the bitterly-won wisdom of the once-exploited scientist who will no longer loose Forbidden Knowledge upon the world.

Ulmer’s renowned genius for making a silk purse out of a B-movie sow’s ear is not much in evidence here: there are a couple of nice touches in the production design, and the exteriors are well-composed, but the interior cinematography is flatlit and uninspired and the grand metaphor never really gets off the ground — the safecracker is by virtue of his job description a kind of magician, the evil Major is certainly a devil incarnate, and the various pranks played by the invisible man on his hapless victims do recall the hijinks of the traditional Faust; but Ms. Chapman is not Helen of Troy nor even the unfortunate Gretchen, the Major does not seduce his accomplices with the prospect of worldly gain but browbeats them into acquiescence by threatening violence if they refuse to cooperate, and the less-mad-than-sad scientist is the real seeker after truth, leaving the putative protagonist an unexciting cipher. — “There is a man who has unlocked every door except the one to his own soul,” the German says, as he bids Faust farewell. Of course, he had no need to: the door was open, and the room, alas, was empty.


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The nature of justice (5/31/02)


Femalien. [Sybil Richards, 1996.]

Alien anthropologist Vanesa/Venesa/Vanessa Talor/Taylor [recall Martin’s joke about the spelling of Sarah Jessica Parker’s name in LA Story] descends from the empyrean via matter transport to visit Southern California, and wanders around Venice whispering anthropologist’s notes into her magic bracelet [apparently some combination of teleportation control and personal digital assistant] as she tries to figure out why the inhabitants of this planet keep ripping their clothes off and playing with one another’s thingies. Presently she enters into the spirit of things and starts ripping her own clothes off: Whoa Trigger.

This needed a couple of carchases and a few more explosions, but I did admire that dialogue among Socrates, Glaucon, Ms. Talor/Taylor, and the ponytailed chef who bakes cookies for the breakfast cafe on the nature of justice and the theory of ideas. However I’m not sure Socrates adequately addressed the objections of William of Ockham to the hypostatization of universals. — Of course, he may have been distracted when Vanesa/Venesa/Vanessa took her shirt off and started blasting with those nucleonic orgasmatrons. Philosophical detachment can only be carried so far.


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Black art deco (5/21/02)


Thir13en Ghosts. [Steve Beck, 2001. Written by Robb White, Neal Stevens and Richard D’Ovidio.]

Lugubriously angstridden widower Tony Shalhoub is unquietly going to pieces in the stinking kitchen of the cockroach-and-coldwater flat where he, his darling children Shannon Elizabeth and Alec Roberts, and their wiseass nanny Rah Digga [Whoopi might consider a suit for patent infringement] are none-too-successfully hiding from those circling vultures their numerous creditors, when abruptly an unusually repulsive lawyer [a guy who seems to leave a physical trial of slime] disposing of the estate of Tony’s recently-deceased uncle F. Murray Abraham materializes at the door, pronounces them heirs to a fortune, and spirits them all away to the bizarre mansion which seems to be the principal bequest: an enormous Chinese block-puzzle of steel and glass, a kind of three-dimensional maze which is constantly rearranging its moving glass walls, which are covered with what look like Elvish runes [mere Latin would not have been sufficiently exotic], and powered by an elaborate interior clockwork mechanism of such diabolical ingenuity that it comes as no surprise to learn, when the inevitable ancient book of necromantic lore is trotted forward to explain everything, that the blueprints were literally provided by the Devil. Uncle Murray, we have already figured out, moonlighted as a freelance ghostbuster, and employed some retro-futuristic containment apparatus and a paramilitary corps of psychic ninjas to assemble a captive menagerie of malevolent spirits — a dirty dozen [associated with the cards of some slasher Tarot] referred to as the signs of the Black Zodiac: The First Born Son, The Torso, The Bound Woman, The Withered Lover, The Torn Prince, The Angry Princess, The Pilgrimess, The Great Child, The Dire Mother, The Hammer, The Jackal, The Juggernaut — whose dire energies he somehow intended to harness within this architectural specimen of postmodern Gothic; as explained by his erstwhile colleague Matthew Lillard [The Tormented Psychic] and former professional nemesis Embeth Davidtz [The Liberal Crusader; apparently some kind of tireless advocate for the liberation of the vitally challenged], both of whom conveniently pop up to provide lengthy expository lectures on the nature and properties of the denizens of the spirit world and Abraham’s wicked designs upon them.

The principals thus united in this strange and marvelous setting, they all put goofy glasses on that allow them to see the supernatural marauders, and, promptly, the house [as always in Gothic, the real protagonist] comes to life: the walls start moving, the doors disappear so that nobody can get out, the rooms rearrange themselves, the invisible bars fall from the hidden cages, and the evil dead are set free to hunt the living.

The chase commences, naturally, with the grisly demise of the lawyer, and, in keeping with the general theme of meting out cosmic justice, proceeds down the list of the actors [The Talentless Buffoons] to the remarkable denouement, in which, after Uncle F. Murray returns from the grave and, with a startling postmodern reversal of camera angle, turns the tables on the film crew, the ghostly posse corner the director and the writers [The Witless Boobs] and prepare to offer them up as sacrifices to Satan, patron of the Black Film Arts. But at the last moment the putative auteurs are revealed to be animatronic puppets manipulated by the real villain of the piece — Joel Silver! [The Shameless Ripoff Artist], whose master plan for the domination of world cinema is now unveiled: a sinister scheme to form a production company called Dark Castle Entertainment, with which he intends systematically to remake all the old Castle classics with flashier f/x and even more shameless [if much less imaginative] promotion — exploiting, the while, the prodigious talents of Howard Berger [The Makeup Artist] and Sean Hargreaves [The Production Designer], whose services he procured by unscrupulous exercises in the white slave trade.

Fortunately the thirteenth ghost turns out to be William Castle [The Inspired Huckster] himself — who leaps from a closet, denounces this scheme in a speech recalling the glories of the individualistic era of the Sixties, throws a mysterious brass lever in a hidden control panel, and cackles theatrically as — a glass wall of razor sharpness descends from the ceiling with astonishing rapidity! bisecting the repulsive Silver! so rapidly that the two halves of the evil producer are still making separate pitches as they separate, melt to the floor, thaw, and resolve themselves into a noxious dew; ensuring a happy ending, and forever putting an end to the possibility of Lethal Weapon Five.

Or was this just another hallucination of The Weary Critic? I guess we’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, I think I’ll look up this irate Princess; anger-management issues or no, on her they certainly look good.


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Once again, pinheads rule (5/14/02)


Blooddolls. [Charles Band, 1999.]

Genetically-engineered pinhead software billionaire Jack Maturin is most of the way through his current project of whacking his principal business rivals Jodie Loudy, Nicholas Wirth, and Warren Draper [who have committed the unforgivable sin of ratting him out to the Feds in an antitrust suit] by the agency of his squad of miniature plastic evil action figure assassins the Blood Dolls [who are animated by electronic voodoo, or something like this] when he realizes to his chagrin that his enemies were all dancing to the tune of dominatrix mastermind Debra Mayer: is this love at first sight? Attended by his clown, his eyepatched cackling dwarf [Phil Fondacaro], and the all-girl punk band he keeps caged in the office and summons to amuse him by applying electric shocks, he contemplates a merger: Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments.

— No, really: a pinhead. Though I am now having difficulty remembering any movie in which Bill Gates was not the villain, the pinhead part is definitely new. — The punk interludes are great [cf. the songs “Kill, pussy, kill” and “Love is pain”]; the girls in the band [Venesa Talor, Yvette Lara, J Paradee, Persia White] went on tour after the movie wrapped. — The DVD comes with [no shit] forty or fifty trailers illustrative of the astounding output of Band’s production company Full Moon Entertainment, and Penelope Spheeris’ six-minute documentary [Hollyweird] on the making of the feature in question — in which, among other revelations, Band notes that this film was “made on the cappucino budget of Titanic”, and the topheavy Ms. Talor explains that while her high school classmates went on to college, she worked as a waitress and saved up to buy boobs. — “So,” asks Penelope, “you think buying boobs was a better investment than college?” “Yes,” says Venesa. — Indeed, judging on the evidence she realized prodigious returns.


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Nuking the whales (4/9/02)


Big Trouble. [Barry Sonnenfeld, 2002.]

Victimized by a gold-digging exwife, fired by a humorless editor at the Miami Herald, and driven into a humiliating and mortifyingly unprofitable career in freelance advertising that leaves him a craven supplicant to loud obnoxious fat guys who want to sell beer to couch potatoes with photographs of girls with big jugs in bikinis, Dave Barry’s [very plausibly cast] alter ego Tim Allen discovers after much trial and error that the only way he can regain face in the eyes of his mercilessly skeptical and brutally empiricist teenage son is to run down a hijacked jet as it taxis down the tarmac, overpower some large and dangerously aggressive but fortunately dimwitted hijackers, toss the ticking nuclear weapon they stole by mistake from the Russian mob and then inadvertently triggered overboard into the Gulf Stream, and save either Miami or the Bahamas [the geography is a trifle hazy] from incineration, albeit at the cost of frying a few fish.

Thus in consequence he earns the eternal gratitude of a couple of FBI guys — who, perhaps not surprisingly, after flashing their badges and quoting some obscure executive order nobody every seems to have heard of seem authorized to seize property at whim and shoot anyone they feel like — is awarded a pair of autographed cowboy boots from Dubya himself [and, presumably, an authenticated presidential nickname like “Timmy Boy”, though mercifully we’re spared that particular ceremony in the Oval office], and wins the hand of Rene Russo, inevitably luscious but here entirely too blonde.

Between the statement of the problem and its resolution Allen grinds gears around south Florida in an unusually pathetic Geo [statistically, we’re informed by Very Authoritative teenage chick Zooey Deschanel, the car most preferred by recently-divorced dork single dads] and his misadventures provide the excuse for the dispensation of a variety of Barryesque wisdom on Martha Stewart, hallucinogenic cane toads, Really Dumb Dogs, airport security, the male cop ego, squirt guns, Gator fans and AM sports talk radio, hippie derelicts who live in trees and eat nothing but Fritos, hit men, the construction industry, bombshell Latina maids, the cult of Xena the Warrior Princess, goats, and the art of the foot massage.

Janeane Garofalo plays a cop again. This is still a mistake.

Funny, but it should have been funnier. Barry should try again, and next time he should write the screenplay himself. It needed more boogers.


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Barthelme (4/1/02)


“What have you written?” she asks. “Mostly I make remarks,” I reply. “Remarks are not literature,” she says. “Then there’s my novel,” I say, “it will be twelve years old Tuesday.” “Published?” she asks. “Not finished,” I say, “however it’s very violent and necessary. ...”


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Rumble in the urban jungle (3/20/02)


Epicenter. [Richard Pepin, 2000.]

Brooding enigmatic technoweenie Gary Daniels — rendered more than usually unstable, we gather, by the untimely passing of his wife — prepares and executes an elaborate solo caper which circumvents the ineffectual security precautions [fools! they know not the mind of the Übergeek!] of his employer, manytentacled multinational “Global Tech”; allowing him to abscond with the darkest secrets of the Stealth Bomber and spirit them away on a Zip disk [is this meant to be product placement?] into the back room of a dark and smoky strip club, where the inevitable representatives of the Russian mafia [notably designated Dragon Lady Daniela Nane] await their delivery with wicked, wicked smiles.

Fortunately for the stability of civilization and the profit margins of the American aerospace industry, ace undercover FBI babe Traci Lords is on the job and at the keyboard as the Mob transfers the eightfigure payoff to a numbered Swiss account, and smoothly interpolates her own twist into the proceedings by changing the password even as the Mob is trying to short Daniels and Daniels is withholding a crucial Magic Microchip — making this, I guess, an octuple cross, if one could keep score.

Somehow this entails a carchase through the streets of San Francisco [somewhere Steve McQueen must always be smiling], ending with one of those classic runaway cablecar predicaments and Daniels’ apprehension and transport by our heroine to a safehouse in LA — where, meanwhile, by one of those coincidences on which the art of the scenario is nourished, her neglected teenage daughter has relocated herself to freak out.

The Mob, of course, immediately picks up the trail, thanks to the intervention of highly-placed double agent Jeff Fahey [making this now I think a double-to-the-fourth cross][but don’t quote me]; and everybody ends up drawing down in a fancy restaurant in a highrise — a Mexican standoff abruptly resolved by the timely intervention of The Big One the title has promised; motivating much cheesy f/x of collapsing buildings, panic in the streets, falling bricks and/or bodies, the burning skyline of Los Angeles [a prospect which never fails to cheer me]; by now you surely know the drill. — Meanwhile the daughter gets trapped in an elevator [you remember that one too]; Lords and Daniels, bonding despite their adversary relationship, flee the mob and the bent FBI guys, escaping through the sewers of Paris [or maybe it was the subways of Los Angeles] after somehow mysteriously for a brief passage getting trapped in a series of rooms flooded by burst pipes, swimming underwater to escape, fighting sharks, struggling with the mob that rushes the boats, arguing with one another whether the band was playing “Nearer My God To Thee” or “Whole Lotta Love” as the great ship went down; finally ending up handcuffed together like Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll and arguing the ethical fine points of espionage while they careen about the ruins of the city doing good deeds, rescuing various other people trapped in predicaments familiar from Speed and Volcano, and, of course, each other, repeatedly. — After the deranged FBI dude takes the runaway hostage, the Mob returns in helicopter gunships. Undaunted, our heroes face them down with a couple of BB guns and a water pistol and a few well-aimed rocks, Ms. Lords falls several stories into a pile of stuffed animals [this may be new], the good triumph, the wicked fail to prosper, and, lo and behold, Daniels is allowed to escape to the South Seas [cf. Out Of Sight]; somehow avoiding romantic entanglement, which has to be a mistake. Nonetheless all concerned live happily ever after.


A silly pastiche, obviously, but it’s still fairly remarkable how many big-budget action movies the authors managed to quote on a nonexistent budget. — As for Ms. Lords as Action Babe: well, why not. Indeed, when has she ever been anything else?


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Man of mystery (3/6/02)


After making a dramatic entrance into the lair of Doctor Evil, Michael Caine, in character as Nigel, founder of the Powers dynasty of International Men of Mystery, directs the first two minions to assault him where to stand so that he may more easily dispose of each with a single punch, and then addresses the third: “Do you know who I am? Have you any idea how many anonymous henchmen I’ve killed over the years? — Look at you! You haven’t even got a nametag! [Encouraging:] You’ve got no chance; why don’t you just fall down?” — And, completely psyched out, the third henchman obliges.

— a paragraph which obviously belongs somewhere below, and must accordingly have been sucked through a wormhole and deposited here at the beginning; possibly to illustrate the paradoxes of time travel. Or is this just an attempt to find an excuse to give away the best gag in the movie at the outset and go home? — But no such luck:


Austin Powers in Goldmember. [Jay Roach, 2002.]

When the temporarily incarcerated but eternally nefarious Doctor Evil works a dastardly revenge from behind prison walls and arranges the kidnapping of our hero’s playboy-spy father Michael Caine (truly excellent casting: “I invented Austin Powers,” says Caine, and indeed I think he did) and his spiriting-away via temporal vortex to the Seventies, the Man with the Mod Jacket must don fur cape and platform shoes and hurtle back to the Age of Disco in a time-travelling pimpmobile to rescue his inattentive parent from the clutches of — well, at first glance from the clutches of a bevy of disco babes, but by implication from the keeper of this honeyed snare, the criminal mastermind Johann van der Smut aka Goldmember aka (guess what) Mike Myers, a rotaryjointed buffon (maybe the point was that his ass screws on backwards, but my mind was wandering) on rollerskates with some mutant variety of eczema that entails many silly jokes about flaky skin, a dorky Dutch accent (“Hey everybody...I am from Holland; isn’t that weird?”)(uh-huh), and a set of glowing artificial golden genitalia which replaced the originals after an unfortunate metallurgical experiment went awry. (This certainly suggests a new category of Snap-On Tools calendar, but never mind that now.) The pursuit once joined, Powers acquires as the indispensable bombshell sidekick Beyoncé Knowles, in character as Fox(x)y Cleopatra (“Up yours, jive turkey!”) — not exactly young Pam Grier, but close enough to cause me to adjust my pants — with whom he chases the several villains and the errant father-figure through a labyrinth of boob fart weenie skidmark subtitle silhouette and talent agent jokes and belabored references to previous blockbusters to the unravelling of the central mystery, which has something to do (don’t ask me what) with the ongoing parodic psychodrama involving Powers, Evil, Caine, and their various clones and dependents — and to the final defeat of a scheme to destroy all life on Earth as well, though of course this absorbs no more of your attention than the period at the end of the sentence.

The jokes are mainly too dumb to repeat (twin Japanese schoolgirls named Fook Mi and Fook Yu, a master plan to melt the Arctic icecap called Preparation H, etc., etc.), but there are a couple of moments which seem to suggest political commentary — the scene in which Mini-Me moons the World Court seems like a sly reference to the best political cartoon of the 2000 presidential campaign (a depiction of Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger as wicked doctor and evil midget clone), and there are occasional flashes of what might be absurdist parody of Texan xenophobia (“There are only two things I can’t stand in this world,” says Caine, “people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures — and the Dutch!”) — and several elaborately-choreographed and very entertaining dance numbers — not simply the predictable Disco Inferno, but also, e.g., a cellblock-rap video starring Doctor Evil and Mini-Me, and the opening sequence itself, whose conclusion establishes what many of us had already suspected — namely, that Britney Spears is an android and that Mike Myers is a better dancer than she is. (Let alone Myers’ remarkably athletic dramatic chorus.)

On the other hand the product placements are so intrusive and continuous as to make one wonder whether the feature-length commercial is really that far off, and, though the cameos by Cruise, Paltrow, Spacey, De Vito, Spielberg, Travolta, et al. are clever and amusing, they only provide more evidence that at this point nearly everyone can do these characters better than their author can himself: when Myers is only the third-best Austin Powers in his own movie, it might behoove him (oh behoove) to hang it up and move on. But then I’m not cashing the checks.


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The revolution will not be televised (2/12/02)


Collateral Damage. [Andrew Davis, 2002.]

Heroic LA firefighter and devoted nuclear-family man Arnold Schwarzenegger is uncharacteristically late to pick up his gorgeous wife and cute kid from an appointment which, unfortunately, has been scheduled next door to the Colombian embassy; and, in consequence, arrives only just in time to watch in horror as they’re blown to pieces by rebel terrorists intent on whacking some government bigshots associated with an unfortunate South American drug-induced policy which is, we almost immediately discover, rather too enthusiastically endorsed by Evil Manipulative CIA Dude Elias Koteas. Thus the protagonist is transformed into that unshaven unbalanced tormented Deranged Arnold of whom, actually, I’m growing rather fond; and, seizing on the excuse that he’s the only guy who can identify the guerilla kingpin, a mysterious figure known as The Wolf [see The Jackal], spurns the perhaps not entirely wellmeaning advice of the bureaucratic suits and departs posthaste for Central America on a Mission of Revenge. This deposits him, I suppose predictably, in a remake of Romancing the Stone — complete with busloads of peasants, guncrazy police who shoot people on whim, and buttslides down ravines, though without laughs, Danny De Vito, or planes full of weed and bottles of tequila — and, after one of those patented dives over a waterfall, he washes up, presently, on the streets of some Colombian town or other [they identified all the locations on those too-helpful spynovel sluglines at the bottom of the screen, but as usual I ignored all of them], where promptly and fortuitously he makes the acquaintance of the mirror-wife and mirror-kid belonging to his double and eidolon, Mister Big. Since by now everyone in the country has his picture and knows who he is, there isn’t time to exchange more than one or two pleasantries before he’s captured by the police and tossed into the local version of the Tijuana Jail; where, nonetheless, his luck continues, since he meets John Turturro, who between sessions of sexual depravity fixes the generators of the dopegrowers upriver, among whom Arnold must seek his nemesis. Busting out when the rebels decide to spring a few of their own with a rocketlauncher attack, Arnold sets off toward the heart of darkness, meets John Leguizamo, blows some stuff up, trails the rebels to their lair, and is on the verge of consummating his revenge when he is faced with the neatly-framed Defining Moment when he faces the choice between croaking the Wolf and saving the girl and kid. Showing his moral superiority by choosing the latter, he gets tossed into an even less appetizing clink. And here we hit pause and reflect.

Up to this point we’ve established Arnold, and his Evil Twin. The latter has [accidentally] killed the wife and child of the former, but suffers no bad conscience because he believes the end justifies the means; the former has [purposefully] saved the wife and child of the latter, because, avenging angel or no, he cannot make himself believe this. The root cause of the conflict between them, it has been established by illustrative incident, anecdote, and the coding of the double’s wife and kid as cute and innocent and Koteas and his fellow CIA gonzos as evil and manipulative, is not some inexplicable form of demonic possession which has seized upon the inhabitants of Colombia to do the work of Satan upon the earth, but American policy in Latin America [sow the wind, reap the whirlwind], which has installed in power an unholy alliance of the police, the military, the landowning elite, and the wicked politicos, and induced a wholly justified rebellion against them in which the drug trade is only an epiphenomenal cash cow exploited by both sides.

Everything in the narrative, in other words, has been designed to raise the question whether our boy is on the right side. And at this point, really, there’s nothing else to do: Arnold should kill the terrorist, adopt his wife and kid, install himself as the leader of the guerilla army, and make war against the CIA manipulators who are really responsible for his misery; this is Bananas, in other words, albeit without so many laughs.

So, naturally, at precisely this point somebody ripped the last act out of the script and ordered a rewrite: the CIA guys arrive in their helicopters and blast the stuffing out of everything and the girl springs Arnold to pursue Mister Big back to — Washington! where, after our hero thwarts another terrorist plot by diving down elevator shafts and throwing bombs out of windows as they’re about to explode he finally dispatches his nemesis, all the momentarily-sympathetic characters mysteriously morph back into soulless monsters, and, a sadder but a wiser man, Arnold absorbs finally the morals that only psychopaths oppose American foreign policy, that any violence committed against Them by Us is justified, that even the assholes of the CIA are only assholes in a higher cause; and, most important [and, frankly, Orwellian] of all, that anyone who thinks otherwise — anyone, for instance, who thought he knew where the plot was going up to the end of the second act — is deluding himself, because Dick Cheney and Big Brother know best.

Nothing could more neatly summarize the co-opting of the war against terror by the forces that, now as ever, relentlessly pursue the opportunity to install the apparatus of repression in the name of a higher good [they too believe the end justifies the means]; and nothing, to be candid, more excites in me the urge to reach for my AK and stand some motherfuckers up against the wall. — First we take Manhattan; then we take Berlin.


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It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing (1/29/02)


Zebra Lounge. [Kari Skogland, 2001.]

Fatal Attraction squared: severely upscale suburban marrieds Cameron Daddo/Brandy Ledford, admitting to themselves that the carbonation has fizzed out of their lovelife, decide after a rare burst of spontaneity which leads them into a porno shop [and which could have led the plot in a much more interesting direction, but never mind] that they might do well to try to step out a little, and place an ad in a swinging-singles magazine. This leads straightaway to an encounter in the eponymous Zebra Lounge with seasoned swingers Stephen Baldwin/Kristy Swanson, a couple of nights of sizzling passion [not graphically depicted], a predictably unsuccessful attempt to terminate the involvement, and, as these evil twins created by their giving in to the promptings of unbridled lust begin to pop up unbidden at every turn, the gradually swelling nightmare realization that the deviant liason cannot be constrained, that the zipper has busted, that [out out damned spot] the spreading stain of moral transgression cannot be localized, and that [like that first puff on a joint which leads inexorably to heroin addiction] these avatars of the Id unchained will now be poking their protrubances into every orifice that Daddo/Ledford have so foolishly exposed to the corruption of oxidation.

Thus, e.g., Baldwin/Swanson dog Daddo to his place of business [a large and unusually sterile glass brick; home, presumably, to many hundreds of corporate robots], where while she hoses the feckless executive-aspirant senseless in the elevator her other half gleefully whacks Daddo’s hated principal rival for the position of vice-president of marketing. — Not the happiest illustration of the wages of sin, since this actually looks like a great idea. But you grasp the principle.

Of course, since the burden of the scenario is so obviously that one slip from the straight and narrow path must lead directly to perdition, all this can only end in righteous gunfire and a solemn oath never to pop a boner again. But, unfortunately, as so often happens in the inherently subversive medium of motion pictures, this moral is undermined by the visual subtext, which conveys the vivid apprehension that Baldwin/Swanson are much more magnetic and interesting than Daddo/Ledford; which leads you to conclude that the latter probably deserve the dullness of their lives, because they aren’t anywhere near as cool as their purported nemeses. [After all though you may not know exactly who Kristy Swanson steps out with in real life, it sure as hell isn’t a vice-president of marketing.]

Moreover even if you think about it in noncinematic terms it doesn’t make sense: why kill Baldwin/Swanson? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to reform them? Give them two-point-three children of their own? Embroil them in corporate politics? Drop them into Volvos, and take them out to the golf course?

The only conclusion you can draw is that this is supposed to be impossible; which is to say that the impulses Baldwin/Swanson represent cannot be controlled or domesticated; which leads us, presently, to an endorsement of the strategy Saint Matthew seems to approve when he says that “there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingsom of heaven’s sake.” And a discussion, no doubt, of the relative merits of aversion therapy [wouldn’t it be interesting, after all, to be the one who gets to plant the electrodes in the subject’s wiener and push the button that gives him an electric shock whenever he becomes aroused?] and chemical castration — though I’m sure the dedicated scientists at Bob Jones University are hard at work on the exploration of these and other alternatives. [Well, maybe not that hard.]

Oh, this is ridiculous. — Get thee behind me Satan. — But first get down on thy knees and take thy teeth out. — And let’s make sure the cameras are rolling.


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Everybody was kung fu fighting (1/29/02)


Kung Pow: Enter The Fist. [Steve Oedekerk, 2002.]

What's up, Tiger and Crane Fist: Mr. Oedekerk and a potpourri of dumb gags are digitally pasted into some redubbed footage from the [perhaps deservedly obscure] 1976 feature, reinterpreted here as the quest of a martial-arts hero [the Chosen One] for revenge against the consortium of evil which killed his family, tossed him out into the wilderness in infancy to be raised by the birds and beasts of the field, and launched against him a conspiracy supervised/maintained by his nemesis the formidable badass Master Pain, aka Betty. Aided by a sweet Chinese girl, a few inept sidekicks, a border collie, a quasiCyclopean fairy-godmother with one enormous boob, and the occasional pair of gopher-nunchaku, he explores strange new realms of the martial arts, combats a mad cow, falls off a waterfall, defeats, finally, his enemy, and confounds the French-speaking aliens in flying pyramids who have been directing the global plot against humanity of which all this is only one manifestation; though not, apparently, before they succeeded in performing brain surgery on the studio executives who greenlighted this feature. Never mind that thing with the tongue.


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The midnight Nash Rambler (1/14/02)


A Beautiful Mind. [Ron Howard, 2001.]

Another fucking triumph of the human spirit: curiously obnoxious mathematical wizard Russell Crowe/John Nash rockets through Princeton on the fast track to immortality, but is shunted off to neverneverland by schizophrenic delusions which begin with the idea that he is cracking secret codes for the spooks [represented by Ed Harris] and escalate to an allconsuming obsessive belief that every scrap of text that crosses his path [newspapers, magazines, advertising jingles, street signs, the fine print at the bottom of the label, any label] contains some kind of secret message from the Russians, or the pod-people, or somebody, necessitating the construction of gigantic [and visually very striking] collages meant to represent the progress of a hidden conspiracy whose machinations only he is capable of perceiving. After repeated cycles of institutionalization and release and a few decades hanging around Princeton acting gonzo, he finally recovers after a fashion, and, his contributions to game theory having been recognized in the interim, wins the Nobel Prize in economics — leading to the grand dramatic finale in which, having gone fifteen rounds with the Apollo Creed of mental illness, he stumbles blindly with his medal from the podium crying “Adrian! Adrian!” in an Italian-Stallion accent and embraces his longsuffering wife Jennifer Connelly, who depicts faithfully a woman who should be nominated for sainthood.

This is based, as they say, on a true story, though the true story in question [cf. Sylvia Nasar’s book of the same title] differs in several critical respects from this one. More obvious and purely cinematic debts include the character of the deranged detective in Dark City [a film in which, perhaps not coincidentally, Ms. Connelly played essentially the same role that she does here], Darren Aronovsky’s [much more interesting and explicitly cabalistic] Pi [1998], Shine [the Riemann hypothesis equals the Rachmaninoff concerto], and, thanks to my own ongoing delusional expectation that Ed Harris was about to morph into Tommy Lee Jones, Men In Black, though I never quite received that final reassurance I was seeking that the headlines in the tabloids really are [Secrets Entrusted Only To A Few] coded messages from the alien masters of the cosmos.

Nor while they are engaged in embroidery can the authors resist exploiting the usual jokes about the pathetic attempts of geeks to pick up girls: Nash is represented as one of those legendary pioneers of the direct “Want to fuck?” approach whose exploits we used to hear in tales whispered around the bunsen burner, and his analysis of the strategic options of the pickup artist is supposed to be the origin of his interest in game theory. [Actually Nash took the much more pedestrian approach of attending a seminar on international trade, but this version is admittedly funnier, and for all I know about either hustling in bars or international trade they follow the same rules.]

Crowe, however, is remarkable, approaching the standard of the great cinematic loonies [one thinks of Robin Williams in The Fisher King and Peter O’Toole in The Ruling Class], and you have to wonder where he studied to perfect his mannerisms: a misfocused gaze, a curiously hunched posture and strangely constrained walk, an oddly unselfconscious manner of mumbling to himself.

But the real hero of the real story is Princeton University, which allowed the real Nash, a gaunt purple-sneakered specter with rotting teeth, to lurk in its shrubbery for a couple of decades until he returned from the Ozone; indeed, they gave him a computer account [a big deal in the old punched-card-and-mainframe days] and library privileges, and tolerated his habit of leaving lengthy messages on the campus blackboards which purported, e.g., to be letters from Nikita Khrushchev to Moses about the factorization of large numbers. There is a hidden message here, sure enough, though it has nothing to do with Commie plots to smuggle nuclear weapons; rather with patience, magnanimity, a tolerance for eccentricity, and the occasionally justified human faith that the degenerate panhandler bumming cigarettes in the park with a plastic pint of Kamchatka vodka in the pocket of his Army jacket is, as you would yourself to be, a creature with an immortal soul with a capacity for surprise who may yet redeem himself.


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‘I’ is someone else (1/7/02)


Impostor. [Gary Fleder, 2002. Written by Scott Rosenberg.]

The idyllic existence [well, love life, anyway] of ace Terran weapons scientist Gary Sinise is derailed one morning in 2079 when SS Oberleutnant Vincent D’Onofrio seizes him on the way to work at the local version of Los Alamos and tells him that, Cartesian certainty regarding his own identity notwithstanding, he’s been replaced by an android double, complete with synthetic memories, manufactured by the evil Centaurans; with whom the Earth has now been at war long enough that, outside the electromagnetic shields that cover the major cities, the whole planet looks like Afghanistan. Objecting to D’Onofrio’s expressed intent to rip the hypothetical bomb in his torso out by vivisection, our hero escapes and spends most of the second act running around the twenty-first century equivalent of the sewers of Paris dodging the pigs before he is reunited with his wife, gorgeous doctor Madeleine Stowe, and gets his chance at last to prove himself innocent of espionage; forgive me if I spare you the last half-dozen twists, which establish, sort of, that nothing is as it appears.

Obviously no one could ape Philip K. Dick so shamelessly, and, in fact, this is based directly on a story written by the master himself in 1953; making it, if nothing else, a classic specimen of Cold War paranoia. But despite the Orwellian aura of D’Onofrio and the vague hint that Sinise is being set up because he has, like Oppenheimer, developed bad conscience about building the Ultimate Weapon [a tower of very ominous appearance, perhaps not coincidentally to be tested on the morrow], the conspiracy against him seems unmotivated and irrational; nor does it seem to have occurred to anyone to allow the [extraordinarily capable] lead to express the ambiguity of character that might have thrown the interpretation of the situation into doubt. Instead, he just comes off as a faux-Hitchcock hero who has been Wrongfully Accused; and, indeed, they might as well have gone straight to the parody starring Leslie Nielsen. When it comes to cosmic paranoia, Fleder and Rosenberg don’t know Dick.


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The fisher king goes west (1/4/02)


Lunatics. A Love Story. [Josh Becker, 1991.]

In a seedy residential hotel in the heart of the urban jungle that is Darkest Los Angeles, bespectacled geek Ted Raimi, an absurdly agoraphobic aspiring poet who models his verse on that of Edgar Allan Poe and Doctor Seuss and his behavior on that of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, is passing his Hollywood nights cowering beneath his bed in the foetal position and his Hollywood days beleaguered by terrifying waking hallucinations [the residue, we gather, of a protracted stay in a mental hospital] of mad surgeons brandishing gigantic hypodermic needles and whirring power saws intent on breaking down the doors and hacking out the busy little animated spiders he pictures nesting in his brain. His only links to the external world are the lingerie model on the billboard across the street from his window [who periodically comes to life and gives him that Barton Fink feeling], and the mocking voices that reject him when he tries his luck on the phone-sex lines — that is, until a freak crossing of the wires connects him with Extremely Anxious blonde bombshell [and erstwhile Valley Girl] Deborah Foreman, another alienated immigrant to the City of Angels who happens to be hiding in a booth in the bus station when the phone rings. As it develops, since her deadbeat boyfriend Bruce Campbell dumped her and stuck her with the bill at the exquisitely sleazy motel from which she was forthwith evicted, Ms. Foreman has been aimlessly wandering the streets of the inner city carrying a dead potted plant, and her subsequent adventures have included a delicate negotiation with a posse of hoodlums whose proposal of gang rape she met with gunfire. Desperate to escape these crack-addled Furies who have now vowed to stalk her to her doom [not everyone responds well to constructive criticism], she agrees to visit Raimi in his room, and, though she is not favorably impressed by the panoply of locks upon his door, the aluminum foil with which he has lined the walls of his sanctuary [“I feel like a chicken in a roaster,” she remarks], and his offer of a Thorazine pick-me-up in lieu of coffee or tea, warms to him nonetheless when she discovers their common interest in writing; and reads his verse aloud from the weird cuneiform that decorates his notebooks.

Obviously a girl pursued by external demons and a guy pursued by internal demons have to hit it off; in more ways than one, this is a marriage made in Tinseltown. [He may be mad, but he isn’t dangerous; and the world without is obviously both.] Alas, the budding romance is interrupted in its progress by another flurry of hallucinations and random gunfire; she bolts into the clutches of her pursuers; and he must sally forth to rescue her. Wrapped in foil like a faux-knight-errant and wielding a baseball bat in lieu of sword, he braves a hallucinatory landscape in which the streets seem to open into the pits of Hell, and dump trucks seem to menace him like giant spiders. — In other words, it takes two-and-a-half out of three acts to figure out that this really should have been Don Quixote in La-La Land; and that our hero might better have staggered out the door a trifle earlier, and tilted at a few more windmills.

Nonetheless this is charming and ingenious, particularly effective in conveying the loneliness of the immigrant alien [Foreman and Raimi are both represented as refugees from the Midwest] in the urban wasteland of LA: a hostile and baffling world, where paradoxically [just as the closer you are to the ocean the farther in spirit you may be from the beach] the more closely you may seem to resemble the natives the more different from them you may actually be — for it is not the color of your skin or the language that you speak that mark you as different here, but a sort of metaphysical Will to Bullshit, a kind of invisible caste mark whose only outward sign is an overcultivated prettiness, that much more effective since unnoticed by those it is intended to exclude. A poet has no place here; he might as well be a throwback to the Age of Chivalry.

You have to guess that this theme lies close to the heart of Becker, who remarks on his website that in the course of a lengthy career battering his head against the gates of the walled city of Hollywood he’s written twenty-eight screenplays and sold only one [and even that one didn’t get him into the Writer’s Guild.] One can only hope that fortuitous accident [the unseen hand of the Divine Screenwriter] has steered him to his own muse, and that, like Raimi, he’s managed however improbably to live happily ever after. Stranger things have happened. Or at least they ought to.


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Let’s do the time warp again (1/1/02)


The One. [James Wong, 2001.]

The evil twin raised nearly to the seventh power: in a network of, I guess, 124 parallel universes [with cute names like “Hades”] connected by wormholes, which flicker in and out of existence according to some kind of cosmic subway schedule [and don’t simply teleport the transportees away a la Star Trek, but shred them and carry them off as dancing dustmotes on tubes of ethereal light], supreme badass Jet Li has somehow figured out that if he kills all his alternative selves, he will absorb their energies and attain godlike power [making this I guess the Saul Kripke rewrite of Highlander]; and, having carried this program far enough that he’s eliminated 122 out of his 123 doppelgängers [and is now faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound — i.e., slightly more impressive than our hero is in real life], enters the Los Angeles of the near future to whack the last remaining Jet — a painfully nice cop who looks good in LAPD shock-troop gear and has a really sweet veterinarian wife who mends unhappy ailing puppies. Since the good Jet has also inherited a lot of the liberated energy, the task isn’t trivial; but any mere mortals who stand in the way don’t stand much of a chance, the two universal paracops [Delroy Lindo and Jason Statham] who show up in pursuit included. Naturally this sets up a bunch of chases down the freeways, over the rooftops, through the hospital, and, finally, into the industry-standard chemical plant for the final dustup. [Someday I am going to figure out why every action movie has to wind up in a chemical plant. Maybe they rent cheap.]

Though the fight choreography [by Corey Yuen] is excellent, and the concept, however shaky, is nowhere near as bad as that of, say, Demolition Man, still there’s something very very tired about the whole electricbluelit leather-and-bulletproof-vest thing, and the plot is incredibly dumb, even by these standards. Occasionally you get a glimpse of what the Wachowski brothers might have done if they’d managed to write Jet into The Matrix [of course, they may yet], and it comes somehow as a relief that Bad Jet suffers not obliteration but exile at the denouement. On the other hand it is incredible that save for one or two [mishandled] moments of confusion the authors fail to exploit the wellworn suspense cliches of mistaken identity; can’t anybody here play this game?

But mainly I look at this and can’t believe they missed the opportunity to do a scifi kungfu version of Kind Hearts And Coronets, with Jet whacking everyone in his extended interdimensional family [young, old, gay, straight, male, female, etc.] standing between himself and the peerage. As always, Hollywood doesn’t know when it has a comedy on its hands.


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Sade but true (12/31/01)


Quills. [Philip Kaufman, 2000. Written by Doug Wright.]

Art, in the person of Geoffrey Rush, overcomes madness, incarceration, privation, obloquy, sexual frustration [Kate Winslet], the Church [Joaquin Phoenix], the State [Ron Cook as Napoleon], Psychiatry [Michael Caine; naturally he is the true sadist], guilt, anxiety, mutilation, and finally mortality itself. — Questions: Now that he’s done Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, how long must I wait for Kaufman to do Baudelaire? Can the transmission of the artistic heritage in fact be regarded as a transmigration of souls? And if you were that poor pathetic priest unhinged by lust, wringing your hands over Kate Winslet’s slowly cooling stiff, wouldn’t you be tempted?

Meanwhile, after watching Rush paint his prose on the dungeon walls with his own shit, I think I’ll stop bitching about this sticky keyboard.


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Traversable wormholes (12/27/01)


Kate And Leopold. [James Mangold, 2001.]

Geek extraordinaire Liev Schreiber discovers a hole in time [royalties are due, again, to Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam] just off the edge of the East River bridge and, in the course of his trip to 1876, excites the curiosity of impoverished Duke Hugh Jackman; who blows off the homely rich girl to whom he is about to propose and follows the White Rabbit back down the rabbithole to modern New York. There, as per genre convention, he immediately meets and falls for Meg Ryan, a marketing executive who thinks she likes her job and is conveniently between boyfriends. Naturally, he makes an excellent impression because his manners are Victorian, he can ride a horse, and anyway he’s Hugh Jackman. But, after much tedious second-act detail, the call of duty summons him forth into the past; and, of course, she ends up renouncing modern life and going with him. This demonstrates the superiority of Love [and Destiny] to the laws of the spatiotemporal continuum and accidents of time and place and birth; and probably also that Schreiber managed to have an affair with his own great-great grandmother, but let’s not go there.

Modulo one inversion [who follows whom], this is exactly the same as Cave Girl [David Oliver, 1985], starring Daniel Roebuck and Cindy Ann Thompson [suggesting the revised poster legend “A love affair fifteen years in the remaking”]; and, if you’ve ever seen Ms. Thompson, you can understand why I liked that better. — I kept waiting for the stroke of genius its readers claimed to have discovered in the screenplay, but I guess it must have been postponed until after the conclusion of the closing credits. Perhaps it will appear in the sequel.


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Notes from the underground (12/22/01)


Subway. [Luc Besson, 1985.]

Christopher Lambert [in surfer mode, with bleached-blonde punk haircut] swipes some mysterious “papers” [a true McGuffin, you never find out what they are] after blowing a safe after crashing the birthday party of Isabelle Adjani, takes off in her car across Paris pursued by bodyguards in a Mercedes, and, before the credits conclude, wrecks the vehicle, ducks into the subways to escape his pursuers, loses them by taking an unfamiliar turn, and winds up in a netherworld beneath the rails inhabited by the eccentric denizens of the underground, including Jean Reno [in his Weird Al Yankovic period] as a drummer, muta persona, who is always playing with his sticks, and Jean-Hugues Anglade as a pursesnatcher on rollerskates. Guided by the occult attraction she feels for him, Adjani seeks him out, but the progress of their romance is inhibited by her pre-existing marriage to some mysterious Mister Big, either a mobster or a businessman with shady connections, to whom her relationship is, as she explains, that of Little Orphan Annie rescued by Daddy Warbucks. Meanwhile the heavies are after Lambert, who for some reason seems mainly preoccupied with forming a band from his new acquaintances, and everyone is pursued by the subway cops, who are characters straight out of Mack Sennett. Complications ensue.

The story is somewhat confusing, but the chases are beautifully choreographed, as always with Besson the photography is amazing, and the concept is priceless. Check this out.


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It’s only a paper moon (12/20/01)


Vanilla Sky. [Cameron Crowe, 2001. Derived from Abre Los Ojos (1997), by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil.]

That even more obscure object of desire: pacing back and forth across his prison cell, we discover prettyboy rich kid Tom Cruise, restored to his good looks after plastic surgery has repaired the damage done by an automobile accident which had temporarily turned him into the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but now, alas, Very Confused, trying to decide, with the aid of prison court-appointed shrink Kurt Russell, whether he is/was fucking Penelope Cruz or Cameron Diaz [a problem with which many of us have wrestled], and if so, which one he murdered, if he murdered either one [ah, this is a tangled screed]; providing the excuse for a series of flashbacks in which we relive his perfect life, the apparition of true love [Cruz, who is apparently supposed to be channeling the spirit of Jeanne Moreau; we have a bandwidth problem here], the jealous reaction of the notsotrue love [Diaz, rather more successfully channeling the spirit of Glenn Close], the decision of the latter to drive off a cliff and take him with her, the fell consequences [is that really a pun?], etc., etc. — none of it quite ringing true, and none of it quite ringing false, either.

Presently with a grand flourish the author pulls back the curtains and provides us with a lengthy explanation of the real meaning of these proceedings, but none of this rings true or false either — because, though it’s supposed to be a big surprise, it’s obvious all along that this is yet another specimen of the now very tired virtual-reality genre [memo to the Wachowski brothers: take stronger drugs], which precludes an unambiguous conclusion [let alone this absurd “Monsters! Monsters from the Id!” punchline] — and, besides, though Crowe and Cruise once again succeed in selling the star as an unattractive character who has to overcome his own limitations, this always comes off as speaking the moral that the possibility of redemption exists for those whose teeth and pecs are good enough. — “One handsome man’s triumph over narcissism.” Oh, there’s hope for crippled children there, sure enough. — You find yourself wondering what the Farrellys would do with this; and then remember Kingpin.

On the other hand the soundtrack is terrific — no one else has an ear like Crowe’s — and the flick looks beautiful, particularly in the final vision of a deserted Manhattan. The vanilla sky, they take pains to remind us, is that of Monet; he might not have been disappointed.

But the highpoint, certainly, is the virtual-reality hologram of John Coltrane playing the sax. Cruise will be forgotten soon enough; but some men really should live a thousand years.


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The dude with no name (12/8/01)


Omega Doom. [Albert Pyun, 1997.]

When a stray bullet whistles off his braincase during one of the last battles of the Third World War, pops everything from his execution stack, and reboots him into the open source Free Will OS, synthetic Samurai Rutger Hauer goes Ronin, and proceeds to wander the Earth, or what’s left of it, in a long overcoat to keep out the chill of the nuclear winter, sword on his back, in search of truth, justice, enlightenment, adventure, a bowl of rice, or maybe just someplace to recharge his batteries [not that it’s never really clear what these guys are running on.]

Arriving presently at a picturesquely bombed-out town [all rubble and graffiti, one of those charming low-budget locations in Yugoslavia where they lost the last three or four wars], he discovers it divided between two warring gangs of androids — one lit blue who wear shades, the other lit red who do not — and is seized by the whim to intervene in their dispute; though whether or not he is, really, intent on playing one gang off against the other by repeatedly switching sides is never clear because this is, alas, a Pyun film, and therefore it is impossible to tell what, if anything, is going on, since the characters occupy themselves not by exchanging meaningful dialogue, or even shooting at one another, much, but rather with striking poses which are meant to convey Attitude.

Thus though it is, at least, obvious that this is supposed to be Yojimbo for androids, nothing else makes sense: the scenes have no connection, the shots don’t match, nothing in particular happens, and the coda for reasons known only to the B-movie gods comes from Dylan Thomas. [I think I was supposed to be sad because Shannon Whirry bought it, but whatever sorrow I might have felt was erased by my confusion regarding why she was getting iced.] — When robots sidle up to the bar, they seem to drink water, but otherwise feel pain, ambition, embarrassment, jealousy, etc., and appear to be subject to varieties of Angst; Hauer repeats the mule speech [though not about a mule] and lights a cigar before riding off into the sunset [though he doesn’t ride], but there are no mistakes about coffins; android’s bodies lie rusting in the streets where they fall, and are indeed occasionally reappropriated by stray heads, to what is supposed to be comic effect. — Well, go figure. — If I had Rutger Hauer and Shannon Whirry, I’d have made a film noir, but somehow this happened instead.


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Inside the bubble (12/7/01)


Startup.com [Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim, 2001.]

The chemist Kekule tells this story about his discovery of the structure of benzene:

“During my stay in Ghent, I lived in elegant bachelor quarters in the main thoroughfare. My study, however, faced a narrow side-alley and no daylight penetrated it....I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.”

The art of prophetic dreaming has, alas, fallen into decline over the last century-and-a-half, and by the time we arrive at the commencement of this documentary it has degenerated to this: a couple of guys, one of whom [the guy who hustles money, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman] looks good in a suit, one of whom [the geek, Tom Herman] does not, are jointly struck by the inspiration that you should be able to attend a city council meeting in your underwear; following the implications of this stroke of genius, they realize that there is no real compelling necessity that requires your physical presence at City Hall to pay a parking ticket, or at the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew your driver’s license, and, on the basis of a back-of-the-envelope calculation which seems to indicate that these petty encounters with the lower echelons of the bureaucracy amount to a sixty-billion-dollar-a-year market, and invoking the familiar and all-important argument that they must Get Big Fast, persuade their backers to let them run through twenty million dollars and a couple of hundred employees before the parabolic arc of their fortunes — whose apogee falls just short, alas, of the IPO that would have allowed them to bail out with a fortune and leave their investors holding the bag — returns them to the penniless ground whence they sprung.

Thanks to the [somewhat more substantial] miracle of digital video and some rather more canny investments on the part of executive producer D.A. Pennebaker, they are dogged throughout this giddy flight by Ms. Hegedus and Ms. Noujaim, who managed to put 400 hours of raw footage in the can following the protagonists around sixteen hours a day — on the road shilling for money, at the gym, arguing in the office — before [as Pennebaker apparently predicted when the project was first described to him] CEO A [the suit] stabs CEO B [the geek] in the back and shoves him out of the company and seizes the controls just in time to auger in all by himself.

Obviously this is fascinating. — The first question that comes to mind as you watch it is, of course, what made these bozos think they deserved to become billionaires? The second question is, why should they not? — I wish Mr. Tuzman and Mr. Herman better luck next time; though I suspect, on the evidence here presented, that Ms. Hegedus and Ms. Noujaim have brighter prospects.


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Not the marrying kind (12/6/01)


Heartbreakers. [David Mirkin, 2001. Written by Robert Dunn, Paul Guay, and Stephen Mazur.]

An occasionally funny comedy about a mother and a daughter tag team, played by Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts, who wander the highways and byways of the land, luring rich suckers into marriages which invariably go unconsummated, are annulled after carefully-contrived scenes of embarrassment, and provide these shameless bitches with handsome settlements; Ray Liotta and Gene Hackman, better sports than the union contract should require, ham it up as the principal victims, Jason Lee plays the love interest who may eventually [though, caveat emptor] get to handle Ms. Hewitt's alluring merchandise; cameos by Ricky Jay and the redoubtable Anne Bancroft.


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Frazer in the Hebrides (12/1/01)


The Wicker Man. [Robin Hardy, 1973. Written by Anthony Shaffer.]

The first, last, and only Druid nudie musical: monumentally repressed Scottish cop Edward Woodward [represented here as the kind of guy who would arrest himself for popping a boner] gets an anonymous tip about a missing girl which leads him on an expedition to the remote island of Summerisle, ruled over by apparently benevolent lord of the manor Christopher Lee and inhabited by a lot of people who seem way too happy to be Calvinists; and, in the course of an investigation which no one but himself seems to take very seriously [maybe because they all know better who is investigating whom], morphs reluctantly from detective to ethnographer — since this lost world in the Hebrides is, he discovers to his disgust, a stronghold of the real oldtime religion, the pagan nature-worship of the Celts and Druids: there are Maypoles everywhere, packs of priestesses dance naked around replicas of Stonehenge, and as soon as the sun goes down people are out humping in the streets; and though no one will admit what happened to the missing girl, he can’t escape the feeling that they all know and they’re laughing at him behind his back — even the absurdly bodacious pagan babes [Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland, and Ingrid Pitt] who take turns playing at seducing him from his mission. — Worst of all, at unpredictable moments everyone stops and bursts into song: have these people no sense of decency?

It isn’t difficult to guess that a human sacrifice has been scheduled for the fertility rites on Mayday, nor is it hard to figure out who’s been nominated for guest of honor; it may be that our hapless hero is making a mistake when he insinuates himself into that grand Celtic Mardi Gras parade of dancing pagans wearing animal heads heading out of town to see the Wicker Man himself. — Summer is icumen in, dude. Watch your back.

The original print was mutilated even before distribution by the usual conspiracy of uncomprehending philistines, but is here in the DVD release restored as best possible from analog masters, with accompanying documentary and illuminating commentaries. It will come as no surprise that Anthony Shaffer did a lot of anthropological research. — Music by Paul Giovanni, and the most pornographic photography of snails on record. An absolute classic. Check this out.


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Lord of the jungle (12/1/01)


Tarzan and the Lost City. [Carl Schenkel, 1998.]

On the eve of his wedding in 1913, Lord Greystoke [Casper Van Dien] receives a psychic transmission from his blood brothers in Africa which causes him to drop everything and dash to the Dark Continent, pissing off his fiance Jane March no end; there unfolds a scheme hatched by some unusually venal White Hunters to seek out and find the Lost City of Opar and loot it of its fabulous treasures, the meanwhile perpetrating assorted heinous acts of rape, pillage, ivory theft, looting, animal capture mistreatment and slaughter, etc., etc., in which after changing out of his civvies back into his loincloth our hero must naturally oppose them. Recovering from her pique, Jane follows him to Africa and promptly falls into the hands of the bad guys; complications ensue. The chase through the labyrinthine caves that lead into the hidden valley concealing Opar [which seems to consist mainly of a giant pyramid filled with jewels and topped off by an altar for staging blood sacrifices] is fairly entertaining. The finale is, predictably, a homage to the Hammer version of She, Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts, and [all together now] Raiders of the Lost Ark. — Not entirely stupid, though Van Dien is more than usually wooden in the role and could probably be replaced by CGI. — Ms. March is much better, but where’s that nude swim beneath the waterfall?


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On the rampage (11/20/01)


Poison. [Jim Wynorski, 2001.]

Femme fatale Kari Wuhrer takes revenge upon the world for the untimely death of her hapless-dweeb husband by killing a bunch of naked people.


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Cave girl of the pampas (11/7/01)


Deathstalker Two. [Jim Wynorski, 1987.]

The second episode in the adventures of the B-movie Conan: sweet innocent [but severely stacked] princess Monique Gabrielle loses her kingdom to a wicked sorcerer who replaces her on the throne with her Evil Twin; after a truckload of swordfights, stalwart squarejawed hero John Terlesky wins it all back. — The MST3K deconstruction of this opus is provided with the DVD release in the form of a commentary track by the director and the male lead, who explain: that the film [as per the instructions of its famously-penurious executive producer Roger Corman] was shot in Argentina for next to nothing; that the crew spoke little or no English, and that most of the cast didn’t realize they were making a comedy; that the original script was [in Wynorski’s words] “leaden”, and that the rewrite proceeded from the premise that it might be more interesting if Bugs Bunny were playing Deathstalker; that the swords were all wooden; that Monique’s outfit was deliberately modeled on Wilma Flintstone’s; that when they discovered that a lot of the film was fogged and they couldn’t afford to reshoot they simply put a lot of thunder in the soundtrack to make it seem like it was raining; that the same three heavies [Argentinian wrestling stars] got killed in every scene, and that the masks they wore not only served to disguise this fact but made it easier to dub their dialogue in post without lipsynch problems; that besides the obvious debt of the scenario to It Happened One Night there were systematic borrowings from Hawaii Five-O, Rambo, the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Night of the Living Dead, professional wrestling [Terlesky dukes it out before an audience of Amazons with Queen Kong], Rocky, The Pit and the Pendulum, and Laugh-In. [I forget where they stole the exploding midget who leaves behind a pair of smoking shoes.] — And, of course, that it was all a lot of fun and they’d do it again like a shot. — If they did, you can bet that I’d watch it.


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Dangerous eleisons (9/28/01)


The Seductress. [J. Edie Martin, 2000.]

Black Widow with bigger balloons: serial gold-digger Shauna O’Brien marries a string of rich guys for their money and then poisons them, though not before hosing them senseless first; Gabriella Hall investigates, which seems at first to entail following her around and peeping through keyholes, then finally joining in herself. — So why do they call them private dicks?


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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern go west (9/19/01)


Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. [Kevin Smith, 2001.]

The world’s oldest eighth graders, dislodged from the front of the convenience store before which [it is revealed in flashback] they have been posed since their hippie stoner mothers abandoned them there in infancy, learn that unscrupulous parties have sold the rights to their legend to the dream merchants of Miramax; take umbrage; and make a pilgrimage to Hollywood, that it may feel their wrath.

Once committed to the road, they meet Shannon Elizabeth, go down on Carrie Fisher [here playing a nun], learn the essentials of the hitchhiker’s craft from George Carlin, fall in with some major-babe jewel thieves who are posing as ecoterrorists [unless it was the other way around], adopt an orangutang who turns in what is easily the best performance in the picture, meander at some length through a weird landscape littered with cactus and boulders and inhabited by yokels with phony accents which apparently represents the conception of the western United States held by the typical dumbshit from New Jersey who’s never actually been there but only flown over it to get to LA, and arrive finally in Tinseltown, where they fight a lightsaber duel with Mark Hamill, study Van Sant and Damon and Affleck at work on Good Will Hunting II: Hunting Season [this was almost funny], run into Shannen Doherty and the dweebs from American Pie, dispense some useful tips on anal hygiene, and indulge the auteur’s fondness for quotation from the Hollywood canon, including, I guess, ET, The Fugitive, the Star Wars movies, and, of course, himself. Probably all this allusiveness is supposed to indicate a deep appreciation of the history of the cinema, but instead it comes across as namedropping; and all the starlet cameos, incidentally, are transparently just a device to allow the author to make the acquaintance of hot chicks.

True to form, Mr. Smith’s alter ego utters barely a grunt for ninety or a hundred minutes, confining his exertions to what is apparently supposed to be physical comedy [though he reminds us very little of Keaton or Harold Lloyd or even Fatty Arbuckle], while the other participants attempt an exhaustive enumeration of the 5040 permutations of the seven words you used to be unable to use on television [the screenplay must literally read “1256473”, “7345126”, “4613275”, etc.] — before [as we expect] he speaks the moral with a remarkable fluency which reminds us, finally, how capable a writer he really is; or would be, if he bothered to exert himself.

A word of advice, then, to the author: there’s a moment at the beginning of The Thirty-Nine Steps [1935] when Richard Hannay/Robert Donat and the Woman of Mystery “Annabella Smith”/Lucie Mannheim come out of the theater to catch a streetcar, and a fat pedestrian [guess who] passes briefly between them and the camera — and then disappears from the narrative. Though he was doubtless as selfobsessed as any other film artist, Hitchcock did not proceed to make a series of movies about this fat pedestrian; a lesson which Mr. Smith might do well to absorb.


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The waste land. (9/16/01)


— In fact [responding to your suggestion of a couple of years ago] there’s a scene at the beginning of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou [1965], in which Belmondo, still the discontented bourgeois and not yet the reckless adventurer cruising around the south of France in a purloined Ford Galaxie with Anna Karina, attends a party to network with his business associates, and, in between little vignettes in which topless women recite testimonials to their Maidenform undergarments, converses briefly but memorably with a guy who claims to be an American director named Samuel Fuller [played by an American director named Samuel Fuller] — in Paris, so he says, to film Les Fleurs du Mal. Since Johnny Depp couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old at the time, I have no idea who was supposed to play the lead. But the thought was there.

It’s curious how people who aren’t trained for the job [as stunt men are, for instance] end up falling. The guy in the photograph plummets head downward; I studied the pose, which somehow seemed familiar, and finally remembered the Tarot card of the Hanged Man. — Not found by Madame Sosostris, famed clairvoyante. But here nonetheless. Unreal City indeed.


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This is not Ben Hecht (9/5/01)


The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion. [Woody Allen, 2001.]

After trading insults for a couple of hours without reminding us in the slightest of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, fauxForties insurance investigators Helen Hunt [Reason] and Woody Allen [Intuition] finally fall for one another while unravelling the mystery set in motion by a stage magician who isn’t Charlie Chan who [watch closely, this is the notsoclever part] has hypnotized them into committing the very jewel robberies they’re trying to solve [I guess they’re not themselves.] — Charlize Theron is not quite Veronica Lake; Dan Ackroyd isn’t really Edward G. Robinson; Elizabeth Berkley doesn’t suck. — Maybe this is why the Schoolmen remind us that the Divine Perfection can only be defined by negatives. Or maybe not.


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Grrly action (8/24/01)


Ghosts Of Mars. [John Carpenter, 2001.]

A greatest-hits medley in which one can discern variously elements of Escape From New York, Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, Total Recall, the Return/Revenge of the Living Dead franchise [cf. in particular the third episode of the second series, the essay on piercing], and a novel of Mick Farren’s on which [I’ll just bet] he isn’t collecting royalties: Martian cops Pam Grier and Natasha Henstridge [agents, we gather, of a reigning matriarchy], dispatched to a mining outpost to bring back Serious Badass Ice Cube to stand trial for a host of offenses against public order and decorum, discover the town to be deserted and the few remaining inhabitants cowering in the jail and curiously disturbed. Cross-examining these survivors they presently shake loose from incarcerated science babe Joanna Cassidy a revised and amplified version of the tale of the curse of Tutankhamen: an ancient tomb unmarsed by excavation, a dire warning engraved above its entrance in an ancient tongue, an audible hiss as the seal is broken and a dimly-perceived gnatlike swarm of malevolent intelligences escapes Pandora’s box, and a subsequent epidemic of demonic possession whose victims adopt the mannerisms of the cannibals in old jungle movies — weird makeup, creative body piercing, hoisting totemic severed heads up on pikes and shaking them to the beat of savage tom-toms, cutting the faces of their enemies off and wearing them as masks, chanting in unknown tongues while industrial-strength Satanic metal throbs on the soundtrack, etc., etc. — The inhabitants of the town have not been killed, in other words, but transformed into characters in a Marilyn Manson video; and our heroes find themselves forthwith surrounded by an army of the undead and attempting to fight their way out against impossible odds to warn civilization of this alien menace — which means, of course, that they kick a lot of zombie ass, that the relationship which develops between Henstridge and Herr Cube [who isn’t getting any better at what he does, but does, let’s give him credit, do it very well] is buddy-movie male bonding, and that the chase is going to conclude with the protagonists trying to outrun a nuclear explosion.

The choreography is indifferent, and the effects [due to the limitations of Carpenter’s budget] minimal, but the subliminal message I read from the casting, that Ms. Henstridge is here commencing a series of blondezploitation movies in imitation of the career of the redoubtable Ms. Grier, is certainly an attractive one. Sign me up for the package tour.


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Chicks rule (7/28/01)


Sugar And Spice. [Francine McDougall, 2001. Written by Mandy Nelson.]

Cheerleaders Marley Shelton [the pregnant ringleader in dire financial straits], Melissa George [wouldbe stalker of Conan O’Brien], Mena Suvari [whose mother is in the pen], Rachel Blanchard [the Christian virgin], Sara Marsh [the brain with a scholarship to Harvard], and Alexandra Holden [the hick added to the squad in medias res], opposed rather ineffectually by jealous rival Marla Sokoloff and aided not in the slightest by nitwit star quarterback and father-to-be James Marsden, take inspiration from the movies [in particular Point Break, but also Reservoir Dogs, Heat, and Dog Day Afternoon] and decide to dress up in doll costumes and rob a bank. They get away with it, but the movie doesn’t; why I’m not exactly sure, but there’s nothing less funny than trying to analyze a joke that doesn’t quite work. Suffice it that this opus has its moments [the signature “cheerleaders kick ass” routine among them], and that it’s certainly just deserts to see the male lead [who begins on the same footing as the others] recede so rapidly into insignificance — just like the girlfriend in a guys’ flick. But for the moment I’m trying to believe that high school is over.


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Gotta like boobsalot (7/28/01)


Breast Men. [Lawrence O’Neil, 1997. Written by John Stockwell.]

A gripping drama about the inventors of the modern breast implant: two men who, like Columbus before them, found a world that was flat, and left behind them a world that was very, very round. — Showcasing many of the geographical marvels subsequently uncovered, among them Lisa Marie and Julie K. Smith.


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Busting loose (7/27/01)


Battle Queen 2020. [Daniel D’or, 1999. Written by Michael Druxman.]

After an errant asteroid drills a hole in the Earth and turns the thermostat down to 75 below, the remnants of humanity retreat to an underground fortress where the upper classes have attained a vampirelike immortality by feeding on the body parts of the lower classes, allowing them to party hearty in perpetuity. Chief courtesan Julie Strain takes issue with this state of affairs and joins the Heroic Resistance, providing her with ample opportunity to kick ass.

The DVD contains a halfhour interview with Ms. Strain, shot at the home in Beverly Hills she shares with her husband Kevin Eastman, creator of the Ninja Turtles. Between the two of them they have, as you might expect, an amazing quantity of junk. — And Julie does admit that, yes, she’s now made so many movies even she is still trying to collect them all on eBay.


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Fun in a Chinese laundry (7/20/01)


Kiss Of The Dragon. [Chris Nahon, 2001. Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, after a story by Jet Li.]

The phenomenal Jet Li here appears in the role of a Chinese agent sent to Paris to trace, you guessed it, a French connection for heroin; since, alas, this connection turns out to be the very police official to whom he reports [Tchéky Karyo doing his very best Gary Oldman], he finds himself in short order alone and abandoned in Paris, wrongfully accused of murder, and forced to fight his way out of town through a malign army of bent cops. Fortunately this doesn’t lie behind the more-than-human capacities of our hero, who manages also to rescue the kidnapped child of junkie hooker [but, shucks, she’s got a heart of tarnished gold] Bridget Fonda while knocking over a horde of Keystone tenpins — and, at carefully metered intervals, taking the measure of several more formidable products of the French schools of the martial arts — which, I am happy to report, have not lain idle, since, in compliance with that law of action movies which usually states that you have to find a villain large and formidable enough that he looks as though he could stand up to the hero [if Stallone in Get Carter, e.g., then, e.g., Mickey Rourke], it is essential here to find somebody fast enough that it doesn’t look like Jet can hit him fifteen times while he’s trying to get his hands out of his pockets. [Else you end up with something like the lamentably bogus finale of Lethal Weapon Four.] But remarkably they found some big fast athletic guys nearly good enough for Hong Kong, and the set-piece fights, accordingly [choreographed by the justly famous Corey Yuen] are very very good.

Though he is not, nominally, the principal author, Besson’s influence is obvious in the shape of the finished product, and there are extended quotations from his oeuvre, in particular La Femme Nikita [the oft-imitated chase through the kitchen leading to the dive down the dumbwaiter into the laundry —since everyone else has stolen this, why not Besson himself] and The Professional [cf. that electric thrill of fear that paradoxically runs through the upper stories of a building full of badasses when they realize that “Somebody’s coming up...somebody serious.”] — Other obvious borrowings include the Fist of Fury episode in which the hero [e.g., Bruce Lee or Jet himself] busts up a school full of martial artists unassisted, and, thanks to some charming science fiction about the creative applications of acupuncture, the classic Scanners exploding head [the dragon’s kiss of the title]. —Nor could any visit to Paris be complete without a brief chase through the sewers.

With a nod to the Schwarzenegger tradition, Jet is given a wholly unnecessary signature line [“Don’t do that again”][or He’ll Be Back], but the beauty of it, of course, is that he doesn’t need one; indeed, he hardly needs to say anything at all. [Recalling the traditional wisdom about John Wayne, that he was good in inverse proportion to the number of his lines.] — Ebert complains nonetheless that this has no plot. Neither has Swan Lake, dumbshit.


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A stroll in the park (7/19/01.)


Jurassic Park Three. [Joe Johnston, 2001.]

Despite his loud protests that he’ll never whiff tyrannosaur again, ace paleontologist Sam Neill falls for the old seven-figure-check trick, abandons his dig in Montana, flies to L’Isle d’Dinos, and, after the mandatory crashlanding, discovers he’s expected to lead the search for Lost [but Plucky] Lad Trevor Morgan — last seen augering into the jungle in the credit sequence — on behalf of estranged but temporarily reunited parents William H. Macy and Tia Leoni. The dread certainty of repeated attacks by giant lizards is of course as nothing beside the possibility of reuniting the nuclear family, and, despite the best efforts of Stan Winston’s animators to stop them [the pterandons were particularly impressive], the party eventually succeeds in reaching the coast and reaffirming the vows never to set foot on the island again that they’ll be breaking in the opening reel of Jurassic Four.

Neill’s repeated denunciations of all this Frankensteinian meddling with the natural order are getting pretty tired. The phenomenal success of this franchise makes two things clear: first, at the very instant it becomes possible to genetically engineer a dinosaur, someone will do it [and the world will immediately beat a path to his door to gawk at it]; second, if there really were an island full of prehistoric monsters off the coast of Costa Rica, no quarantine would be adequate to keep people out of it. In fact, they’d be shooting the next season of Survivor there as we speak, and all America would be arguing over lunch which of the participants ought next to be sacrificed to appease the anger of the reptile gods.

Somebody get me Spielberg’s number. I feel a pitch coming on.


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Reality bytes (7/19/01)


Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. [Hironobu Sakaguchi, 2001.]

The earth having been devastated by ghosts from another planet long since destroyed [phosphorescent monsters which float like jellyfish, their design apparently inspired by microscopic critters like dust mites], the remains of humanity live in fortresses guarded by electronic shields amid the ruins of the great cities of the world. Ace chick researcher Aki [Ming-Na] and wise old scientist Doctor Sid [Donald Sutherland], aided by essentially the same squad of Marines we remember from Aliens [Ving Rhames is Apone, Alec Baldwin is Hicks, Steve Buscemi is Hudson, Peri Gilpin is Vasquez] devise a peculiar form of exorcism that seems to be based upon a Fourier analysis of the evil spirits; this necessitates they find eight fundamental tones [or whatever] in the ruins of the earth, from which the antidemonic can be composed. Naturally they’re opposed in this quest by evil General Hein [James Woods], who favors the simpler scheme of zapping the demons with a death ray and thus destroying the earth in order to save it.

All of which though entertaining is unremarkable; the astonishing thing, obviously is the fact that this is an animated feature which approaches photorealistic verisimilitude so closely that, though the goal is not achieved [the lip synch is not quite right, the Marines’ faces are a bit too squarejawed and perfect, the motion of the characters is a trifle too constrained and graceful, their clothing doesn’t rumple quite the right way, and similar quibbles — though, nota bene, all this will probably be visible only on the big screen] it is now obviously within reach: all previous animated features look like Clutch Cargo compared to this, and never has anyone produced human figures that moved so naturally, flexed bent and wrinkled in so many places; or had lopsided facial blemishes with uneven coloring, for that matter.

Indeed, the Screen Actors Guild is now voicing concerns that human actors may soon be replaced by synthetic thespians. But, since [judging by the incredible length of the closing credits] this will entail hiring a much larger and presumably no more malleable horde of programmers, the gain for pennypinching producers might not be all that great. [The additional protest that all this artificiality is dehumanizing is absurd: Aki is considerably more natural than, say, Pamela Anderson.]

Fascinating, at any rate; but you wonder, as usual, what will come along to top it and how soon.


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Gorillas in the mist (7/19/01)


Congo. [Frank Marshall, 1995. Screenplay by John Patrick Shanley; after a novel by Michael Crichton.]

Only the fertile brain of Michael Crichton could have penned a tale such as this, one of a quest for a lost city in Africa, home to the diamond mines of King Solomon, guarded by a hitherto unknown race of ferocious giant apes, and somehow managed to render it dull and lifeless. But every turkey has its moments, even this one: first, when the African native bearers loading the expedition’s boats break into one of their colorful field hollers, and it turns out to be “California Dreaming”; second, when a mysterious woadbedaubed tribe of headhunters materialize around the intrepid explorers as they enter a jungle clearing, ask Ernie Hudson who's in charge, and burst out laughing when he explains [truthfully] that he is — because, benighted savages though they may be, even they know the black guy is never in charge. — Beyond that though the gorillas are, predictably, the only interesting characters, Joe Don Baker does a passable turn as an Evil Capitalist, Tim Curry portrays as only Tim Curry can an unbalanced Romanian diamond hunter Whose Greed Is His Doom, and Laura Linney, who, really, deserves better, excels as an exCIA chick. — The volcano conveniently situated on the skyline does finally erupt, but rather to my disappointment Tom Hanks doesn’t show up to hurl himself into it. But I’m sure that wasn’t Shanley’s fault.


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Next-to-last tango in Paris (7/14/01)


Moulin Rouge. [Baz Luhrmann, 2001. Written by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce.]

A sort of postmodern La Bohème, nested within several sets of bracketing quotation marks and rendered as music video: aspiring writer Ewan McGregor, having fled his bourgeois upbringing and made his way to Paris to seek his artistic fortune amid absinthesoaked Bohemian squalor, is no sooner installed in a picturesque garret than introduced to his neighbor Toulouse Lautrec [John Leguizamo, looking very short] and an extremely colorful supporting posse, hears the magic words “let’s put on a show!”, and, his services enlisted as prospective author for the inevitable musical-within-the-musical, makes a pilgrimage to the Moulin Rouge, where he discovers the star of the proceedings, Nicole Kidman. In scarce a Montmartre minute he’s fallen for the babe, she’s begun to delicately cough blood into her handkerchief, and he and the Duke [Richard Roxburgh] who has been conned into fronting the money for the theatrical venture [an Indian romance, in apparent homage to Bollywood] are using their argument over the way the internal story is supposed to end to channel their contest for her favors. No surprise, Ms. Kidman follows the famous example of the Polish starlet and fucks the writer; and then follows the even more famous example of the Lady of the Camellias and expires operatically/theatrically/tragically/“tragically” — a demise over which it is impossible to shed either a tear or “a tear”, because, as with everyone and everything else in this movie, it looks like she’s having too much fun.

Hallucinatory production design, great dance sequences [as you would expect from the auteur of Strictly Ballroom], an ingenious use of musical anachronism [the first big production number quotes “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”, and it only gets weirder], and a wealth of eccentric individuating detail, e.g., how the sitar player ends up being played by the narcoleptic Argentinian. [Note, however, that McGregor’s Underwood typewriter is a model not available in 1900. Should this matter?]

There’s an essay in the question why it was so exactly right to quote modern popular music rather than to try to write something new. But for the moment suffice it that if Luhrmann could compose like Puccini on top of everything else, his talent would be more than human. — As it is, he’s a fucking genius. I can’t remember the last time I heard the audience applaud at the end of a movie. Check this out.


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He’s taking the fall, sweetheart (7/13/01)


Red Corner. [Jon Avnet, 1997. Written by Robert King.]

Richard Gere comes to China to cut a television distribution deal with some governmental bureaucrats and, after making a few incidental cultural observations so inconsequential that I’ve already forgotten them, gets caught in the crossfire when the contest over whose pockets get lined turns violent. Framed for murder, he’s tossed into a stinking cell in a third world country where the rule of law does not apply [mail the check to Oliver Stone], the embassy mysteriously stops returning his calls, and very unsympathetic attorney Bai Ling is assigned by the court to make sure he gets a fair trial before they hang him. Fortunately the star’s personal magnetism proves superior to circumstance, and Bai, despite her best efforts to despise her decadent Western client, falls for him, starts channeling the spirit of Clarence Darrow, and after the obligatory carchase I still can’t believe they grafted into the plot [maybe I was hallucinating], the trial ends with a Perry Mason moment which in this exotic foreign setting seems to entail actual courtroom gunfire [not a bad idea, when you think about it.] Presumably the sequel will bring Bai to Los Angeles to team up with Gere in a buddy-cop pursuit of drugsmuggling white [or yellow] slavers. But expect me somewhere else.


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Love among the ruins (7/13/01)


The Mummy Returns. [Stephen Sommers, 2001.]

The rotting corpse of an ancient Egyptian magus is revived from the dead; should he not be thwarted, he’ll rally the legions of the jackal-headed god to his banner and conquer the world. — Again. — With: Rachel Weisz [whose heart doesn’t seem to be in it] as the intrepid and omniscient albeit accidentprone Egyptologist, now revealed to be the reincarnation of Nefertiti; Brendan Fraser as, well, Brendan Fraser [the idea that he, too, is really someone else is introduced but not developed]; Freddie Boath as their cute and extremely precocious kid, conduit for the supernatural forces that mark the trail to the lost lair of the Scorpion King; John Hannah as Rachel’s ne’erdowell brother [at least his Egyptian has improved]; Oded Fehr as the Arab dude with the cuneiforms on his face, embodiment of the Wisdom of the Sands; Arnold Vosloo [in various stages of decomposition] as the Gott of Rot; Patricia Velazquez as his now-reincarnated girlfriend [just watch them sucking face]; The Rock mainly as template for some fancy CGI [compare Layla Roberts in Beowulf]; rats [but see Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu], scarab beetles [but see the first installment], tarantulas [but see Raiders], and scorpions [but see L’Age D’Or]; pygmy mummies [but see Jungle Moon Men]; some remarkable synthetic environments [but check out the trailer for Final Fantasy]; the balloon from Baron Munchausen; the domino thing again, this time with pillars; a chase through the city to London Bridge that somehow is simultaneous homage to Tex Avery and Sergei Eisenstein; an Evil Librarian; and what we’ve all been expecting modern archaeology to provide, namely, conclusive evidence of the influence of Hong Kong action choreography on the martial arts of the ancient Egyptians. There’s also brief mention of the evergreen theme of Freemasonry — cut short, presumably, because Tomb Raider has a lock on that franchise. But if Lara Croft doesn’t do better than this, I’ll be blowing off the rest of the summer blockbusters in favor of a leisurely review of the middle works of Antonioni. Meanwhile, you have to think the money has gone to Sommers’ head. — And have to wonder what Cocteau might have done with this apparatus: a CGI voyage through the Land of the Dead? Orpheus versus the Reality Engine? — Did they really garble the name of Nefertiti deliberately because Beavis and Butthead were going to snicker? — Why doesn’t The Rock do that thing with the eyebrow? — Oh, never mind.

I’m starting to feel sorry for poor Vosloo: the guy keeps coming back from the dead for this babe, and it never works out. Why not let him conquer the world for once? The worst thing that could happen would be another sequel.


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I’ll help you scrape the burned rubber off your hood (7/13/01)


The Fast And The Furious. [Rob Cohen, 2001.]

Paul Walker as Keanu Reeves goes undercover among gangs of Los Angeles street racers as surfers led by Vin Diesel as Patrick Swayze in an attempt to discover whether they’re responsible for a series of truck hijackings as a series of bank robberies being investigated by some unholy alliance of the cops, the FBI, and jackbooted thugs in assault gear as the FBI simpliciter; going rather too enthusiastically native, he falls in love with Jordana Brewster as Lori Petty and, of course, with screaming engines, smoking clutches, burning rubber, and motion blur: Point Break with turbochargers.

The false bust is abbreviated, the Gary Busey mentor-character didn’t make the cut, and Swayze’s many speeches about the Cosmic Significance of surfing don’t seem to have been translated, Diesel confining himself to a few remarks about preferring to handle his life a quarter-mile at a time; maybe that should provoke some cutting remarks about this being the abridged version for younger readers, but, let’s face it, James Cameron is on no one’s short list of the great Twentieth Century philosophers, and the racing scenes are really, really great.

Not the Great American Dragracing Movie [that distinction still belongs to the technically more primitive but philosophically more satisfying Two-Lane Blacktop], but as good as any other. Tell the authors to pump that nitrous and keep that sequel coming.


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Deuce in the hole (7/13/01)


Evolution. [Ivan Reitman, 2001.]

Them Again: when a meteor crashes into the Arizona desert and a rapidly-multiplying alien slime oozes out, takes up residence in a conveniently-situated honeycombed labyrinth of caverns, and begins using its more densely-coded DNA to unfair advantage, accelerating its evolutionary progress from protozoa to giant apes in the space of ten reels, lower-caste community-college scientists David Duchovny and Orlando Jones see the opportunity to exploit this heavensent research topic to escape their exile in the academic bush leagues — at least, if they can keep the extraterrestrial menace from devouring the earth. In this endeavor they are assisted by somewhat klutzy CDC babe Julianne Moore, and opposed, more or less, by the bumbling military, led by a general [Ted Levine] who is still bearing a childish grudge against Duchovny for the minor mishap with an experimental anthrax vaccine [whose side effects apparently included memory loss, erectile dysfunction, and hyperflatulence] which bought him his one-way ticket to Palookaville. After various misadventures occasioned by the periodic escapes of the rapidly-mutating aliens from the caves into which they have been none-too-successfully hermetically sealed [Jones takes a giant mosquito up the ass; a flying lizard swoops through the shopping mall with a shoplifter in its clutches; a mutant alligator takes up residence in the golf course pond], our heroes, who [like the writers] must have seen a lot of movies on the late show, realize the aliens will thrive on the predictable military solutions of napalm and nukes, but will suffer a fatal allergic reaction to the selenium contained in a familiar brand of shampoo, and end up racing through [yes!] the storm drains to administer a Head and Shoulders high colonic to The Mother of All Blobs to save the world: it’s product placement they can’t stand. — Though this is not, actually, the best gag in the movie; that distinction probably belongs to the scene in which Duchovny moons the General through the windshield of a Jeep, summing up the relations of science to the military once and for all.

Maybe not as funny as Tremors, but the monsters are better: mostly variations on the theme of dinosaur, but also plants, insects, and scary apes. Anyway, any movie that casts Dan Ackroyd as the governor of Arizona can’t be all bad. Check it out.


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Athena Massey’s body parts (7/13/01)


Harold Robbins’ Body Parts. [Craig Corman, 1999.]

Born loser Richard Grieco agrees on the spur of the moment to go along with wild and crazy buddy Will Foster Stewart [aka J.J.] on a Far Eastern shopping expedition which turns out [oops] to be a $750K score of China White; and, sucker that he is, seems genuinely surprised when in an excess of entrepeneurial enthusiasm J.J. wastes the sellers and then tries to smoke him too. Surviving this escapade by pure dumb luck, he finds himself taking the fall in a Hong Kong jail after an abbreviated show trial in which his doting wife Athena Massey — who, strange but true, doesn’t seem to have been surprised by any of these events — testifies against him; and seems well-launched upon a permanent vacation at governmental expense until political accident springs him in 1997, allowing him to make his escape to California.

Here immediately and surely not by accident he runs into the upwardly-mobile Ms. Massey, now ensconced in suspicious affluence as the proprietor of a company which matches transplant patients to organ donors [hmmm], and she immediately and surely not by accident declares her undiminished passion for him, rips her clothing off, and hoses him into acquiescing to a dimwitted scheme which entails his making a business trip to Manila on her behalf — and, as an incidental corollary, seeking revenge upon his nemesis, who in the interim seems to have raised himself to robber baron status among the Filipinos. With that existential shrug with which the film-noir hero invariably steps into the current which sweeps him to his doom, he allows himself to be convinced, despite the transparently nefarious motivations of Ms. Massey. — “I think there’s something you should know,” she says. — “What?” asks Grieco, “that you were fucking J.J. behind my back?” — “I’ve always loved you,” she protests. — Yeah, right.

The predicament of the protagonist is, however, as nothing beside that of the authors, who, having succumbed to temptation and allowed the spectacular Ms. Massey to disrobe so early in the scenario, have no alternative but to repair posthaste to a strip bar in Manila, in the vain hope that quantity will, as it were, substitute for quality. Thus here sure enough our hero presently discovers himself drowning his sorrows and searching vainly among the Filipina hookers [“We take traveller’s checks,” they explain helpfully] for a rack that may expunge his perfidious ex from memory. — No such luck, of course, but he does turn up another girlfriend [too sweet, alas, to be able to go the distance in a cold cruel scenario such as this], and locates the wicked J.J., who seems taken aback at his ability to hold a grudge. — “Come on, man. Cut me some slack” — “Cut you some slack? J.J., you tried to kill me twice, and in between, you fucked my wife.” — [J. J. is hurt:] “You make it sound so personal.” — Indicating the vast expanse of construction projects [a veritable metropolis springing up overnight] he is supervising, he protests that the syndicate is going legit by getting into real estate. — “Well, you are right about one thing,” says Grieco. “You are going into real estate.” [If you read this as a Jimmy Hoffa reference, you are correct.] They draw down, and commence a fight among tropical fishtanks. Complications ensue.

Weird but undoubtedly true, B-movie though this is, it is far more entertaining than what I’ve seen in A-movies lately. — For one thing, they couldn’t afford the wooden Affleck for the lead. — For another, the dialogue is laced with zingers. [Probably the work of Robbins, though you’ll forgive me if I don’t check; I swore off after The Carpetbaggers.] — And, anyway, film noir was always a B-movie genre, because in the classic era as now a limited budget not only allowed more creative latitude in the screenplay and more interesting casting choices but forced occasionally inspired improvisation; as in this instance, where the necessity of shooting cheap in the Philippines meant the film could end with a gunbattle in the tunnels of Corregidor — where, not to give away anything that shouldn’t be obvious, Grieco ends up wasting his wife for buying his girlfriend’s organs on the black market and delivers a classic kissoff over her cooling stiff: “Mom was right...I never should have married you.” — With which he walks off into the East Asian sunset; leaving me laughing my ass off, and reaching for my edition of Mickey Spillane. Who says movies can’t be fun any more?


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Midafternoon of infamy (6/2/01)


Pearl Harbor. [Michael Bay, 2001. With thirteen producers besides Jerry Bruckheimer; and maybe even a writer.]

The romantic triangle formed by sweet innocent Swing Kids Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale is complicated by the militaristic ambitions of the Empire of Japan: Yamamoto Is The Iceberg, or, Gone With the Divine Wind. — With Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle, Cuba Gooding Jr. as the kid who turns out to be even better with a machinegun than he was with a potato peeler, Jon Voight doing his best as FDR, and Dan Ackroyd [if only] as an intelligence officer.

Sample dialogue: “Why ya always bustin my ass, Rafe?” — “After two years of training you think a forty five thousand dollar airplane is just there for your amusement?” — “They call it an homage, sir.” [Yeah, right.] — “That’s bullshit! But it’s very very good bullshit.” — “Don’t preach to me about duty. I wear the same uniform you do.” — “You don’t dogfight with manuals.” — “Ma’am, please don’t take my wings.” — “You are so beautiful it hurts.” “It’s your nose that hurts.” “No, it’s my heart.” [Only after I wrote this down on the popcorn bag, laughing in the dark, did I realize that the critic for the New York Times got to it first. Shit.] — “If I had one more night of my life to live, I’d want to spend it with you.” — “I will come back.” — “Just make sure to come back for the both of us, all right?” — “Are all Yanks as anxious to die as you, Pilot Officer?” “Not anxious to die, sir. Just anxious to matter.” — “We’re building refrigerators while our enemies build bombs!” — “Dear Ellen...it’s different than I thought it would be here...it’s cold...so cold that it gets into your bones...” “Dear Rafe...I miss you so much...” — “Pearl Harbor is too shallow for a successful aerial torpedo attack...we’ve bunched our planes together to make them easier to defend.” “You analysts have it all figured out.” — “I always knew whatever trouble I got into, I wouldn’t be alone.” — “Brilliant, Admiral.” “A brilliant man would find a way not to fight a war.” — “You ever wonder if this war’s going to catch up with us?” — “I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant.” — “There’s nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer.”

Obviously this was absolutely excruciating. Fortunately, just at the point when I really thought I was going to have to get up and walk, the attack began and restored my [qualified] faith in Bay and Bruckheimer: three-quarters of an hour of an incredibly vivid recreation of the carrier launch, the approach, the bombs falling, the torpedoes churning through the water, the Arizona exploding, the Oklahoma capsizing, the sailors in the water getting machinegunned by strafing Zeroes, the panic in the hospitals — stuff blowing up on a really grand scale, as only the guys who nearly destroyed the Earth could pull it off; not entirely photorealistic, of course, but realized with an attention to detail and a painterly elegance of composition that more than made up for minor lapses in verisimilitude. — When this began I was still harboring the usual liberal war guilt about nuking Hiroshima. After about twenty minutes I was down to mild regret. After forty minutes I was ready to do it again, just in case those lousy Nip cocksuckers didn’t get the message the first time. — Of course everything actually worth saying about Pearl Harbor has been said long since, and most of it was said right then and there. Admiral Halsey put it best, when he got a look at the aftermath of the attack: “When we get through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell.” Just about.

And, sure enough, the good guys eventually won the war; though you’d never know why from the remainder of this motion picture, which immediately relapses into unbearable fatuity. — I’d like to be able to report that Beckinsale is struck by a falling shell and Affleck and Hartnett fall into one anothers’ arms and vow to continue the conflict like Homeric warriors, or that the three of them set off on a secret mission behind enemy lines and crashland on a lost jungle island inhabited by dinosaurs and giant apes, but no such luck. — No, the authors immediately reintroduce Alec Baldwin/Jimmy Doolittle and throw our heroes into preparation for the famous air raid on Tokyo of April, 1942; which, we are led to believe by portentous looks and swelling music, was no mere turning-point, but, nay, the very knockout punch of the conflict. Which all leads up to that cosmic Jerry Bruckheimer Moment when Baldwin stares brooding across the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet at his handsome young pilots and confides to his straight man “I know why we’re going to win this war.” And when the straight man obligingly asks why, he says, gesturing at Affleck and Hartnett: “Because of them.” — Pure Hollywood; pure bullshit. — With such appeals to elan French generals ordered cavalry charges against machine-gun emplacements in the First World War. More to the point, as the solemn predawn slowmotion sequence that exhibits the Japanese pilots preparing themselves for the attack was deliberately designed to evidence, with such religious appeals to the sanctity of their higher collective purpose and the purity of the individual warrior spirit Yamamoto and his deputies inspired their own handsome young pilots to fly off and wreak the havoc we just witnessed. — Baldwin, in other words, has just explained why the Japanese were going to win the war. Great.

Not to demean the memory of General Doolittle, who was, by all accounts, a daring and imaginative commander and a great man. But his sixteen B-25s dropped only a few bombs on Tokyo, to little real effect. When Curtis LeMay dispatched his command to firebomb Tokyo in March, 1945, he sent three hundred twenty five B-29s carrying ten thousand pounds of incendiary explosives apiece; they burned sixteen square miles of the city to the ground, and killed a hundred thousand people. The idea with a sword is little in itself; it is industrial organization that makes the difference.

Winston Churchill was, as you might expect, a starry-eyed military romantic, and would undoubtedly have loved samurai movies; but he also loved facts and figures, and the cable he drafted to the Imperial envoy Yosuke Matsuoka in April 1941 was succinct and went straight to the point: if the Japanese contemplated war, he said, they might well reflect on the fact that though their annual steel production might be roughly equivalent to that of Great Britain, it was only one-tenth that of the United States. Indeed, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor with 343 planes launched from six aircraft carriers; by 1944 the American navy had thirty thousand planes and [counting the escort ships that won the submarine war in the Atlantic] something in excess of a hundred aircraft carriers. Most of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were dug out of the mud, repaired, and put back to sea [the Nevada shelled the German positions at Normandy; the West Virginia, the Pennsylvania, the California, and the Maryland took part in the Battle of Leyte Gulf that eliminated the remnants of the Japanese navy and reclaimed the Phillipines]; on the Japanese side, by contrast, four of the six aircraft carriers that launched the attack were sunk at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and never replaced. — Henry Ford won the fucking war, long before it started. Rosie the Riveter won the fucking war. The geeks who cracked the Japanese codes and perfected radar won the fucking war. Bushido did not win the fucking war. Alec Baldwin did not win the fucking war. Ben Affleck did not win the fucking war.

But he did sell seventy-five million dollars’ worth of tickets over the weekend. Ah, what’s the use.


Point of trivia [I am not making this up]: in a war-gaming exercise in 1932, Rear Admiral Harry Yarnell launched a highly successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor [on a Sunday morning, yet] with planes from the aircraft carriers Lexington and Saratoga. Obviously this was later studied by the Japanese. Boy, were his ears red.

Just for the record: Coppola’s Apocalypse Now [probably the best war movie ever made] is being reissued in a new director’s cut about an hour longer than the original. It premiered at Cannes to very favorable notices; there may actually be an American theatrical release. — The best war movie about The Big One was, I think, Malick’s The Thin Red Line; the cast, which was phenomenal, included Sean Penn, who would have punched out anybody who handed him this screenplay. [And that’s why we won.] — The best war movie I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks I caught by accident at three in the morning on AMC: John Wayne in The Flying Tigers. Ya gotta love those jackets.


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Immanuel Kant (6/1/01)


Having taken the unusual step of dropping a few of these compendia into a word processor to analyze their content, I discover, either to my chagrin or amusement, that the ongoing quest for the one-sentence summary of the major motion picture has led my prose into an unfamiliar region of baroque complexity; and that the longest single run-on sentence [to date] exceeds two hundred fifty words. — To the best of my knowledge the modern record for European languages is held by Immanuel “Bubba” Kant, who broke the eight-hundred-word barrier somewhere in the Critique Of Pure Reason [one reason why — I am not making this up — German students are introduced to the Critique via a retranslation of an English translation of the original]. If Jerry Bruckheimer doesn’t retire, this may lie within reach.


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Terry Southern (5/31/01)


Charles Zigman on Terry Southern’s screenwriting class at Columbia in 1991: “One of our more earnest classmates stands up. She reads the class a short screenplay she has written — a feminist retake on the Joan of Arc legend, featuring Joan and her same-sex lover. This student prattles on for upwards of half an hour. We, her peers, are supposed to listen to this incredible boorishness, and to make comments when she is finished. But she is just so incredibly boring, that we are all dropping off like flies. People who are not wearing watches start, absently, checking their arms. When the student finishes laying down her never-ending monologue, she gazes at the class triumphantly; ready for the admiration that she knows she deserves. She asks us, ‘What did you think?’ Terry, who has been nodding off during the reading, answers gracefully: ‘Why don’t they just get stoned and fuck?’”


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Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice (5/31/01)


Group Marriage. [Stephanie Rothman, 1972.]

Aimée Eccles, Claudia Jennings, Victori Vetri, and three really lucky but otherwise forgettable guys enter into an unusual experiment in communal living which strains the fabric of social convention and dismays their uptight bourgeois neighbors. Not exactly a cinematic landmark, but it does, occasionally, serve a useful nostalgic purpose thus to recall the days when Our Love Could Save The World.


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Just a gigolo (5/31/01)


Extramarital. [Yael Russcol, 1998. Written by Don O’Mulveny.]

Aspiring Los Angeles journalist Traci Lords cuts short an argument with her none-too-supportive husband to fly to San Francisco to do an interview for her scandalsheet with an uncooperative subject; this doesn’t go well, but along the way she falls in with a babe on the plane who is meeting a gigolo at the same hotel for an interview of rather a different sort. Her Catholic-girls’-school inhibitions notwithstanding [yeah, right], Ms. Lords finds this spectacle fascinating, and commences an investigation of Married Women Who Step Out, which takes an unexpected direction when [a] her friend the swinger gets whacked in the middle of a tryst [b] Traci decides to extend the investigation to the contents of studpuppy’s shorts even though [c] he may have done it and [d] it turns out somebody arranged that supposedly fortuitous meeting on the plane. So whodunit? the gigolo? the husband? the editor? Check out those revealing big closeups, and stay tuned.


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Naked warriors (5/31/01)


The Arena. [Joe D’Amato, 1973. Written by John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington.]

Gladiator for chicks: in the dark days of the decadence of the Roman Empire, Margaret Markov and Pam Grier are kidnapped at opposite ends of the Earth and sold into slavery in the circuses, where they end up dancing, serving drinks at orgies, and getting pawed over by fat disgusting Italian guys with hair on their backs. This wouldn’t carry us very far, but when a picturesque foodfight reveals Pam to be the Chyna of her day a lightbulb goes off over somebody’s head and the babes are sent to gladiator school, where they learn the rudiments of swordplay and how to sneer at fallen enemies; they do several star turns about the blood-and-sand circuit which repay their owner’s investment handsomely before the ugliness of it all registers, their political consciousness is raised, and they lead a slave revolt that sends many a motherfucker up against the wall.

Thus predictably we have naked babes auctioned off in chains [really, eBay should give this some thought], torture, crucifixion, ritual disembowelment, the hungry drooling mob waving thumbs down [but not at least holding up those fucking signs for the television cameras], a chase through the catacombs [didn’t the Romans have sewers?], swords, sandals, and helmets with fancy plumes; all they needed was a bit of digital trickery to make the crowds look bigger, and, presumably, this could have carried off the Academy Awards. — Seriously, I wish Ridley Scott had screened this before he cast Russell Crowe; he might have reconsidered his concept, to the betterment of all.

D’Amato [née Aristide Massaccesi] may hold the IMDB record for aliases, having worked as a director under thirty-five or forty different names [not including “Steve Carver”, the name that trails the credits here]; his one hundred fifty films include such titles as Emmanuelle And The Last Cannibals, Sex Penitentiary, and Porno Holocaust.


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Scots wha hae (5/18/01)


Shrek. [Andrew Adamson/Vicky Jenson/et al., 2001. From a book by William Steig.]

DreamWorks wipes its ass on the Disney fairy tale. With a Scottish ogre [Mike Myers], a talking donkey [read wiseass, and who but Eddie Murphy], a less-than-Handsome Prince [John Lithgow], a rather-too-easily-intimidated Magic Mirror [the CIA in Vietnam], a Perfect Town [Boulder as Disney World], a smartmouthed princess [Cameron Diaz], a lonesome dragon, and homages to professional wrestling, The Matrix, game shows, and Robin Hood: Men In Tights, cameos by the three blind mice and Pinocchio, a bravura performance by the Gingerbread Man, a breakdancing routine by the Three Little Pigs, and [so the animators claim, and it certainly seems plausible] an underlying skeletal model with something in excess of five hundred forty hinges. But the twists and turns they added to the fairytale plot were nearly as impressive. — The best animated feature ever made; at least for another couple of weeks.


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Moonwalking (5/2/01)


Freddy Got Fingered. [Tom Green, 2001.]

The notorious premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring in Paris, May 29, 1913, which literally provoked a riot among its audience, created a rather unfortunate historical precedent, in effect raising the bar for subsequent avant-garde debuts: after this spectacularly negative reception, it has always been an unspoken assumption [at least in every Bohemian discussion] that no work of art can be really original or consequential if it doesn’t dismay the uncomprehending bourgeois, outrage the critics, and goad an audience of high-rolling patrons of the arts into ripping off their black ties and storming the stage. Thus naturally after hearing the first reviews of this opus [Ebert “a vomitorium” — the Washington Post “creative bankruptcy”, “an abomination” — Paul Clinton for CNN “quite simply the worst movie ever released by a major studio in Hollywood history”] I knew I would be obligated to attend, to find out whether this is a misunderstood work of genius, an elaborate con perpetrated upon the studio moguls who financed it, or just another piece of shit. Life being more complicated than the rhetorical simplifications we attempt to impose upon it, it turned out to be all three.

Mr. Green introduces himself as a pathetic loser who, in quick succession, leaves home in the Pacific Northwest to seek his fortune in Hollywood as an animator, takes a job in a cheese-sandwich factory [less Chaplin I’m afraid than Laverne and Shirley], pitches a show unsuccessfully to network executive Anthony Michael Hall, goes home again, broods upon his destiny, builds a skateboarding halfpipe in the driveway, hits upon a wheelchairbound girl rocket scientist [Marisa Coughlan] who likes to have her shins caned, is improbably struck with inspiration, returns to Hollywood, makes a lot of money, and blows it all immediately on an elaborate and inexplicably-motivated revenge upon his father [Rip Torn] which involves an expedition to Pakistan. Other themes include animal porn [Green jerks off a horse, cloaks himself in the skin of a roadkilled deer, and directs an avalanche of elephant spunk — the phrase “a dork like a fire hydrant” does come to mind — upon the very professional Mr. Torn, who may with this gig have carried good sportmanship a couple of tokes over the line], the sexual abuse of children [specifically the eponymous brother Freddy] and their even more dreadful subsequent exploitation by the psychiatric profession, childbirth, and suddenly getting hit by a truck. Meanwhile the auteur comports himself like a retarded eightyearold, and spends most of his screen time whining that his parents don’t understand him. Perhaps he’s been too long on MTV.

The shock value of all this has been [a cough behind the hand] grossly exaggerated: John Waters did it all much better a long time ago, and if we measure, say, the money shot with the elephant against, say, the spectacle of Divine being raped by a giant lobster, it is clear that Mr. Green has fallen short of the mark. — Moreover there is [of course] an entire website devoted exclusively to scenes of women getting whipped in movies; and though one might have groaned when the cute little kid steps into the airplane propellor, this is, in the first place, telegraphed, and in the second place an obvious steal from the original ending to There’s Something About Mary, in which Ben Stiller while crossing the street to embrace his beloved was supposed to be dismembered by a bus. [The final line in the published screenplay is Mary’s instruction to the crowd: “All right, everyone, let’s fan out and look for the penis!”] — Not only could it have been much worse, if this alone had been the intention it should have been much worse.

The difficulty, rather, is that every time Green gets a good idea — e.g., in the scene in which he sits at the piano with strings attached to his fingers simultaneously playing a song and animating an elaborate mobile sculpture of dangling sausages — something which must recall classic surrealistic exhibitions like the dinner jacket to which Dali sewed eighty shotglasses filled with milk — he immediately spoils it by opening his mouth — and, usually, singing something infantile and obnoxious. But Pee Wee Herman is over; and anyway he did it better.

Furthermore the film is not merely not plotless, but formulaic and uninspired: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. How should this provoke a riot?

Should Mr. Green have another opportunity to write and direct, I would suggest a complete departure from his methods here: he should stay behind the camera, put real talent out in front of it, and throw away that copy of Syd Field’s manual of screenwriting some wellmeaning advisor obviously pressed upon him. — I fancy something like a remake of Candy, with his girlfriend in the lead; I’d pay to see Drew Barrymore screaming at the hunchback “Give...me....your...hump!” — As might others pay: though I haven’t reviewed the grosses, it cannot bode well that when I went to catch Freddy at a matinee I had the entire theater to myself.

But on balance one must think of the scene midway through these proceedings in which Green, preparing rather ineffectually for a job interview, puts a suit on backwards and dances back and forth in front of a full-length mirror while singing an atonal little ditty about the Backwards Man. — Tom Wolfe in his brilliant analysis of the New York artworld remarked that the Bohemian pose of contempt for the bourgeois resembled a ritual mating dance: that the point in feigning an attitude of superior disdain toward the wealthy patrons of the arts was to attract their attention, as it were by playing hard to get; and that once this attention had been successfully obtained [and one’s reputation made and one’s shows mobbed by the patrons and the press], the pose became superfluous. — As Wittgenstein said, having climbed up our ladder we can kick it away. — But Green already has fortune, celebrity, and one of the principal babes of Hollywood as a trophy girlfriend; why is he going through these motions? to back through the mating dance and throw it all away?


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The tough go shopping (4/27/01)


One Night At McCool’s. [Harald Zwart, 2001. Written by Stan Seidel.]

A study of lower-middle-class accessorization that might be called Beyond The Pink Flamingo: sweet but hypermanipulative young thing Liv Tyler, a babe gifted with a strange power to cloud men’s minds, stages a thoroughly-scripted falling-out with her hoodlum-lowlife boyfriend Andrew Dice Clay after closing time for the benefit of hapless-goof bartender Matt Dillon [put charitably, a chronic underachiever]; who, predictably, seizes the bait and takes her back to his rundown and bricabracencumbered St. Louis home. Her potent instincts for interior decoration aroused by even this shabby scene of domesticity, Tyler adlibs a decision to move in, hoses Dillon senseless to ensure his allegiance, and summarily executes Clay when [still sticking to the script] he shows up to plunder the household. Fluttering her eyelashes, she convinces the already mortally-smitten Dillon to take the fall, and in short order he finds himself unemployed, under police surveillance, and unwilling accessory to the crime wave she commences to acquire the furnishings and accessories [and the DVD player essential to any home entertainment center] on the wishlist she has catalogued in a scrapbook clipped from the glossy magazines which formalize the canon of yuppie status symbols — a predicament from which, presently, even our mentally deficient [and, it goes without saying, terminally pussywhipped] hero realizes he can only escape by hiring somebody to whack her. — Which is how most of the story ends up being narrated by Dillon to exquisitely sleazy hitman Michael Douglas [the dyejob on his hair is in itself worth the price of admission] in a bingo parlor, and annotated by dissenting opinions [the pronounced subjectivity of the flashbacks is meant to suggest that each of the protagonists is, in effect, screening his own movie about Ms. Tyler; though of course in each instance she is the sole auteur] addressed by obnoxiously selfconfident slimeball attorney Paul Reiser to incredulous shrink Reba McIntire and hangdog police detective John Goodman [the only guy living who can actually make himself look like a cartoon bloodhound] to a drunken horny priest. All of them, in due course, converge upon Dillon’s living room for the grand finale: a beautifully-choreographed John Woo gunfight [and a Rosebud gag, but why spoil it] that reads the judgment of the Fates against the race of lawyers.

Wonderfully clever and frequently hilarious; probably the most amusing study of the relationship between the bourgeois nesting instinct and the criminal impulse since Raising Arizona. And I didn’t even mention the Cool Hand Luke carwash scene. Check it out.


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Sun, surf, serial slaughter (4/24/01)


Psycho Beach Party. [Robert Lee King, 2000. Written by Charles Busch (from his play).]

A crowd of funloving surfer guys and girls have their evening at the drivein interrupted by a brutal murder in their midst! the work, it soons becomes apparent, of a mad serial killer determined to exterminate the physically imperfect [how perfectly Californian.] Suspicion at one time or another falls upon all of the principals, who include multiply-personalitied aspiring surfer Chicklet, her sister the geek girl intellectual [who didn’t see who done it because she was concentrating on the subtext of the film], their Fifties Mom [“A slumber party is an invitation to sexual intercourse...you have no idea how repugnant it can be to have a man’s sweaty thing poking at you”], the Swedish exchange student, the surfing guru who lives in a shack at the end of the beach and speaks only in rhymes, the sharptongued bitch in a wheelchair, the surfer with prophetic balls, and the B-movie starlet taking a sabbatical among her fans while she studies the script for The Rat-Faced Girl From Mars. Meanwhile it’s sun, sand, and surf [at least on the backprojection screen] among a gang of carefree party dudes who quote Dostoevsky and model lingerie for one another [sheesh] on the way to a grand beachparty dancenumber finale [shades of Twyla Tharp] and a terminal confrontation, where else, at the drivein. [Maybe this is only a setup for the Caligari frame-reveal, but let’s not get metaphysical.] If only they’d all stayed home to pickle beets and practice the oboe.

Though I’m still wondering where I might pick up that recipe for jalapeno pancakes with peach sauce, the best gag of all might be that the lady detective is played by the writer himself in drag. As somebody says, Boy, there sure are a lot of twisted souls out there.

The DVD includes a video by Los Straitjackets.


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Heads will roll (4/20/01)


The Widow Of St. Pierre. [Patrice Leconte, 2000. Written by Claude Faraldo.]

A French colony on the bleak northern Canadian coast, circa 1850, is shocked when Very Large Person Emir Kusturica gets shitfaced one evening and commits a senseless murder; the civil authorities, less concerned with life and death among the little people than with maintaining the appearance of a firm hand on the tiller, condemn him to death; but then realize to their embarrassment that they have to mail-order a guillotine from the home office, which is sure to take months. In the meantime they hand the penitent, indeed now docile, Kusturica over to military commander Daniel Autueil for safekeeping, with the unanticipated consequence that the Captain’s do-gooder wife Juliette Binoche adopts the prisoner as a project and starts towing him around the colony like a pet bear, training him to perform good deeds. This experiment in rehabilitation meets with remarkable success, and in due course Kusturica marries, expects a child, saves a woman from a runaway house [no, really], and is embraced by his fellows [the bigshots naturally excepted] as a model citizen; with the result that when the guillotine finally does arrive, the lines are clearly drawn between the civil authorities and the necessity of saving face on the one hand, and the Captain, his wife, the people, and human decency and the possibility of redemption on the other. No surprise who wins out in the end.

The French authorities, as is usual in nineteenth century fiction, come off looking like a bunch of assholes; since this story is based on actual court records, it’s probably safe to assume that this is because they really were a bunch of assholes. — A real downer of a story, and, in view of the setting, a fairly dark and dismal piece of photography: no light seems to fall upon the filmstock at this latitude. — But it could be worse [as Marty Feldman would have said]; it could be a teen comedy starring Freddie Prinze Jr.


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A man and his mullet (4/11/01)


Joe Dirt. [Dennie Gordon, 2001. Written by David Spade and Fred Wolf.]

LA talk radio shock jock Dennis Miller [“all aberration, all the time”] takes a fancy to the station janitor, trailer-trash poster boy Joe Dirt [David Spade with lower-class-Seventies-retro wig, pitifully-undernourished moustache, and unusually ridiculous sideburns, and wearing several layers of grime and a tshirt bearing the legend “I choked Linda Lovelace” and paradoxically much more attractive for all this], and, in the process of prying his absurdly depressing but garishly colorful life story out of him — a tale in which Spade is is born with a hole in his head, abandoned in childhood and left to raise himself in the woods [like Tarzan or the Frankenstein monster], mocked, abused, ridiculed, beaten up, buried in a pile of shit, chewed upon by gators, carried off in a balloon just when he was about to get lucky, and condemned to an endless futile quest for his lost family which only leads him to every pathetic shantytown and rundown rustbucket trailerpark in the heartland — makes him a celebrity, unearths his longlost family, reconciles him with his improbably attractive hillbilly true love Brittany Daniel, and reunites him with his 426 hemi-head, the better that he may spurn the gravel in the faces of his oppressors: Grand Funk meets the Dukes of Hazzard. Or sort of.

I don’t know what it was precisely — perhaps the spectacle of Joe towing his enormous brown pet-rock/meteorite/frozen-coprolite around on a Radio Flyer, perhaps the idea of Christopher Walken as a janitorial mentor-figure [I was never so fortunate], perhaps Rosanna Arquette’s explanation of how she couldn’t bear the thought of her parents getting turned into gator shit — but at some point I abandoned my critical pretensions and admitted to myself I thought all this was pretty funny; and, moreover, beneath the heap of turds, a very shrewd parody of the cloying sentimentality of the Hollywood comedy — which always does seem to end, as the authors suggest, by playing the country-music song backwards and bringing your dog back to life. — As for what to do when your dog’s gonads are frozen to the porch, you’ll have to see this yourself to find out. But don’t expect me to admit that I recommended it.


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Pair production (4/4/01)


Virtual Combat. [Andrew Stevens, 1996.]

When a not-particularly-mad but probably misguided scientist discovers that crossing the wires in his cloning experiments will allow the characters in virtual-reality games — notably terminal badass Michael Bernardo and virtual-sex bombshells Athena Massey and Dawn Ann Billings — to materialize from a vat of bubbling green goo and run amuck, Don “The Dragon” Wilson is called in to clean house. — Ah, but does he do windows? Stay tuned.


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Love at the antipodes (4/1/01)


Happy Together. [Wong Kar Wai, 1997.]

The title does come from the Turtles, and this is, as one might expect from Wong, a love story in a minor key: a couple of guys from Hong Kong [Tony Leung earnest, committed, jealous; Leslie Cheung more than a bit of a tart] take off for Argentina together, run out of money, split up, get back together, and split up again; the while working in Buenos Aires at a weird variety of bad jobs [Leung works clubs, kitchens, and finally ends up on the night shift in a slaughterhouse; Cheung seems to be some kind of hooker] trying to put together the price of a ticket back. The fact that they’re [almost exactly] on the other end of the world from China is not insignificant; nor should it escape our notice that the focus of the story is Leung’s determination to visit the most unurban [and, therefore, relative to Hong Kong, antipodean] place he can imagine, the famous Iguazu Falls; when he finally succeeds, the movie and the love story are over.

With Chang Chen [Zhang Ziyi’s love interest in Crouching Tiger] as a third party to the [still essentially bipolar] relationship. — This is the film that won Wong the Best Director award at Cannes in 1997. Not, I suspect, his last such honor. Check it out.


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Cut and paste (4/1/01)


Dracula Versus Frankenstein. [Al Adamson, 1971.]

Notes: After a couple of preliminary bloodsucker-in-the-cemetery shots, we relocate abruptly to Vegas, where the auteur’s wife Regina Carrol is doing a song-and-dance for the benefit of a sparse crowd among whom Adamson himself [it’s that Hitchcock thing] is seated. — Then there’s something about a carnival; a house of horrors. — Mad Doctor Frankenstein, played from a wheelchair by J. Carrol Naish, dispatches Lon Chaney Jr. [muta persona: throat cancer, alas; not that he could easily retain his lines in any case here at the end of his long and alcoholic career] to fetch more subjects for the current round of experiments, which seem to require a copious supply of naked dead girls. — Then Count Dracula [played by Adamson’s accountant], who just happens to be in the neighborhood, drops in and expresses an interest in reviving the family monster. — Doctor Frankenstein’s dwarf [an erstwhile star of Freaks and an old drinking buddy of John Barrymore’s] cackles with delight. — A couple is making out on the beach. Chaney appears and hacks them to pieces with his trusty axe. — But he still loves his puppy. Hmmm. — Abrupt cut to Exterior, Day, Student Protests: for this is a document of the Sixties, after all. — Ms. Carrol reappears here on the beach, apparently in search of her missing sister; it is darkly hinted that the runaway may have fallen prey to the white slave trade. — The crowd of hipsters at the coffeeshop, thinking she must be some kind of nark, put LSD in her coffee. Bummer, man. — Meanwhile our heroes are reviving the monster in the laboratory. A bunch of wires run into a face that looks like mold on cottage cheese. — Appearances are deceptive: far from continuing its obviously advanced decomposition, the monster gets up, goes out for a stroll, and eats the first guy he happens across, who turns out to be the legendary horror geek Forrest J. Ackerman. [A guy who gets great cameos: check him out in Attack Of The Sixty Foot Centerfold.] — Meanwhile social misfit Russ Tamblyn briefly reprises his role as the leader of Satan’s Sadists [“the Citizen Kane of biker films”], but nobody seems to be able to figure out how to insert that movie into this one, and he promptly disappears. — Miss Carrol is revived from her bum trip by Good Guy Anthony Eisley, who offers his services as Virgil to guide her through this weird Dantean hippie underworld. — Romance blossoms. Or blooms, or whatever it’s supposed to do. — Meanwhile to appease the expectations of the drivein crowd that is watching all this, the monster wanders around for a bit menacing couples in parked cars. [This is supposed to scare the girls in the audience and induce them to move across the seats toward the boys.] — Chaney Junior takes his axe/Gives the bikers forty whacks/Since the rushes don’t look great/Gives the cinematographer forty-eight. — Carrol and Eiseley hear something suspicious on the beach at night and investigate; leading them into the carnival, and thus into the lair of Frankenstein. — If you look closely you notice that the dead zombie chicks strapped to the walls in the background keep blinking. — One of the zombie chicks is the missing sister! [But after this they forget about her again.] — Frankenstein explains that he is trying to harness the psychic energy released by traumatic shocks. Unfortunately in the confusion that ensues when he attempts to illustrate this point he gets beheaded by his own guillotine: what could be more ignominious. — Time for a chase: Chaney pursues Ms. Carrol. But gets shot. Dracula appears out of nowhere and takes over, so impressing Ms. Carrol with his unearthly menace that she is stricken with a monumental case of Heaving Bosom. No wonder Adamson married her. Eisley arrives in the nick of time! he saves the day! — No, actually, Dracula turns him into a heap of ash with a lightningbolt. [Dude, that was pretty harsh.] — But now the monster reappears and the two of them drag her off to an abandoned church to contend for her hand. — Big fight. They stagger outside just as the sun is coming up. Dracula is winning. He rips the arms off the monster! just like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. — Then he rips its head off! game over. - But the rays of the rising sun catch him as he’s trying to get back to his coffin. He evaporates. — Ms. Carrol escapes from the church into the light of the new day and staggers off to commence a life of perpetual therapy. The end.

Adamson having been shipped off to his reward by a psychopathologic cement contractor [but you can watch that episode of the E! True Hollywood Story for yourself], his old comrade-in-arms and producer Sam Sherman is left to reminisce about the Golden Age of exploitation cinema on the commentary track all by himself, and provides the definitive explanation of the genesis of this cult classic, namely, that the bizarre incongruity of the disparate segments stitched together to assemble the narrative arose from necessity: they started out making one movie, ran out of money, hustled a few more bucks and started making another, got some negative feedback from the distributors, started again, etc., etc. — until when finally they had enough footage to edit into something of feature length [and had spent enough money that they had to], it didn’t make any sense. — When William Burroughs did this, it was supposed to be Art. [For that matter, compare the junk in the genome.] — Uniquely weird and completely nonsensical, and I mean that in the best way. Check it out.

This stands, incidentally, at Number 84 on the IMDB bottom one hundred. Presumably with a silver bullet.


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Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor (3/30/01)


The Tailor Of Panama. [John Boorman, 2001. From a novel by John Le Carré.]

Mephistophelean spook Pierce Brosnan [not at all the good guy] tries the patience of his superiors in London one time too many and gets exiled to a minor desk in a banana republic; where with admirable initiative he immediately sets about stirring up enough trouble to get himself promoted back to Europe. Zeroing in with unerring instinct on the local representative of Saville Row, Geoffrey Rush, as the guy most likely to know who in the capital city is dressing right or left, he exerts sufficient pressure with financial carrot and blackmailing stick to prompt Rush [by training and inclination an obliging guy] to tailor a story to fit Brosnan’s requirements — something which. less like silk than Spandex, stretches in due course to encompass Brosnan’s need to be able to report an imminent revolution that will necessitate very dramatic military intervention and an avalanche of unmonitored American cash. — Meanwhile, of course, in the best spook tradition, he is nailing everything with a pulse.

Not without its memorable observations [“They got Ali Baba,” somebody remarks apropos of Noriega’s buddies in the power elite, “but left behind the Forty Thieves”], its memorable moments [Brosnan and Rush meet to exchange information at a gay bar and dance together], and its memorable characters [particularly the real former revolutionaries depicted by Brendan Gleeson and Leonor Varela, who evidence all-too-vividly the real cost of standing up to the CIA’s stooges], but not really funny or cynical enough to measure up to the standards set, e.g., by Our Man In Havana or Wag The Dog. — Nor is it an especially profound observation at this point that the Great Powers create the truth they wish to discover in the postcolonial world; not when the guys in the briefing rooms who gesture with cigars are at present so busily plotting the conduct of the Colombian civil war. — But it’s good to see Boorman working again.


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A bovinity that shapes our ends (3/30/01)


Someone Like You. [Tony Goldwyn, 2001. Screenplay by Elizabeth Chandler; after a novel by Laura Zigman.]

More evidence that the contagion Nora Ephron represents has spread: ambitious talk show host Ellen Barkin, determined to be photographed turning over every slimy rock on the continent, the better to ensure her rapid rise to the top of the cesspool gathers about her a crack staff of executive assistants; every one of them, apparently, fucking everyone else. Thus inevitably Ashley Judd falls for The Greg Kinnear Character [establishing once again that disturbingly universal theme of the chick flick, that narcissistic assholes are the most certain babe magnets]; when predictably he dumps her and breaks her heart, in desperation she moves into the picturesque bachelor loft of even-more-attractive coworker Hugh Jackman — himself, it develops, the victim of an emotional hit-and-run, from which he is recovering [as of course all of us Hollywood hunks do] by stuffing his medicine cabinet full of Trojans and nailing an endless string of supermodels.

Here, reflecting on her personal history of romantic failure, she develops a behavioral theory to explain Why Dudes Are Scum — something involving bored bulls and new cows — and allows her buddy Marisa Tomei [the Rosie character] to insinuate the finished manifesto into a national magazine, but panics at the last moment and invents a phony pseudoacademic Doctor-Ruth persona to stand in for her as the author of record. [Why precisely she feels she needs some substantial academic qualification to present herself as an expert on human sexual behavior is never adequately explained; one can easily make the rounds of the talkshow circuit claiming to channel the spirits of the elders of Atlantis.] — Meanwhile she and Jackman are falling for one another; I’ll bet you never saw that coming.

At any rate this is, obviously, just the classic sitcom Predicament, which begins [cf. any hundred episodes of Lucy] with an innocent white lie that is somehow improbably compounded into a gigantic structure of contradiction which must collapse in a moment of discovery that precipitates a grand finale in which, e.g., Jackman leaves to become a sheep rancher in Montana far from the enforcement of the bestiality statutes, Kinnear opts for an operation to turn himself into a hermaphrodite, Barkin rockets off to terraform Mars, Tomei runs away to join the circus, and Ashley is saved from the nunnery when her longlost uncle returns from India incognito and writes her back into his will after he can’t trick her into selling off his portrait at the estate sale she stages to appease her creditors.

Alas, what the writers actually manage falls somewhat short of this. But it might have been worse.

Ashley can do anything, obviously, but I like her better in film noir. As for Jackman, you have to wonder what Hollywood will do when it runs out of Australian studs; aren’t we running out of continents?


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Smells like team spirit (3/28/01)


Time Regained. [Le Temps Retrouvé (d’apre l’œvre de Marcel Proust). Raoul Ruiz, 1999.]

The credits run over a goldenlit shot of a flowing stream; the concluding shot exhibits the ocean. In between Marcello Mazzarella, Emmanuelle Beart, Catherine Deneuve, and John Malkovich debate the nature of Time, the disintegration of the linear text, the propriety of playing Beethoven at a Parisian social function in wartime, and the therapeutic virtues of getting whipped by cute guys in uniform. The results are mixed.

The story, like Reservoir Dogs, begins near its end: the dying writer [Proust/Mazzarella], not actually gutshot but certainly sounding like it, dictates from his bed; attempting with a last obsessive burst of concentration to make sense of his life before it ends — or, to be absolutely precise, to make sense of his life [and thus render it Art with a capital alpha] as it ends.

It is the conceit of the project that he should be able to compose his memories into an organization that reflects their natural order — their structure as seen sub specie aeternitatis, like Vaughan’s vision of Eternity — and that this natural ordering should not necessarily be congruent with the simple-minded scheme suggested by the literal order of events; that though Time may be something like a stream or an oceanic receptacle, the true pattern of things is something more like that of a very complicated web document with a lot of hyperlinks in it.

Translated into the language of the cinema, this means that the narrative should be presented as a network of flashbacks; that characters should dissolve into one another [actually they ought to morph, but apparently this trick still lies beyond the technical capabilities of French cinema]; that there should be abrupt associative transitions between situations and eras; that the sight of an advertisement may transport Marcel instantaneously back to his childhood, and that something equally arbitrary [but, guess what, there is no such thing as chance] may carry him back [or elsewhere]; that the Ghost of Christmas Present should invariably invoke the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Yet To Come. Thus we have metaphysical assurance of the indivisibility of the Three Amigos.

A Proustian narrative, in other words, should look a lot like one of Tarantino’s; making it rather a disappointment that this one does not. Marcel’s idea of action is, alas, deficient: though it would be a vast relief if he ever actually knocked over a bank — or, in view of the fact that the center of gravity of this fragmented narrative lies somewhere during the First World War, took a cab to the front and fired a few shots at the Germans — his life instead, for curious reasons of social determinism, consists mainly of putting on starched collars and going to dinner parties where he hangs out with a lot of people who bore the hell out of him because he can see through them at a glance. [Lots of servants. Lots of junk art: statues, paintings, trinkets, bricabrac. Lots of cheesy pseudoclassical architecture. Lots of wallpaper. Apparently this was the Age of Wallpaper.] Since he is rather inappropriately gifted with an acute intellect and prodigious powers of observation [Sherlock Holmes becalmed among the Four Hundred], his air of decadent languor is clearly less a pose than the result of asphyxiating ennui. But an abrupt departure from the drawing rooms of Paris for a career as a consulting detective or as one of Sergeant Fury’s Howling Commandos seems out of the question. In fact, were it not for the occasional blackout or bombardment, and Marcel’s occasional expeditions to a male brothel where the [wildly various] sexual propensities of war heroes are acted out, it would be difficult for someone moving in his orbit to know there was a war at all. — The surreal contrast between the world of the drawing rooms and the world of the war is, in fact, so pronounced that even the members of the upper classes begin to remark it; though naturally only one or two go so far as to abandon their lives of privilege, enlist, and [predictably] get killed. [The suggestion that these one or two casualties have some special significance, measured against a conflict which slaughtered an entire generation is, weird but true, the most convincing evidence of the isolation of the upper classes from reality.] We see a fashion show with designs based on military themes; we hear complaints from the attendees when the pianist at a dinner party — no doubt some kind of Bolshevik — plays Beethoven. [“No,” says Ms. Deneuve with a smile, cocking her head to listen: “Schumann.”] It must be difficult to get good help, with so many in the trenches. Occasionally the lights go out. War is hell.

Presently the strain of reconciling these contradictions overcomes him, and Marcel retires to a sanitarium for the duration; emerging after the Armistice to discover his friends subtly altered [and not for the better], but his world, apparently — and this is strangest of all — not changed in the slightest. — Even Proust must find this depressing; he despairs of literature. We recognize even in this purportedly shapeless storyline the familiar fourth-act crisis. — But presently our hero is reconciled with his talent and his sense of smell; and, though there’s no chase, no shootout, and no last-minute rescue, something, perhaps, is saved after all. There is a certain familiar satisfaction in the conclusion.

Perhaps smell is just the problem here. Proust famously found the nonlinearity of experience best illustrated by odors, which, at least subjectively, seem to have the power to connect the present directly with the past; to recall childhood memories more rapidly [and one must hope more faithfully] than hypnotic suggestion. And it has often been remarked, for instance, that the classical view of epistemology [with which the author is trying to pick a fight] is largely the product of unquestioned assumptions about the primacy of vision. — The world would seem very different if we whistled it; as Marcel himself remarks herein, improvising a little essay on the idea of the leitmotif and the significance of the repeated phrase when a lady friend complains about the repetitiveness of one of his favorite composers. [Proust obviously would have loved the Ramones.] — Thus Thomas Mann claimed to have derived his own [very elaborate] system of correspondences in The Magic Mountain from the example of Wagner.

But film doesn’t stink, at least if Joe Eszterhas didn’t write it; and this is supposed to be a movie. — Movies are, by definition, visual: they tell stories in pictures. And though every idea we find in Proust did, eventually, find its way into the cinema, each one had to be reinvented; and, actually, improved in the process. The vision of Proust is solipsistic: the correspondences are all internal, as if the hypertext could only link to itself. The vision of the cinema, if not precisely objective, nonetheless synthesizes multiple points of view: correspondences are established between several narratives [and several narrators] at once; it suggests, even if it cannot provide it exactly, the perspective of the eye of God. Actions and events are associated with one another even if they do not lie exclusively within the experience of a single protagonist. [Moreover, there is always something forced and unnatural about an attempted singularity of perspective; as evidenced by experiments like Robert Montgomery’s The Lady In The Lake.] — One might think, for example, of the beautiful dissolve in Tykwer’s Winter Sleepers between two still-unrelated characters, male and female, smoking cigarettes: as one exhales, the other inhales. [Later, naturally, they become involved.] — Nor should there in principle be a distinction between associative hyperlinks between events in a single writer’s life, or events in two soon-to-be-related characters’ lives, and correspondences between events separated by decades, generations, or geologic eras; the dreams of the world-soul [if you will] can take any shape, and take place on any scale. — This is the point, after all, of the most famous and audacious of all cinematic match-cuts: Kubrick’s dissolve from the spinning thigh-bone of the antelope to the spaceshuttle falling toward its docking station, which summarizes in a single associative conjunction the nature of tools. — Marcel, on the other hand, doesn’t get to ancient Egypt to investigate the invention of papyrus; in fact, so far as I can discern, he never gets as far as Marseilles.

In sum: nothing happens [and nothing is supposed to happen], the flick looks cheap [I’m starting to think there’s no cinematographer in all of France good enough to shoot a Guns’n’Roses video][Luc Besson doesn’t count], and it’s pretty rough sledding trying to get through a movie with so many Margaret Dumonts and no Groucho. — On the other hand, how can you resist a French art movie with Malkovich as a decadent aristocrat, Emmanuelle Beart as the babe who turns the head even of Proust, and the apparently ageless Catherine Deneuve as the unmoved mover of their social world? If only they’d thrown in a carchase.


“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Oh, you bet your ass.


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Things go better with coke (3/28/01)


Straight To Hell. [Alex Cox, 1987. Written by Cox and Dick Rude.]

Alex Cox, who claims to have written his thesis at UCLA on the spaghetti Western, here [at least to hear him and Dick Rude tell it] grabbed a few of his musician buddies [e.g. Courtney Love and Elvis Costello], spent a couple of days writing a script, and drove off into the Spanish outback to a town built for a Bronson flick [not far from the famous Eastwood sets] to shoot this rather plotless feature [in which a gang of unshaven American hoodlums who drink beer and a gang of unshaven Irish hoodlums who drink coffee glare at one another for a few days before they all start blasting] over the space of a few weeks without the slightest recourse to cocaine — and, despite the relative polish of the homage and the surreal hilarity of the musical numbers, one is tempted to take this claim at face value and suggest they needed stronger drugs. Not quite Sergio Leone as interpreted by Buñuel; forethought might have helped. — With Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Jim Jarmusch, the unrelenting Iberian sun, and several thousand tons of blowing dust. — My mistake: four coffees.


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Deja vu all over again (3/16/01)


Memento. [Christopher Nolan, 2000.]

Kierkegaard said that the tragedy of life is that it must be lived forward but is only understood backward. [He might have said that the functor expressing the duality of the mental and the physical is contravariant and reverses all arrows, but then he would have been fucking with you.] This is a movie that explains what he meant.

The opening shot is time-reversed: a Polaroid photograph of a dead man fades and pops back into the camera, and the victim [Joe Pantoliano] gets up off the floor and coughs up a bullet which returns to the barrel of a gun unfired by the protagonist [Guy Pearce.]

The rest of the action is exhibited in brief scenes of a few minutes’ duration, which, though they run forward, are presented in reverse order; a telephone conversation between the protagonist and an unknown listener, intercut in counterpoint, provides additional exposition.

It is explained that Pearce has suffered a brain injury, during an attack by some unknown assailant who murdered his wife and left him for dead. As a result he cannot translate short-term into permanent memories, and lives in a sort of eternal present, as it were from vignette to vignette: though he may know, at any moment, where he is and what he’s doing [and seems to know who he was before all this began], he never knows how he got where he is, or how long his sense of the moment in progress will persist. [Again and again a scene begins with Pearce starting to explain his condition to someone only to receive the reply: “You already told me.” — In one amusing instance he fades in to discover himself running around a corner toward someone whom at first he assumes he’s chasing; only when the other guy starts shooting at him does he realize he’s supposed to be running away.]

Despite this handicap Pearce is attempting to find the murderer of his wife and avenge her death. In order to remind himself that this is what he is doing and to keep track of the progress of his investigation he has tattooed himself with data and instructions like the Illustrated Man, and carries with him a collection of Polaroid photographs of persons [e.g. Pantoliano], places [e.g. the lowlife motel he finds himself living in], and things [e.g. his Jaguar convertible], with brief notations upon them which remind him of their significance: axioms and facts from which he can reason his way to a conclusion.

Eventually we discover how these items entered his database; and thus find out, e.g., [though in the opposite order], how he found out the licenseplate number of the killer and tattooed it onto his arm, and how he found out that the driver of the car in question was, indeed, the guy we saw him shoot.

Whether or not Pantoliano was, in fact, guilty, whether Pearce’s barmaid girlfriend Carrie-Anne Moss is indeed the good angel she appears to be, and whether Pearce has been telling himself the truth appears in the prequel. Suffice it that the step-by-step reconstruction of Pearce’s argument [the proof carried back from conclusion to premises] is difficult to follow and produces in the viewer an exact correlate of the disorientation of the protagonist. The effect is profoundly disturbing.

The result, at first order, is a kind of deconstruction of the situation of the classical Cartesian detective. [It is very significant, a very pointed reference, that Pearce in his former life was supposed to have been a claims investigator at an insurance company — not the Fred MacMurray character in Double Indemnity, in other words, but the Edward G. Robinson character: in the universe of film noir, the very embodiment of mathematical rationality.] Though repeatedly Pearce states his belief that there is a real objective world, that his actions matter whether he can remember them or not, and that by establishing the facts and employing his reason upon them he can take control of his life and destiny, everything that happens serves to undermine these positions. And, it becomes clear, once you start taking apart the idea of the detective — of the rational observer faced with an epistemological problem of life and death, forced to weigh evidence critically, to find the signature of the demon [the perpetrator] who is working to deceive him — you start taking apart rationality itself: the memory, the self; the world, the flesh, the devil. Usually the detective cannot trust what others tell him; but what if he cannot trust himself? What if he really doesn’t know what he has been doing? There is a rapid dissolve here from the anxiety about the foundations of knowledge that Descartes discovered and Poe codified in detective fiction through the Freudian anxieties of film noir to the anxiety about the foundations of self that lie at the root of film noir’s logical antecedent, German Expressionism — in which the Cartesian demon is embodied in the alter ego, the figure of the double. — How can you fail to love a movie that is so completely successful in fucking with your head?

Cornell Woolrich once wrote a thriller in which an amnesiac protagonist simultaneously recovered the memory of his previous life and forgot what he’d been doing since he’d lost it: restored to his former bourgeois contentment, he finds himself trying to decide why sinister figures are following him, and whether he’s committed a murder he cannot remember. But a more immediate precursor, obviously, is the story [written by Jonathan Nolan] on which this scenario was directly based [archived when last I looked at www.esquire.com.]

The original refers explicitly to a famous argument of John Searle, designed [with considerable malice aforethought] to show the impossibility of artificial intelligence: suppose that, say, the understanding of Chinese [in the sense of being able to translate it into English] could be reduced to a computer program; then, since any such algorithm would be machine-independent, it could be implemented by a guy playing the role of a mechanical translator sitting in a closed room with a list of rules written down, say, on three-by-five index cards. The linguistic input could be broken down into a string of symbols [even binary symbols — even Chinese can be digitized] written on other cards shoved in through a slot one at a time; each one could, then, be processed according to the rules and, when output is required, a symbol [an X or an O, say] could be written on yet another little card and shoved out through another slot.

Even granting the hypothesis that something like this could work, still it seems obvious that at no time would the guy in the room necessarily know what he was doing; in particular, and perhaps paradoxically, you can’t say that he knows Chinese.

So where does the knowledge reside? What knows Chinese? Something appears to be missing in the Chinese room; something like consciousness.

Thomas Gold once [quite independently] attempted a similar deconstruction of the problem of the direction of time [not a trivial problem, as it turns out, in theoretical physics.] He imagines an observer writing brief descriptions of events down on index cards in sequence and then shuffling them and handing the deck to somebody else. How could the second party put them in the correct order?

[This is Pearce’s problem with his Polaroids, of course, but also, curiously enough, exactly the problem the cinematographer hands the editor, in the making of any motion picture.]

The answer, obviously, under ordinary circumstances, is that memory sets the index cards in order; and it is memory, in this sense, that assures the unity of the Cartesian ego. But if memory fails and has to be replaced by mechanical procedure, the ego is replaced with a simulacrum; and the substitution somehow seems invalid, like Searle’s Chinese translator.

The anxiety you feel at your inability to put your finger on the gap in this argument becomes an anxiety about the reality of the ego under any circumstances. — Perhaps you are always like Pearce, an intelligence adrift, annotating the backs of your Polaroids, never certain whether somebody else is following you around amending what you’ve written. — Perhaps the Cartesian ego is a myth. To borrow one of Kafka’s punchlines, it suggests that the world-order is founded on a lie.


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The writer succumbs to coprophilia (3/16/01)


Exit Wounds. [Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2001.]

The very talented director of Romeo Must Die takes what ought to be a pathetic piece of shit and somehow makes it all look good: maverick cop [please, no] Steven Seagal [I speak his name with doleful groan], a guy who keeps saving the world but [what a surprise] just can’t seem to follow orders, rescues the Vice President from a small army of terrorist kidnappers in the opening reel, but, what can you expect, pisses off the tightassed suits of the Secret Service in the process, resulting in a ritual tonguelashing by a superior officer, banishment to the lousiest district in the city [this being Detroit, it is a very lousy district indeed], an odd-couple buddy-cop pairing with an unlikely partner, and the immediate fortuitous discovery of a drug ring run by corrupt elements of [say it ain’t so] the police force itself — essentially, in other words, the plot parodied by The Last Action Hero; and it was too dumb even then to play for decent laughs. But miraculously every time one of these obnoxious cliches is about to register Bartkowiak contrives to interrupt the exposition with another carchase, punchout, gunfight, or complete non sequitur [e.g., our hero’s sentencing to anger-management classes with Tom Arnold]; and the flow of the action distracts the viewer from the realization that he is enjoying what ought to be an abomination. — Moreover any survivor of the last few Seagal vehicles will be astonished to discover that someone has succeeded in persuading the star that dramatic tension can be considerably enhanced if the protagonist doesn’t win all the fights and get all the good lines. — Good beyond all expectation; check it out.

Mr. Seagal, incidentally, works his way through a Dodge pickup the size of the Queen Mary, a bright yellow Hummer, and a red Ducati [and doesn’t even get the Lamborghini]; no wonder they call it the Motor City.


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Mourning becomes Electra (3/14/01)


American Vampire. [Luis Esteban, 2000.]

A movie which intends to be Beach Blanket Bloodsucker, but falls somewhat short: a surfer dude’s vacationing parents leave him the beach house for the summer, but his progress toward the Endless Party is arrested by a seeming chance encounter with a magnetic but peculiar individual averse to light and garlic named Erich Von Zipper [aka Moondoggie], whose cadaverous posse takes over the household; only the intervention of The Big Kahuna [played by the venerable Adam West] can save our hero from the endless night. — Though the authors open strong with a cameo by Dick Dale and the Deltones, the flick needs more beach, more bands, and [the presence of Carmen Electra notwithstanding] more babes: even a casual glance at the old AIP epics will reveal they had amazing depth at the skill positions.


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Stars and bars (3/2/01)


The Mexican. [Gore Verbinski, 2001. Written by J. H. Wyman.]

Career incompetent Brad Pitt has spent several years as an accidentprone Mob errand boy, trying unsuccessfully to work off the debt he incurred when, in a typical lapse, he sideswiped the car of Mister Big [Gene Hackman, actually, but we only find this out toward the end] and inadvertently allowed the police to discover a body in the trunk — trying unsuccessfully, since, as the Deputy Boss hastens to point out, he fucks up every job they assign him. But this time for sure: Pitt is dispatched to a seedy bar in a small town in the Mexican outback to recover a rare and valuable pistol; which, it develops, carries a curse acquired when the gunsmith who made it tried to marry his beautiful daughter off to an asshole nobleman and not her poor but deserving true love. [Or something like that; the backstory develops in several installments of flashback, and doesn’t take reliable shape until the penultimate crisis.] Naturally Pitt’s luck is no better on this expedition than on any previous, but while he’s bungling the mission the several factions intent on obtaining the pistol for their own nefarious purposes, erring on the side of optimism, contend for possession of his estranged girlfriend Julia Roberts, who, though she has decided to write him off as a loss and seek her fortune in Las Vegas, seems plausible as a hostage; after a violent dispute over right of possession is resolved in his favor, she ends up taking an extended road trip with gay hitman James Gandolfini — with whom, the names above the title notwithstanding, she develops the most interesting relationship in the picture, disarming his presumably predatory nature with an avalanche of psychobabble and absorbing in turn a renewed faith in the power of Love. — Pitt, in the meantime, rockets rather aimlessly up and down the Mexican blue highways in an antique pickup, accompanied by a familiar spirit which has taken the form of a junkyard dog. — In due course the parted lovers are reunited to quarrel through the [suitably protracted] final chase; and, after a very clever series of surprises, reversals, discoveries, and, naturally, carchases and gunfights, Love [and Star Power] triumph over all, the pistol is restored to its rightful owner, and the viewer is persuaded of the virtues of fleabag hotels, battered old cars, and Manly Love.

Lopsided structure or no, this nearly worked. But it leaves me wondering when John Woo will direct a romantic comedy; say, a remake of Pierrot le Fou [though naturally with better gunfights.] — Brad could do Belmondo, I’m sure of that. But let’s see Julia’s Anna Karina.


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Boys meet girl (2/28/01)


Malèna. [Giuseppe Tornatore, 2000.]

A Sicilian Summer of ’42: the wartime adolescence of Italian lad Giuseppe Sulfaro acquires focus when he develops a mostly-comical fixation on the eponymous Malèna [Monica Bellucci], the local combat widow, the lodestar of the community gossips, and certain proof we didn’t win the war against the Axis because we had Betty Grable on our side. Though much of this, predictably, is just Porky’s with subtitles — squeaking bedsprings, hairy palms, the farting night watchman, the deaf Latin teacher, the pratfalls of the peeping Tom — there is a deeper humor in the comic particulars of Sulfaro’s struggle to liberate himself from the pernicious influences of the civil and spiritual authorities; and the fate of Malèna herself at the hands of the mob of moral simpletons who accomodatingly cheer both the Fascists marching off to war and the Americans marching back isn’t funny in the slightest. — Indeed, the moral lies here: in the suggestion that exhibiting the spiritual capacity to suffer the ritual stoning the mob demands of its martyrs with dignity — not so much turning the other cheek as finding the magnanimity to transcend any need to call the transgressors to account or seek revenge — ennobles not merely the victim herself [and her not-so-dead husband], but even the witless yokels who would tar and feather her and run her out of town on a rail; if you try to think of a contemporary figure the moral equivalent of Malèna, it might be John McCain.

Thus very funny and surprisingly deep, but mainly remarkable for the presence of the phenomenal Ms. Bellucci: who is, for the moment [Uma having taken extended maternity leave] the most beautiful babe on the silver screen. — And add another to the list of Anna Karina homages: this, Bellucci’s dance to an scratchy 78 in a darkened livingroom as her young admirer watches, fascinated, through a peephole — the object of desire and the director/voyeur within a single frame.


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Six hundred thirty four blowjobs in five days (2/28/01)


Erin Brockovich. [Stephen Soderbergh, 2000.]

Variations on the theme of underwear: Julia Roberts proves that Travolta could have won A Civil Action if only he’d worn a Wonderbra; Albert Finney, meanwhile, the young stud of Tom Jones no longer, looks like he could use a girdle. — Soderbergh, apparently, needs a tshirt with “Genius” written on the front and “Whore” on the back. But he’s got me coming and going.


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The idiot (2/23/01)


Monkeybone. [Henry Selick, 2001. From a graphic novel (Dark Town) by Kaja Blackley.]

Orpheus in Cool World: cartoonist Brendan Fraser masters his dark side, hits it big, and is about to propose to his girlfriend Bridget Fonda [who used to play little sister to Blair Brown’s doctor, but now gets to play doctor herself] when a freak accident drops him into a coma and sends him off on a journey to the Land of Dreams — a sort of puppet-show carnival [compare Beetlejuice] beyond space and time where the main attraction, to his chagrin and disgust, is his own illmannered but flamboyant creation, the eponymous Monkeybone [for which read, the Little Head]; when presently his sentence is commuted and he is allowed to return to the land of the living, the Id usurps the place of the Ego. Complications ensue. — This sucked, of course, though not so badly as critical opinion would have it; personally, I rather liked Rose McGowan in kitty whiskers.


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Baker’s dozen (2/21/01)


The Thirteenth Warrior. [John McTiernan, 1999.]

Court poet Antonio Banderas is making the best of the Dark Ages partying in Baghdad until he hits on the right woman at the wrong moment and finds it politically expedient to take a roving ambassadorship that dispatches him to the distant North, where fickle Chance — nay, inscrutable Fate — appends him to a band of Vikings on a quest; despite a certain amount of fraternity hazing, he learns their language with uncanny rapidity and impresses them with his skill with horse and sword, and has been accepted as one of the boys by the time they arrive at their destination, where an anonymous tribe of — protoBritons? — face an apparently supernatural menace.

The trailers never did this justice: an essay in action in the age of Beowulf [a reminder, perhaps, that the medieval sagas were the action movies of their day]; Conan with a forebrain. Check it out.


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Talkin’ ’bout my trepanation (2/19/01)


Hannibal. [Ridley Scott, 2001.]

The further adventures of Hannibal Lecter, played mainly for grisly laughs: the good doctor, long incognito as an art critic, is unmasked in Florence by an ambitious but unwary Italian detective [naturally the mark goes down hard, though for some reason it takes a third of the picture to have done with him], motivating the master psychiatrist’s return to America and his interpolation into the political difficulties which have befallen his — uh, protege — FBI agent Clarisse Starling [this time the redoubtable Julianne Moore], who has been busted off the force thanks to the insidious machinations of billionaire Fiend Without A Face Gary Oldman, a Lecter victim only partially, and by himself consumed, now perhaps understandably obsessed with the project of luring the cannibal genius back to Virginia to be fed to a penfull of wild boars. Complications ensue. — The rather heavily underscored subtext of the romantic connection between Lecter and Starling [who share, it is made clear, an inhuman integrity and strength of purpose that sets them apart from everyone else in the story] sets up the punchline: a letter-perfect quotation of the fireworks display that lit up the Riviera sky behind Grant and Kelly in It Takes A Thief; I laughed helplessly in the dark. — Really, if you can hold your gorge, this flick is quite a yuck, and Scott is relatively restrained by contemporary standards: the Farrellys must already be plotting something involving the Three Stooges and meatcleavers.

As for protests over the gruesome fate of the Bad Fed: much ridicule has been unjustly heaped upon the French critic who exclaimed, in a moment of excessive enthusiasm, that Charlton Heston was “an axiom of the cinema!” — for there are, after all, certain axioms of the cinema, and there are certain persons who embody them. Whatever they may be [and I doubt I could enumerate them], I think it goes without saying that one of them must be that, whatever happens to Ray Liotta in the final reel, he had it coming.


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Paint by numbers (2/16/01)


Pollock. [Ed Harris, 2001. Screenplay by Barbara Turner and Susan Emshwiller; after a book by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.]

Ed Harris/Jackson Pollock washes out of the Army as a chainsmoking nerve case, lives as a parasite on his brother’s household in New York, meets Marcia Gay Harden, does some fairly nice but obviously derivative painting, hits it moderately big, fences with the critics, pisses in a patron’s fireplace during a reception, does some more painting, moves out to Long Island, breaks through with the invention of a style that involves dripping paint off a stick and flinging it around the canvas, hits it really big, and drinks himself to death. All this is absolutely true to life and completely riveting. — With Stephanie Seymour and Jennifer Connelly as art groupies [you wish], and Val Kilmer obviously relishing his turn as Willem de Kooning. — The usual platitudes about the evils of alcoholism are avoided. What Harris manages to convey perfectly is the sense of a guy who is constantly skating around the edge of a nervous breakdown, literally hanging by his fingernails above the abyss, whose only valid strategy for survival is to drink himself into stupefaction. [Also the native existential situation of the American poet; compare, e.g., Robert Lowell or John Berryman.] — With the use of modern clinically approved psychoactive substances, on the other hand, a man like Pollock could spend a productive career watching television with a vaguely puzzled expression; undoubtedly to the greater profit of society and the legitimate drug industry.

Ms. Harden, of course, won a richly-deserved Academy Award for her portrayal of Pollock’s longsuffering wife Lee Krasner [herself a painter of some repute.] But mainly here you look at Ed Harris, a guy who has had in his career the opportunity to play John Glenn, E. Howard Hunt, and Jackson Pollock, and you have to think the life of an actor doesn’t suck.


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Totally busted (2/14/01)


Under Suspicion. [Stephen Hopkins, 2000. Written by Tom Provost and W. Peter Iliff; from a novel by John Wainwright.]

When a couple of specimens of teenage jailbait turn up raped and strangled, Puerto Rican police detective Morgan Freeman hauls in wealthy and influential tax attorney Gene Hackman for questioning; and, with the kind of withering crossexamination that would have pinned the Ramsey murder on the nearest available suspect in time for lunch, succeeds in turning over every rock in Hackman’s psyche, sandblasting every trace of polish from his personality, controverting his every statement, exposing his every peccadillo, and, finally, extracting a confession every bit as sound as the ones the Inquisition always managed to extort from the instruments of Satan. [In Hackman’s defense, if you were married to Monica Bellucci and she wouldn’t put out it would be pretty easy to drive you over the edge, too.] Then of course the last-second reprieve when the real killer is caught redhanded; many on death row were not so fortunate. — Technically impressive, with layered revelations, Rashomon-like multiply-versioned flashbacks [oh, what is Reality, anyway], and neatly jumpcut a la Soderbergh [though not of course so good], but mainly [since Hackman is the guy who actually gets raped and strangled] a reminder of why you should never talk to the police without a lawyer at your elbow. And a magnum in your hand.


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Rauchen verboten (2/14/01)


Get Carter. [Stephen Kay, 2000. Screenplay by David McKenna; after a novel by Ted Lewis.]

A remake of the 1971 feature starring Michael Caine [which. however, owes more to Soderbergh’s The Limey]: when he learns of the purportedly accidental death of his brother in Seattle, Vegas mob enforcer Jack Carter aka Sylvester Stallone — Chili Palmer with larger biceps and less personality — though hitherto not much of a family guy drops everything to go to the funeral; arriving unannounced, he pisses off the bereaved widow [Miranda Richardson] with his relentless rattling of the mourners’ cages but does, sure enough, determine that the accident was staged and that somebody ordered a hit. Suspicion devolves successively upon Michael Caine [whose presence in the film, obviously, is meant to be legitimizing], proprietor of a club where the late lamented hung out; pornomeister Mickey Rourke, now heavily into the videogame market; punk computer billionaire Alan Cumming, who has nebulous dealings with Rourke; and major babe and apparent extracurricular interest of the deceased Rhona Mitra, who must know more than she’s admitting; all of them, naturally, point their fingers at one another. — Meanwhile Stallone is bonding with his niece Rachael Leigh Cook, despite the fact that he’s a badass and she has that thing in her nose. — Presently the smoking gun turns up, in the form of the inevitable computer disk [hint: pornographic video] just as Stallone’s boss in Vegas figures out who’s been humping his girlfriend and dispatches a couple of Sly’s erstwhile colleagues to put the hurt upon him; this necessitates much picturesque violence and several carchases in the rain. — I think the moral of all this is supposed to be that modern billionaires are pussies, but don’t quote me.

Provocative exchanges: “You’re Carter?” “Yes, and you really don’t want to know me.” — Rourke to Stallone: “You got my deepest condolences, and all that shit.” Stallone in turn compares Rourke’s eyes to two pissholes in the snow. [At this point you realize that this is a Relationship Movie.] — Stallone to a succession of bitchslapped scumbags: “Tell me what I need to know, or this is going to another level.” — Rourke to Stallone: “You’re going to end up like a onelegged man in an asskicking contest.” — Stallone to Rhona Mitra: “If you’re lying to me, I’ll break every beautiful bone in your body.” [Not bad, actually; nearly good enough for Mickey Spillane.]

The DVD release is equipped with a director’s commentary considerably more interesting than the dialogue track which not only satisfies the viewer’s curiosity regarding the details of the cinematography [i.e. use of color saturation, choice of lenses, sources of compositional quotations], presents a rather labored explanation of the significance of the fragmented editing style [Stallone/Carter’s self-deconstruction], relates the much-repeated mirror motif to this last [self-image], laments the folly of shooting on location in Seattle [rain], points out a variety of continuity errors, provides the solution to the problem created for the soundtrack by enthusiastic fans off-camera screaming “Yo Rocky!!” [looping dialogue in post], and expresses repeatedly the director’s admiration for the size of Stallone’s biceps and his awe at the expense of his wardrobe [five thousand dollars for a silk suit? what would Perelman have done with this?], but solves what would otherwise be the greatest mystery about this opus, namely, why everybody smokes in the first half of the movie and nobody smokes in the second. [Stallone in particular tosses his pack on the counter and pronounces himself a cured addict in the middle of a sentence.] — The answer [as if you couldn’t guess] is that the producers insisted on it. — In fact, one gathers, the producers were constantly seizing the controls from the authors of record — no great surprise, since the credits list thirteen producers against one writer and one director — with the predictable result that the idea that a professional hitman who finishes off the movie by whacking halfadozen people in as many minutes should otherwise comport himself in a manner befitting a role model is hardly the most piquant absurdity to be found herein. But one must expect this, when a story is continuously redesigned by a committee; something about fifty million monkeys and their typewriters comes to mind.

Without Kay’s commentary I probably wouldn’t have noticed that Faye Wong has a song on the soundtrack; he doesn’t seem to realize, however, that whoever picked the music out must have laid this track down under the night scene in the diner in homage to Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express. — A movie in which everybody smokes cigarettes from beginning to end, incidentally; don’t producers watch their dailies in Hong Kong?


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Citizen Goya (2/11/01)


Goya In Bordeaux. [Carlos Saura, 2000.]

The old Goya, stumbling around Bordeaux in his nightgown, flashes back to the career of the younger Goya; suggesting the obvious comparison, though I must have missed the part with the sled. We do see a lot of the paintings, but, obviously, they can tell Goya’s story without the assistance of Mr. Saura; why bother with a movie? Still, rest assured you get to see the Duchess of Alba naked.


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The age of Eisenhower (2/11/01)


Confessions Of Sorority Girls. [Uli Edel, 1994. Written by Debra Hill and Gigi Vorgan.]

A remake of one of Corman’s famous essays in exploitation, in which blackhearted Bitch from Hell Jamie Luner lays waste to the happiness of her sorority chums, particularly sweet wholesome cupcake Alyssa Milano — fucking her boyfriend, undermining her political position as sorority president by spreading the news that her mother is in prison, and finally trying to blow her up. I don’t know what the present authors intended, but, modulo a few fond pangs of reminiscence at the sight of Chris Craft powerboats and vintage Corvette Stingrays, the net effect is antinostalgic: this is a perverse celebration of the dark nightmare of Fifties college life, which channeled into the Greek system the political contests of a gigantic class of teenage mutant ninja bourgeois all of whom wanted to grow up to be the Man In The Gray Flannel Suit; and wanted this with a fury born of universal sexual frustration, because none of their girlfriends put out. This in turn was the result of the nonexistence of adequate birth control — doubly tragic, since though it was inhumanly cruel to forbid these people the opportunity to fuck, they never should have been allowed to breed. — Handle this film with care. I’m not sure what contagion it contains, but it may spread.

[Attention paparazzi: Alyssa Milano confesses to gardening topless. “The naked body is something very natural and beautiful. I’ll be in my garden, you know, just being natural.” Satellite footage at eleven.]


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Dishonor among thieves (2/11/01)


City Of Industry. [John Irvin, 1996. Written by Ken Solarz.]

Refinery Dogs: a diamond heist is going all too smoothly; right up to the point at which wild and crazy getaway driver Stephen Dorff decides four shares are better than one and summarily whacks his collaborators Timothy Hutton and Wade Dominguez. Unfortunately, he misses Harvey Keitel: big mistake. After that, it’s all about revenge. — With Famke Janssen as the deserving wife of one of the late lamented, Lucy Liu as a stripper, and Elliot Gould [?!!] as a loanshark for the Chinese mob.


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Mysteries of Hong Kong (2/7/01)


Chungking Express. [Wong Kar Wai, 1994.]

A couple of stories about a couple of lovelorn cops in Hong Kong, connected by the little fastfood stand [the Midnight Express] where they both occasionally hang out: since the first [Takeshi Kaneshiro] is dumped by his girlfriend May on the first day of April; every day for thirty days he buys another metaphor-laden can of pineapple with the expiration date of May first. When the new month arrives he abandons denial, eats all the cans at once, hurls like a volcano, and goes off to the bar for ritual cleansing, where he meets woman-of-mystery Brigitte Lin, in blonde wig and sunglasses, winding down after a rough day in the drug trade. The second [Tony Leung] is dumped by his stewardess girlfriend; the new waitress at the stand [Faye Wong] falls for him but [being a Wong character] finds it impossible to express her interest directly. Instead she begins to sneak into his apartment while he’s away, buying him groceries, doing his laundry and his dishes, and stocking his aquarium with fresh goldfish. The epitome of bachelor absentmindedness, he never seems to figure out what is going on; but finally catches her redhanded, absorbs the implications of her obsession, and asks her out. Abruptly she runs away to California to become a stewardess herself.

One of the cops advances the theory that jogging is good for the lovelorn, since sweat expels moisture from the body that would otherwise be shed as tears: something about this argument reminds me of Ben Jonson.

The VHS print [now several years old] is introduced by Quentin Tarantino [remember him?], who in an energetic albeit ungrammatical commentary explains that Chungking Express was a near-improvisation tossed off as an aside while Wong was bogged down in the interminable editing of his epic Ashes Of Time [1994]; it was originally intended as a three-story edifice, but when the first two parts seemed long enough, he left the third for a later film [Fallen Angels.] Tarantino also points out the considerable debt of Wong to Godard; which, with a bit of a jumpcut, he chooses to illustrate with the admission that the Uma Thurman character in Pulp Fiction was modeled after the Anna Karina character in Vivre Sa Vie. [After all, that wig.] — The connection, actually, is best seen in the beautiful sequence [over which Tarantino enthuses at length] in which Faye Wong, solo, wholly unselfconscious though wholly selfpreoccupied, dances behind the counter of the fastfood stand while her boombox [tuned, apparently, to some Hong Kong source of American oldies] plays California Dreaming. This is an exact counterpart of the little dance Uma performs in her livingroom in Pulp Fiction to an old Neil Diamond tune [Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon], and both are imitations of the poolhall ballet of Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie.

It is curiously difficult to convey in words the appeal of these scenes, but Tarantino, certainly, has put his finger on one of the great mysteries of film: why something so seemingly simple as the spectacle of a girl, alone, dancing to a tune playing on a jukebox/a reel-to-reel tapedeck/the boombox over the refrigerator should be so endlessly fascinating.

[Compare Yeats:

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.]

Wong may have been an obscure figure of the Hong Kong cinema then, but his new picture In The Mood For Love [starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung] is opening to spectacular reviews in the U.S. At this rate he’ll be called upon for the next release of Pulp Fiction to explain who Tarantino was.


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Kiwi kino (1/27/01)


Forgotten Silver. [Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, 1995.]

A bogus documentary about the life and work of the pioneering New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie, who [within the bracketing fiction] began his career at the turn of the century by inventing bicycle- and steam-powered motion picture cameras, filmed a heavier-than-air flying machine whose flight antedated that of the Wright Brothers, pioneered the sound picture in 1908 with a kung-fu movie in Chinese [unfortunately it was a commercial failure, since he neglected to invent subtitles], shot the first color documentary footage of topless maidens in Tahiti in 1912 [and got busted for smut peddling], found himself subsequently reduced to making atrocious slapstick shorts in the teens, and, finally, devoted the remainder of his life [until his untimely demise serving as a combat photographer in the Spanish Civil War] to building a replica of the city of Jerusalem in the mountains of New Zealand and shooting a mammoth Biblical epic based on the illstarred romance of Salome and John the Baptist.

The burden of the fiction is that this forgotten masterpiece has been recently dug up by intrepid film archaeologists who have found the auteur’s lost city in the jungle and unearthed a treasure-trove of reels of film in a hidden room therein; the tale of the reconstruction of the longforgotten epic from this store of ancient stock and its triumphant premiere before a contemporary audience provide a grand finale. [The gigantic Babylonian set for Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece Intolerance stood three hundred feet high and covered ten acres in downtown Hollywood, and stood crumbling for years after its abandonment; Abel Gance’s amazing 1927 bioepic Napoleon had been forgotten for fifty years until Kevin Brownlow supervised a restoration and staged a screening — attended by Gance himself, then past ninety — at the Telluride film festival in 1979.]

The ancillary materials on the DVD reveal that this imposture was so successful that many of the viewers who saw the film on New Zealand television were completely taken in — not simply because of the meticulous imitations Messrs. Jackson and Botes managed of silent-era mise-en-scene and the look and texture of decaying nitrate stock, but also, presumably, because of the deadpan interviews contributed by wouldbe critic/historians Harvey Weinstein, Sam Neill, and Leonard Maltin.

A note of protest: the corpulent dancer who plays Salome may, indeed, be typical of the movie heroines of 1915 [the female complements to William Howard Taft]; but Griffith’s Babylonian princess, Seena Owen, could have stepped straight onto the set [and into the hot tub] of an Andy Sidaris feature. Genetics are always superior to the accidents of fashion.


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Cyborgs a go-go (1/20/01)


The Astro-Zombies. [Ted V. Mikels, 1968.]

Mad scientist John Carradine’s forbidden experiments reanimating skullfaced cadavers controlled by telepathy and powered by solar cells succeed in creating a race of remote-controlled robot astronauts ideally suited for the exploration of the solar system; unfortunately the defective criminal brains implanted in his robot zombies possess them with a lust for blood which can only be slaked by raping and butchering women in filmy underthings. CIA bozos must contend with a posse of foreign agents led by the formidable black widow Tura Satana as they try to hunt the madman down and find his secret laboratory. — Renowned as a cult classic, though it hardly seems bad enough to warrant this distinction. — The most jarring moment, actually, came early in the development, when the Feds met in somebody’s office to talk strategy and I realized the portrait hanging on the wall in the background was that of Lyndon Johnson. — Gaah. — And you thought Bush was a mistake.


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Cockney bull (1/19/01)


Snatch. [Guy Ritchie, 2001.]

Mr. Madonna follows the very amusing Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels with another attempt to translate Tarantino into British: this, an extended caper movie in which a boatload of colorful lowlifes [Benicio del Toro is only first among equals] chase a diamond around London. I might attempt a summary of the plot, but it was far too confusing, and, anyway, this is really a film about accents: note in particular Brad Pitt’s portrayal of an absolutely incomprehensible Gypsy boxer. — Indeed, if there were a moral, it would be, Never trust a Gypsy. Or a Gypsy’s dog, for that matter.


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Georgia on my mind (1/19/01)


The Gift. [Sam Raimi, 2000. Written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson.]

Cracker Gothic: after her husband is blown to bits in an industrial accident, sad shy but psychic smalltown Georgia peach Cate Blanchett takes up fortunetelling to support her three children; collecting among her clientele Very Disturbed auto mechanic Giovanni Ribisi and Battered Wife Hilary Swank. When Cate advises Hilary to leave her husband [Keanu Reeves, here surfing in the Deep South], he threatens her and her children with various picturesque forms of violence; meanwhile she is developing a thing for schoolmaster Greg Kinnear, who, unfortunately, is about to marry Katie Holmes, who, unfortunately, is fucking everybody in town; Keanu included. Katie abruptly disappears and foul play is obvious; Cate’s visions seem to pin the job on Keanu: a solution which, alas, is entirely too cute, entirely too quick; other visions follow, and the dead intervene in the affairs of the living. — Strange but true, this is terrific; Thornton must deserve some credit, but the real gift, obviously, is Raimi’s. I await his interpretation of Spiderman with bated breath. In the meantime, check this out.


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Love and death (1/14/01)


The Virgin Suicides. [Sofia Coppola, 1999. After a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.]

The voice of Giovanni Ribisi narrates yet another rosyhued tale of suburban life [this time in Seventies Michigan] about four beautiful high school blonde sisters [Kirsten Dunst takes point] awash in obsessive adolescent love — and: their dead sister; their pathologically strict Catholic mother [Kathleen Turner], who burns their Aerosmith records; their nerd mathteacher father [James Woods],who wears funny glasses and talks to himself; their station wagon; the circle of adoring adolescent males that surround them; their trip to the Prom; their yearning to escape; and their plot to run away from home — which comes to naught because, abruptly, the girls all kill themselves. — The stock character of the grasping female television journalist, promoting herself by exploiting the misery of others, is becoming tiresome. But the final cocktail party, at which the auto-industry rich wear gasmasks with their evening clothes, is priceless: Michael Moore meets Buñuel. — As directorial debuts of famous auteurs’ daughters go, this isn’t up to the [admittedly daunting] standard of Boxing Helena. But give the poor little rich girl a big cigar; and maybe she, unlike Jennifer Lynch, will get another chance.


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Old English (1/14/01)


Beowulf. [Graham Baker, 1999. Written by Mark Leahy and David Chappe, with some assistance from classical sources.]

In the middle ages of the distant future, wandering knight Christopher Lambert [as, you guessed it] arrives at a strange castle besieged from without by very unfriendly dudes with a giant Swiss Army knife who like to chop everybody in half, and menaced from within by a supernatural monster named Grendel [played by the Predator] who likes to bite everybody in half; after hacking an arm off the thing to cut it down to size, he has to deal with the monster’s mother — portrayed [with a nod to Natasha Henstridge] by bodacious erstwhile centerfold Layla Roberts, augmented somewhat by CGI. — Also featuring Rhona Mitra [a former Lara Croft] as a princess in peril: a picture that makes more babes than sense.


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Two guys in a garage (1/12/01)


Antitrust. [Peter Howitt, 2001. Written by Howard Franklin.]

Stanford computer whizkid Ryan Phillippe, on the verge of revolutionizing communications software in company with his best friend — uh, Woz — is seduced from the path of startup righteousness by Evil Emperor Tim Robbins, who recruits him into a picturesque corporate campus/fortress in the Pacific Northwest to put the finishing touches to a global network that probably won’t end all life on Earth, but will certainly end all competition. The curious enthusiasm felt by his girlfriend Claire Forlani for this career decision — indeed, the curious fact that he has a girlfriend at all — should by itself have been cause for suspicion, but presently our hero discovers that Robbins is not simply ripping off the ideas of his competitors and then driving them out of business, but killing lone-wolf-genius programmers and tearing their bloodstained code from their cold dead fingers. Energized by a righteous paranoia, Phillippe adopts the methods of the secret agent [don’t worry, he still gets to spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen typing furiously], turns the scheme against its maker, destroys Microsoft and imprisons Gates [no, sorry, that just slipped out], and reaffirms his commitment to the Open Source movement. Thus a lament for lost geek innocence, an impassioned plea for the renunciation of the profit motive, and a reminder that Women Are Evil. I’m sure Mr. Phillippe, Messrs. Howitt and Franklin, and the executives at MGM embrace all these principles.


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Doze doll does wiz biz (1/10/01)


The Cell. [Tarsem Singh, 2000. Written by Mark Protosevich.]

Very tired FBI dude Vince Vaughn is doggedly pursuing looney serial killer Vincent D’Onofrio — a guy who likes to kidnap attractive young women, cage them in glasswalled cells that look like outsized aquariums, leave them there for a few days, pump water in until they drown, admire the aesthetic effect of the floating female corpse within the giant fishbowl, and then suspend his naked body by hooks embedded in his flesh above the naked stiff while watching video replays of the drowning and scream until he reaches a sexual climax. [Presumably he also recites passages from the Canterbury Tales and farts the Star-Spangled Banner, but mercifully the suthors scanted on detail.] Fortunately D’Onofrio is nice to his dog, or we’d think he was a monster; unfortunately it’s just this canine companion who leads the Feds to his door, which they bust down, by bizarre coincidence, just as he collapses in the throes of a rare viral form of schizophrenia and lapses into a catatonic state. This happenstance leaves Vaughn momentarily baffled as to how to locate the Buffalo-Bill memorial dungeon in which the latest victim still languishes, until his sources refer him to megababe shrink action figure Jennifer Lopez, the point chick in an intriguing set of real-virtuality virtual-reality experiments which allow intrepid psychiatrists to enter semibodily into the psyches of their patients and explore the rather-too-vividly-realized landscapes of their imaginations; and in a trice our heroine finds herself crawling through the cellars of the D’Onofrio Bastille, populated by clockwork-automaton Barbiedolls representing his former victims and furnished with flashy rock-video production design. Ms. Lopez makes contact with both the Good and the Bad D’Onofrios — the Inner Kid and, uh, Idi Amin — witnesses re-enactments of both the childhood abuse and [oh, take that, you Christian-right denouncers of Hollywood as fount of all moral corruption] the traumatic baptismal ritual that formed the killer’s unorthodox views of water, and falls prey to the Dark Side just long enough to allow Vaughn to ride improbably to the rescue before a denouement that suggest that even the boogieman may find redemption. — Very striking imagery, production design, and costumes; lots of very flashy religious iconography. But you have to wonder what Dali and Buñuel could have done with this kind of money.

Though I doubt anyone will admit it, it seems obvious this scenario must have derived from an old novel of the late Roger Zelazny, The Dream Master, which at the time of its appearance [the Sixties] was the first and only substantial piece of science fiction ever written about psychoanalysis. Therein the intellectually formidable but disturbingly arrogant protagonist was supposed to be one of the pioneers of a techno-therapeutic technique which, once analyst and patient had plugged themselves into womblike immersion chambers, allowed the construction of a shared dreamlike fantasy [invariably based on classical sources, allowing Zelazny to engage in his characteristic literary namedropping] in which the patient could dissipate his neurosis by role-playing: an inversion of the supposed causal chain connecting the internal representation of the self and the dreams which mirror it. — The plot followed a Greek dramatic arc: the hero’s pride, which involved him with a dangerously selfwilled female patient, led to his downfall; and we left him gibbering in an endless remake of Tristan and Isolde. — Unfortunately for the Zelazny estate, all this happened quite a while ago, and The Cell appears in the wake of a barrage of virtual-reality pictures from which, who knows, these authors may have stolen more. But Zelazny would be able to console himself with the reflection that he got there first, and made a better story of it.


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The chariest maid is prodigal enough (1/6/01)


Let The Devil Wear Black. [Stacy Title, 1999. Written by Jonathan Penner.]

Having apparently been dropped on my head that evening, I was well into this dark and noirish thriller about a blackclad doctoral candidate given to lengthy philosophical ruminations who lingers at the family mansion in LA after his father’s funeral, haunted by unsettling visions and the suspicion of foul play, disgusted by the alacrity with which his loathed uncle is taking over the old man’s business empire, holding oddly charged conversations with his disturbingly attractive mother [Jacqueline Bisset], trying to avoid his crazy poor-little-rich-girlfriend, and followed everywhere by a couple of ne’erdowell drinking buddies who seem as interchangeable as Tweedledum and Tweedledee — or, well, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — before I figured out what was going on, and began to develop a real appreciation of the ingenuity of the interpretation. — As it turns out there isn’t room in the scenario for Laertes, Polonius doesn’t get killed [though our hero does kick the shit out of him], Ophelia throws herself in front of a bus instead of drowning, and though the protagonist does pause in a graveyard on his way to the terminal shootout [in any version, Hamlet ends as bloodily as a John Woo movie], it isn’t an entire skull that prompts his reflections on mortality. But, sheesh, not at all bad. And I thought I was watching it for the strippers.


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The end of the world as we know it (1/6/01)


The Book Of Life. [Hal Hartley, 1998.]

Its release having been delayed by the usual mysterious complications, this sixty-minute minifeature Hartley constructed for French television now appears as a rather belated expression of millenial anxiety: the Son of God [Martin Donovan], accompanied by his female sidekick Magdalena [P.J. Harvey], arrives in Manhattan on the last day of 1999 to set the Apocalypse in motion; has second thoughts; meets a guy with a gambling problem and his bartender girlfriend; tosses down a few shots with the Great Adversary [Thomas Jay Ryan]; and finally [to the disgust of his attorneys] decides to cancel the festivities. — Obviously this owes more than a little to Godard’s Hail Mary. — The best gags: the Book itself is stashed on a Macintosh laptop, and when Donovan breaks the seal on its iconic representation, a dialogue box pops up asking him whether he’s sure he wants to go through with the end of the world; the gunfight with the Mormon thugs; Polly Jean sings “To Sir With Love”. — The most remarkable thing about this opus, actually, is the look, which cinematographer Jim Denault [Boys Don’t Cry] somehow coaxed out of a digital camera [specifically, a Sony VX-1000]; without question this is the first movie I’ve ever seen shot on video that didn’t look like shit. The new century may not be wholly devoid of promise.


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Just say no-no (1/5/01)


Traffic. [Steven Soderbergh, 2000.]

A multiply-storylined but wholly clichéd examination of the War on Drugs, structured for the most part around the evolution of government bigshot Michael Douglas from Stern Granitejawed Disciplinarian New-Drug-Czar Dad to Caring Nurturing Supportgroup Ex-Drug-Czar Dad as he chases down his errant daughter Erika Christensen, whom freebasing has turned from an private-school honor student into a drugaddled zombie who fucks black guys for crack money in ghetto hotels [the descent into the lower classes ... the horror ... the horror ...] — while in the meantime Catherine Zeta-Jones progresses from bewildered shock when her drug-entrepreneur husband is arrested to managing his business while he’s in the slammer to hiring a hit on the principal witness against him to get him off and out, mildly corrupt go-along-to-get-along Tijuana cop Benicio del Toro gets sucked into the turf war between two Mexican cartels and reluctantly becomes a hero, and lots of people get shot and tortured, lots of doors get kicked down, lots of exciting chases make lots of cops look like they’re doing lots of Really Important Stuff, lots of DEA guys in lots of anonymous vans do lots and lots of illegal electronic surveillance, and lots of important people in Washington smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey [oh, the irony] and bullshit one another at cocktail parties while many millions of pounds of ever-purer product cross an ever-more-porous border. — Shot in meticulous handheld jumpcut homage to the French New Wave on carefully distressed film stock with amazing quantities of grain filtered nearly down to tinted black-and-white; again it’s obvious that the author has learned a lot from Godard and Altman. — And thus wonderfully complex and beautifully realized but ultimately tiresome. The war on drugs is a fraud; Soderbergh should know better than to belabor the obvious.


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Boobs and farts (1/4/01)


Scary Movie. [Wayans Brothers, 2000.]

Farts. Bimbo gets stabbed through the breast implant. Dickjoke. Rubbers. Pissing at targets. Snot. Football as male homosexual ritual. Bitches. Teenage frigidity. Blowjobs. Cellphones at the movies. Stoners. Girls’ gym coaches are dykes. Farts. Drool. Retards. Farts. Farts. Fastforward. The end.


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There’s always a girl in the picture (1/4/01)


Buck Rogers. [Ford Beebe et al., 1939.]

When a dirigible attempting to circumnavigate the globe is forced down in an arctic blizzard, intrepid pilot Buck Rogers/Buster Crabbe and his teenage sidekick Buddy, thinking it may take a while to be rescued, pop the cork on a bottle of experimental suspended-animation gas. This works a trifle better than expected, as they figure out when they are awakened by explorers five hundred years later in the world of the twenty-fifth century and are hauled off to the Hidden City, the refuge of a heroic band of scientists who represent the last line of resistance to universal domination by blackclad gangsters led by the evil Killer Kane, whose political platform seems to involve turning everybody into brainwiped zombie slave laborers. Fortunately, somebody gets the bright idea of enlisting the aid of the inhabitants of the planet Saturn; complications ensue. — Great stuff, obviously, but some aspects strike the contemporary viewer as odd: though in the future they have antigravity belts, disintegrator rays, retroscopic television that shows past events, and rays that make them invisible, their radios still work on vacuum tubes, for some reason in the future as in the distant past everybody is living in caves, and Buck’s faithful sidekick Wilma Deering [Constance Moore] is, to judge by all appearances, the last woman left alive on either of two planets.


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Visual jazz (1/2/01)


Timecode. [Mike Figgis, 2000.]

A dark comedy of Hollywood: rich and unusually possessive bitch Jeanne Tripplehorn gives her aspiring-actress girlfriend Salma Hayek a ride to an audition in a limousine; suspecting hanky-panky, she plants a bug in Salma’s handbag, allowing her to listen in as Hayek and Very Depressed producer Stellan Skarsgard [manifestly the kind of guy who has to buy his whiskey by the case] get it on behind the screen in a projection room where his staff are viewing the rushes of their current project [Bitch From Louisiana; a Red Mullet Production], which is not, to say the least, going well. Salma’s generosity with her favors does not, alas, influence the boss to allow her to read for a part and she gnashes her teeth in despair for a moment in the ladies’ room, before emerging and stumbling fortuitously upon the director [the celebrated auteur of Yo Grandpa], whose needle tracks are not so fresh as his judgment; recognizing star quality in his find, he reads her for the lead and proclaims her his choice for the role. Meanwhile Skarsgard’s wife Saffron Burrows, having psyched herself up with a visit to the shrink, announces to the producer her intention to leave him, despite his impassioned pleas that the two of them should renounce Tinseltown and retire to their villa in Tuscany. Taking a few more shots from the office bottle, he staggers into a meeting with his staff, led by Holly Hunter, who are all getting neck massages from Julian Sands while they debate their chances of getting Bitch From Louisiana out the door and into a theater near you. Abruptly Ms. Tripplehorn enters and shoots Skarsgard: not quite the end.

The remarkable thing about this film, of course, is that it was largely improvised, shot on digital video cameras, and presented as [unedited and continuous] simultaneous action in four windows on a quartered screen; the finished product, such as it is, is [roughly] the fifteenth take [the penultimate runthrough is also available on the DVD.] Figgis, a talented musician, provided his cast not with a screenplay but a sort of orchestral score in four parts, noting the points at which specific actions [in particular an earthquake] would have to be synchronized among the separate video streams: harmonically correlated, in other words, between distinct melodic lines; a sort of visual Dixieland. Much of his theoretical viewpoint is explained internally when purported eighteen-year-old girl-wonder European director Mia Maestro pitches the concept to the production company in a brilliant monologue which draws heavily on the theoretical writings of Eisenstein — and, in the kind of reference that is guaranteed to win my heart, compares the synthesis of the points-of-view of the individual cameras to the integration of the internal worldviews of Leibniz’s monads.

Figgis remarks in his director’s commentary that, after finishing this work, with the unique problems that it presented, it was difficult to contemplate going back to making ordinary motion pictures. Probably Nature is just trying to tell him that he’s too smart to make mere movies. — Should this message fail to get across, I’m sure his peers will find some way to remind him that an abhorrence of originality is the industry norm.


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Le petit soldat (1/1/01)


Le Petit Soldat. [Jean-Luc Cocktail, 2K++.]

The credits roll over an assortment of bikiniclad babes, cavorting in a variety of tropical settings — white beaches, tall palm trees, silly cocktails with little umbrellas on the swizzlesticks, big bright smiles, big white teeth, deep blue water, deep brown cleavage.

With every provocative pose, a clicking noise and a freezeframe. Somebody is taking photographs. Somebody is taking a lot of photographs.

Beneath, the voice of our protagonist and narrator:

“Man is for woman a means, said Niezsche; and asked then: what is woman for man?”

Babes standing on their heads. Babes walking on their hands along the beach. Babes juggling chainsaws.

“A real man wants two things, he said: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything...”

Babes modelling army fatigues, bearing automatic weapons. Babes piloting helicopter gunships. Babes with bazookas, wearing howitzer brassieres. Their smiles are terrifying.

“You are going to women? Do not forget your proton guns.”

Astronautical babes in bubble helmets and bikini spacesuits contest the advance of a phalanx of bugeyed monsters.

“The magazine of extreme sports,” the narrator remarks, “should also be the magazine of extreme poseurs.”

A couple of babes in bikinis are fencing. With a grand climactic flourish, they simultaneously run one another through. Their boobs explode.

Three girls balanced on surfboards smile for the camera — which, apparently mounted on a helicopter, swoops rapidly up and away to reveal a oncoming tidal wave. The girls are abruptly propelled out of shot.

Eight scuba girls wrestle with an octopus. It rips off all their tops at once.

“Build your lovelives under Vesuvius,” he suggests.


An abrupt cut. The film stock changes to grainy black-and white.

Winter. Gray sky. Leafless trees. A plume of smoke from a lone chimney.

Whip pan to:

A border checkpoint. A convertible pulls up to the gate. A uniformed guard inspects the papers of the driver.

The driver wears a hat and trenchcoat, and smokes an unfiltered Lucky Strike. It is, but of course, John (Wild Buffalo) Craig.

He continues his narration in world-weary tones:

“I only found it harder as time went on,” he says. “the endless photo shoots with the endless procession of beach bunnies — young, nubile, filled with boundless lust...”

He glances down at a stack of photographs on the seat beside him. Holds one up: Laetitia Casta patting the trunk of an elephant, with an inscrutable expression. Shrugging, he tosses it back onto the pile.

“...prisoners of the weakness of the flesh.”

He lights another cigarette. Perhaps he is reflecting that there are worse prisons than the flesh of Laetitia Casta.

“But this was only my cover: sports photojournalist, football correspondent for the Review of Sporting Metaphysics. In reality I was an agent in the secret war...”

Montage: a rather different series of stills, these in grisly black and white — scenes of war, famine, pestilence, death. Shots of John in jungle settings with Che Guevera characters. Shots of John with a Bowie knife between his teeth. Wrestling alligators. Torturing bankers.

“...the war that pitted good against evil, east against west, Buffs against Huskers...

Shots of John in the endzone coolly taking photographs as several tons of steroid-swollen beef heave back and forth about the goal line.

“Of course, what was reality.”

Let the camera pull away as the convertible zips down the highway through an autumnal European landscape in the direction of a distant city.

“The war was endless now, and international. And so was the football season. Just when you thought it was over, just when you thought the last faux-platinum Sears national championship trophy had been handed out to the last Gatorade-soaked coach in the last corporate-sponsored stadium in the last league on Earth, another one popped up and you had to go and cover it. And in between the endless swimsuit issues to be filled with endless photographs of endlessly cavorting bimbos. It was always winter somewhere, and that meant it was always summer somewhere else. The seasons might have been ephemeral, but the antipodal oppositions, and the wants they created, were eternal.”

Abrupt cut to a chaotic montage: Zeppelins going down in flames.

“The facts, though incomplete, were undisputed,” John says. “It had happened during the halftime of the Adobe Acrobat/Stuffit Expander Fuchsia Bowl, just after the Suck.com trivia question and just before the Team Compliance consultants from the TCP/IP/JPEG 2000/IEEE 1394 Standards Bowl gave the Burger King update to the Valvoline Slick Presentation of the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter executive summary of the Tommy Trojan/K-Y Jelly Penetrating Analysis of the Half.com midpoint statistics. Details later obtained by imaging with the Danni’s Hard Drive/Victoria’s Secret/Double Bubble Toil And Hubble Space Telescope revealed the kind of problem that wasn’t going to fall for one of those superficial Dell solutions... .”

Something confusing transpires on what appears to be a microscope slide: infinitesmal amoeboid bugs, their tendrils flailing, surround a larger ovoid and tug it away.

“A crack squad of terrorist fanatics had hijacked the Sun Microsystems/Java Virtual Machine Leaden Zeppelin — the flying machine everyone agreed was destined to revolutionize transportation, as soon as it actually got off the ground. No one was sure how they’d managed to crank up the Imodium/GasAid inflation apparatus and get the blimp into the air, let alone escape unnoticed, even if they had managed to wind it out to its full design speed of four miles an hour. But somehow they had.”

John stares straight ahead, his hand upon the wheel. Behind him, out the window, the passing European landscape.

“It was my job to find it and bring it back, in time for the halftime show at the American Beauty/Suburban Midlife Crisis Rose Bowl.”

Confused images of two teams trying to play football in a blinding blizzard of rosepetals. All the cheerleaders look like Mena Suvari.

“Many saw in this the hand of Microsoft. Of course, many now blamed Microsoft for the decline of the Holy Roman Empire and the vanishing of the cosmological constant. Still, it could hardly be a coincidence that the product launch of Balloons 2001 had been advanced and was now scheduled for the Natural Monopoly Bowl in Redmond April first...”

Footage of the famous adjustably-inclined Level Playing Field, which swivels and gimbals to ensure that the visitors must advance up a sixty-degree slope against Team Microsoft. A partisan crowd of geeks jeer and hurl the contents of their pocketprotectors at the underdogs.

As a marching band plays “Up Up And Away” and arranges itself into the semblance of a balloon the face of Gates appears on a hundred gigantic video screens ringing the stadium. “You will believe, that a brick can fly!” he declares triumphantly.

PR flacks with pointers gesture at their presentations with broad artificial smiles and paint a colorful picture of red, yellow, and blue balloons floating away upon the wind.

Meanwhile in the locker room a gang of geeks are frantically spraypainting concrete blocks. Microsoft managers are shooting the stragglers.

More stock footage: the Death March from Bataan; a plain darkened by the Mongol Horde; goosestepping soldiers of the Red Army passing in review. with the stolid gray men of the Kremlin watching them impassively.

In closeup, the heel of a soldier’s boot crushes a bug.


Rapidly jumpcut urban montage: bridge, river, plaza covered with pigeons, sidewalk newsstand, railroad station, etc.

A city street, in Geneva. John and another guy in a trenchcoat (but of course, this is Leonardo Garbonzo) stand in front of the Circle K, eating microwaved burritos and guzzling enormous soft drinks. They speak in code: — “The progress of this investigation has been most untriumphant,” says Leonardo. — “If we fail to discover the whereabouts of the Lost Zeppelin, we shall flunk most egregiously,” says John. — “The girl must know something.” — “Excellent.” — “But you will totally have to interrogate her.” — “This is most unacceptable.” — “She is totally insistent.” — “No way.” — “Yes way.” — “Women are a most heinous distraction.” — “But they serve a most essential evolutionary purpose.” — “No way.” — “Yes way.” — A telephone booth materializes from an electric-blue cloud of ionization. — “Whoa!” (in chorus.) — Two figures emerge. They look exactly like John and Leonardo, but are dressed like beach bums instead of spooks. — “How’s it hanging, John and Leonardo?” — “How’s it hanging, doppelgängers?” — “We us are present here in flashback from our most triumphant retirement in the south of France, in which we us recall the riddling twist of fate which led you us to accept the necessity of cross examining this most phenomenal babe to advance this most resplendent plot beyond this utterly non-non-heinous moment of second-act stasis.” — “No way.” — “Yes way.” The phantom doubles expatiate, relating an uncanny tale of giant robots, artificial intelligence, bubble helmets and blasters, and a conspiracy involving the Illuminati with Radar Men from the Moon. — “But thus to interfere with the events in one’s own past light cone entails the existence of a closed timelike curve which must violate causality most grievously, a possibility not admissable unless the local energy density is totally negative,” Leonardo objects. “This is most unacceptable,” says John. — Bogus John and Bogus Leonardo look at one another and exclaim “Wrong movie, dude!” They vanish in another blue flash of ionization with an electric trilling noise. — Unbogus John and Unbogus Leonardo regard one another with wonder. — “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” — “You and I have witnessed many things, John, but none so bodacious as what just happened.” — They munch reflectively on their burritos. — The babe appears. She is Monica Bellucci. — “Whoa!” they exclaim in chorus. — “How’s it hanging, most excellent babe?” — “How’s it hanging, Johnny Cocktail?” —She adjusts her very savory decolletage. John’s eyes grow large. He crushes his Egregiously Big Gulp absently in one hand. — “This is a most world-historical babe,” he mutters. — “She embodies the evolutionary imperative most triumphantly,” agrees Leonardo. — “Catch you later, Leonardo.” — “Catch you later, Johnny Cocktail.” — John leaves with the babe.


A barren urban apartment, suggesting a motel room. Light enters from the window. The camera circles John and the babe one way as he circles her the other, taking photographs: a metatextual commentary, photographing the photographer. Or maybe it’s just another fucking quote from Vertigo.

As he snaps a series of fabulously artistic black-and-white shots which capture her in a variety of pensive poses, she tells a tale of action and adventure which necessitates a complementary series of flashback stills in lurid living color: “Abandoned in infancy when my parents, famed European archaeologists, were captured by piranhamouthed aliens, spirited away to a distant galaxy, and hurled into the maw of a black hole as sacrifices to the cannibal god, I was adopted by a tribe of gorillas and, in keeping with the legends held among them of an Italian goddess who would wield uncanny psychic power over the denizens of the animal kingdom, raised as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, reigning over the lost city of Angkor Wat. Then one evening as I bathed in the Moon Pool sacred to Khonsu, attended by my handmaidens and my palace guard of beady-eyed man-apes, the lunar god appeared to me in a vision and told me to descend into the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the ancient temple, where I would find a ring, a key, a staff, a golden book with silver leaves, a left-handed Stratocaster, a letter of introduction to the director of Marilyn Manson’s videos, and a magic ticket for the teleportation chamber that would transport me to Hollywood by nanofax. Following these instructions to the letter, I was dismayed to discover that low-level errors in the implementation of the transmission software caused me to be transported instead into a nested series of selfreferential movies about making movies whose reference to Hollywood was, in consequence, not direct, but lay hidden within a baffling thicket of parentheses and quotation marks. Condemned, as it seemed, to an eternity of suffering/”suffering“ in the postmodern cinema, I seized this chance to take a role within an improbable digression from an unmotivated narration within an abbreviated scenario posing as a review of a motion picture of an actual text of the French New Wave which though perhaps engaging was hardly coherent, since it offered me the opportunity to phrase these questions: What remains here of the supposed verisimilitude of film? What grounds our cinematic fabrications? What substance can they have, if they only refer to one another? If this is poetry, can poetry be truth? And what is truth?”

“Photography is truth,” says John. “Film is truth twenty-four frames per second.” — Shooting continuously as he speaks. — “Football is truth ten yards to the first down, four quarters to the contest, and three fifths of Southern Comfort to the postgame celebration.”

Another series of stills, frozen poses: she hangs in midair, brandishing a pair of AK-47s like pompoms, her legs kicked out in a variety of splits. Her outfits are various, but include cheerleading uniforms and nuns’ habits.

John has circled to the rear of the babe. The lens of his camera is directed at the lens of our camera. There is an instant when they photograph one another: a loud click and a flash —


An abrupt cut. John is coming out of a movie theater. On the marquee, the legend: “Showgirl Instinct”. Two figures in trenchcoats emerge from a nearby alley and surround him, one on either side. They gesture with their revolvers. John is shoved into the cab of a pickup truck and driven away.

“They cornered me as I was coming out of the theater,” says John. “I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings. I was still trying to decipher that trailerpark peroration by the existentialist biker. What had Garbonzo been trying to say about Eszterhas? Or was it something Eszterhas had already implicitly said about the possibility of Garbonzo saying something about the reality of Eszterhas?”

Interior of the cab. He is seated between his captors.

“It was like Lemmy Caution always said. You never understand anything...then suddenly one evening, you end up dying of it.”

Montage: highways, cornfields, railroad tracks; the endless expanses of the Midwest.

“They’d torture me first, of course. They were barbarians.”

John stares out the window.

“Garbonzo told me when he fell into the hands of the executive recruiters they chained him in the front row of an empty theater and screened the three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut of Tango And Cash...after the first hour or so his spirit had seemed to depart from his body and enter into the world beyond the screen, like Keaton in Sherlock Junior...Fred Olen Ray busted him out with the B-Girl Brigade, but for months afterward he’d awakened thrashing in the middle of the night, mumbling dialogue in the voice of Stallone... .”

Jumpcut montage: rusting farm equipment; windmill; abandoned silo; decaying barn; sheep wearing lingerie.

An old farmhouse, apparently abandoned. Within, a chaotic jumble. The walls are covered with pinups clipped out of the special Midwestern Barnyard Edition of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

There is a perfunctory struggle as they haul John through the front room and into the bathroom. They stuff a gag into his mouth and handcuff him to the bathtub.

Montage: cattleprods, Zippo lighters, pliers. Forcefeeding him cans of Spam and pouring plastic cups of watered stadium beer down his throat. The television. The VCR.

“They tried fire, water, electric shock,” says John. “Finally they just strapped me into a chair in front of the television and looped the Season 2000 Colorado highlight reel to play over and over again. I saw the last forty-seven seconds of the Nebraska game two hundred eighty eight times...They had to gag me at first, but toward the end there was no need...I was too weak...I thought I was screaming, I thought my voice could be heard, but it was no louder than a whisper... .”

Jumpcut footage of John, alone in a darkening room, struggling with his bonds in slow motion.

Fade to black.

“After that the hallucinations came,” says John.

Jumbled visions:

Nebraska cheerleaders clad in scarlet. Their faces are porcine and sinister. Making oinking noises in an ominous lower register, they leap in slow motion, flail their arms, land heavily upon the ground, and lumber ponderously on all fours to group about a trough on the sideline.

Grainy old stock footage of the maiden flight of the Netscape Navigator Blimp 3.0. Panicking crowds stampede away from the wreck as it crashes in flames. Oh, the humanity.

Garbonzo in trenchcoat. “All we are is dust in the wind, dude,” he says.

John, gun in hand, staggering through a hall of mirrors. Surrounded by images of a woman who is pointing her own gun at him. He fires at the images again and again. Mirrors shatter. Fragments of the woman’s image tumble to the floor in slow motion and vanish.


John comes to. He perceives that he is alone in the house, which looks like it has been deserted for some time. The tables are littered with stale Twinkies and emptied cans of Spam. He gnaws the ropes from his wrists, looses the bonds about his ankles, staggers to the window, throws open the curtains. The light blinds him for a moment. He hurls a chair through the glass, and leaps out after it, a dark outline against the blinding white light.


Dusk. A small plane bores through the ether.

The camera (presumably mounted on a Whooping Crane) swoops in toward the cockpit, revealing our protagonist slouched behind the controls.

As a concession to aviator fashion, in addition to his signature trenchcoat he is wearing a leather flying helmet topped with goggles. This cannot possibly make him look like Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

“I was wondering why she’d sold me out to the Huskers,” he is saying. “Greed? envy? angst? could I not provide a mate for her tormented artist’s soul?”

He takes a reflective pull upon his cigarette.

“Or was it just that she knew I couldn’t get her on the cover of the swimsuit issue? I didn’t know. Perhaps now I never would.”

A hissing noise! Something hurtles past the windshield! Turbulence!

A strange light surrounds the plane. The engines fail. It seems to hang suspended in space, held up by some kind of tractor beam.

Weird flying creatures surround him: bodacious babes in bikinis, suspended in the air by propellor-beanies. They brandish very impressive rayguns.

These are the dreaded Bimbos of the Stratosphere.

His engines frozen by their tractor beams, John is forced down on Laputa, the Flying Island of the Bimbos. From here no man has ever returned.

He is dragged from his plane, forced to run the gauntlet, and heaved staggering into the brig, a windowless steel cage where he languishes for an indeterminate period. Communicating by Morse code with the occupants of nearby cells, he hears fantastic tales of time travel, alien abduction, cosmic conspiracy, and war among the planets, from which he gathers material for future story conferences with his producers.

“I don’t know how long they kept me there,” he says, “but it seemed like a century at the drivein.”

Finally he is unchained and hauled to the bridge for an audience with the Captain of the Bimbos (played by Nikki Fritz.) Flanked by her numerous entourage, she receives him with apparent hostility. Later, however, in a private audience, she offers him the opportunity to dwell with her upon Laputa as her consort and gigolo.

Negotiations are proceeding well until they stick upon insurance and portfolio issues.

Spurning her final offer as a negotiating ploy, he is somewhat taken aback when Ms. Fritz abruptly decides to post the opening on Monster.com, and, reverting to buccaneering type, makes him walk the plank.

“So much for your golden parachute,” she says.

He steps off into empty space!


The empty air. John’s falling body rockets into shot.

“Fortunately I’d managed to ingratiate myself to my jailer with a few lessons in prose stylistics. She’d reciprocated with a few lessons in aerodynamics,” he says.

His leather flying-helmet has been retrofitted with a propellor. He gives the starter cord a pull. The propellor spins. He ceases to fall.

Drifting slowly away north by northwest, he lights a cigarette.


Exterior. Afghanistan. Dawn.

A vast barren empty plain. Mountains in the distance.

A tiny figure alone in the center of the emptiness. It is John.

Closer as he trudges onward.

He’s still wearing the propellor-beanie above his trenchcoat. The impact of this fashion statement is difficult to evaluate.

Series of dissolves, suggesting time and distance.

Fade in again upon John, still trekking through the desert.

Indistinct noises in the distance. Loud rhythmic grunts, like an army performing calisthenics.

John comes to the top of a ridge and pauses, obviously astonished by what he sees in the valley beyond. The camera swings around him to reveal:

A vast encampment, plainly the lair of an enormous terrorist army.

He produces binoculars from within his trenchcoat and studies the site assiduously.

But abruptly we realize, as does he, that he has been surrounded by an armed patrol.

Cut.

The guards lead him through the encampment, past practice fields where coaches shout instructions through megaphones at hordes of towelheaded linemen who are heaving blocking sleds around and ripping the heads off dummy quarterbacks. They pass rows of tents covered with the logos of the many corporate sponsors of terrorism; at first the names amaze John, but then it all begins to make a sick kind of sense. Finally they pass a stadium, where under camouflaging tarpaulins he finds the missing blimp at last, tethered to a mooring mast.

They take him to an imposing tent, obviously that of the leader. One of the guards pulls a silken rope hanging at the entrance. A distant bell is heard within.

A dramatic pause. Many of the army have gathered, to witness the judgment that plainly lies at hand.

Four bellydancers armed with automatic weapons appear first. They take their stations, two on either side of the entrance.

A tall figure, beturbaned and clad in flowing robes, emerges from the tent.

He has a familiar aspect. He may remind us of — dare we say it? — the former offensive coordinator of a once-formidable college football program.

John regards him with wonder. “Dog?” he asks.

The leader does not respond immediately. Plainly it costs him a great effort to recall his former life.

“Once, perhaps,” he says. “Now I am known as...Osama bin Dog, the Sword of Allah!”

There is a roar of approval from his assembled army; they raise their AK-47s over their heads and shake them. Many demonstrative rounds are fired into the stratosphere. Birds, aircraft, and cometary debris drop from the sky.

Acknowledging his followers with waves and bows, the Dog beckons John to follow him back into the interior of his tent. Here the bellydancers serve glasses of the native beverage, a strange golden bitter tea distilled from the agave plant (which grows here in profusion), and the Dog relates a tale replete with twists, surprises, and discoveries whose narrative thread John finds difficult to trace — perhaps because of its complexity, perhaps because of the intoxicating power of the native beverage, perhaps because the bellydancers provide so consistent a distraction — whose elements include the baffling case of amnesia which left him stumbling as a door-to-door computer salesman through the Balkan civil war, the miraculous recovery of his memory in Sarajevo when a street urchin played “Misirlou” on a broken balalaika, his return from exile, the subsequent premiere of his Concerto for Rocket Launcher in D Major at the Van Halen Competition in Paris, Texas, its uncertain reception by the critics, the black-tie reception that degenerated into a food fight, the days and nights of soulsearching (aided somewhat by controlled substances) that followed, and the pilgrimage to Culver City, California — where, standing over the grave of Mack Sennett, he swore vengeance upon the bankrupt civilization that had abandoned and betrayed him.

There followed his negotiations with venture capital. His return to the steppes of central Asia. His ability to recruit first-rate talent with pre-IPO incentives. His vision of comic jihad against the godless West.

Montage:

A fat lady runs through a dinner party, firing a gun randomly into the air. Servants and guests run into one another and fall down.

A large open car full of policemen with walruslike moustaches waving their nightsticks in the air flies off the end of a pier and into the water.

The leaders of the World Trade Organization greet one another with joybuzzer handshakes.

An army of martial artists drills on a goldlit beach at dawn, performing precision exercises in unison—hurling cream pies, kicking one another in the backside, slipping on virtual banana peels and turning backflips.

Swelling music. The Dog, standing atop a mountain as the camera swoops in toward and around him, throwing his arms out to embrace the world, bursting into song:

The hills are alive
With the sound of slapstick...

“Really,” says John hastily, interrupting this flashback before it can go any further. “But what is the role of football?”

The Dog explains that Islamic law prohibits television journalism, programming languages which violate referential transparency, and sexual congress with nonconsenting ruminants. It does, however, permit unrestricted defensive contact on bump-and-run pass coverage and the flying wedge.

His recruits scrimmage constantly. In time they will return in glory to rule the Big Eight, Ten, Twelve, or Forty-Two, as the case may prove.

“I realized then that this was it,” says John. “The long-sought nerve center of international comic terrorism. The brain trust that had trained the infamous shock corps that had attempted to blow up the World Trade Center by lighting farts in the parking garage. The fiends who had planted whoopee cushions on the bench of the Supreme Court. The cleaners who handled the blue dress, the consultants who formed the environmental policy of the Bush administration, the detectives who trained the Boulder police.”

Clapping his hands, the Dog summons an entourage which accompanies the two of them as they tour the camp, serving drinks from a bottle which John now strongly suspects contains Jose Cuervo Gold.

The Dog points out the athletic facilities, the practice fields, the weight rooms, the stadium skyboxes for highrolling supporters, the library, the supercomputer complex, the genome-sequencing laboratory, and the volcano into which they toss human sacrifices. “Virgin blonde cheerleaders would be best,” says the Dog, “but one must make do with the materials available.”

With the computers concealed within the tents, the Dog explains, his legions are preparing to face the Pepsi Computational Challenge: the simulation of the collision of a black hole with the Writer’s Guild. The resultant Hawking blackbody radiation of mutant highconcept scenarios will enable the production of motion pictures that will evoke shame even from Jerry Bruckheimer...biological warfare in a new key...weapons of mass distraction.

“Today this stinking desert,” proclaims the Dog. “Tomorrow the world!”

His followers, who have massed in the course of this exposition, roar their approval. They fire a few thousand more rounds into the air.

“And the blimp?” John asks.

“A joke, of course,” says the Dog. “It will never fly. If Allah had meant for us to have automatic memory management, he would not have given us hard pointers. — No, it was a ruse. They needed you out of the way while Eszterhas and his henchmen fixed the Indonesian XFL playoffs and kidnapped Bellucci.”

“Eszterhas?!” John exclaims, recognizing the name of his sworn enemy. “The Hungarian fiend?”

“Of course,” says the Dog. “Cheney made him head of Covert Ops in return for delivering Cleveland. And promised him the babe, of course. She’ll star in Showgirls Two: Ninja Boogie.”

“Now I understood everything,” says John, over. “The babes, the blimps, the bowls, the betatesting of the brick balloons, the bogus beach bums, the bodacious Bellucci, the boffo box office for the Basic Instinct sequel, the bleating, the beating, the beanies, the bellydancers, the broken balalaika in the Balkans, The Brain from Planet Arous as a product of black hole entropy; everything but the Bush administration, which would never make sense. If only Nikki and I hadn’t quarreled over my stock options. This could only end ugly.”

“So,” says John to the Dog. “That’s the way it is.”

The Dog shrugs. “A temporary alliance only,” he says. “At the moment we need Eszterhas and his Hollywood connections. When the moment is right, we’ll crush him like a bug. But for now —”

“I can’t be allowed to leave,” John finishes.

“My sponsors would object,” the Dog admits. “I’m looking for a quarterbacks coach. We need you here. But if not — ” He indicates the fiery pit.

“Sorry,” says John. “But you know how it is.”

“Well,” says the Dog. “It’s the volcano then.”

He gestures. The guards escort John to the brink. The army gathers to witness the execution.

“Have you any last wishes?” asks the Dog.

John ponders this. “Peace on Earth, but a plague upon the ruling classes. The death penalty for anyone who uses the apostrophe to form the plural. More Tequila.”

The Dog hands him the bottle. John takes a lengthy pull.

“There wasn’t any particular design involved,” he says. “If nothing else I figured the fucking beanie would save me again. But when I handed the bottle back to him...”

He drops it.

It plummets into the abyss.

Without thought for consequence, the Dog lunges after it.

John stares, fascinated.

A long shot of the falling Dog, his robes swirling about him as he recedes from sight into the bottomless pit of the volcano.

Calling out as he falls: “Need....salt...need...limes...”

The Islamic horde stand stunned for an endless pregnant moment, gazing into the fiery pit.

Then as a man they lift their weapons and shout: “Osama bin Cocktail!”

In a speech not lacking in Churchillian grandeur, John refuses the leadership of the army. His is not the path of political activism, he explains. No, he is an intellectual terrorist; as such he must walk alone.

They are baffled. “But who will lead us? What are we to do?” asks one of the harem girls.

“Be excellent to each other and party,” John advises.

And turning up the collar of his trenchcoat, he walks away into the desert of postmodernism.


Fade out.


____________


Masters of the universe (1/1/01)


American Psycho. [Mary Harron, 1999. Screenplay by Harron and Guinevere Turner, after a story by, etc.]

The long-delayed (if not exactly long-awaited) screen adaptation of the novel of Bret Easton Ellis — a guy whose fifteen minutes of literary fame derived from his intimate acquaintance with the fashion statements and mating rituals of preppie snots in the midEighties (not a moment earlier; not a moment later): the possibly-ambiguous saga of alltooperfect upperclass drone Christian Bale, a polished but functionless cipher who seems somehow to have negotiated the rapids of Harvard and its business school and taken his place at the conferencetable of a nebulously-defined financial firm in Manhattan beside his fellow networked-since-prepschool Vice-President-for-nothing-of-consequence trustfund babies without ever having learned a fucking thing; though, nonetheless, his grasp of the particulars of dress, grooming, and hygiene appropriate to his station is impressive, his manner with his subordinates and those he deems his social inferiors is appropriately obnoxious and overbearing, his apartment commands a really nice view of the park, and, should he deserve it or not, his starstruck secretary (Chloë Sevigny) adores him, his drugaddled society-babe-zombie fiancee (Reese Witherspoon) embraces him as her destiny, and his fellow vicepresidents (none of whom seem to do much more than deciding where to have lunch and watching Wheel Of Fortune on their office televisions either) apparently respect him as an Übermensch among Übermenschen.

Actually not quite everything is perfect: Bale’s taste in music is execrably bourgeois; his colleagues don’t seem to share his love of slasher movies and respond unappreciatively to his allusions to the wit and wisdom of the great serial killers; when he takes prostitutes home and beats them up the incompetents at the Chinese laundry don’t seem to be able to remove the bloodstains from those handwoven cotton sheets he can only get in Sante Fe; try though he may he can’t get a table at the most exclusive restaurant in town (indeed, the maitre-d laughs at him); and, unkindest cut of all, his rival and nemesis (of course, a Yale man) Jared Leto has much nicer business cards than he does. — It is this last which precipitates the crisis: confronted with the evidence, contrasting it with his own now-inadequate selfadvertisements, Bale turns pale and breaks out in a sweat. “Look at that subtle offwhite coloring,” he exclaims to himself, turning the card over in his trembling hand. “The tasteful thickness of it...Oh my God: it even has a watermark... .” Leto’s superiority is unbearable. Naturally he must die.

Or not. The killing spree upon which Bale embarks is probably just going on in his head; though, in truth, it didn’t seem to be worth the trouble to go back and review the evidence to be sure. Like the Hollywood version of The Wizard of Oz — or, to make reference to something at a more appropriate artistic level, like that season of Dallas that was revealed after the fact to be a figment of Victoria Principal’s imagination — this is all only a dream.

This means (to follow the argument of the authors) that the movie is intended as a joke; that Bale is meant as a figure of fun; and that we’re not laughing with Bale, but rather at him. Thus it is all-too-heavily underscored that Bale is a cipher, a void, a zero; a creature composed entirely of his appearances; another manifestation of the postmodern mystery of the disappearance of the noumenon — or, to phrase the matter in the terms which seemed to many at the time to define the puzzle, another version of the phenomenon of Reagan, who managed to be President (indeed, at times managed admirably) simply by acting the role; that Bale is a creature without a soul; that there is no there there; that his fantasies have no substance; and that the sleep of reason breeds monsters.

This might be more convincing if I didn’t have vivid and unpleasant memories of the Eighties — an era that thought it worshipped Darwinism, but whose theological presuppositions derived, actually, from an older and more primitive conception: the idea that a great Chain of Being extended link by link from the bottom of the animal kingdom to the apogee of human economic activity, each creature in the hierarchy feeding upon the creatures below it and in turn being fed upon by the creatures that lay above; and that atop this ontological ladder, luxuriating in their penthouses, fawned upon by their servants and retainers, absolutely secure in their consciousness of privilege, dwelt the corporate raiders of Manhattan — financial sharks who devoured entire industries for their sustenance; the selfstyled lords of creation, who seemed to have been genetically programmed with the assumption that all the world had been made for no purpose other than to serve them.

Which is to say that I met those people. I didn’t think they were funny then, and I don’t think they’re funny now.

Moreover there’s something very odd, indeed almost pathological, about the precision of the scenario’s focus on a particular time and place — what a cinematographer would call the restriction of its depth of field. The story is set in 1987; and somehow nothing about it could be transplanted to, say, 1986-and-a-half, or the first quarter of 1988.

In consequence, even if you accept the premise that the narrative details are intended as jokes, of necessity they’re rather stale jokes: Bale’s ongoing failure to get a table at the trendiest restaurant in New York is now at best a pale reprise of Steve Martin’s risible discomfiture in LA Story (“With a financial statement like this, he expects to be able to order the duck?”); the absurdly elaborate care with which he dons a plastic raincoat to protect his precious designer clothing from blood splatters can only recall Michelle Bauer carefully hanging a sheet of plastic over her prized Elvis-painted-on-velvet before hacking a hapless customer to pieces in Fred Olen Ray’s Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers; and the practice of hamming it up for the video camera while engaging in sexual intercourse is now so universal an entertainment that you can make fun of it in television commercials.

Moreover though it would introduce anachronism to have it otherwise, it seems very strange even at this slight historical remove that a VCR is supposed to be a status symbol, MTV is still avantgarde and interesting, and nobody has a computer or a cellular phone: how quickly dulls the cutting edge; could it have been so keen?

Finally, though admittedly it’s amusing to learn, e.g., that in the course of his morning shower Mr. Bale makes use of an icepack, a deep-pore cleanser lotion, a water activated gel cleanser, a honey-almond body scrub, an exfoliating gel scrub on the face, and an herbal facial mask (this last rather severely laden with metaphor), one cannot help but recall the trenchant wisecracks about grooming and accessorization in another black comedy of the late Eighties, Heathers; and register the opinion that the teenaged Christian Slater would have dusted the lot of these bozos in the first reel. And then blown up Manhattan all around them.

As for Ellis: like his contemporary Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City), he aspired to the title and the stature of the Scott Fitzgerald of the Eighties. Both fell pathetically short; for wherever else in the postmodern landscape the ding-an-sich may seem to disappear, there remains a basic ontological difference between being a writer and merely acting like one. Poseurs like Ellis and McInerney seemed to want to become writers not out of some innate urge to describe or express something about the world, but rather because they thought a reputation as a writer could get you into the good restaurants, allow you to hang out with the idle rich, and rock and roll all night and party every day. This, as Darwin would have been happy to explain, is to aspire to the status of a remora: the little sluglike suckerfish that rides around on the shark and eats its leavings. — Fitzgerald, obviously, was more than that: whatever his failures of purpose and weaknesses for drink and dissipation, he had an immense and immeasurable talent, and wrote a couple of the finest novels in English. One simply cannot compare someone like Ellis to Scott Fitzgerald.

Nor though there would be more reasonable grounds for comparison was Ellis Tom Wolfe; whose Bonfire Of The Vanities shared with this scenario similarities of time, place, and characters (and, to be fair, made an even worse motion picture.) For Wolfe, though he is not (as per his own advertising claims) the equal of Dickens or Balzac, is nonetheless a wonderful stylist, has unmatched powers of observation and analysis, and is motivated (as persons like Ellis are not) by the enormous universal curiosity that is characteristic of a real novelistic intelligence: an interest in the entire spectrum of humanity — in all types and all classes — in Balzac’s neoDantean phrase, in the whole of the human comedy.

Thus Wolfe’s protagonist thought himself one of the Masters of the Universe, and this really was funny; Ellis’s protagonist thought the rest of mankind lower animals he could butcher for meat and keep on ice in the freezer compartment of his upscale refrigerator, and this was not.

But to conclude (with far more generality than the matter deserves): what has thus far miraculously saved the American empire from extinction is that, though at any given moment there is inevitably some decadent aristocracy which thinks it’s running the country into the ground (and a retinue of campfollowers and celebrity journalists who buy into their myth), fortunately, they are never as important as they think they are; indeed, even the people who are actually supposed to be running the country rarely direct its destiny. The real life of the nation lies elsewhere. In a hundred years no one will remember who Ellis was, or where he got his handwoven cotton sheets; no one will remember Michael Milken or his alterego Gordon Gekko, and they’ll have to look Reagan up in a book. What they’ll remember about the nineteen-eighties will be the invention of the Internet; and what they’ll remember about 1987 is that this was the year that Edward Witten sat down in Princeton and wrote his paper on quantum field theory and the Jones polynomial, which explained the quantum theory of gravitation (at least in two-plus-one dimensions) in terms of the topology of knots — one of the most striking intellectual accomplishments of the century, and something all the preppie brats in all the world will never equal, never approach, and never, lower animals that they are, understand.


____________


Greek translation (12/24/00)


O Brother Where Art Thou? [Joel and Ethan Coen, 2000.]

There’s a moment about twenty minutes into this feature, when the three cons who’ve escaped from the chaingang [George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson] are camping out in the woods — posed, to be precise, before a faded yellow forest background [etiolated; as if every leaf on every tree had been pressed into a book in 1937 and left to wait for the Coens to come and collect it to dress their set], debating their options in their best witless-cracker accents — when suddenly all around them in the woods a host of mysterious ethereal figures materialize, moving slowly and silently [though voices are heard singing, off] like ghosts or apparitions toward some unknown destination: a moment of pure Fellini inserted seamlessly [for it turns out they’re all going down to the water to be baptized] into what seems superficially a period piece about Mississippi in the Depression. At this point I laughed out loud [not for the first time], and muttered “fucking genius” under my popcorn-saturated breath. — Suffice it that this is not the only inspired moment in this opus, which among other things is loosely based upon the Odyssey [John Goodman does a Bible-salesman Cyclops and Holly Hunter is the somewhat-faithful Penelope beset by suitors], and touches on the legend of Robert Johnson, the secret empire of the Ku Klux Klan, the career of Baby Face Nelson, Southern politicians, rural electrification, radio, and pomade. — The title makes reference to the great Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels: that was one of the best movies of the Forties, and this is a worthy homage. Check it out.


____________


Skywalkers (12/22/00)


Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. [Ang Lee, 2000.]

Legendary swordsman Chow Yun Fat, having resolved to hang it up, and, maybe, if he can overcome his native bashfulness, at long last pitch some woo to his longsuffering [but obviously adoring] sidekick martial-arts babe Michelle Yeoh, gets sidetracked by the discovery of the whereabouts of the evil Jade Fox [Cheng Pei Pei], the wicked witch who poisoned his master and against whom he has sworn vengeance. Said Fox, it appears, has been hiding out incognito as the governess of teenage kungfu whizkid Zhang Ziyi, teaching her [Senator Palpatine to her Darth Maul] the forbidden secrets of the Wudan masters, and poisoning her attitude; which may explain why Zhang steals Chow’s famous sword, the Green Destiny, skips out on the marriage her government-bureaucrat father has thoughtfully arranged for her, and sets off to seek the life of adventure she has read about in the dime novels of the Chinese Wild West.

Or it may not. In fact nothing seems to explain the behavior of the wonderfully contrary Zhang [the very antithesis of the mythical submissive Oriental woman]; who, it develops, has absorbed more of the Wudan chordcharts than her supposed mentor knows, and [in pointed contrast to her painfully repressed rolemodels] has run away from home before, to live in sin with a Byronically romantic brigand [Chang Chen] in the wilds of the western deserts; though not, of course, without first kicking his ass.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that she spurns the renewed overtures of her former lover, the friendship of Ms. Yeoh, and even Chow’s me-Yoda-you-Skywalker proposal to teach her the fine points of the wandering swordsman’s trade: sometimes, after all, a babe must walk alone.

And anyway there must be some dramatic conflict to excuse the fights: a series of duels which constitute an extraordinary aerial ballet in which the protagonists bound up and down the walls and fly over the rooftops of Beijing, dance among the treetops, and [literally] walk on water, waving their swords at one another and arguing like Scholastics; not to mention the memorable saloon brawl [yes, this is a sort of Chinese Western, complete with horseplay] in which Zhang [in character as the Invincible Sword Goddess] takes on every guy in the joint and knocks the walls down with their flying bodies.

So though in due course the witch gets in the penultimate word and Chow [once again] satisfies the requirements of Chinese romance by expiring nobly, the little girl, who shares with the phenomenal Ms. Yeoh a remarkable beauty, a preternatural quickness, and a grace beyond the reach of art, very nearly steals the show.

Obviously this doesn’t represent a radical departure from the genre standards. Maybe Tsui Hark could do better, if he had this kind of money. — On the other hand George Lucas has more money than the Treasury, and he hasn’t made anything this good since the Seventies.

Photographed by Peter Pau [who did The Killer]; cello by Yo Yo Ma; choreography, again, by the remarkable Yuen Wo Ping. Nobody seems to be able to dream up an Academy Award for this guy; maybe it’s time to consider nominating him for the Nobel prize.

Terrific scenery; who would have guessed the Gobi looks like Utah?

The best movie of the year.


____________


There she is (12/20/00)


Miss Congeniality. [Donald Petrie, 2000.]

When a Unabomber clone threatens the destruction of a national beauty pageant run by somewhat unbalanced former queen Candice Bergen [here more than a few splitends short of a coiffure], the FBI takes time off from its busy schedule of bungling espionage cases to attempt to confound his scheme by inserting undercover agent Sandra Bullock into the proceedings as Miss New Jersey; since our heroine is here represented as a nosepicking tomboy incapable of making herself up or balancing on heels, contest coach Michael Caine is called in to effect the overnight makeover that turns the badhaired ugly duckling into a bikiniwaxed swan. The bornagain bimbo bonds with her fellow contestants, thwarts the mad bomber, and gives fellow agent Benjamin Bratt the boner he should have had all along; for, though it somehow escapes the notice of Hollywood, when you scrape the makeup off her and tangle up her hair Ms. Bullock is still the cutest geek on Earth. — Actually pretty funny; for once not every good line appeared in the trailer. Photographed by the great Laszlo [Easy Rider] Kovacs. — With William Shatner as, well, William Shatner; who could now replace him?

[Ms. Bullock, incidentally, claims to have learned the virtues of hemorrhoid cream as a beauty treatment during the making of this feature: “Apparently butt-cream helps the lines around the eyes. That’s the important tip...In fact, in all my acting days that is the most astounding piece of information I’ve ever heard.”]


____________


The tears of a clone (12/19/00)


Jay Mohr, holding open auditions for the perfect Barbarella tits, inspects a chorus line of naked-torso’d bimbos in his office. Staring openmouthed with glazed eyes at the row of babes, he mutters something hoarsely appreciative about Number Five: Look at those, he says. — Yes, says his assistant, they’re very impressive. — But do they make a statement?


The Sixth Day. [Roger Spottiswoode, 2000.]

In the not-too-distant future, an illegal attempt to render the darkly brilliant paranoiac vision of Philip K. Dick immortal by recombinant cloning of the plots of his novels is thwarted by subtle transcription errors, raising philosophical questions of identity which as usual can only be resolved by carchases, laserblast gunfights, a vertiginous swandive over a precipitous waterfall, many colorful explosions, and a rooftop chase that ends with the hero hanging onehanded from a helicopter skid fifty stories above the pavement of the cold cruel city. [No doubt Quine would have enjoyed better grosses had he employed these devices in Word And Object.] — One must feel a certain skepticism regarding the possibility of downloading a human genome and personality into a body-blank in less time than it takes to install Linux [not to mention the instantaneous retinal-scan brain dump, which elementary arguments show to be impossible]; but, then, there are decent effects [I particularly liked the simulated holograms], a few amusing speculations about virtual outcall massage, some exercises in memory-playback montage which suggest the influence of the Japanese arthouse hit Tetsuo [the Iron Man], a repeated-cloning joke which turns into a homage to the Road Runner cartoons, Tony Goldwyn as a villainous combination of Bill Gates and Vince MacMahon, Robert Duvall as the wellmeaning scientist who nonetheless [all together now] transgresses against the cosmic moral order; and Arnold, of course, of whom for some reason I never tire. If they want to clone him first, it’s all right with me. But let the author of Total Recall rest in peace.


American Virgin. [Jean-Pierre Marois, 2000.]

Or, the American Beauty’s Boogie Nights: porno entrepeneur Bob Hoskins [looking exquisitely sleazy in a limegreen suit, even before somebody tattoos a dick on his forehead] has an inspired vision of the world’s first virtual-reality Internet broadcast of the deflowering of an eighteen-year-old, and, after a nationwide search for a protagonist which one assumes must have been rigged beforehand to ensure his sweet revenge, singles out Mean Suvari — the darling and still at least physically innocent daughter of his estranged mentor and erstwhile employer Robert Loggia [referred to by an awestruck admirer as “the Martin Scorsese of porn”] — as the subject of this breakthrough in adult entertainment. Loggia overhears the announcement on the [live] talk show of assault-TV host Sally Kellerman, crashes the set with his bodyguards, and a melee ensues which rather prematurely provides the Jerry-Springer denouement every mediocre comedy now seems to require before twenty minutes have elapsed on the cinematic clock. — What happens thereafter is not particularly memorable, though the flick does have its moments: the unveiling of the [ludicrously boner-pocketed] VR suit, the development of a curious pornstar/stuffed animal equation, the porno remake of the trial of Joan of Arc, the mortifying bicycle accident of Tommy Salami. But essentially this is yet another attempt to turn me into Kevin Spacey — reminding me, naturally, of President Lloyd Bridges’ famous comeback in Hot Shots Part Deux: when one of his aides warns him a political opponent is trying to prove that he’s an idiot, Bridges snaps “I can prove that better than he can.”


Cobra Verde. [Werner Herzog, 1988. After a novel by Bruce Chatwin.]

Brazilian brigand Klaus Kinski [herein the notorious Cobra Verde] ingratiates himself with an obscenely wealthy plantation owner and temporarily goes straight; alas, when the bloated plutocrat discovers that Kinski has impregnated all three of his daughters, he concocts a scheme to rid the continent of this menace to the gene pool by shipping him off to Africa with orders to resurrect the moribund slave trade. Landing at an abandoned fortress on the coast, Kinski finds the country under the spell of a mad king perennially at war with his people, his neighbors, and the gods, but by dint of luck and force of personality manages to set up a brisk trade in guns and bodies that satisfies the depraved needs of all interested parties; not least himself. After an alarming reversal which leaves him at the mercy of the deranged monarch and threatened with colorful native tortures, he escapes with the aid of an even loonier [but, naturally, insanely ambitious] royal relative and leads an army of barebosomed Amazons against the incumbent to install the pretender. Alas, as must always be the case with a Herzog hero, his triumph is qualified by the reassertion of the reality principle, and Kinski once again ends cursing Fate and shaking his fist impotently in the face of an overwhelming Nature. — Shot, in Herzog’s uniquely metadocumentarian style, with authentic Africans, ineffably charming in the way that they all keep glancing sidewise at the camera [Herzog always somehow manages simultaneously to shoot a fiction film and a documentary about the natives he’s dragooned into appearing in it], real South Americans; and the really deranged Kinski; who inhabits these mad-European-adventurer roles so convincingly one cannot help but believe that, in another time and place, he would have been exactly what he portrays.


Meet The Parents. [Jay Roach, 2000.]

Having resolved to marry freshfaced blonde cupcake Teri Polo, lovesick bumbler Ben Stiller discovers that he must first venture into the bosom of her family and survive a weekend with her formidable father, retired CIA operative Robert De Niro. Obviously the viewer will not be disappointed if he expects disaster; but though Stiller suffers nicotine withdrawal, sexual frustration, athletic humiliation, repeated demonstrations of his ludicrous inadequacy in comparison to Ms. Polo’s prior boyfriend [Owen Wilson], gibes at the expense of his chosen profession [male nurse], an inability to ingratiate himself with a small obnoxious furry creature [this time a cat], a mortifying lie-detector test, a flood of sewage, inadvertent arson, and getting busted on suspicion of terrorism, he never quite gets his dick caught in his zipper. — Expectations once raised are not easily lowered again: the disappointment of the audience was palpable. Better luck next time.


Best In Show. [Christopher Guest, 2000. Written by Guest and Eugene Levy.]

Though dogs belong in principle to a single biological species, they are found today in hundreds of disparate varieties which differ wildly in their dispositions, mannerisms, aspirations, inclinations, tastes, moods, and shopping habits; as do their owners, of course, suggesting a metaphor here brilliantly exploited by Mr. Guest [aka Baron Haden-Guest of Saling] in this mockumentarian study of the diverse lot of eccentrics who descend upon a dog show in Philadelphia to enter their pets in competition — among them Michael Hitchcock, Parker Posey, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, and the auteur himself, in character as a bloodhound-fancying Southern cracker and wouldbe ventriloquist. It tells you everything you need to know about the motion-picture industry that Guest has written and/or directed no more than halfadozen films [dating back to Spinal Tap] in the last fifteen years [compare, of course, the misadventures of wouldbe director Kevin Bacon in Guest’s The Big Picture (1989).] But, then, if he made more of them we wouldn’t have time to memorize his dialogue. — Easily the funniest movie of the year.


The Legend Of Drunken Master. [Jackie Chan, 1994.]

Foreign devils intent on purloining the priceless antiquities of China are thwarted by martial artist you-know-who, here represented as master of a form of Kung Fu known as Drunken Boxing, which necessitates his instantaneous transformation into a rubbery-limbed woozy-faced staggering inebriate. Since even Jackie can’t always pull this off correctly, in extremity his, uh, stepmother [yeah, right] Anita Mui must toss him a bottle of firewater — which, once chugged, renders him invincible; the parallel with Popeye’s spinach is exact. Brilliantly choreographed and unfailingly hilarious; arguably the best kung fu movie ever made.


Red Planet. [Antony Hoffman, 2000. Written by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin.]

A mysterious glitch having developed in a project designed to terraform Mars in order to save the Earth, astronaut Carrie-Anne Moss [looking very buff and somewhat more buxom than last I remember her] leads an expedition to investigate; filling out the detail are Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin Bratt, Simon Baker, Terence Stamp, and an artificial intelligence named Lucille. As per convention a solar flare disables the ship as they approach the planet [at least it’s not another fucking meteor shower]; and, while Carrie-Anne bounds around the orbiter putting out fires in zero-g, the guys pile into the lander and make a spectacular over-Niagara-in-a-barrel crashlanding down the side of a stupendous canyon. Staggering out in their spacesuits, they trek overland to their prepositioned habitat and discover as their oxygen bottles are running dry that it’s been trashed by forces or parties unknown and their supplies have been destroyed; leading up to the Grand Predicament, a situation in which our heroes are gasping out their final breaths stranded on a barren planet with no way back no hope of rescue no air no food no water, etc., etc. — and, worst of all, I didn’t have enough time [sitting in the theater] to figure out how I’d write them out of the dilemma myself. [Should you see this first on video, I suggest you pause the action for a day or two and try to solve the puzzle; it makes an interesting exercise.] Suffice it that the authors’ solution leaves much to be desired; and, as best I could determine after the fact, I’d have done it very differently. — Not all of them escape, at any rate; noble and ignoble deaths are equally apportioned [Stamp has the best], and Carrie-Anne once again gets to resurrect a cute guy who’s flatlined before the survivors rocket back from the red world to the blue. — Not as flashy as De Palma’s Mission To Mars, but not as silly either, and excellent in fine detail: the ship, the landscapes, the mad robot, the boyish glee of the astronatus pissing in one-third gee. On balance I pronounce myself satisfied with the results of this, the year that Hollywood went to Mars; and we’ve yet to hear from John Carpenter [whose Ghosts Of Mars is still forthcoming.] Meanwhile check this out.


Bedazzled. [Harold Ramis, 2000.]

A very polished attempt at a remake of the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore classic of 1967: social pariah Brendan Fraser, a minor Valley technoid ostracized even among a society of geeks, despairing of ever getting the attention [let alone gaining the affections] of coworker Frances O’Connor, sells his soul to the exquisitely Mephistophelean Elizabeth Hurley and gets seven wishes, none of which [duh] work out quite as he expects: asking to be wealthy and powerful and married to the damsel in question, e.g., he is instantaneously transformed into a Columbian druglord whose lieutenants are plotting his downfall; his wife, who, naturally, despises him, is humping the chief conspirator in every closet of his mansion. — And, so on. — Each amendment to a previous wish only creates greater opportunity for humiliating disaster; with every iteration of the scenario he moves farther from the satisfaction he covets, and closer to eternal damnation. Unfortunately this sense of comic progress was somewhat lost on me, since every motion of the plot carried Fraser farther from his original persona, whose bumbling efforts to obtain acceptance reminded me all-too-vividly of the eighth grade, and left me groaning aloud in the dark: the delayed stress syndrome of the career dork. For this reason I must recuse myself from any decision as to whether the flick works or not: Fraser and Hurley are obviously great, but the whole may be somewhat less than the sum of the parts; it’s probably indicative that I walked out of the theater trying to decide whether the moral of the picture really was that selling your soul to the devil can be a positive experience that promotes personal growth. Christopher Marlowe, after all, put it rather differently.


Committed. [Lisa Krueger, 2000.]

The spirit of Søren Kierkegaard finds itself trapped in the body of Heather Graham; should it try to escape? — When her feckless weenie of a husband Luke Wilson decides that their marriage has becalmed him in a debilitating fog and splits abruptly for parts unknown, Ms. Graham, whose preternatural honesty has made her a woman who would mate for life, interprets the desertion as a test of faith; applying some curious variety of New Age witchcraft which seems derived from the methods of Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective, she tracks the errant bumbler from New York through the Southwest to El Paso — where, curiously reluctant to confront him, she hovers in his neighborhood, half stalker, half guardian angel, intervening on his behalf with his employer, winning away the affections of his new girlfriend Patricia Velasquez [Pharaoh’s mistress in The Mummy, here at last seen with her clothing on], and protecting him from Patricia’s deranged exboyfriend. Thus somehow what seemed at first designed to be another of those weighty and fatiguing narratives in which angstridden urban twentysomethings deliver ponderous speeches about their Relationships turns instead into a flakey entertainment in which, e.g., Ms. Graham pays a mariachi band to serenade her as she sits [forlorn but curiously content, even cheerful] in her rented car staking out one of her husband’s trysts. — Charming and funny; and [since the improbably photogenic Ms. Graham appears in nearly every shot] very easy to look at. What is it about her and daisies?


Tales From The Gimli Hospital. [Guy Maddin, 1988.]

Kafka meets Garrison Keillor: the eccentric Canadian auteur [whose nicknames the IMDB lists as “Magma Head”, “Guymoe”, and “Flurpie”] sets his narrative in some mythical plague-ridden land [apparently meant to resemble his native Winnepeg] in a hospital that doubles as a [very] rude stable where the staff operate upon the patients with farming implements; the two protagonists [one of whom spends a considerable interval after his introduction to the camera shaving the space between his eyebrows and washing his hair with fisheggs], who occupy adjacent beds, befriend one another but then fall out when one discovers the other fucked his girlfriend’s corpse. [The Norse-saga-on-acid flavor of all this might best be conveyed by explaining that the three corners of this love triangle are named Gunnar, Einar The Lonely, and Snjófridur.] — An essay filled with Scandinavian dread, Lutheran guilt, and Expressionist shadows, with a disturbing look which could be described as Eraserhead black-and-white [perhaps it most closely resembles a very bad print of Murnau’s Faust]; the visual signature is a peculiar irising effect [probably a variation on the old vaseline-on-the-lens trick, though knowing Maddin he might actually have mushrooms growing in his optics] which creates the impression that the subjective eye of the camera is that of someone with blurred peripheral vision — connoting a sort of narrative migraine, actually. — But words cannot adequately convey the freakish weirdness of this feature. Maddin is unique.

This appears on DVD with the companion semishort feature The Dead Father [1985] — possibly [as the title suggests] inspired by the late great Donald Barthelme, though not nearly so funny.


Spaceways. [Terence Fisher, 1952.]

Squarejawed rocket scientist Howard Duff triumphs over recalcitrant bureaucrats, Commie spies, leaking fuelpumps, and his scheming bitch of a wife to launch the first satellite into orbit and himself after it; assisted by Eva Bartok, here in character as an East-European mathematician with nice tits. [Uh-huh.] Great spaceship, but somebody will have to explain to me why the camera goes out of focus at the end of every shot.


U-571. [Jonathon Mostow, 2000.]

After a plot setup which seems to imply the theft of the German Enigma machine [which by itself may have determined the outcome of the Second World War] was a coup of American intelligence, this turns into a fairly ordinary submarine drama — i.e., an ode to claustrophobia fraught with strained sweaty oilstained faces with eyes cast upward in that signature reddish sepulchral submarine runninglight as they listen for the depth charges which [intercut, intercut] we perceive are drifting right past the hull: not Das Boot, but not really bad either. — As for the premise, it is inaccurate and unfortunate, but not so integral to the development as one might have feared; still, don’t be surprised if you now hear of impending projects celebrating the brilliant Yankee victory at Jutland, Andrew Jackson’s rout of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, and the triumph of the American longbow at Crécy. Those ignorant of the lessons of history are condemned to relive Hollywood’s versions of them.

The movie itself is less interesting than the occasion it provides to remark the proliferation of personal-assistant credits in major motion pictures: I had, in truth, hardly noticed the existence of this crew category before Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994) — when, as it were out of the blue, while sitting through the trailing litanies I happened to observe that Kim Basinger had demanded an additional personal assistant to ensure that she would have two to Sophia Loren’s one; the gesture seemed so risibly pretentious that I burst out laughing on the dark. — The present example illustrates the lengths to which this kind of behaviour has been taken: Mr. and Mrs. De Laurentis get four assistants; Mr. Mostow gets three; Mr McConaughey gets two [one for “security”, presumably to protect him from himself.] Mr. Harvey Keitel, whose career has been more valuable to the cinema than all of the above put together, has none at all.


The Filth And The Fury. [Julien Temple, 1999.]

A documentary study of the meteoric career of the legendary Sex Pistols: the reductio ad absurdum of the rock and roll band, an apparently tonedeaf assemblage of workingclass radicals who exploded out of obscurity in the late Seventies, playing chaotic anthems of violent protest to clubs full of spastic androids; conjuring an alarming sound, look, manner of dress, and mode of behavior out of the pregnant ether overnight and impressing them upon an audience which seemed to grow with the terrifying rapidity of bacterial multiplication; inspiring the denunciation of every British figure of authority [and baffled putdowns even from their precursors, the Rolling Stones] before imploding under the weight of their own too-well-practiced selfdestructive impulses — all in the space of a couple of years.

Mr. Temple has here assembled footage of the band [and their audience] in their heyday and intercut it with colorful newsreels of London in the elsewhere-placid Age of Disco [buried under garbage and on the brink of class warfare], television programming meant to illustrate the cultural milieu [including several episodes of the Pistols’ own war against the media], presentday interviews with the surviving members [discreetly backlit in witness-protection fashion to preserve their mystique], and occasional scenes from a cheesy production of Richard III, whose relevance to the character of Johnny Rotten is rather too heavily underscored.

Points of trivia: A&M Records fired the lads after keeping them under contract for a single day; Johnny explains that the first line he penned as a songwriter was “I am an Antichrist”, which left him stuck for a rhyme [somebody else suggested “anarchist”]; the other bandmembers describe Johnny’s original audition by saying “he sang Alice Cooper like the hunchback of Notre Dame” and observe approvingly of replacement bassplayer Vicious that “Sid couldn’t play a fucking note”; all of them are still pissed off at one another and at their erstwhile manager [Malcolm McLaren] — indeed, they all stress the colossal irony that despite their definitive incarnation of the antiboyband, they were just as completely manipulated by their handlers and cheated of their money. — The story about the four of them wanking into an omelet does not appear, however; nor does their pilgrimage to South America to visit the perpetrator of the Great Train Robbery. For this and other details of the legend interested parties are referred to Johnny’s autobiography and Temple’s earlier [albeit McLarencentric] quasidocumentary, The Great Rock And Roll Swindle.

It is a fascinating question, what the cultural impact of the Sex Pistols has actually been. One might suggest two examples of the apparent pervasiveness of their influence: the obnoxious but universal practice among fraternity boys of affecting a constant need to spit descends from punk, and derives, originally, from the happenstance of Johnny’s sinus condition, which kept him hawking continuously on stage [presently the audiences started hawking back]; the curious [and now very annoying] habit of graphic designers [particularly in advertising] of using disparate fonts of different weights and sizes [as it were alternating shouts and whispers] in a single layout seems to descend from the Pistols’ first album cover, on which the title was lettered like a ransom note.

Other and deeper evidences will no doubt be visible to more acute cultural observers; I expect their research will commence with this motion picture.


Zoo/A Zed And Two Noughts. [Peter Greenaway, 1985.]

It is not enough that this narrative should commence with an automobile accident at the entrance to a zoo which results in the death of two women and the amputation of the leg of a third; no, the car has to be a white Mercury with a wingéd-messenger hood ornament, the collision has to involve an eggbound Mute Swan, the collision must take place on Swann’s Way [though if there were any further references to Proust I spaced them out], the relationship of the alphabet [as an enumerative ordering device] to the taxonomic classification of animals by species must be invoked and systematically exploited, the driver has to change her name to Leda and must turn out to be pregnant [Z is for Zeus], there should be a string of Venetian-blinds shots visually punning on the stripes of the Zebra, and the husbands of the dead women must be two Siamese twins separated at birth [Zoologists Oliver and Oswald, who are always arranged symmetrically about the central axis of the frame] obsessed with the idea that time-lapsed photography of decomposing corpses will reveal the secret distinction between animate and inanimate [Is life an accident? or, E is for Entropy.] — “Darwin was a great storyteller,” says the Dude In The Black Hat. So is Greenaway; though Darwin is usually easier to figure out.


A Better Tomorrow II. [John Woo, 1987.]

Another blood-drenched saga of the Hong Kong gang wars, sequel to a first installment which ended, as most of them seem to, with Chow Yun Fat dying gloriously in an epic gunbattle. Naively I’d wondered how the authors would manage to bring him back from the dead — worse fool I, to forget the old twin-brother-in-America ploy: and, sure enough, Yun Fat/Ken no sooner gets word of his sibling’s demise than he hops the plane from New York to Hong Kong, dons the long black bullet-riddled overcoat of Yun Fat/Mark, sticks a wooden matchstick between his teeth, puts on his shades, slaps a couple of fresh clips into his artillery, and instantly reincarnates the coolest gunslinger of modern times. The final shootout is quite as remarkable as the one that concluded the previous episode, but this time Leslie Cheung gets aced and our hero survives to avenge him. Otherwise they’d have needed to turn up a triplet for


A Better Tomorrow III. [Tsui Hark, 1989.]

— Or would have had to, were this not, as it were, A Better Tomorrow 0.7: a prequel which introduces Yun Fat/Mark as a somewhat younger guy, his cool yet unacquired, who goes to Viet Nam in 1974 to bail his cousin [Tony Leung] out of jail and try to persuade his uncle to leave the country for the relative safety of Hong Kong. This adventure embroils him in a tangled conflict involving corporate gangsters, bent military officers, and corrupt bureaucrats; and introduces him to The Woman With A Past, Anita Mui, who gives Chow his first black overcoat and teaches him the virtue of a pair of forty-fives. [This has some of the flavor of an origins-of-Superman issue in which you get to see the Man of Steel learning to fly.] A series of gunfights and reversals ends finally with the inevitable dash for the last helicopter out of Saigon, and the tragic demise of Miss Mui — who should, incidentally, reconsider her usual billing as “the Madonna of Asia”: Madonna can’t act, let alone dive across a room wielding a couple of blazing revolvers.


Suburbia. [Penelope Spheeris, 1984.]

A DVD rerelease of the first feature film of the celebrated documentarian of punk [and later director of the Wayne’s World franchise] Ms. Spheeris, whose story of a band of spikehaired teenage runaways who hang together amid the menaces of rats, cockroaches, and guntoting vigilantes in a condemned property in Orange County [as she explains in her director’s commentary] actually proved prophetic: today, she explains, the suburbs of LA again teem with punk kids living in crashpads just like this one who look and dress exactly as her Eighties characters did. — Once again Art beats Life to publication. [It was ever so.]

My sources indicate that, despite a favorable reception at Sundance a couple of years ago, the third installment in Spheeris’ Decline Of Western Civilization series was pocketed by the distributor and has yet to be released. If only Corman had handled that as well.



Dumbest trailer of recent months: for the forthcoming comedy Dude, Where’s My Car? which appears to be, roughly, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Lobotomy. Sweet.

Later.


____________


Angels and ministers of grace (12/19/00)


Travolta has threatened a sequel to Battlefield Earth, rumor now attaches the name of Ridley Scott to Terminator Three, Terry Gilliam’s latest project is accursed, Meg Ryan is mulling over the idea of playing the lead in a Linda Lovelace biopic [presumably working with Nora Ephron will teach you a lot about suppressing the gag reflex], and Stallone’s mom’s psychic dogs are predicting a bright romantic future for newly-minted billionairess Anna Nicole Smith [so are mine.] But our aims this week are purely spiritual.


Charlie’s Angels. [McG, 2000; writers beyond number.]

Irresistable megaditz and wouldbe Dancing Fool Cameron Diaz, leatherclad dominatrix [but abominable cook] Lucy Liu, and producer/gigababe Drew Barrymore — so supremely confident of her ability to pull this one off that she allows her fabulously untalented boyfriend not one but two scenes herein — reprise the roles made famous by whatstheirnames in the late and now mysteriously lamented Seventies action/titillation series; accompanied by the new Bosley, Bill Murray; and assisted by a phenomenally talented assortment of effects wizards and martial arts choreographers and an army of writers whose willingness to hurl their bodies beneath the chariots of the studio Pharaohs must recall the sacrifices of the slaves who died to erect the Pyramids.

Of course, the Pyramids are impressive, and, in its own way, so is this scenario: after preliminary flourishes which serve to establish our heroines as daredevil Masters of Disguise, they converse by telephone with their invisible and mysterious employer, the eponymous Charlie [still the voice of John Forsythe], receiving the intelligence that computer zillionaire Tim Curry [here as always a guy who looks like he is twirling his mustachios whether he has them or not] is supposed to have kidnapped rival computer zillionaire Sam Rockwell in order to steal...something [as Hitchcock was always fond of pointing out, it never matters what it is, only that it is] — with which [dare I say it] he can rule the world. Bounding from the office sofa with girlish enthusiasm, they dance through a succession of undercover roles, imitating, variously, massage therapists, swank-party caterers, Formula One drivers, bellydancers, corporate consultants, ninja safecrackers, frog girls, and birthday-telegram singers decked out in Heidi outfits [this one was by itself worth the price of admission]; mimicking, the while [thanks to the expert wirework of Hong Kong import Corey Yuen], kung fu badasses; establishing, in the meantime, the relative innocence of Curry [who hams it up with admirable relish nonetheless] and the relative culpability of Rockwell and his all-too-slinky ExecVeep Kelly Lynch; and prancing through whole transplanted chapters of several recent action hits before the Grand Finale, a threeringcircus shootout in an entirely improbable clifftop fortress. — Though none of this quite achieves, say, the playful touch of the classic Doctor Who episodes — in which the writers would manage to steal the plots of two or three bad old scifi movies in a single halfhour — the authors do exhibit a certain lighthearted grace in their systematic plundering of the recent history of the action flick; and one need only imagine what Stallone would have done to a script like this to realize that it might have been much, much worse.

Critical opinion has been remarkably undivided regarding the merit of this opus; and, indeed, it is difficult to see how it could stir any deeper controversy than a dispute over the proper spelling of “babe-a-licious”. [I take no position.] But where else can you see a sumowrestling match between Bill Murray and Tim Curry? And wouldn’t it be great if Bill Gates and Larry Ellison took the hint and kidnapped one another? hopefully never to reappear. However though its remarkable success has prompted the usual speculations about the birth of a franchise, the penurious studio executives at Columbia have already indicated their reluctance to rehire the current Heroic [and, accordingly, Expensive] Trio for the sequel — as always, penny wise, pound foolish: if they think I’d sit through this again without Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore, they’re out of their minds. Even a worm has his pride. At least I think he has.


Fallen Angel. [John Quinn, 1997.]

Saxophones. A rainslicked city street, at night. As a couple of 1947 roadsters cruise by to set the period of the piece, we dissolve through the entrance of a seedy tavern to the interior, where amid a festive crowd in period costume hardbitten private investigator James Patrick Keefe is knocking them down at the end of the bar while delivering the kind of worldweary voiceover that makes you wish for an international moratorium on bad imitations of Raymond Chandler. Fortunately for the sensibilities of the audience, his ruminations are cut short by the appearance of the slinky female Oriental chauffeur of Rich Bitch Samantha Phillips [presumably on loan to the Playboy Entertainment Group from Andy Sidaris], who in an audience in the back of her limousine represents herself as the wife of a mobster who is planning to kill her to cash in her life insurance policy; and, though our hero doesn’t exactly fall for the story, naturally he can’t help but fall for her. Sure enough, after the requisite atmospheric peregrinations through seedy office, smoky nightclub, fleabitten hotel, urinestained shoeshine stand, lowlife racetrack, dark dank alley, and rundown poolhall, and some weirdly anachronistic scenes of bikiniwaxed babes with silicone-inflated hooters and collagen-swollen lips making out in the bathtub, he fucks her, she fucks him, by dint of the feral cunning of the femme fatale she gets away with the money, and by dint of the pure dumb luck of the shamus he gets away with his life. “I knew from the start a dame like her was trouble,” he says ruefully. And I knew from the start a flick like this would suck. Both of us will have to console ourselves with the knowledge that we got to see Samantha naked.


Fallen Angels. [Kar-wai Wong, 1995.]

Or, night creatures of Hong Kong: after a shootout goes bad, a strangely detached [indeed almost unselfconscious] professional assassin decides, uncharacteristically, to take the reins of his career into his own hands and retire; he informs his agent/assistant, a leatherskirted Dragon Lady in spike heels and fishnet stockings, by leaving her the message that she should play a certain song redolent of renunciation and loss on the jukebox of a club which they both frequent [though they never seem to meet.] She reacts to this indirect announcement, as usual, by masturbating furiously on the table next to her fax machine. Meanwhile a curiously sympathetic [but alarmingly eccentric and apparently mute] thief is falling for an unbalanced girl strangely unreceptive to his solicitations; presently, all paths cross. The action takes place in garishly green neonlit urban night interiors [clubs, malls, subway stations] and is captured by a near-fisheye wideangle lens that never seems to be more than a few inches from somebody’s face. An arresting essay in romantic obsession and alienation; is this the Chinese film noir?


A For Andromeda. [Michael Hayes, 1961; story and novel by Fred Hoyle.]

A sevenpart BBC series based upon a scenario written by the noted astrophysicist and more-than-occasional author [in his heyday referred to by envious colleagues as “Leonardo da Hoyle” — later knighted, but mysteriously unmentioned by the Swedish Academy when his collaborator Fowler was awarded the Nobel Prize for their joint work on the stellar nucleosynthesis of the chemical elements] about the detection of the first message from space by a harddrinking young radio astronomer whose brilliance ensures both the decipherment of the code and the alienation of his superiors — a shortsighted lot of selfserving bureaucrats who choose to ignore his warnings as they construct a massive supercomputer after the alien blueprints and, subsequently, synthesize a series of biological experiments which culminate in a beautiful girl [portrayed by the young Julie Christie] whose function [our hero warns] is that of a Trojan Horse. The later debt of Contact, Species, and even [one might argue] of Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties [which concludes with the incarnation of the network-resident synthetic female personality, the Idoru, via transmission by hypothetical nanofax] should be obvious. But Hoyle is deeper and more subtle — and, of course, got there far ahead of anyone else: indeed, the idea of a an alien intelligence invading the Earth not by physical intrusion but by sending instructions for its own construction seemed impossibly abstract at the time, and many people had difficulty understanding it. — After seeing Species, I realized finally Hoyle’s mistake was the failure to make his alien heroine sufficiently buxom. Anyone interested in the exposition of scientific ideas should absorb this moral.


The Exterminating Angel. [Luis Buñuel, 1962.]

A titlecard displays the epigraph: “The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, it has no explanation.”

In an imposing mansion, in a Spanish-speaking country, in the not-too-distant past, servants prepare for a dinner party. Strangely apprehensive, they mutter nervously among themselves; by twos and threes they find contrived excuses to quit the scene, ignoring even threats of dismissal. They scurry out as the guests [about twenty of them] begin to arrive.

The invitees are an elegant lot: among them are a military man [the generic “Colonel”], an author, an architect, a doctor, a conductor, an actress, a diva, and the usual load of tightassed society women. They exchange elevated sentiments over the long dinner table, attended by the sole remaining [now strangely accidentprone] head waiter.

The host, for no apparent reason, repeats a toast.

The party repairs to an elegantly-appointed drawing room [paintings, sculptures, ornate mirrors, a grand piano] to converse after dinner.

And here, as the evening winds down and the camera moves from one of the guests to another, making their excuses to their host and preparing to leave, it gradually becomes apparent that some peculiar field of force has descended over the company, and that no one — albeit for no obvious reason — indeed in each case it almost seems to be by whim or accident — will actually depart.

Overcome by exhaustion, members of the party begin to doze off unselfconsciously on the couches; some even lie down on the floor. Those still standing remark their dismay, even disgust at this behavior. Nonetheless no one can seem to cross the invisible boundary that separates the drawingroom from the rest of the house.

Finally, past five in the morning, all fall asleep.

What follows once the new day dawns — the continuing ordeal of the partyguests, their rising panic, their mutual recrimination, the vigil without by the townspeople [Buñuel has the military ringed around the house; in contemporary America, it would be the media], the tacit agreements determining which closets are reserved for the toilet facilities and which for the trysts, the unrelieved stench, the religious observances [freemasonry revealed by signs and countersigns, fevered visions, prayers to Satan], the suicide pact of the young lovers, why one of the women declares her intention to insure herself against future recurrences of this situation by purchasing a washable rubber Virgin when she gets out, and what a bear and a couple of sheep are doing wandering around the house — passes for variation on the essential theme. Suffice it that though the party eventually escape, their liberation is quite as arbitrary as their incarceration; and is immediately qualified.

Others have realized the comic possibilities in dumping a boatload of the upper classes on, say, a desert island [with or without Gilligan and the Skipper]; but the idea of marooning them within sight of shore in a prison of their own devise is perniciously subtle, and savors of Sartre’s vision of Hell.

An entirely original investigation of the structure of unconscious compulsion; a devastating critique of bourgeois society. Undoubtedly a work of genius.


Date With An Angel. [Tom McLoughlin, 1987.]

Accidentprone celestial messenger Emmanuelle Beart trips over an errant satellite, busts a wing, and augers into the swimming pool of wouldbe composer Michael Knight; who, mortally hung over from the bachelor party at which he has attempted to reconcile himself to a forthcoming bourgeois marriage to uptight society bitch Phoebe Cates, takes a moment or two to settle into playing the role of Peter Pan nursing the world’s most beautiful Tinkerbell back to health. [I do believe in fairies. Honestly I do.] — The details of what follows [Splash with feathers] aren’t terribly important; suffice it that animals love her, she develops a taste for French fries, and the soundtrack is an abomination. — It is, however, interesting to note that, had the story been set in the Fifties, she’d have been a Commie mole; in the Sixties, she’d have fallen in among hippies who would have saved her from contending agents of the CIA and the KGB; in the Seventies, she’d have been a hit at the disco; and in the Nineties, she’d have materialized from a hacker’s computer screen. But since Ms. Beart crashes into the Eighties, she lands in the set of The Wedding Singer and everyone immediately starts trying to make a buck off her. Personally, I think I might have developed other ideas.

Angel Heart. [Alan Parker, 1987. From a novel by William Hjortsberg.]

Lowlife New York detective Harry Angel [Mickey Rourke] is called up into Harlem in 1955 to meet the mysterious and frightening Louis Cyphere [Robert De Niro], who represents himself as the former handler of a once-famous crooner named Johnny Favorite — maimed in the war, reduced to a vegetable state, placed in a sanitarium, and now disappeared. Services were performed for the missing singer, De Niro explains, and bills have come due; “certain collateral was involved.” Though Rourke agrees to take the case, it is plain that De Niro terrifies him; nor does it seem that he himself escaped the war without some devious form of brain damage, which manifests itself in vivid and strangely unsettling recurrent flashbacks — images of whirling fanblades, black nuns, a crowd carousing in a crowded square, a hotelroom with drawn blinds, circling spiral stairs, a descending elevator. Moreover everyone he can discover who knows something of the fate of Favorite — a junkie doctor [Michael Higgins], a jazz guitarist [Brownie McGhee], a palm reader [Charlotte Rampling] — is no sooner interrogated than murdered [indeed, subjected to some kind of heinous ritual slaughter] by parties unknown. Unnerved by his exposure to this ghastly violence, Rourke grows increasingly paranoiac and distraught: chickens terrify him; dogs attack him; he keeps staring at himself in broken mirrors. Following the trail from Harlem to New Orleans, he finds at last the daughter of Johnny’s longlost black mistress [Lisa Bonet] — a true voodoo child, fond of dancing naked in the woods covered with animal blood. — And here, presently, it becomes clear where Favorite is hidden, why De Niro pursues him, what Angel’s visions mean, and just who’s been fucking his own daughter; and why the elevator leads to Hell. — Dark, violent, and profoundly disturbing; something like Cornell Woolrich in voodoo. With Blue Velvet, one of the great modern films noir.

Wings Of Desire. [Der Himmel Über Berlin. Wim Wenders, 1987; screenplay by Wenders and Peter Handke.]

Invisible to all save children, angelic creatures Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander wander in long black overcoats through the streets of Berlin, dark capital of the dread history of the Twentieth century, listening in on the [remarkably poetic] streams-of-consciousness of its inhabitants — among them an elderly author, a teenage prostitute, an actor [Peter Falk, playing himself], a suicide — channelsurfing, as it were, among the inner lives of mortals. Gradually Ganz falls prey to the lure of temporality, and begins to yearn for the chance to step out of eternity into the flow of time, out of Being into Becoming — in Wenders’ visual metaphor, to descend from the abstract moral clarity of black and white into the messy particularity captured by color filmstock. He wants weight, wind, dirt: “to come home after a long day like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat” — to have the thrill of discovery, not to know it all and to have known it all all along — no longer simply to observe, but to participate [doesn’t this seems like the desire of the critic to work on the other side of the camera? or perhaps the traditional anxiety of the artist over his detachment from a life of action] — to bleed, shiver, learn the names of the colors, mingle with beatniks, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, act not watch — descend into reality and [are angels voyeurs then?] cop a feel off trapeze artist Solveig Dommartin. Presently he gets his wish, enters into history, and doffs his austere overcoat in favor of a loudly-checked jacket which in itself says everything we need to know about the relief one must feel at being released from the burden of angelically perfect taste. — And gets the girl as well, of course; but why spoil any more of the story.

Wenders made the sequel Faraway, So Close! [In Weiter Ferne, So Nah!] in 1993 with the same cast, augmented by, among others, angel Nastassja Kinski [talk about typecasting] and mortals Willem Dafoe, Lou Reed, and [no shit] Mikhail Gorbachev. [There is a satisfying poetic justice in the way that the two films so neatly bookend the fall of the Wall; and it is, of course, appropriate that the man ultimately responsible for the liberation of Berlin should make a cameo appearance.]

This last begins, incidentally, with an amazing shot: an iris-in on Sander [or his double], perched atop the statue [a wingéd Victory, of course] that crowns the Siegessaule in the center of the Tiergarten as the camera swoops in and circles; revealing, as it does, the whole of the city turning in the background. — This effect beautifully evokes the view the Immortals must have of the fallen world: a ball of light at a great distance, confined to a plane [one might say, projected on a screen]; seen as it were through the wrong end of the telescope.

Wenders was shamelessly ripped off by the Hollywood remake City Of Angels. But accept no substitutes.


Lost Angel. [Roy Rowland, 1944.]

An infant abandoned on the steps of an orphanage is adopted by scientists determined to manufacture a prodigy; after six years, sure enough, she turns into pigtailed Übertyke Margaret O’Brien [John Stuart Mill was never so cute], who has mastered algebra, semantics, economics, Chinese, and the details of Napoleon’s Peninsular campaigns, but [reach for that hanky] just doesn’t know how to be a kid. Fortunately for her emotional development, she is discovered by a newspaper reporter trying to make a story out of her, and follows him home; compelling him, in due course, to adopt her, but not before a series of adventures in the real unscientific world of New York that acquaint her with a variety of Damon Runyan characters — boxers, torch singers, gangsters — though none so terrifying, we are meant to conclude, as the evil behaviorists whose mania for control has poisoned her childhood. — The fabulous irony, that the coldblooded manipulative skill of these fictional scientists must pale by comparison with that of the actual showbusiness mother who pushed a real sixyearold into playing this role in a motion picture, somehow goes unstated.

Drunken Angel. [Akira Kurosawa, 1948.]

Alcoholic doctor Takashi Shimura [obviously talented but compelled, somehow, to drown a sense of failure] while treating bulletwounded gangster Toshirô Mifune as an afterthought diagnoses tuberculosis; their subsequent relationship, which flickers in and out of focus with Mifune’s cycles of denial and Shimura’s erratic sobriety, forms the nominal matter of the picture — though the real subject [which Kurosawa cannot address directly] is the [graphically depicted] postwar degradation of Tokyo, a city which has obviously been bombed flat and left to choke in filth, garbage, and disease; it would, apparently, be a breach of propriety to state this explicitly, let alone to explain how and why it happened. [It is typical, for example, that the only indication of the occupation is a sign in English above the entrance to a club.] Still, the result is rare enough in its candor: an unsanitized Japanese specimen of the classic American gangster film — thugs, gamblers, swing bands, dancehall girls, and all. [And the women talk back, just as if they had the right to.]

As for the moral: Mifune, here a very young man, is magnetic and arresting; but it is the character of the doctor, who despite of or even because of his selfloathing is fearless and unfailingly energetic in the pursuit of his duty, that is, one must suspect, Kurosawa’s suggestion of a rolemodel for his countrymen.


Lucifer Rising. [Kenneth Anger, 1973.]

Another episode in the Anger Magick Lantern Cycle; or, what happens when you drop acid and read Aleister Crowley. [Honestly, in the days before Manson this was harmless fun.] — Some studies of vulcanism; a topless chick in an Egyptian-priestess outfit waving some magic wands around; hatching crocodiles; boiling mud; Egyptian ruins; either an imagined real or an imagined imagined ritual murder; the Moon; assorted poses against the backdrop of the Pyramids and the Sphinx; night procession of hooded figures bearing torches, having something to do with Stonehenge; a couple of Yeatsian towers; a few sacred circles and pentagrams; lightning on the plains; [my personal favorite] unsuccessfully-disguised footage of dancing girls arrayed around the Great God Tao [or whatever his name was] stolen from the Flash Gordon serials; and the descent of a flying saucer every bit as convincing as the ones you see in the home movies they show in the bullshit documentaries on the SciFi channel. — Music by among others Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page; it does sound like somebody’s album played backwards. — However impenetrable Anger’s intentions in most of this, one of the great mysteries of the Art Film, at least, can be cleared up herewith: the puzzle of why everything [and everyone] moves so slowly. Every shot, every motion, is painfully slow and impossibly deliberate, as if its significance [as contrasted, say, to a cream pie to the face or a smoking-rubber wheelie] were so vast and cosmic that the viewer should be given ten times the usual space and time to contemplate it. The explanation is simple: it’s because everyone [the cameraman included] is so fucking stoned. — These details one may garner from a perusal of the memoirs of the babe playing Lilith [hooded, cloaked, and smeared with imitation woad], Marianne Faithfull — famous as a singer herself, of course, and as Jagger’s girlfriend in the glory days of Swinging London; but here captured like a fly swimming slowly through thickening amber in the middle of her epochal smack addition. — Ms. Faithfull was discovered in the midSixties at a party in London by the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham; who signed her to a contract on the spot, muttering to himself the immortal phrase, “an angel with big tits.” Whatever the limits of Anger’s vision, Oldham’s, obviously, was boundless.


Paradise Lost. [John Milton, 1667/1674.]

Terminated with prejudice after leading an employee walkout, unrepentant miscreant Satan and his posse regroup in a tropical rental to plot their revenge. Determining to corrupt the unspoiled inhabitants of Eden, they dispatch Lucifer himself on an undercover mission to the newly-created Earth; after a vividly-imagined flight through the landscape of Chaos, he crashes the party, confuses the allegiance of the newly-minted Barbie and Ken dolls, and simultaneously precipitates their fall from grace and the birth of consciousness — thus establishing the principle that knowledge is sin, and leads to death; sure enough, Fundamentalists have been as dumb as dirt ever since. — In the end, Adam and Eve take a walk: fallen angels meet fallen arches. I loved the thing with the snake.


Roger Corman on his difficulties making The Wild Angels [1966] — the exploitation classic which introduced the Hell’s Angels to the drivein audience and the director to the mechanical failings of Harleys: “We were always sitting and waiting for the damned bikes to be repaired, and I said to one of them [the bikers]: ‘Look, I understand what you guys do. You come into town. You beat up the men, you rape the women, you steal from the stores, the police come charging after you, you run to your choppers, and you know the fucking things aren’t going to start. What do you do then?’...‘They start, they start,’ they mumbled. ‘Bad luck, that’s all.’”


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The girl with electroscope thighs (12/14/00)


Ilsa, Harem Keeper Of The Oil Sheiks. [Don Edmunds, 1975.]

Lifesized Nazi Barbie doll Dyanne Thorne [weighing in at 37/17/33] finds herself in this second installment of the Ilsa saga cast as the sadistic assistant to a psychopathic Arab ruler who kidnaps white women to serve as his love slaves. Peripheral characters are eaten by rats, consumed by flames, blown up in the act of sexual congress, and castrated by female assassins who rip genitalia off with their bare hands; a female love slave is auctioned off to the highest bidder, who then insists he won’t take possession until her teeth are pulled. Ilsa herself once again makes the mistake of falling for a studly American spy, but tries to feed him to a tarantula anyway, just on general principles. The DVD release features color commentary by both director and star, who laugh at the folly that led them to make this feature using their real names, speculate about the future of the Ilsa franchise [Daughter of Ilsa, with Gwyneth Paltrow? or a big-budget Nazi Love Boat, say, Ilsa, Recreation Director On The Titanic?], and reveal that the tarantula got paid better than Ms. Thorne did; presumably because it had a better agent.


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Rocks in their heads (12/8/00)


Vertical Limit. [Martin Campbell, 2000. Written by Robert King and Terry Hayes.]

The novelist John Gregory Dunne, who in collaboration with his wife Joan Didion has made a tidy living over the years as a screenwriter, tells the story of their first encounter with the New Breed of action directors: called in to doctor an ailing script for one such Kid Flash noted for his love of vivid moments of excitement [carcrashes, explosions, etc.], they asked for his input. — What about Act One? asked Dunne. — Act One, said the Kid, Needs more whammies. — Okay, said Dunne, What about Act Two then? — Act Two, said the Kid, Whammies mount up. — I see, said Dunne. And Act Three? — Act Three, said the Kid: All whammies.

The director in question [one learns elsewhere] was Renny Harlin; whose best work, of course, was the mountaineering thriller Cliffhanger — from which, along with Jon Krakauer’s real-life account [Into Thin Air] of the Everest disasters of 1996 and [referenced at a critical juncture] the recent discovery, after a seventy-year search, of the body of the Himalayan pioneer George Leigh-Mallory, the present narrative derives.

And sure enough, after a minimum of preliminary designed to estrange sibling climbers Chris O’Donnell and Robin Tunney and deposit them on K2 in the company of Evil Billionaire Bill Paxton and Old Man Of The Mountain Scott Glenn, it’s a continuous series of blizzards, avalanches, wild leaps into empty space, and headlong slides down nearvertical glaciers ending with everyone in the cast strung out like beads on a rope hanging over a yawning chasm wheezing horribly from the altitude staring terrified at the lurching helicopter whose blades are about to sever their tether while the Indians and the Pakistanis fire artillery rounds at one another overhead: all whammies. — Obviously nobody would ever have climbed K2, if it were really this difficult. But in movies like this one, reality is a crutch.

Incidentally, what must be regarded as the Worst Moment In Motion Pictures for the year 2000 appears in the first reel of this opus, when O’Donnell [posed, naturally, hanging from a rope on the face of a cliff] sings a song to Ms. Tunney; this would be a nightmare at best, but the song is MacArthur Park, which makes it the ultimate horror. Where was that load of unstable nitro when we really needed it?


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Thora, Thora, Thora (12/8/00)


Dungeons And Dragons. [Courtney Solomon, 2000. Written by Topper Lilien and Carroll Cartwright. Seventeen claimed producers.]

Evil magician Jeremy Irons plots the ruin of Empress [but wouldbe social leveller] Thora Birch; toward which end he dispatches his henchmen to steal a, uh, Sacred Scroll detailing the whereabouts of a, uh, Rod of Power which will allow the bearer control over the species of, uh, Red Dragons [presumably to be contrasted with the run-of-the-mill mudcolored variety]; fortunately for the future of parliamentary democracy a couple of enterprising thieves, a cute albeit stuckup female mage-trainee, and a redbearded dwarf with poor table manners make off with the crucial document instead, and, after a lengthy expedition through a mythical landscape laden with boobytraps familiar to every viewer of the Indiana Jones movies, they collect all the talismans, free assorted imprisoned damsels in distress, and polish off Irons and his evil lieutenants in a lightsaber duel [well, almost] on the balcony of a high tower against the backdrop of a Battle-of-Britain sky darkened by swooping firelizards. — It is difficult to convey the cognitive dissonance caused by the constant interruption of amazing threedimensional virtual camera moves through astonishingly beautiful hyperGothic cathedral-castles by incredibly dumb gasbag dialogue about class warfare. I suggest the effects artists fire their writers and try again. With the utmost expedition.


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Art as extreme sport (12/7/00)


My Best Fiend. [Mein liebster Feind — Klaus Kinski. Werner Herzog, 1999.]

A bit like the 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, though Herzog foregrounds his own narration, and there are a lot more than thirty-two stories to tell about the late Klaus Kinski. Among the first few: [1] Kinski [preserved in documentary footage] shouts at an auditorium crowd through a microphone he doesn’t really seem to need, defending the stage with physical violence against the efforts of several hecklers to seize it. The occasion is some kind of one-man show in which Kinski is depicting his idea of Jesus, but it is obvious that the method actor thinks he really is Jesus [and the mob is really ready to nail him up.] [2] Kinski locks himself into the bathroom of a rooming-house [by a remarkable coincidence, this was Herzog’s own mother’s rooming-house] for forty-eight hours, shouting at the top of his lungs and smashing everything to bits [“very small pieces, you could have strained them through a tennis racket” says Herzog wonderingly.] [3] A theater critic dines with Kinski and praises his recent stage performance, calling him “outstanding, extraordinary”; Kinski throws a plateful of potatoes into the critic’s face and thunders “I was not ‘outstanding’! I was not ‘extraordinary’! I was MONUMENTAL! I was EPOCHAL!” [4] Kinski locks himself in a closet and practices his voice exercises for ten hours straight. [5] Kinski receives the screenplay for Aguirre from Herzog, calls him at three in the morning, and shouts incoherently into the telephone for half an hour. — Fortunately this is enthusiasm. Kinski agrees to do the movie. — Unfortunately this is right after the one-man show mentioned above; when Kinski arrives in Peru, he still thinks he is Jesus. Complications ensue.

The narration is illustrated by excerpts, outtakes, and behind-the-scenes footage from the five films [Aguirre, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde] Herzog made in collaboration with Kinski between 1972 and 1988, features interviews with Claudia Cardinale [still rather sweet on the old looney] and Eva Mattes, and culminates with Herzog’s description of his negotiations with the Indian players who appeared in Fitzcarraldo with regard to their offer to assassinate the star; and Herzog’s own subsequent decision to bomb Kinski’s apartment and kill him himself.

Probably this seems like overreaction. But, then, what’s the point of Art, if you aren’t playing for keeps?


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Stoners on holiday (12/7/00)


Hideous Kinky. [Gillies MacKinnon, 1998. Screenplay by Billy MacKinnon, from a novel by Esther Freud.]

The fetching but rudderless Ms. Kate Winslet, accompanied by the two love-children of her liason with a British poet, wanders about Morocco in 1972 in search of Sufi wisdom. The story is told from the point of view of the little girls [who are inordinately fond of devising little-girls’ games — how else could you get the punchline and thus the title to come out “Hideous Kinky”?], and is apparently intended to refute the classical dictum that drugs will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no drugs. — Maybe it’s time to start wondering when we’ll see the first round of narratives written by children of children of hippies, bitching about how straitlaced and unimaginative their parents were and re-embracing the irresponsibility of their grandparents.


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No, really (12/1/00)


Coyote Ugly. [David McNally, 2000. Screenplay by Gina Wendkos. From a novel by Marcel Proust.]

All right, all right: I finally did see it. But I like my version better.


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Holes in space (10/5/00)


Director Don Edmunds on his first perusal of the script for Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The SS [1974]: “I was just flat-on-my-back broke...I read it and thought, ’Man, what a piece of shit,’ went back the next day and told [the producer] Dunning: ‘This is a piece of shit. No — this is the worst piece of shit I have ever read in my life,’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but I’ve got this much money.’ So, whore that I am, I said, ‘Well, there is something very distinctive about it... .’”


Whipped. [Peter M. Cohen, 1999.]

Essentially a feature-length episode of Sex In The City: the Sunday morning breakfast meeting [a sort of Village-diner SportsCenter where the panelists swap stories about rimjobs] of three selfproclaimed urban sexual adventurers [once again the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse] is disrupted when by apparent freak coincidence they all separately and simultaneously encounter Amanda Peet, find in her the love that transcends affectation, and become contenders for her hand. In a few brief weeks their friendship is over, their egos are crushed, their boners have wilted, and the joy they once derived from loudly swapping tall tales of sexual conquest is at an end. Is this mere accident, or some elaborately plotted comic revenge? Take a wild guess. — Though there are amusing observations regarding jerking off, ass crust, the effects of pineapple juice on the flavor of semen, the equation of Marriage with Shopping, and the difficulty of retrieving a vibrator that’s fallen down the toilet, after ninety minutes of listening to these people accuse one another of totally messing with each other’s shit [Dude, that is like, so fucked up], I feel a powerful need for a couple of Merchant-Ivory Edwardian costume dramas to restore my acquaintance with the English tongue. — Ms. Peet, however, appears with this feature to have arrived at the stardom she richly deserves. So I guess every fucking cloud has, like, this totally silver lining.


Corman Retrospective, Volume One.

Any remaining skeptics will be instantly convinced of the superiority of the DVD format when they discover that it makes possible the presentation of a Roger Corman triple feature on a single disc: an entire evening at the drivein for the price of a single rental. Here provided for your viewing pleasure are Attack Of The Giant Leeches [swampdwelling bloodsuckers of improbable dimensions develop a culinary interest in the neighboring trailertrash, notably Designated Slattern Yvette Vickers], The Wasp Woman [aging cosmetic tychoon Susan Cabot rejuvenates her appearance with injections of wasp venom which have the unfortunate side effect of giving her a monstrous lust for human flesh], and A Bucket Of Blood — the legendary cult classic, written by Charles Griffith, in which B-movie great Dick Miller depicts a dim but earnest busboy so desperate to acquire status with the beatniks who frequent the coffeehouse scene that when he discovers by macabre accident the striking sculptural effect created by packing a dead body in modeling clay, he goes on a killing spree in the name of Art. — This last is one of the best remaining portraits of classical beatnik culture [“the old coffeehouse scene,” laughs George Figgs in the John Waters documentary, “where people dressed in black, had cigarette holders, played bongo drums, read poetry, drank Chianti all day... .”] — And its affectations. — Miller, transmogrified, orders confidently at his reception: “Bring me a cappucino and a piece of papaya cheesecake. And a bottle of Yugoslavian white wine.” — Ah, those were the days.


Who Am I? [Jackie Chan, 1998.]

After a mysterious meteorite with uncanny physical properties is dug out of a diamond mine in South Africa [compare Karloff’s find in The Invisible Ray], a crack multinational team of commandos — deceived, alas, as to the nature of their mission — is dispatched to purloin it by a bent faction of the CIA determined to employ its unearthly powers for evil ends; after their success in obtaining the prize ensures their own expendability, their pilots bail out of the helicopter carrying the illfated band and they auger into the jungle. Only the preternaturally athletic [and movie-star lucky] Jackie Chan survives the crash, though the bouncing-pinball descent through the treelimbs that saves his life serves also to erase his memory, and the African tribesmen who nurse him back to health christen him Who Am I? In due course he recovers from his merely physical injuries and ventures back into the world beyond to rediscover his origins, immediately finding himself pursued simultaneously by several factions of Bad Spooks and [scariest of all] the South African security forces; escaping their clutches, he flees to Rotterdam, where he tracks down the parties responsible for his betrayal, kicks the butts of their security dudes, and hands the bad guys over to the good guys — or at least, some somewhat better guys; no one in this scenario seems particularly trustworthy, and our hero makes plain his intention to renounce the purported comforts of civilization and return to his adopted tribe. — These adventures provide Jackie the opportunity to paint himself like an African warrior, hang a glucose IV from a cocoanut, climb sheer walls while bound and shackled, dodge a falling piano [though I wish they’d done the falling safe as well], stage a fight in wooden shoes, and effect yet another of those patented unorthodox descents of a skyscraper, this time a buttslide down twenty stories of not-quite-vertical glass. Harold Lloyd lives.


Drowning Mona. [Nick Gomez, 1999.]

When psycho Bitch from Hell Bette Midler loses her brakes and goes over a cliff into the river bordering the bucolic hamlet of Verplanck, New York — a town where everyone drives a Yugo with vanity plates — police chief Danny De Vito launches an investigation [illustrated by many amusing flashbacks] which rapidly establishes not only that the fatal mishap was no accident, but that nearly every one of the colorful braindamaged eccentrics who make up the population — among them Neve Campbell, Casey Affleck, and Jamie Lee Curtis — had some reason to kill her. Can this be the Murder on the Orient Express? Alas, after an elaborate setup that is obviously designed to suggest just that, the authors let slip their grasp of the development and, not to put too fine a point on it, chicken out; leaving most of the evidence unexplained, as even the drunken priest or the mortician on the make would have been able to figure out — let alone the lesbian auto mechanic who discovered all of it. But despite this disappointment, the flick still has its moments. [“I get half!” says one moron. “And don’t give me that ‘fifty percent’ bullshit!”] Anyway, a town where even really dumb guys get to play Wheel Of Fortune with Jamie Lee Curtis can’t be all bad.


The Art Of War. [Christian Duguay, 2000. Written by Wayne Beach and Simon Barry.]

Black Ninja Wesley Snipes and Trusty Sidekick Michael Biehn [but you can see through that one right away, can’t you] are enjoying productive careers as secret agents for the United Nations [Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin without tongue in cheek] — blackmailing recalcitrant North Korean generals, bungeejumping off skyscrapers, downloading maps of the Solar System in the twinkling of an eye through their T1 cellphones — until the hidden agenda of Scheming Executive Anne Archer [for once not married to Harrison Ford] embroils them in the political intrigues surrounding a new international trade agreement, unspecified parties frame Snipes for whacking a Chinese ambassador, and the FBI and the, uh, Triads [what ever happened to the fiendish agents of the insidious Doctor Fu Manchu?] take turns chasing him around New York blowing stuff up and ignoring traffic regulations until the Wow Finish, predictably [if you didn’t fall asleep in the second act] a one-on-one John Woo gunfight between Cain and Abel in the lobby of the UN building. — All this is derived from distinguished sources but leaves Wesley hanging midway between Robert Cummings in Saboteur and Leslie Nielsen in Wrongfully Accused: Hitchcock never belabored his exposition; Pat Proft knew that if you did, you made sure it was funny. — Will our hero escape the vengeance of the Shameless Profiteers [wow, is it getting difficult to invent bad guys for spy movies] and live to retire to the South of France with that cute Chinese translator? Will I remember next time to look and make absolutely sure the theater is empty before I start whistling “Secret Agent Man”? If this is really the UN, why aren’t they taking bribes? — Not that bad, of course; but obviously all this has about as much to do with Sun Tsu as Purple Rain had to do with Machiavelli.


Where’s Marlowe? [Daniel Pyne, 1999. Written by Pyne and John Mankiewicz.]

A tragicomic essay on the confusion of subject and object: undaunted by the indifferent reception their epic three-hour cinema-verite essay on the New York City water supply receives at the somewhat-less-than-world-famous Utica Film Festival, inept documentarians John Livingston and Dante Beze commence their next project, an intimate study of two equally incompetent private detectives [Miguel Ferrer and John Slattery] operating an agency in Los Angeles who despite having adopted the standard affectations [brass knucks, pocket flasks, shoulder holsters] are not making enough getting conned by teenage runaways and mediating neighborhood disputes over dogshit to pay the office rent, the phone, the electrical bill, or the medical expenses incurred when one of them was bitten on the ass by a parrot. Improbably, the reigning lord of the late-night commercials [the famous Beeper King] walks in the door and assigns Ferrer the chore of staking out a motel to find out who’s popping his wife; lo and behold, though it isn’t the wife after all [as the real wife explains, it is instead his mistress], the absent partner Slattery is the transgressor, and is whacked forthwith for this presumption by parties unknown. The detectives having thus become the matter of their own investigation, the filmmakers in turn become detectives and the objects of their own documentary. So who is filming whom? — At one remove, a movie about making itself. — “Is that an Arri SR?” asks the hooker who went to film school, pointing at the camera. Indeed it is.


The Big Blue. [Luc Besson, 1988.]

Besson’s epic about free diving in the Mediterranean is here rereleased at greater length in a director’s cut which answers none of the questions I harbored about the original, e.g.: why are a bunch of scientists studying diving in the mountains of Peru? and, how am I supposed to identify with a protagonist who is more in love with Death than he is with Rosanna Arquette? Frivolities like the plot aside, however, this is an astonishing piece of photography [students of Besson will note here the first instance of his signature motion-over-water opening shot, later repeated with ingenious variations in La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element], Jean Reno is great, and even if the human characters aren’t particularly believable, the dolphins are.


The Replacements. [Howard Deutch, 2000. Written by Vince McKewin.]

Called back from retirement by curmudgeonly team owner Jack Warden to put together a pickup team to finish the season when the spoiled millionaires of the Players’ Union decide to go on strike, old pro coach Gene Hackman assembles a rainbow coalition of colorful losers desperate for that one last shot at the brass ring — an assemblage oddly reminiscent of the roughnecks Bruce Willis led into space in Armageddon, Cage’s gang of carthieves in Gone In Sixty, the planeload of psychos in Con Air, etc., etc. — a chainsmoking Welsh kicker several fathoms deep in debt to the Mob, a couple of guys who look like Doctor Dre and Ed Lover [unless it’s the other way around], a truly enormous Sumo wrestler, a deaf tight end, a fast black kid with huge scared rabbit-eyes and terrible hands, a psycho con, a psycho cop, etc., etc., etc. — led, naturally [for believe it or not this is a major motion picture] by quarterback Keanu Reeves; who has, for the purposes of this scenario, been cleaning barnacles off the bottoms of boats for a living since his team melted down around him in the mortifying Sugar Bowl blowout which put a period to his career at Ohio State. [Some Keanu scholar will have to explain to me why he is always a former quarterback from Ohio State.] — Sewage would have been funnier than barnacles, but then Keanu isn’t as funny as David Arquette. — After a couple of days of practice that go badly and a game that takes a turn for the worse, the merry band bond in a spirited barfight with the strikers which is rather more entertaining than any of the football sequences [this should have been an embarrassment], do a nice group dance number in the holding cell to cement their relationship, and return to the field for a not-particularly-suspenseful run at the playoffs which reaches its climax [shortly after Keanu scores with Head Cheerleader Brooke Langton] with essentially the same football game the Marx Brothers won in Horsefeathers. — Obviously this could have been better, but even so it’s an improvement on Oliver Stone. — With John Madden, Pat Summerall, and a truckload of strippers in cheerleading outfits.


Titus. [Julie Taymor, 1999.]

A flamboyant restaging of the Shakespearean revenge-tragedy, with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange as the contending leads: Greenaway Lite.


The Indian Tomb. [Joe May, 1921. Written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang.]

A silent serial from the first Golden Age of the comicbook plot: an Indian prince [Conrad Veidt] with a knowledge of the occult gets wind of the scheme of weird Yogi Ramigani [Bernhard Goetz, the large spooky-looking dude with glowing eyes who played Death in Lang’s Destiny] to be buried alive in order to achieve enlightenment; ordering his minions to dig the seeker up, he awakens him from his trance, demands his fealty, and dispatches him to Europe to recruit the services of brilliant but underemployed architect Olaf Fønss, whom we discover staring wistfully at a photograph of the Taj Mahal and complaining to his girlfriend Lya De Putti that he, alas, will never be so fortunate as to have a Maharajah commission him to build a tomb for his departed wife. Guess again: Ramigani [now possessed of supernatural powers which allow him to walk through walls, negate distance, and cancel the credit cards of his adversaries with a snip of his mental scissors] shows up with precisely this proposal, and brushes aside the feeble practical objections of the thunderstruck European with an appeal to the moral imperative: “No man can ignore the unborn children of his soul, Sahib!” Mesmerized by the Yogi’s force of personality, the architect drops everything and walks out the door for Bengal; baffled by her abandonment, his faithful fiancée sets out in pursuit, and in a twinkling they’re all striking dramatic poses in front of gigantic statues of Kali. Here we discover that the princess in question [Mia May] isn’t dead at all, but, rather, under house arrest since the mad Maharajah found her fooling around with a handsome English White Hunter; and that his plan, actually, is to bury her alive; albeit in something architecturally impressive, that being the custom of the province. Complications ensue. — Though the authors exhibit an admirable grasp of the vocabulary of the adventure serial [why not, Lang invented most of it], and you find herein no dearth of leper pits, stampeding elephants, skinny guys wearing diapers sleeping on nails, energetically gyrating exotic dancers wearing gem-encrusted Mickey-Mouse ears, snakecharmers, fireswallowers, arenas filled with tigers, and chases down rivers full of crocodiles ending with standoffs on rope bridges over bottomless gorges, I’m not sure on the available evidence that the Germans ever really caught onto the idea of ending a chapter on a cliffhanger. But obviously they had everything else.


Hollow Man. [Paul Verhoeven, 2000. Written by Andrew W. Marlowe; story by Gary Scott Thompson.]

Brilliant megalomaniac Kevin Bacon — the kind of movie scientist who practically announces with his first entrance upon the screen that he is going to transgress against the cosmic moral order, usurp powers Man was not Meant to Wield, and call down upon himself the dreadful retribution of the gods — invents invisibility in an underground laboratory, with the incidental assistance of Elisabeth Shue, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, and a guy in a gorilla suit, and then, alas [don’t these people ever get out to the movies?] chugs a draught of his own magic potion to make sure of its effect on human subjects. Before you know it he’s sneaking into the neighbor’s apartment to watch her undress, and after that it’s a short slide down the slippery slope before he’s a mad serial killer and a danger to all mankind. Fortunately he returns to the subterranean fortress to gloat, allowing Ms. Shue and her posse to overcome him in the usual grand finale, a firefight in a warehouse; the chase ends [I am not making this up] with a scene in which she outruns an explosion by climbing a ladder up an elevator shaft. Kids, don’t try this in your underground laboratories at home.

I’m not sure that everyone knows exactly why Galileo didn’t really have to drop a bowling ball and a golf ball off the Leaning Tower; it was because he had a gift for the embarrassing question. — If you tie a twenty pound weight to a ten pound weight, does the heavy one speed up the lighter one, or does the lighter one act as a brake? But, wait a minute, ten and twenty is thirty; shouldn’t the two joined together fall faster than either one separately? [Where do you draw the invisible dotted lines?] — Similarly, if you’re invisible and you eat a visible Twinkie, does it disappear when it enters your aura? or does the camera record its mastication by invisible teeth, the progress of its fragments down an invisible throat, their attack by invisible stomach acids and transformation into — what? — invisible sugars and carbohydrates? How is this supposed to work? Do you gradually become visible again? Or is it the other way around? So if you’re walking around invisible in a cloud of smoke, do you acquire a layer of visible soot? Or does your invisibility start to rub off on everything you come in contact with? like the invisible imitation butter on this fucking popcorn, come to think of it; gaah, the slime... . Anyway, if light passes through you, it passes through your retinas; so it should work out that they can’t see you and you can’t see them. Right?

Wrong. Always wrong. — Ah well. — Astonishing effects in the service of a really dumb plot; but, then, what did you expect. Check it out.


Spy Games. [Illka Jarvilaturi, 1999. Written by Patrick Amos.]

CIA guy Bill Pullman and KGB girl Irene Jacob are enjoying the aftermath of the Cold War with an extended romantic interlude in Helsinki until a couple of buffoons from the Home Office show up with a pornographic video that encodes the command sequences for every surveillance and communications satellite known to man, and they’re propelled willynilly into a game of spooks and robbers. Entertaining as hell, despite the nagging suspicion that the authors of movies like this are still stealing their characters from The President’s Analyst. — Finland? Sheesh. Check out those reindeer.


Gorgeous. [Vincent Kok, 1999.]

Pigtailed Taiwanese cutie Qi Shu, the kind of simple fishing-village girl who likes to hang around the docks talking to dolphins, finds a romantic message in a bottle, supposes herself smitten by its unknown author, and travels to Hong Kong to track him down. Contrary to expectation he turns out to be a gay dude in the fashion industry pining away for his missing boyfriend, but they hit it off anyway and he takes her under his wing. On a photo shoot in the harbor she observes pirates boarding the yacht of a baron of finance, rushes to the rescue in a powerboat, and thus makes the acquaintance of Jackie Chan [whose fight choreography in this particular sequence seems to have derived from a study of the Three Stooges]; after ascertaining that he is, indeed, a millionaire playboy who resides in a fabulous mansion her heart is naturally won, and it’s only a matter of a few dozen plot twists before the two are united, separated, and united yet again. - There’s more dancing than fighting in this one, but Jackie does manage a couple of dustups with hired gun Brad Allen; something about the way they decide to converse in English while they’re punching one another out makes me suspect Jackie saw Mike Myers switching from subtitles to dubbing in the middle of the fight with his prospective father-in-law, and took this opportunity for homage.


Titan A.E. [Don Bluth/Gary Goldman, 2000.]

An interesting attempt at an animated feature on the cosmic scale: after the evil Drej [a swarm of electricblue insectoid Terminators who cruise the galaxy in a wickedly angled mothership that looks like a giant virus] take offense at something we said and destroy the Earth, the scattered survivors wander aimlessly until the Han Solo guy [who sounds like Bill Pullman] finds the Kid Flash/Luke Skywalker guy [who sounds like Matt Damon], introduces him to the Princess Leia chick [who sounds like Drew Barrymore], and launches him on the quest that will save humanity; the Drej, of course, give chase. A peculiar mixture of processes leads to weirdly mixed results — the characters look like Saturday morning, the backgrounds are firstrate CGI: Clutch Cargo meets The Phantom Menace. The high point is a beautifully-rendered game of spaceship hide-and-seek among an orbiting field of icebergs: the classic Lady From Shanghai finale in a threedimensional hall of mirrors. — Incidentally, even Drew Barrymore’s voice gives me a woody. I think I need help.


Later.


____________


Dancing on the bar (10/5/00)


“You guys are really weird, you know that?” the girl remarks to the two nerds. “They’re not weird!” the Monster exclaims — seizing the two geeks one in each paw and crushing them to his bosom with a fond embrace. “They’re scientists!”

[Frankenstein: The College Years.]


Almost Famous. [Cameron Crowe, 2000.]

Cameron Crowe’s beautiful autobiographical essay about his first tour on the road with a rock-and-roll band as a Boy Wonder stringer for the Rolling Stone — in which his alter ego Patrick Fugit by dint of talent luck and bullshit attracts the attention of the famous editor Ben Fong-Torres, acquires the assignment of following a group of rising stars [the fictional Stillwater] as they ride off to look for America, escapes the suffocating influence of his controlfreak mother [Frances McDormand], skips his high school graduation, and launches himself into an adventure that bounces him all over the Midwest in a tourbus, lands him in the exotic ports of Cleveland, Topeka, and New York, and places him finally on a chartered flight to hear the [memorably hilarious] last confessions of the band members as they prepare to auger into a cornfield in Tupelo; brooding, the while, over his portable typewriter as he tries to fathom the Deeper Significance of this roadtrip. For these were the now-distant days when sex was still safe, drugs were still plentiful, and rock and roll still meant something: when musicians were more than merely another species of the rich and famous; when there was a journalistic currency other than that of celebrity; and when the best writing in America appeared in the Rolling Stone.

These delusions have long since evaporated; oddly enough it is only what once seemed most ephemeral, the sense of how much fun it all was, that remains. Oliver Stone may have found the war, but Cameron Crowe found the party. And since he may have been the only geek ever to have done so, his triumph sustains all of us.

So though obviously this is not the cinematic Bildungsroman that will make you forget Platoon or The 400 Blows, still, it’s one of the best rock and roll movies ever made. — With Philip Seymour Hoffman brilliant once again as Fugit/Crowe’s mentor the semilegendary rock critic Lester Bangs [pay particular attention to the speech in which he explicates the relationship of critic to rock musician as that of dweeb anthropologist to the tribes of the cool and the beautiful], Billy Crudup [actually better in the role than would have been the prior choices Cruise and Pitt] as the fledgling-star guitarist, and Kate Hudson as the leader of the Band Aids, Penny Lane. — When the riddle of the human genome has been finally deciphered, someone will be able to explain to me what makes Goldie Goldie, and how Kate inherited it; I want to hear how this is supposed to follow from protein folding.


Frankenstein’s Daughter. [Richard Cunha, 1958; written by H.E. Barrie.]

A high school girl figures out the mysterious laboratory assistant aiding her uncle in his scientific research is actually the last remaining scion of the Frankensteins: no wonder he’s been making eyes at her; he wants her body, and not necessarily all in one piece. Complications ensue. — An architectural quibble: I don’t recall that an attached dungeon was a standard option on the typical Fifties suburban home. But admittedly it should have been.


Nurse Betty. [Neil LaBute, 2000. Written by John Richards and James Flamberg.]

The screenwriter’s solution to the problem of an obsessive fixation on the Object of Desire is to act this fixation out through surrogates on whom [as it were by definition] such obsessions look good. — thus: Soapaddicted daydreamer Renée Zellwegger inadvertently witnesses the drug-related execution of her usedcarsalesman husband in the living room of their Kansas home; flipping out, she casts off the grim bonds that tie her to her rather sadly constrained life and her unfulfilling job as waitress in a roadside diner, hops into a Buick [ah, but it’s a Buick with a secret], and sets off for Los Angeles to unite herself with her imagined lover Greg Kinnear — star of a daytime melodrama which depicts him as a famous surgeon at a great metropolitan hospital, and, as usual, a guy who’s very impressed with his own importance. Along the way she dons a nurse’s uniform and begins to emanate a mysterious magnetic field which affects the internal compasses of everyone with whom she comes in contact, with the result that both the real and the imaginary hospital hire her, Kinnear falls for her in spite of himself, and even the hitmen on her trail [Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock] are diverted from their purpose by the force of her personality. The moral, plainly, is that you can get away with acting like a deranged stalker if you are Renée Zellwegger, World’s Cutest Human; but I don’t advise it for ordinary mortals.

One might contrast an old favorite, the 1971 feature They Might Be Giants, in which George C. Scott played a paranoiac who thought he was Sherlock Holmes [and Joanne Woodward played a psychiatrist named Doctor Watson.] Somehow that worked beautifully; I think simply because it was so obvious that Sherlock Holmes need not himself have been any more than a paranoiac who thought that he was George C. Scott.


Hell’s Kitchen. [Tony Cinciripini, 1997.]

Errant slumchild Johnny “The Tombstone” Miles emerges from the joint after a stretch for armed robbery and attendant accidental homicide a sadder and wiser lad: his sainted mother has departed and left him with the sacred charge of looking after his ne’er-do-well little brother Stevie [mysteriously unavailable for comment and last seen flopping in the gutter sucking on a crack pipe]; moreover Tough Girl Angelina Jolie and her drunken-floozy mother Rosanna Arquette are determined to waste him for revenge. Fortunately he is taken under the wing of a slightly punchy Italian exboxer with cauliflower ears who trains him for a championship bout which he wins despite the insistence of a sleazy promoter who owns a string of strip clubs that he take a dive — and at this point [believe it or not] there are still a good forty minutes of clichéd situations to negotiate before the scenario comes to its conclusion: On The Waterfront Of New Jack City, or, Body And Yo Punk Bitch Soul. — The kind of movie that makes you want to reach out to that reckless miscreant with soft poetic eyes who accidentally wasted your little brother during that coke-frenzied orgy in which he was simultaneously popping your girlfriend and her mother, and, shucks, just give him a big hug. Or something like that.


Tycus. [John Patch, 2000. Written by Michael Goetz and Kevin Goetz.]

Tabloid reporter [and exmilitary martialarts badass] Peter Onorati stumbles across an underground city built by not-particularly-mad scientist Dennis Hopper to preserve humanity after the imminent collision of the Earth [the Moon, something] with an errant comet: yet another remake of When Worlds Collide. Remarkably successful, probably because this is the kind of B-movie premise that works best in an actual B-movie; and not, say, a big-budget weepie like Deep Impact. [Undoubtedly it would have been even better if Corman had made it in the Fifties for ten thousand dollars over the weekend from a script Jack Nicholson had written on acid.] — It would seem curious that the government is represented herein as rejecting Hopper’s predictions of doom without regard for the facts; were our elected representatives not engaged at present in an attempt to fire the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration en masse for finding evidence of global warming. Instead, it seems an added dash of realism.


Quiet Days In Hollywood. [Josef Rusnak, 1996.]

A hooker on the Sunset Strip who collects snapshots of celebrities gives a blowjob to a lookout for a gang of burglars whose girlfriend escapes when he gets whacked to wait lunch upon an obnoxious recording-industry lawyer who is sharing the favors of the wife of his boss who gets hit on at the health club by the dissolute gay boyfriend of the hooker’s favorite actor; when said boyfriend overdoses in the pool, her idol goes on a bender and ends up in her hotel room: Slacker on a shorter Rolodex. With Hilary Swank, Peter Dobson, Jake Busey, Meta Golding, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and B-movie vixen Tammy Parks as the redheaded flasher.


The Way Of The Gun. [Christopher McQuarrie, 2000.]

The directorial debut of the prodigious author of The Usual Suspects: when two ne’erdowell gunsels [Ryan Phillippe and Benicio Del Toro, herein identified only as Parker and Longbaugh] trying to make donations at a fertility clinic happen across the identity of a surrogate mother [Juliette Lewis] about to give birth to the implanted child of a couple of specimens of the stinking rich, they form the notion of kidnapping the mother-to-be and holding the foetus for ransom; the plan succeeds, after a fashion, and they escape across the border to a picturesque From-Dusk-Till-Dawn motel from which they launch negotiations. But after a couple of acts of baroque variations have been interpolated between setup and dénouement, the relationships of the millionaire to the sources of his money, his wife to her bodyguard, the expectant mother to her doctor, the millionaire’s head of security to the expectant mother, the infant to its supposed parents, and of everyone left standing to the fifteen million dollars James Caan is hauling around in a gym bag have grown so complicated as to defy adequate resolution; though the concluding gunfight in a Mexican whorehouse [a meticulously staged homage to Butch Cassidy] would certainly suffice in any ordinary circumstance.

So this isn’t as good as one might have hoped: there’s too much of what is obviously meant to be weighty philosophical dialogue, and McQuarrie is not Dostoevsky. On the other hand he exhibits a gift for the cinematic statement of paradox — e.g. in the carchase that goes at the pace of a slow walk, or for that matter in the very idea of an action movie about motherhood [one in which the most ghastly of the many bloodsoaked scenes is Juliette’s Caeserian section] — that has to remind you of Hitchcock. He’ll do better, given another chance. Meanwhile, check this out.


Woyzeck. [Werner Herzog, 1976.]

The fabulously deranged Klaus Kinski stars as the title character in this curiously theatrical production [“nach dem Bühnenfragment von Georg Büchner”] of the story of an apparently simpleminded soldier-Everyman stationed in a quaint postmedieval German village who is belittled by everyone: most particularly his Captain [who demeans him with absurd duties], the town Doctor [who performs witless pseudoscientific experiments upon him], and his wife [who cuckolds him with a handsome Drum-major.] Wandering in the woods beyond the city’s boundaries, however, he feels a nameless Presence in the world that speaks to him with a frightful voice, senses the possibility of transgression - what stands beyond the ground of Being, what happens “when Nature is over” — and, like a good German, having turned everything first into an occasion for metaphysical speculation [“Did the No cause the Yes, or the Yes the No?”] finds that in turn an occasion for grisly murder. — Somehow the sight of Kinski pressing his ear to the earth to hear the voices of the underworld and babbling about the figures toadstools form upon the ground [the cropcircles of the eighteenth century] made it obvious to me that Herzog is the only guy who could film Thomas Pynchon.


Cecil B. DeMented. [John Waters, 2000.]

An amusing demonstration of Waters’ determination to play his own Tim Burton to his own Ed Wood: a deranged terrorist collective of underground filmmakers [led by the ubiquitous Stephen Dorff] kidnap a Hollywood princess [Melanie Griffith, who here as in Woody Allen’s Celebrity serves admirably as the hypostatization of the abstract Idea of the Movie Star] in order to employ her services, will she/nill she, in their ongoing improvisational motion picture project; sallying forth from their secret hideout [an abandoned theater in downtown Baltimore] they ride in the battered van that serves as their Batmobile to a succession of scenes at which they film one another delivering hilariously over-the-top speeches declaring the liberation of the art of film from the constraints and contrivances of the studios and the star system to terrified audiences of the cinematic bourgeois. Beyond its manifest resemblance to the life and work of the young Waters and his colleagues at Dreamland Productions, this is also a sort of film-geek remake of Weekend [in fact I can’t figure out why Godard never made this movie himself], a nostalgic paean to the lost days of Sixties revolutionary fervor, and, obviously, an oblique commentary on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, rendered more piquant by the presence of Ms. Hearst herself [one of Waters’ current repertory company] in a supporting role. — With the usual jabs at heterosexuals, some amusing digs at multiplex culture [e.g., an audience sobbing helplessly at the theatrical release of Patch Adams: The Director’s Cut], and a variety of acute observations on the cult of celebrity: by all means, let’s hear more about Mel Gibson’s cock. — Alicia Witt appears here in a role [expornoqueen turned artmovie vixen] that might better have been assigned to another occasional member of Waters’ repertory company, Traci Lords; and the gunfights haven’t enough Tarantino in them. But anybody who’d set himself on fire at a drivein for the sake of Art is all right by me.


Sergei Eisenstein. Autobiography. [Oleg Kovalov, 1996.]

A curious experiment which attempts to epitomize the career of the great Russian auteur by employing his own techniques — splicing together excerpts from his features of the Twenties and Thirties with samples from other avantgarde classics of the era [notably Entr’acte (1924), Kino-pravda (1925), Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926), and Un chien andalou (1929)] and documentary footage [including home movies of the master at work] according to the principles of dialectical montage: i.e., arranging a collision of images [thesis, antithesis] in an attempt to produce a [synthesized] whole greater than the sum of the parts. It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain this method verbally [and Eisenstein’s own writings would in any case be the best guide], but the idea is illustrated herein, for instance, by a passage which sums up the Age of Ford by intercutting some curious kind of industrial-film cartoon, a Busby Berkeley musical number, and the Moloch/machine-god episode from Lang’s Metropolis. — We have also statements of the visual equations of spilled ink/spilled blood and bullets/semen, and many fascinating studies of waves, trees, childbirth, weapons, African tribesmen, nudist-camp ballet, cross-referential images of the French and Russian Revolutions, and lots and lots of very earnest Soviet industrial machinery [the contrast with Chaplin’s very funny capitalistic industrial machinery is pointed though unstated and as it were taken for granted.] A very minimal narrative voiceover is provided by a few dozen sentences from Eisenstein’s written memoirs. And all this without drugs.


Coyote Ugly. [John Craig, 2K.]

It is Christmas in a town without pity. As a light snow falls on the seasonal decorations that adorn the streets and jolly elves in Santasuits ring bells on every corner soliciting softmoney contributions to political action committees, a lone waif dressed in rags looks wistfully through the window of a department store at an expensive garment draped upon the voluptuous form of a rubber mannequin. “Look at those hooters,” she sighs. “Just like Nikki Fritz. Someday... .” Her voice trails off. Gathering her tattered garments more closely about her against the bitter chill of the December breeze, she limps slowly down the sidewalk. She does not notice the man in the Santasuit muttering something into a cellular telephone. Passing the entrance to an alley, she hears a faint voice calling out for aid. Pausing, she looks both ways up and down the street; but it is now strangely empty, and no one is in sight. She turns to leave, but hears the voice again, more clearly now. “Help me,” it croaks. It seems the voice of an elderly man, crying for help. At the thought of a fellow human being alone, in pain, perhaps dying, she cannot hesitate. She enters the alley. Within the narrow passage the light is dim, crepuscular. Almost invisible, the figure of the old man, seemingly crushed and discarded, slumps against the wall beside a dumpster. “Help me,” he says. “It’s dragging in the dirt, and I just can’t get it up.” “What?” she asks, puzzled and now somewht apprehensive. “Can I help you?” “Sure, baby,” he cackles, stepping toward her. “Just take a look at this.” Ripping open his trenchcoat, he reveals an intricate pattern of ceremonial tattoos declaring him a prince of the Yakuza. A physically disgusting prince of the Yakuza. “Gaah,” she mutters. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asks as he advances. “Why...why...I don’t know!” she realizes. And swoons. She recovers consciousness in a dank stinking dungeon, chained to a wall splattered with blood and covered with politically-incorrect graffiti. Oil portraits of Jerry Bruckheimer hang everywhere around the room, protected by sheets of plastic. “What evil fate can have brought me here?” she wonders aloud. As if on cue there enter Ilsa, She-Wolf of the Heidelberg Bartending Academy, and her blonde-bimbo assistants, Gretchen and Brunhilda. “Welcome, my little cupcake,” Ilsa announces in a thick Teutonic accent. “It is time for your orientation.” Her assistants smile, strip to the waist, and begin to oil one anothers’ torsos. Ilsa flips a row of switches activating an alarming bank of electrical apparatus, attaches alligator clips to the most delicate portions of our heroine’s anatomy, and examines the readings on a bank of ammeters. “Interesting,” she murmurs. She adjusts a voltage. A pen begins to twitch up and down across a moving band of paper. “It is my contention that the female of the species can withstand more pain than the male,” she explains. “When I can prove this to the producers, it will undoubtedly result in larger grosses.” She throws a lever. A section of the wall revolves about a hidden axis, bringing a polka band into the cell. She makes a peremptory gesture with her riding crop. They break into song. Our heroine screams. Montage: other gruesome scenes of torture: leather whips, cattleprod dildos, repeated screenings of Con Air. The pen jerks up and down upon the moving strip of paper, leaving a jagged trail behind it. Dreadful polka music. Dissolve through a ghastly accordian solo to a tavern scene: as a horde of drunken Yale fraternity men with duelling scars and promises of ambassadorships in the Bush administration wave beer mugs in the air and shout their approbation, a chorus line of dancing St. Pauli Girls decked out in peasant dresses cavort upon the top of the bar; our heroine among them. Swirling her skirts about her hips, she reveals unusually gaudy bloomers. The number concludes when a red 1969 GTO convertible hurtles through the front window with an explosion of glass and splintering timber, scattering the crowd and crushing several lawyers; a stunt driver staggers out and collapses, groaning “Tequila...tequila... .” Restoratives are applied. He gasps out a tale of a man wrongfully accused, prosecuted, incarcerated, busting out of jail and commencing an outlaw roadtrip through the Nevada desert with a girl and a gun which ends in armed robbery and a spectacular carchase; a barmaid takes notes for later review by studio executives. Having dived behind the bar to avoid possible gunfire, our heroine finds herself alone and unnoticed; crawling away from the others toward the egress, she notices that the wallsized mirror behind the liquorshelves has grown strangely translucent. Reaching out to touch it, she is amazed to discover that her hand goes into it as if into water; waves emanate in concentric rings from the point of entry. She crawls through the looking-glass to investigate. On the other side she finds a bizarre mirror-world in grainy black-and-white where the bar is a Parisian cafe, the fraternity boys are chainsmoking intellectuals who drink coffee and argue incessantly about the articulation of the noumenal self in the films of Jerry Lewis, and nobody understands money. Since everyone speaks French without subtitles, she has no idea what they are saying; she herself delivers a three-hour lecture on Dick Powell’s incarnation of the Cartesian ego in Murder My Sweet without understanding anything that comes out of her mouth. Despairing, she crawls back through the looking-glass, finding the bar now empty save for a mysterious stranger seated by himself at a table in the back dressed in a black trenchcoat, wearing shades, and chewing on a wooden matchstick. “If you’re another tattooed flasher I’m going to rip your lungs out,” she warns. “No, baby,” he replies. “I’m the writer.” “All right,” she demands. “If you’re the writer then who am I?” He laughs easily. “The errant daughter of the wildcat oilman who disarms the biological weapons and saves the reformed carthief from the falling meteorite at the end of act two,” he says. “Played by Nikki Fritz.” “Oh yeah?” she says. “If I’m Nikki Fritz then what about these?” — ripping her shirt open and revealing to her own astonishment a pair of melons unmistakably those of Nikki herself. “But if I’m Nikki Fritz then you must be... .” “That’s right, baby. Leonardo Garbonzo.” A team of commandos burst in, weapons drawn. “Hands off that nipple ring,” their leader demands. Garbonzo sneers, whips out a forty-five, and points it at the head of an enormous stuffed animal. “Freeze!” he says. “Or the bunny gets it!” As each of the three dozen triggers of each of the three dozen guns now aimed at him makes a loudly audible click, with his free hand he dials a cell phone. “Quentin?” he asks quietly. “I have a problem with a standoff... .”


Later.


____________


Laugh-a while you can, monkey boy (9/11/00)


— As for our other misadventures:


I did find the Joy piece in the Wired archive, but tired after half an hour or so of slogging through extraneous downloads and never got to the end of it. [Surfing has now become roughly as exciting as standing in line at the Post Office.] Meaning, I guess, that I got through the part where the machines are taking over, but never quite got to the part where we all learn kung fu like Keanu and beat them up in virtual reality while looking very cool in black leather and mirrorshades. — It is profoundly depressing to compare this freshman-essay composition with the philosophical pieces we were accustomed to receiving from scientists a generation ago: Dyson, Monod, even Bethe or Feynman; let alone Bohr, Einstein, Born, Heisenberg, Schrödinger. Or [more directly to the point] Turing or Von Neumann. — Mr. Joy doesn’t seem to be able to reason on his own, preferring, apparently, a technique of random quotation introduced by namedropping anecdote; the result, I presume, of a career spent thinking in buzzwords. I don’t care how much money the guy has made; he’s an illiterate cretin.

On the other hand I’ve read one or two occasional pieces of Kurzweil’s, and he’s very smart. He wrote an article in the American Scientist a few years ago, for instance, that indicated an appreciation of the fact that the historical development of artificial intelligence has recapitulated the development of analytical [“linguistic”] philosophy; even quoting Wittgenstein, as I recall. [Of course this won my heart at once.] Whatever he has said on the subject is probably much more interesting. But is this yet in print?

[The significance of Wittgenstein in this connection is that he selfconsciously took an engineer’s attitude toward the philosophy of logic; thus the invention of truthtables — the original “mechanical procedure” — which, carried to its logical conclusion, led to Turing’s treatment of abstract machines. Insofar as there’s a philosophy of mind in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it’s a theory of automata.]

I flipped through the responses to Joy’s article in a subsequent issue while standing in line at the grocery store, but couldn’t find much substance; indeed, it looked as though they’d simply printed the comments of the people who sounded most impressive; still more namedropping. [Again, the corrupting influence of the principle that all journalism is celebrity journalism.] — I have somewhere the Xerox of an entire issue of one of the AI journals devoted to ritual denunciations of Roger Penrose, published shortly after the appearance of The Emperor’s New Mind; no less than forty separate polemics, and every one of them sucked. — I wouldn’t expect much from any public forum, in other words; even if the remarks were not constrained to sound-bite length.

As for the end of the world and the destruction of humanity, all this is true, sure enough. But since nothing can be done to stop it, and since the exact course events will take is impossible to foresee [for the usual reason, i.e., even if the initial and final states and even the change in energy driving the transition were known, the chain of intermediate catalytic reactions would not be], there’s not much point in worrying about it.

[This is a slightly stronger version of the usual observation on unpredictability: not simply instability of the evolution under perturbation of the initial conditions, but instability of the path connecting initial and final states under slight perturbations of either. Or slight perturbations of the form of the Lagrangian, for that matter.]

There was a period when [never mind exactly why] I went around polling people on their opinions regarding the identities of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This turned out to be one of those questions for which the officially received answer was by no means the best one. [E.g. Stefano: “Poverty, Flatulence, Horniness, and Atrophy.”] — Anyway I never did get it straight, and found it easiest to stick with the first thing that had come into my own head — predictably, Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo.

I doubt we need a romantic lead, making Zeppo once again dispensable. This leaves us with three obvious threats: artificial intelligence; nanotechnology [specifically artificial life, the mean between the two extremes]; and reprogramming the genome.

The problem you have in discussing these several Horsemen, then [something which certainly sails over the head of Joy, but when I need a whipping boy in these polemics I generally flog Minsky][we stuck a fork in Skinner long ago], is just the problem that their writers used to have with the Marx Brothers: although it’s gratifying to pretend for the benefit of journalists and babes at cocktail parties that you’ve scripted the performers’ routines, in reality you never have any idea before the curtain goes up precisely what they’re going to do. Obviously you remember the story about George S. Kaufman at a performance of Animal Crackers [“Wait a minute — I thought I heard one of the original lines”]; guys like Joy and Minsky, alas, are never so honest.

This problem is intrinsic, you can’t discuss it without confronting the fallacious idea that you can bottle intelligence, which is [psychologically, anyway] a corollary of the hacker obsession with fantasies of control, and, accordingly, most of the salient points fall out in the first third of the discussion; which, therefore, is the longest. [And anyway it figures that Groucho would do most of the talking.] — Actually the same points keep falling out over and over again in slightly different form, but since even now no one seems to understand them, redundancy in exposition probably serves a useful purpose. [I read only the other day that Minsky is still on tour claiming that once the Master Algorithm has been unearthed the human brain can be replaced by a hundred-megahertz CPU: amazing stupidity.]

At any rate:

With regard to artificial intelligence, you are doubtless aware that the progress of the research program, at least as classically conceived, has been vastly exaggerated.

It is amusing to contrast the brilliant advertising campaign with the relative triviality of the problems no one seems to be able to solve: e.g., finding the date fields in old computer programs; anyone with a way to automate this task would have made more money than Gates overnight, in 1999. — Or, more generally, the unsolved problem of the intelligent compiler. Of all the purportedly mechanizable intellectual activities with which I am familiar, hacking is the one that should be easiest to automate. And if you could mechanize the optimization of the translation of higher-level languages into assembly language, you could buy Microsoft with petty cash.

This doesn’t mean that I put much stock in the traditional arguments against the possibility of machine intelligence [e.g. Searle’s room that doesn’t know Chinese, or the folklore arguments Penrose attempted to summarize from the Gödel incompleteness theorem.] These have never made sense to me, and I presume that they’re wrong [in fact not even wrong in an interesting fashion.]

It seems to me instead that, though machine intelligence is obviously possible, there has been an irrational insistence on trying to develop it in exactly the wrong way. [Or: with the wrong definition of “machine”.] And that this insistence has been motivated by illusions about rationality, precision, predictability, understanding, and the ability to manipulate and control.

You observe, for instance, that the apparent triumphs of the program, e.g. the computer’s victory over Kasparov, on closer examination only reveal its futility. For here you have on one side a machine evaluating billions of positions before it makes a move; and on the other a guy who doesn’t seem to be examining more than a couple of dozen [and who then loses only because he chokes.] Obviously whatever he is doing — whatever the workings of his natural/all-too-natural intelligence — bears no resemblance to the brute-force machine algorithm, and [at least on the face of it] is infinitely more efficient.

[Moreover (and maybe most important) what Kasparov does seems to scale better, in the sense that if you increased the complexity of the problem and asked the computer to evaluate ten times as many positions, its performance would deteriorate much more dramatically than Kasparov’s.]

And, really, the classical AI idea isn’t much more than this: a brute-force tree-search, with some [essentially arbitrary] evaluation function at the leaves. The implicit thesis is that the function of intelligence can be reduced to deterministic algorithms [ideally, to just one master algorithm — like resolution in Prolog]; the implication is always that even if this isn’t the way thinking is done in a state of nature, this is the way to do it with a computer; and anyway that it is more “exact”, and therefore better.

A sympathetic reading of this approach might compare it with Carnap’s interpretation of the logic of induction as a method of justification, not of discovery: you itemize a set of rules, and brush away protests that these do not represent the real methods of the human scientist with the rejoinder that you aren’t concerned with that; and anyway they ought to.

This is the distinction between, e.g., how you know that 25 is the next number in the sequence 1, 4, 9, 16, ..., and how you would try to prove that this statement is correct; or between the act of recognition of a picture as a picture of Richard Nixon, and the assignment of a probability or degree of truth to the statement that the picture in question is a picture of Richard Nixon. [Somehow though the former is easy, and anyone can do it, the latter is difficult, and only a logician can even try; moreover (since the act of recognition is a real process in a real brain, and the “degree of truth” is a mathematical fantasy) somehow in the name of logical reconstruction you replace science with science fiction. But when I was reading Carnap it made a twisted sort of sense.]

Another of the “classical” approaches, rulebased systems, involved enumerating an enormous number of facts and principles for a class of problems and trying to deduce the solution for any individual instance by brute force. — The analogy with civil law is interesting. — The difficulty that the set of “facts” and “axioms” is never internally consistent was always an embarrassment. — This worked fairly well with things like medical diagnosis (EMYCIN) and very badly with things like trying to teach robots to drive. No one ever attempted to address the obvious question, namely, if we only have a hundred thousand genes, how do we code all these rules? and how did the rules evolve?

But [anyway] I find it hard to give classical AI the sympathetic reading. Everything about it suggests an appeal to the fantasies of control so dear to the hacker psyche.

[About which, so far as I can recall, the original reference is Weizenbaum’s book Computer Power And Human Reason: I haven’t looked at this in years, but seem to remember that he stressed the idea that most AI applications, e.g. his own ELIZA, were based on very simple tricks, and emphasized the importance of revealing the geek behind the curtain, as it were; moreover, and surprisingly for an MIT guy, he expressed grave reservations about hacker culture before anybody outside Cambridge even knew what it was.]

The peculiar inflexibility of the doctrine is the giveaway: it suggests some unstated [“unconscious”, if you like] set of motivations or reasons which are the actual supports of the structure. [Some sort of compulsion.]

That is, there is an assumption, as it were unquestionable, a priori, that the possible moves of an intelligence can be enumerated, catalogued, before the fact, and searched, surveyed, examined. — After all, this is how computer programs are written. You anticipate everything in advance. For each situation, you craft a response. — If you’re writing a computer algebra program, you have a list of procedures you can employ to transform an expression, and, basically, you try all of them; if you’re trying to integrate an expression involving elementary functions, you list all the procedures you can employ to transform that; if you’re writing air-traffic-control software, you list all the paths the planes can follow and try to keep them from running into one another [yeah, right]; etc., etc.

Obviously it ought to be an embarrassment that the strategy is always the same but the lists of procedures are always contrived ad hoc. Still, if you have a problem like chess for which you can handtune the search, the results can be impressive.

But in consequence, in the design of computer programs employed by others, the designer tends to develop the attitude that the user [or “luser”, as the MIT guys always loved to say] is just a rat in a maze, whose every move has been anticipated in advance by the [godlike] programmer. And presently the designer begins to think that he can anticipate anybody’s moves, anytime, anywhere; and that the fact that his computer programs never acquire the true autonomy that is characteristic of real intelligence is an asset, not a liability — the program need do no more than bottle the intelligence of the programmer, as it were, and this should be good enough. For after all the programmer can code anything. Thus inevitably he does not address the question of what problem-solving is so much as he attempts to solve all the problems in a given class in advance and then bottle the results; though presumably the classes are getting bigger as the project moves along, and he expects someday to arrive, as it were, at root.

This always reminds me of the story about the late scion of the degenerate Habsburg line who saw his first train pulled by an engine and assumed there had to be a horse inside. But in fact in traditional AI programs [in computer programs generally] there is no engine; and there is always a programmer inside.

[Again, this is not very different from what Carnap thought: that human reasoning could be codified, regularized, and then (of course) improved upon. — I always thought it was amusing that Carnap kept backing away from the implication that one would be able with his inductive logic to evaluate the probabilities of truth of competing theories and thus, as it were by calculation, determine which was most correct — resolving all scientific controversies “scientifically” — obviously this should have been the whole point of the exercise; an idea that goes back at least to Leibniz. — Though to be fair only recently has it become possible to mechanically verify even mathematical proofs of any complexity.]

For the hacker, at any rate, megalomania is not simply an occupational disorder, but a kind of methodological imperative.

I’m never really sure whether I should take all this seriously. I’m always reminded of the way that Rotwang the inventor, with wild hair and mad glowing eyes, describes his robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: “I have created a machine in the image of man, that never tires or makes a mistake!” Then I remember that the first thing the [emphatically female] robot actually does is to mesmerize a club full of bankers with an erotic striptease. — Isn’t this the story of the Internet, after all.

Anyway. All this provides an illustration of what I call the Napoleonic fallacy: the idea that you can sit on a white horse on top of a high hill overlooking the battle, looking down at the noise, the smoke, and the confusion, and with a swift commanding glance of your godlike eagle eye compose the whole into a unifying vision; and then, presumably, summon an orderly, and commit your reserves to the charge.

But Napoleon is like Maxwell’s Demon: when you examine what he has to do in order to function as you imagine that he would, you find that he can’t. The “swift commanding glance” presupposes gathering the [noisecorrupted] data and then piping it through some [bandwidth-limited] conduit back to Napoleon — exactly the kind of situation for which Backus invented the phrase “von Neumann bottleneck”; and “composing the whole into a unifying vision” usually involves a combinatorially impossible problem in pattern recognition — which, as it were by definition, you’re pretending will be handled by a single processor.

Implicitly you presuppose a pyramid — a hierarchical structure, a chain of command — with Napoleon at the top, evaluating everything that’s piped up to him. — But whatever Napoleon’s speed might be, it is finite. Given that, and the simple fact that the size of the pyramid he sits upon must grow exponentially, its maximum height must be proportional to the logarithm of his speed.

So you know you can’t do this as a serial computation. But once you start to try to analyze this as a parallel computation, you start deconstructing Napoleon! — and he factors into a network of less-omniscient generals, on grayer horses on lower hills, who are arguing with one another via dispatches that only get through once in a while because the orderlies transmitting them keep getting shot ... presently nobody is taking orders at all, and you have a sort of procedural chaos from which order emerges only from the bottom up, not by imposition from the top down. Or percolates outward from the middle of the network, which meanwhile you have realized isn’t really a hierarchical tree at all, but a very unhierarchical general graph — in which, you perceive, the characteristic size of the neighborhood over which any individual node can maintain a coherent picture of the global state is, again, fixed by the logarithm of that node’s speed.

What works in nature, in other words, is something much closer to anarchy, and involves local communication and local control. It is important to think like a physicist here, and not like an engineer: to realize that this state of affairs is dictated not by the frivolous accidents of history, but by mathematical necessity. Nature never bothered with the “rational” approach because, actually, it doesn’t work.

On the usual argument there’d be no point in implementing biological evolution, for instance; adopting the role of Napoleon, you’d simply “look at” the possible genomes and then select the best one. [Actually, and even harder: “best” — maybe in the sense of “largest mutually compatible” — subset of them. Compare Leibniz’ idea that the best of all possible worlds was the largest mutually compatible set of possibilities, and translate this into biology.] Part of the fallacy, obviously, lies in supposing you could examine and rank, say, 2^6000000000 possible genomes; another, curiously enough, lies in the failure to recognize that the process that constitutes your “internal examination” of the set of genomes is essentially isomorphic to the external, experimental process of evolution — that it is exactly this calculation, in other words, that Nature is performing. [It’s a related observation that with problems of this order of complexity you find yourself thinking, literally, that God himself could not tell you beforehand what the answer is, and that the world represents some kind of simulation he’s running to find out. Reminding you of the old observation about Augustine’s idea that the world might consist only of thoughts in the mind of God, that this wouldn’t make any difference to anything.]

The point is a trifle subtler, of course: it would be absurd to suppose that you could examine a zillion genomes one by one, but it might not be absurd to assume the existence of an algorithm that permitted you, as it were, to prune the tree of choices fast enough to allow a deterministic calculation in a reasonable amount of time. But the first thing you learn from complexity theory is that almost any interesting problem [e.g., Boolean satisfiability, the existence of a Hamiltonian circuit, three-colorability, the travelling salesman] that appears to grow in difficulty exponentially in the size of the input actually does; that it cannot be pruned effectively, that the exponential fanout of the tree is irreducible.

The futility of parallelism [which is apparently less obvious] then follows. The number of processors you can stuff into a machine grows [since we don’t live in Hilbert space] only as the cube [or in arbitrary fixed finite dimension as a polynomial] of its size; the number of possibilities that have to be examined in a general tree-search goes up exponentially. Accordingly, though for instance like everyone else I stand in awe of Adleman’s ingenuity in inventing a technique for solving the canonical combinatorial optimization problems by coding their representations into DNA strands and, in effect, using every molecule in a sample of macroscopic size as an independent processor to test a trial solution, with a mole of DNA you’d be able to solve the travelling salesman problem for [let’s wave our hands] 24 cities. If you filled all the oceans with DNA you’d be able to solve it for something like 37 or 38 cities. If you filled the physical universe, you might be able to solve it for 60 cities. [That’s 8320987112741390144276341183223364380754172606361245952449277696409600000000000000 routes you have to examine, incidentally.][Thanks. I’ll be here all week.]

This assumption [of the irreducibility of fanout] is essentially the assumption that, as per conjecture, P doesn’t equal NP [so far as I’m concerned this, not Gödel’s, is the theorem that says intelligence isn’t mechanizable in the traditional sense]; an open question, strictly speaking, but equivalent to the assertion that, in any nontrivial formal system, finding a proof of a theorem is inherently harder than verifying that proof — which is, to say the least, intuitively sound. [Moreover when you think about it you realize that it is just some such a point that must vitiate the mechanization program: remembering, e.g., may be a matter of mechanical procedure, but discovery or invention is something dual to it, like remembering backwards in time; just the distinction between verifying a proof and finding one.]

[Also, as I’m always observing, it’s much harder to write than it is to read.]

[There’s something right about that idea: that reversing the direction of time is, mainly, computationally prohibitive. Compare Maxwell’s Demon, which seemed to have a computational version. — Maybe this: given the macrostate in which the gas is divided evenly between the halves of the box, the computational difficulty of identifying the microstate (out of an enormous number N) that puts all the molecules back on one side is huge; the Demon has something like a sorting problem. The number of steps then probably just goes as log(N), which is to say, the entropy is the length of the sort. — More succinctly: consider the computational difficulty, as, say, a picture-puzzle, of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.]

One obvious [though never publically admitted] corollary is the impossibility of writing long computer programs without mistakes. Writing a program is equivalent to finding a proof, in a suitable formal system. [Naively, it’s a proof that a given function is recursive, though I think there’s better theory on this point, cf. the literature on typed lambda-calculi, particularly on the Curry-Howard correspondence; and it’s a bit of a mystery how intuition provides the alternative description of the function. — Part of the problem in real life, actually, is that intuition simply doesn’t; the process of writing the program is largely a process of inventing and refining the specification.] The difficulty should go up exponentially with length — and, if you examine the empirical evidence honestly, this is obviously the case. [The difficulties of matching a series of program segments don’t add, as by some mental-optical illusion they seem to: they multiply.] The limits of human capability have long since been reached and exceeded. [And no wonder nothing ever really works.] There is no hill high enough, no eagle-eye sharp enough, no horse white enough to finish debugging Windows 95. — Or the operating system for the IBM 360, for that matter; the locus classicus [cf. The Mythical Man-Month] which seemed most apropos to the problem when I started thinking about this in connection with the problem of validating the SDI code.

On a less cosmic scale, this [the impossibility of Napoleon] is exactly the problem with a command economy. First, as a practical matter the people pretending to run it can’t acquire and assimilate all the information they need fast enough to make decisions [I remember hearing a story about a midlevel Soviet apparatchik who was supposed to try to adjust sixty thousand prices a month]; second, if you ask yourself exactly how you’re supposed to compute, e.g., the greatest good of the greatest number, you realize immediately that (a) this is an impossibly difficult combinatorial optimization problem and (b) this is [modulo the arbitrariness of the utility function] what the market is doing for you, anyway — in a distributed-computational model much more efficient than anything you can design from the top down. [However, contra the usual free-market mythology, the invisible hand is only guaranteed to find a local, not a global minimum; and it’s obvious that large corporations and governmental bureaucracies are inherently inefficient in exactly the same way.]

Ah, these are great times to be an anarchist. You find yourself winning arguments you hadn’t even thought to contest.

Anyway this suggests the approach that anyone familiar with mathematical physics would have thought of in the first place — namely, when you have a seemingly intractable problem, you take the hint from the way that Nature solves it.

[This is exactly the fascination of protein folding, since the problem is prima facie combinatorially impossible (Levinthal’s paradox): you might have 10^200 ways of folding a polypeptide of 200 amino acids; the natural cycle time of the system (at 300 degrees Kelvin) is about 1.6*10^-13 seconds, suggesting that it can’t sample much more than a few trillion configurations in the time it observably takes to fold; how does it find the ground state? — Literally the question is: how does the protein make this computation?]

Historically this motivated the idea of trying a theory of automata more closely modelled on the workings of the brain; this is, of course, the theory of neural networks, which began in the Forties with McCullough and Pitts, languished in the Horse Latitudes for several decades, and was then revived in the Eighties with the work on associative memory models advanced, e.g., by Hopfield.

To make a long story short, this is the first real advance in the philosophy of mind since Hume, and it’s obviously the correct approach; though the details are formidable, only details remain. So it’s clear that a real thinking machine will not be deterministic, that its output on given input will not be predictable, that it will solve problems by guessing, that [just as evolution does] it will depend on error to function, that it will not in the ordinary sense be programmable [“parallel programming” is almost a contradiction in terms]; that it will, in short, be selforganizing, near-chaotic, undesigned, autonomous. — Also [and this is a critical realization] that it won’t ever solve the problems it’s presented with “exactly”, not because of the imperfection of its design, but because exact solutions for those problems don’t really exist.

So, anyway, the idea of dissecting the human mind on a laboratory bench, itemizing its parts and their functions, enumerating its possible outputs for each of its possible inputs, and then building a well-oiled and wholly deterministic machine that will reproduce not its actual behavior but the behavior it is “supposed” to exhibit is delusional. [But note that this fantasy is also shared to some extent by true believers in behaviorism and psychoanalysis.]

Still this doesn’t mean you can’t design and build [or at least grow] something like a human brain. In fact you should be able to model it efficiently in [nondeterministic] software; and then improve upon it. It’s just that this doesn’t imply that you’ll know how it works.

[There is already at least one guy I’ve heard of who builds neural network chips that evolve their own programming to solve the specific problems he assigns them using genetic algorithms, and then, like any other biologist, spends most of his time trying to figure out how the hell they do it. — In a nutshell, this is the future of computer programming.]

In fact it’s not even obvious that you’d know when you’d done it. Gibson’s original prediction was that artificial intelligences would emerge more or less by accident on the global network, and that it would take, as it were, the best part of three novels to figure out exactly what had happened. This still seems plausible.


Having made this fairly overwhelming case against determinism, I should admit that it’s possible that strict algorithms might be able to run in polynomial time on quantum computers. — That is, it’s possible that quantum computation is inherently more powerful than classical computation; and that, perhaps, in this model P equals NP, Church’s thesis is modified, combinatorial optimization problems can be solved exactly within reasonable time limits, and Napoleon might be able to climb as high a hill as he likes. As evidence in favor of this conjecture you can wave your hands generally at the native parallelism of quantum-mechanical dynamical evolution [the particle doesn’t traverse the classical path of least action but all paths simultaneously with an amplitude whose phase is proportional to that action] and specifically at Shor’s quantal algorithm for factoring integers in polynomial time. As evidence against it you can wave your hands at the apparent necessity of preserving reversibility [aka unitarity] in quantum computations, which seems to indicate that the previous handwaving argument linking the polynomial/exponential distinction to the irreversibility of time wasn’t complete bullshit; and guess that the size of a reversible quantum computer might have to grow exponentially with the size of the problem.

Penrose, one should note, did half-seriously propose that the brain is inherently quantum-mechanical in its operation [as did Eddington long before him, actually, though no one seems to recall it]; however his arguments weren’t very convincing, and anyway the point seems to be that quantum mechanics doesn’t banish determinism but rather reinstates it. But I suspect the correct analysis of quantum computation will show the way to solve the P/NP problem; which is to say, that none of this will really be understood until the theorem has been proven. Meanwhile I’ll stick with my conclusions.


Anyway. The assumption — of Minsky, of Frankenstein, of Rotwang — and of Joy, were he smart enough to be that interesting — is that in the process of replacing all the messy wetware of the human brain with the rule-based systems that it imperfectly attempts to implement, the riddle of the nature of intelligence will be laid bare to a select few, the dudes on the white horses on the high hill, the philosopher-kings, the hacker Napoleons; and that these guys will have it within their power, as it were by construction [as a mathematician would put it] to control the behavior of their creations. [And the behavior of all those messy imperfect humans as well; but let’s not go there. Yet.] But the artificial brains won’t work that way, the riddle is though transparent nonetheless impenetrable, and control as always is an illusion. — You can fantasize yourself the master puppeteer; but no one, not even Cusack, can pluck a trillion strings.

Thus though machine intelligence has no apparent bounds, hacker intelligence has very obvious limits. And though it will not be that long before it’s possible to fabricate a machine smarter than Von Neumann, it won’t be a Von Neumann machine; will not be programmed since not programmable; and its behavior, being more complex than that of its creators, will be even more impossible to predict in advance.

[Von Neumann himself was, alas, rather easily impressed by bozos in uniform; robots, being really alien, will be harder not easier to tame.]

So the fantasies of control are delusional. What emerges will be something inherently uncontrollable: insofar as they know what it’s doing, it won’t work, and insofar as they don’t, it will. It won’t even be possible to direct the research in such a way as to avoid unintended consequences. And nobody gets to play the short dead dude.

In fact that’s probably the best summary: nobody gets to play Napoleon; as usual, everybody gets to play Bill and Ted.



As for the second menace: I don’t know much of the literature. In principle it’s possible to manipulate things at the atomic level [not that we don’t do this already, cf. chemistry], and this may have applications to the fabrication of materials; fine. What might be construed as controversial or alarming is the idea of [physically-realized] artificial life. As best I can determine from flipping through the papers in a couple of volumes of the Santa Fe proceedings, the people proposing such experiments, Drexler, for example, are not entirely stupid; but nowhere near as smart as, say, Oppenheimer and Bethe, whose minor oversights nearly precipitated the end of civilization.

For instance Drexler seems to see the necessity of drawing a clear conceptual distinction between nanomachinery designed for some specific [and necessarily very narrow] purpose and, say, uncontrollable synthetic viruses that will breed until they devour the world; but doesn’t really succeed in doing it. This is not encouraging.

The problem with infinitesmal machines, obviously, is that [contra Fantastic Voyage] they aren’t good for much if manufactured one at a time and operated singly by human telepresence; they have to be autonomous, and probably they have to be self-reproducing or at least self-modifying. [They’d have to be hand-tooled for any given site or application, and you’d need trillions for every job. What kind of assembly line could turn them out?] — Skipping a few steps, what this means, mathematically, is that you have to imagine some kind of generative grammar [in the sense of Lindenmayer’s variation on Chomsky] which produces the little suckers as the endproduct of a recursive development process using a fixed set of rules from an initial quasigenomic string of specifications [no accident this sounds like morphogenesis]; if the end result is supposed to be nontrivial, these have the complexity of computer programs, and the outputs of computer programs are [see above] wholly unpredictable. Protests that the programs can be debugged before the critters are set loose are [I say yet again] simply fatuous. [E.g., the problem of predicting what language is generated by a general phrase-structure grammar — literally: whether or not the language is nonvoid — is essentially the same as the halting problem for Turing machines; not simply NP-hard, in other words, but recursively unsolvable.] Moreover if the point is to manufacture these machines for applications which involve their interaction with real living things, e.g. scrubbing sclerotic arteries or killing tumor cells, their programming will have to be extremely flexible: the most obvious prototypes of such gadgets are the antibodies of the immune system, and these adapt to attack foreign intruders by mutating at a prodigious rate until they develop binding sites specific to the alien objects they want to recognize and negate.

I suppose there’s some fantasy entertained about directing this army of little boogers by remote control; but this is just Napoleon again, obviously — and the smaller the critters are, the more literally Napoleon and Maxwell’s Demon look alike. So forget that.

But to restate the most obvious objection yet again: you well remember your first happy adventures in computer programming — that harmless-looking little procedure that crashed the operating system, the input-output routine that wrote zeroes throughout core and copied itself in fragments all over the disk drive, those entertaining embarrassments that recalled to you Mickey’s exploits as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia. — So who’s backed up the biosphere? because some imbecile will certainly find a way to erase it, if this line of research is pursued.

In conclusion, though some kind of miscegenation between the organic and the not-yet-organic is certain to occur, I doubt it will take the form of reinventing bacteria and letting them eat us. Who could be that stupid?

[Don’t answer that.]


Let’s pause to state the computational challenge problem which, if we translate it back into existing biology, this line of thought suggests: given the genome for an unknown organism, to generate a [complete] simulation of it. — And, so long as we’re imagining impossibilities, the inverse problem: from a [necessarily incomplete] description of an organism, to produce the code that will generate it. [Suppose, e.g., that you wanted to make dinosaurs, but you couldn’t find Crichton’s mosquitoes trapped in amber.] — The forward problem [suitably constrained] can’t be impossible, even though it properly contains relative trivialities like protein folding; you can always grow the organism [i.e., Nature can perform the computation.] But the inverse might be. [Again, this is the difference between following a proof and finding one; in this case, the “proof” that a given organism can be obtained by morphogenesis.]

[I’m haunted by an idea I first found in an old story by Keith Laumer, Worlds of the Imperium, which described a magic televison that allowed you to channelsurf (as it were) sideways in time; he illustrated this with a vivid description of a scene of a farmer plowing a field behind a couple of oxen which morphed repeatedly as the viewers tuned their way from the original settings through a series of variations in which the animals changed into alien forms, the farmer’s skin turned purple, he grew more fingers and extruded antennae from his forehead, the landscape rippled into hills, the sun and the sky changed color, etc., etc. I remembered this not long ago when I was trying to figure out some way to steer the changes in a generic picture of a face: if you could put the right controls on the software, you could, maybe, produce some kind of generalized police-artist that would allow you to draw people from memory — or, maybe more interesting, make them up. (Actually I think the cops do have something like this now, but I don’t know how it works, or how well.) — Similarly you might imagine a tuner that would steer you through possible variations on a genome and generate simulations of the corresponding creatures for you in real time. — The problem, in both cases, is trying to figure out some happy mean between your naive vision of a single tuning knob and the nasty reality, which is that you’re trying to navigate your way around a Hilbert space, and need an infinite number of them. Or at least a few billion.]

[Note added later: the underlying skeletal model in Shrek is supposed to have five hundred forty joints; so in some sense you can see from the verisimilitude of the animation that a few hundred knobs — the first few hundred dimensions of the Hilbert space — would suffice, insofar as reproducing human motion is the object. I’m still not sure about faces.]


As for the third menace, the reprogramming of the genome, this will certainly happen. Since it will probably start happening in the very near future, people are already talking [in the pages of Business Week!] about legal restrictions, etc. — as if there were some distinction you could clearly enunciate in a courtroom between eliminating genetic defects and introducing genetic assets. Even if there were legal restrictions, they would not apply universally [I’m happy that we do for the moment run the world, but there is an alarming hubris in this unspoken assumption that American law is the only law] — offshore, in Asia, if need be on the Moon — and the competitive advantages of ignoring these constraints will be so enormous that a way will be found to circumvent them.

For instance at the first moment that someone finds it advantageous to breed supermen for specialized purposes, or simply to clone the most obvious candidates, it will happen. — In the Gibsonian scenarios [and Gibson is our surest guide here] the ruling classes end up owning them, and there’s certainly ample historical precedent: Leibniz and Bach and Euler were all kept as pets.

On the other hand the lead time for delivery of a crop of Ed Wittens is at least twenty years, and a lot can happen in that time.

At the other end of the food chain, it’s hard enough already to figure out what separates men from apes; very modest augmentations would suffice to turn chimpanzees into a new servant class. Try to stop that. [A career at the butt end of the service industries has taught me the great truth that makes the world go round: people are cheaper than machines. — And if people were only cheaper, it would all go round that much faster. Just ask the editors of the Wall Street Journal.]

In general it’s so easy to think of mechanisms that would accentuate the internal differentiation of the species that you can’t imagine that it won’t happen; more, you have to suspect there’s some kind of principle that dictates this out of natural necessity.

But the motives that drive the initial applications will likely be more prosaic. I remember having being struck by Gibson’s observation [now a couple of decades old] that whole gangs of disaffected youth could decide to look like James Dean; and thinking that this had the stink of the truth about it. — Indeed a sort of improved cosmetic surgery is a natural first step. But where does this stop?

None of this is at all new; it’s just that it’s finally within reach. Most of the obvious points were made by J. D. Bernal in the Twenties in a speculative essay entitled The World, The Flesh, And The Devil; a work which I looked up recently and read again, just to confirm the suspicion that all this had been foretold long ago.

Bernal was no mean stylist. The first sentence is memorable: “There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.” — So much, I want to say, for science fiction. — But, skipping over a number of interesting speculations about materials science, the first descriptions of photon sails, space stations, solar panels, etc., etc., and cutting to the biological chase, you find the piquant summary: “It is quite conceivable that the mechanism of evolution, as we know it up to the present, may well be superseded ... after all it is only nature’s way of achieving a shifting equilibrium with an environment; and if we can find a more direct way by the use of intelligence, that way is bound to supersede the unconscious mechanism of growth and reproduction.” — Pointing out that this began, in effect, with the invention of tools, he continues: “Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution.” — Though Bernal’s explicit vision of this is a trifle old-fashioned, a sort of brain-in-a-barrel idea [reading this over again I realized this was the origin of the old classic Thirties scifi story Professor Jameson’s Satellite, about a scholar who dies, has his body put into orbit, and then wakes up a couple of million years later when a party of exploring robot-dudes find the orbiting casket and transplant his brain to one of their bodies — presumably the origin of the fantasy which apparently governs the decision by the Alcor-bracelet dudes to have their brains frozen when they die and stored in Scottsdale], his idea is, as it were, mechanism-independent, and it’s obviously correct.

Bernal must obviously have had a direct literary influence on Huxley; presumably it extended farther. This sounds, actually, like another urtext of cyberpunk, which is in large part the elaboration and development of the theme of the interpenetration of the animate and the inanimate; regarded variously with paranoiac alarm [in Pynchon], fascination [in Gibson], or with a sort of grisly playfulness [in Cronenberg].

Bernal concludes that a class division will appear in humanity depending on whether they do or do not embrace these changes; and suggests that the ones who do will be the more intelligent, adventurous, etc., and that they’ll probably end up living somewhere off the planet. — I too expect that this will happen, but expect instead that the division will fall along pre-existing class lines: i.e., the ones who will have the money then to pay for cosmetic alterations, to have their children augmented, and to remove themselves from the reach of terrestrial law will be essentially the same ones who have the money now for cosmetic surgery, to place their children in private schools, and to buy their way out of murder raps; but as more power is concentrated in fewer hands, and the already considerable competitive advantages of the wealthy over the disadvantaged become qualitative biological differences, the gap will become a phase boundary. It’s a kind of Scott Fitzgerald joke now, when people refer to the very rich as a different species; but presently this will literally become the case.

And then they’ll all go to war and smoke all the rest of us trying to get at one another. [Like 1914, only worse.] Not exactly a cheerful prospect.

But probably the machines get smart and take over first.


Let’s make a parenthetical note that, if it should prove economical [in the broadest sense] for humans [and not intelligent robots designed specifically for the purpose] to do things like colonize Mars and mine the asteroids, they will certainly be drastically modified and thoroughly re-engineered humans. [But, pace Dyson, it seems as if a robot would be a better idea all around: something that could live in vacuum directly off sunlight.] And of course it’s been obvious for a long time that interstellar flight is completely impractical for organic lifeforms; a million-year lifespan would be the minimum requirement. I think you need something stabler than DNA to pull that off.

[So, inverting the argument, if we were to be visited by extraterrestrials, it’s unlikely we’d recognize them as organic lifeforms. The little green men would be wholly superfluous; the flying saucers themselves would be the aliens. — Or worse, something like Hoyle’s Black Cloud, some nanotechnological virus descending in a swarm to devour the Earth. — It never ceases to amaze me what a fucking Pollyanna Carl Sagan was.]

With regard to the other parlor stunts, e.g. cloning, it seems inevitable that some Gatesian megalomaniac will try it; the temptation to hand over the empire of Microsoft, for instance, not simply to a designated heir, but to one’s self, would certainly be irresistable. [Think of it this way: this is what the evil mastermind in a James Bond movie would do; and there are now any number of overnight billionaires who would like to think they’re the kind of guys for whom Doctor No is the only appropriate role model.] But in view of what’s now possible, the idea already sounds retro.


In summary:

Wittgenstein said once that a philosophical work could be written entirely in the form of a series of jokes; and it must have occurred to you, in your meditations on the nature of comedy, that not only are there jokes which express something really deep, but that you can’t imagine any other way of stating what the joke expresses that doesn’t destroy its meaning in the translation; even if you knew what it was. [Donald Richie on Kurosawa: “While quite ready to talk about lenses, or acting, or the best kind of camera-dolly, he is unwilling to discuss meaning or aesthetics. Once I asked what a certain scene was really about. He smiled and said: ‘Well, if I could answer that, it wouldn’t have been necessary for me to have filmed the scene, would it?’”] — So it’s the point, finally, that Douglas Adams’ gag about the purpose of life on earth — that it’s all some kind of enormous computation, by some kind of organic massively-parallel computer, all run to find the answer to the question [or the question to the answer] of life, the universe, and everything — is exactly right; it is exactly that. [And the idea that the output might be trivial could be the best part.] — Obviously we don’t understand what the computation is, or what it’s for, or whether calling it a computation is really the best way to look at it, or whether we are even allowed to figure any of this out [but, dig we must] — and that’s why the most direct statement you can make about it takes the form of a joke. But it is something like this. And that’s why it’s a great joke.

But then it seems obvious that [as they say] the software is independent of the hardware it’s running on [this seems to be the engineer’s version of Platonism: platform-independence], indeed that it’s continuously redesigning the hardware it’s running on; and that if there’s some radically different direction it can take to continue the optimization of whatever metaphysical function it’s trying to maximize, it will certainly take it.

In fact arguably it’s changed platforms before: there’s some entertaining science fiction about templates stored in clays preceding organic life, and there was almost certainly an RNA world which preceded the DNA/RNA/protein era governed by the central dogma.

Nor does it matter a great deal whether we [as individuals, or even collectively] can predict what direction it will take, or figure out in more than the vaguest terms what it is doing; we can understand this well enough to see that it is by definition something that we cannot design, harness, or control. Not all the King’s horses nor all the King’s men could reassemble Humpty Dumpty; and something here is being put together that no one can take apart. [There’s a missing principle, something that’s been disguised by the way we usually look at statistical mechanics: not simply the entropic but also the organizing principles are irreversible and inexorable.]

When I write this out and look at it, it doesn’t seem terribly original: “evolutionary” philosophies are old and fairly lame; none of this is a whole lot different from what Bergson said, or Whitehead [when that mood was on him], or even a hack like Herbert Spencer; and all of that derives [cf. Arthur Lovejoy] from temporalizing the idea of the Chain of Being, which dates from the philosophical stone age. The difference is that those guys weren’t in the position of swimming in the shallow water, watching the amphibians march away onto the land.

As usual, Nietzsche understood it better than anybody else: it’s less the idea of some sort of life force or elan vital than an abstract will-to-power: the dual to entropy; a force with the properties of an ineluctable necessity or an immutable Fate. — The story [as it were] is not about us, but about that; it is silly to suppose that we can rewrite it.

But, look on the bright side: the Übermenschen would have killed us off as a minor corollary of their competition; at worst our machines will end up keeping us as pets.


........


A couple of afterthoughts:


Regarding the automatic generation of theory, etcetera: the ancestry of the idea actually extends farther into the past than Leibniz: I may still have a little volume by Martin Gardner on Logic Machines which traces the notion of the grand Ars Combinatoria back to medieval times; I seem to recall the name of Ramon Lull, for instance. — It keeps getting reinvented. E.g., writing on the semiotics of the cinema, Christian Metz refers to someone’s proposal of “a ‘permutational art’ in which poetry, discarding the chaste mystery of inspiration, will openly reveal the portion of manipulation it has always contained, and will finally address itself to computers...The ‘poet’ would program the machine, giving it a certain number of elements and setting limitations; the machine would then explore all the possible combinations, and the author would, at the end of the process, make his selection.” — And compare Swift, of course, when Gulliver visits Laputa; etc., etc. There’s another monograph here. — Of course it never seems to occur to anyone just how many “all the possible combinations” are. [Except Umberto Eco, I now recall; who traces this idea back to some tradition about the Torah of improbable antiquity.]

[I once had an elaborate scheme for musical composition by automata that sounded like this “computational poetry”. Fortunately that was before I had computers.]


In re “evolutionary philosophies”: I happened across a copy of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene in a used bookstore a while ago and [for the first time] read it; what he means by a “gene” is difficult to figure out, but he probably intends to promote some kind of Platonism that reifies chunks of biological programming. If you ignore the propagandizing, this is more or less correct. — Some decent ideas in this, but not enough to explain why he got to marry the blonde Romana.


And, incidentally: though it is presumed that there is no [classical] polynomial-time algorithm for finding the factors of an integer, from a plausible hypothesis you can show the validity of a [nonconstructive] test for compositiveness that runs in something like quintic time. — The “plausible hypothesis” is a generalized Riemann hypothesis, which gives you some idea as to the difficulty of this kind of question. — In general the formidability of the mathematical machinery that has to be brought to bear to prove even the simplest propositions about running times is daunting. I sat through a three hour talk by Smale not all that long ago, into which he inserted progressively more and more impressive apparatus until finally invoking results about the cohomology of the braid group [I burst out laughing in the middle of the lecture — I mean, how very] to establish some relatively trivial bounds on the difficulty of locating the zeroes of polynomials. — The mathematical theory of algorithms is largely terra incognita.


Later.


......


Notes after the fact (5/14/02):


In general I find it difficult to push a composition one way or the other when it gets stuck as this one did, about halfway along in the evolution from a three-paragraph flame to a heavily-footnoted twenty-thousand word philosophical essay in the style of my old hero Paul Feyerabend. On the one hand, the short and cryptic flames are fun, and brevity is the soul of wit; if you can just stop. The lengthy essays in the classical style, on the other hand, are, I suppose, rewarding in their own way, but I’ve never had much luck getting anyone to read them, and enthusiasm, accordingly, tends to flag. [This isn’t necessarily just the sort of who-gives-a-shit apathy that settles over you when you realize you can’t imagine anyone ever reading the fucking thing, but a strong suspicion that the form itself is foolish and the exercise inappropriate.] Moreover the most obvious compromise, the midsized compilation of cryptic wisecracks, has its own problems. It took me years to break the habit of trying to write like Wittgenstein, and I don’t care to provoke a relapse.

Anyway. Let’s drop this into the outbasket with a few emendations and a few prefatory observations:

First, the P/NP distinction is fundamental but, conceivably, controversial, and part of my hesitation in shooting my mouth off about its consequences stems simply from the feeling that you really shouldn’t wax authoritative about the philosophical implications of a mathematical theorem if you can’t prove it.

On the other hand it certainly looks true, and the consequences don’t seem to be well understood. So why not.

Second, Kurzweil’s book did eventually come out, but I haven’t read it. At the moment real biology seems more interesting than its imitations. Or something like that.

Third, it probably isn’t fair to say Searle isn’t even wrong in an interesting fashion: he is wrong in an interesting fashion. A lot of the time we don’t know what we’re thinking about or why it dictates what we’re doing — Freud is the locus classicus, but there are other examples - and there are many situations in which that classic paranoiac tendency to project intention where strictly speaking it does not exist is not wholly incorrect: the actions of institutions and corporations, for example, often evidence motivations and reasonings that are not instantiated in any particular person belonging to them. Something speaks Chinese, even if none of the people pushing the bits of paper around do.

[Right. I should be on the Enron defense team.]

Fourth, I don’t think the Gödel incompleteness theorem says that the brain isn’t a machine. Instead I think Church’s thesis says that Nature contains no computer more powerful than a Turing machine [I seem to recall that Fred Thompson used to call this a “metaphysical hypothesis”], the brain included; that, therefore, anything can be simulated by a digital computer [as universally assumed]; but that the unsolvability of the halting problem for Turing machines [equivalent to Gödel incompleteness] implies that the behavior of sufficiently complex machines is essentially unpredictable. [The brain may be a machine but machines aren’t machines. If you catch my drift.]

It’s possible this argument would be vitiated if quantum computation were inherently more powerful than classical computation and, for instance, allowed the solution of NP-hard problems in polynomial time; which might affect Church’s thesis as well. [The relationship between the polynomial/nonpolynomial and decidable/undecidable distinctions isn’t understood, though there’s a strong temptation to identify the latter as some kind of limit of the former; cf. recent papers of Freedman.]

Fifth, I do think you ought to be able to write a sort of Boltzmann compiler that would optimize code nondeterministically. [How you evaluate the cost-effectiveness of this depends on how many times you plan on running a particular piece of code. Obviously.] And that the traditional reliance on deterministic [fixed-algorithmic] compilation, which necessitates rewriting the compiler for every new target architecture [as opposed to entering the target architecture as a parameter, and letting the compiler itself do the work] has imposed a very low ceiling on the complexity of practicable computer languages. [Why everybody gave up and settled on C.]

This is part of the solution to the problem of the impossibility of writing computer programs: as with any other combinatorial optimization problem, you have to try to find your way by rolling weighted dice.

There’s more to it than that, but, another time.

Sixth, though the analogy between the attempt to reduce intelligence to logical calculation and Carnap’s attempt to reduce science to a logic of induction is digressive, I figured I’d leave it alone because of its intrinsic interest. — It seems to me, in fact, that the question of how you’d try to reduce the process of guessing a function from a finite set of its values [induction in the sense of Polya, a sort of inverse problem for the lambda calculus] to an algorithm is the central question in artificial intelligence [not exactly an accident variations on this question keeps recurring in Wittgenstein’s notes on the foundations of mathematics]; and though I expect that the elements of the solution are already in hand [nondeterminism, the principle of the associative memory as it applies to the problem of pattern recognition, the Metropolis algorithm, genetic recombination] at the moment I don’t see the general solution. — Russell used to say that theories were “logical constructions” from elementary facts. You wish.

Seventh, it’s worth mentioning that Fritz Lang was far ahead of his time in his understanding of geek psychology; there is an essay, for instance, in the relationship between the theme of the underground city, in the early Lang, and the traditional Caltech romance of the steam tunnels. — And, damn it, I’m just the one to write it. But not today.

Eighth, it is true [though I’ve never written out all the details] that the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics involves really fundamental logical issues; for example, the world is not a model of a set theory. [This is the content of the Bell inequality, for instance.] I always thought this should have illustrations in the theory of computation, but never had time to work them out. It may yet happen.

Last, there is, alas, an even more excruciatingly elaborate discussion of all of this which, unfortunately, I will now probably have to push through toward some kind of conclusion. Since it began as a pile of excerpts out of my back correspondence [which I use, obviously, to think out loud], this letter included, if and when you ever get a copy parts of it will probably sound very familiar. I apologize in advance.

Meanwhile, of course, you can quote me in whole or in part to your heart’s content.


— Sitting here watching Point Break as I put this back together. What ever happened to Kathryn Bigelow? the best chick action director ever. [Check out her early biker noir, The Loveless, starring Willem Dafoe.] — And note, incidentally, that The Fast And The Furious [which I also loved] reprises Point Break note for note. — “The Ex-Presidents,” says Busey, “are...surfers!” What genius.

Later.

.....


[Jonathan Swift, from A Voyage to Laputa:]


The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with forty Pupils about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations. But the World would soon be sensible of its Usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted Thought never sprung in any other Man’s Head. Every one knew how laborious the usual Method is of attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was twenty Foot Square, placed in the middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at Work. The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were fourty fixed round the Edges of the Frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This Work was repeated three or four Times, and at every turn the Engine was so contrived that the Words shifted into new Places, as the Square bits of Wood moved upside down.

[A plate is inserted here illustrating “The Literary Engine”.]

Six Hours a-day the young Students were employed in this Labour, and the Professor shewed me several Volumes in large Folio already collected, of broken Sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich Materials to give the World a compleat Body of all Arts and Sciences; which however might be still improved, and much expedited, if the Publick would raise a Fund for making and employing five hundred such Frames in Lagado, and oblige the Managers to contribute in common their several Collections.

He assured me, that this Invention had employed all his Thoughts from his Youth, that he had emptyed the whole Vocabulary into his Frame, and made the strictest Computation of the general Proportion there is in Books between the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs, and other Parts of Speech.



Compare John Stuart Mill’s account of his depression:

“After the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by music ... . I at this time first became acquainted with Weber’s Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good by showing me a source of pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was much impaired by the thought that the pleasure of music (as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semi¥tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty.”


— Other examples can, of course, be multiplied at will [have we even mentioned Borges’ description of the Library of Babel?], but let these suffice for the moment.


..........


Final note (9/1/02): a polynomial-time algorithm has been found for determining primality. So much for requiring the Riemann hypothesis.


____________


Falling bodies (8/8/00)


Not long ago I happened across the latest paperback release from Elmore Leonard: Be Cool, a sequel to the celebrated novel-turned-to-movie Get Shorty; containing the further adventures of Chili Palmer in Hollywood, and dropping by the way assorted opinions of Mr. Leonard on motion pictures — opinions with which [as you might expect] I almost invariably agree. I took note, accordingly, when during an early lull in the action Palmer pauses while channelsurfing in his living room [an occupation to which, apparently, even the buccaneers of the film industry must occasionally be reduced], and locks in on the Michael Mann version of The Last Of The Mohicans [1992]; remarking that it is a great motion picture, and that he would certainly watch it any time it might happen to be on the television.

I was struck by this observation, since though I had very vivid memories of the theatrical release of the film [which I sat through twice in succession], I’d never been able to watch it all the way through since. The reason was stupidly simple: I thought it was one of the most beautiful pictures I’d ever seen; and that the variously watered-down versions later made available on broadcast television, VHS, and even classical laserdisc were, at best, pathetic travesties of the original. As a result so far as I was concerned the film might as well have been lost; and I regarded any subsequent attempt to pretend it was still extant with impatient annoyance.

This probably requires an explanation.

Even under the best of circumstances, i.e., when a film shot in the classical aspect ratio of 4:3 is transferred to video, at each of the several stages of the process which reproduces the image it is cropped to ensure overscanning. The final result is usually about sixty-five percent of the original frame; when allowance is made for distortion around the edges of the television screen, the so-called title-safe area is really only about fifty-five percent. And this is the best case. When a film is shot in the Cinemascope aspect ratio of 7:3, pan-and-scan truncation removes an additional forty-two percent of the image; at this point, even if the resolution and color quality of the television monitor were equivalent to that of the original negative, no more than a third of the picture need be left. But at this point, of course, one must make allowance for the loss of color bitdepth in the NTSC conversion [a loss of two-thirds to three-quarters; even classical laserdisc is no more than eight-bit color], and, finally, the fact that a television image measures at best 720 by 480 pixels [it would be too much to expect from television engineers that the pixels should be square] and an adequate digital transfer of the thirty-five millimeter frame is generally supposed to require a grid of about 3600 by 2600 [cf. the American Cinematographer’s Manual for details regarding this and related technical issues.] Moreover, at the last minute, adding insult to injury, the interlaced display of the television monitor divides the effective resolution neatly in half. After multiplying all these factors out, you realize that you might as well be listening to the movie on the radio.

But improvements have been made of late: films presented on DVD are usually letterboxed, to preserve the original aspect ratio [though there is some concern that the imposition of the new video widescreen pseudostandard of 16:9 — a figure which bears no relationship to any established convention of feature film — will provide a new excuse for pan-and-scan], and the options of S-video and even three-component output [approximating 16- and 24-bit color] transmit two or three times the previous maximum in color information to the screen; there is also an apparent improvement in [horizontal] resolution, though really fine detail still inevitably disappears. [Sean Young, in a Ridley Scott homage to The Maltese Falcon, smokes what look like handrolled cigarettes in Blade Runner; I have yet to see this detail reproduced on the small screen.]

But it isn’t as bad as it used to be. And, therefore, prompted by Elmore Leonard, I went out directly to look for the DVD; brought it back; and, what can I say, watched it four times in a row. It isn’t all there, of course [this would appear to be one instance — another is the great French arthouse comedy Delicatessen — where some of the atmospheric effects cannot be reproduced in any video format], but enough has been restored to do justice to my memory of the original. — Still [and I remain emphatic on this point]: if you have only seen this on television, you’ve never seen the movie.

This rant discharged, a word about the film.

The story is not unfamiliar: it is a somewhat re-engineered version of the ancient Fenimore Cooper novel — one of a series in which the legendary woodsman the Deerslayer/Hawkeye/Natty Bumpo showed off a woodsy lore more than slightly exaggerated for the benefit of Cooper’s adoring audience of cloistered urban Yankee rubes, each a disconnected series of episodes in which the keeneyed and seemingly omniscient protagonist tracked bugs walking over water, whiffed farts on the wind days after the moment of truth, and shot lice out of the wings of flying birds; the redesign is the work of Michael Mann, a director who made his reputation with a television show about a couple of putative detectives who wore a lot of Armani and seemed fond of striking strong silent brooding poses before the Miami waterfront while throbbing rockandroll music swelled on the soundtrack beneath. Fortunately the whole was somewhat more than the sum of these parts.

The filmed scenario runs as follows: it is 1757, and the French and Indian Wars have commenced on the American continent. The protagonists, the abovementioned Hawkeye [Daniel Day-Lewis] and his adopted Indian father and brother Chingachgook [Russell Means] and Uncas [Eric Schweig] — the last two of the once-numerous tribe of the Mohicans — are discovered chasing a stag through the forest; after Hawkeye drops it with an impressive shot from his long Kentucky rifle, they pronounce a prayer over the carcass expressing their gratitude to the spirit of the deer for providing them with sustenance. Having thus established their pagan religious credentials, they repair to a frontier outpost, there discovering representatives of the British army [the usual clichéd stiffnecked inflexible arrogant redcoat cocksuckers we’ve been rooting against since the dawn of our national mythology] attempting to recruit colonial volunteers for the holy campaign against the Frogs. A local militia is raised, but not without the exchange of harsh words between several of the colonials [our hero in particular] and the always-insensitive Brits. Meanwhile, one particularly tightassed redcoat specimen named Hayward [Steven Waddington] is attempting unsuccessfully to make time with the dazzling Cora Munro [the brunette Madeleine Stowe]; tabling his proposal for the moment, he undertakes the escort of herself and her sister Alice [the blonde Jodhi May] to meet their father Colonel Edmund Munro [Maurice Roëves] at Fort William Henry. Clueless rookies that they are, they have no idea how to find the fortress in question, and take as native guide for their expedition the formidable Magua [Wes Studi] — a really mean-looking dude who predictably turns out to be a French mole with some kind of blood hatred for the old Colonel. In consequence it’s no surprise when Magua’s buddies waylay the party in the deep woods, killing many extras and doubtless steering the story to a premature conclusion, were it not fortuitously the case that Hawkeye and his blood brothers happen across the ambuscade and drive the bad guys off. Taking up the duty of guiding the babes through the enchanted forest, they drop a few hints regarding the dos and donts of life in the American wilderness, and by the time they all arrive at the [now heavily besieged] fortress, to the jealous disgust of Hayward Cora has fallen for Hawkeye, and Alice and Uncas [though somewhat less demonstrative] are pretty obviously making eyes at one another. Slipping through the enemy lines in another demonstration of American native-scout expertise, they arrive within the walls and accept the eternal gratitude of the elder Munro — which, naturally [since he is, after all, a British heavy] lasts no more than a couple of minutes before he tosses Hawkeye into irons for his insolence. But after a brief interval of uncertainty the French triumph in their strategic project and bring their bigger guns to bear, and Munro must surrender his position and, under some peculiar eighteenth-century gentlemen’s agreement, march his defeated army out under flag of truce to transport them back to Europe. Magua and the French commander have, however, a purely twentieth-century discussion about the terms of this surrender, and the British don’t get far before an Indian ambush cuts them to ribbons in what is, without question, the most beautifully-photographed firefight I have ever seen [smoke, confusion, bright red uniforms, brilliant forest greens.] Magua makes good on his promise to cut Munro’s heart out and eat it raw, but Hawkeye has thrown off his irons and he and Uncas and Chingachgook escort Hayward and the two girls away from the battlefield. They then flee in canoes across a lake and down a river infested with rapids with the Bad Indians in hot pursuit; taking refuge, finally, behind a waterfall. Finding that their powder is wet and that they can make no effective defense, they make the traumatic decision to abandon the girls and the disbelieving redcoat temporarily to the pursuers [whose torches, in a memorable image, are seen approaching through the veil of falling water], the better to effect a reversal of fortune. Pledging his eternal troth and vowing his return [this shot always makes the trailers, and it certainly ought to] Hawkeye turns from the never-more-dazzling Ms. Munro and leaps through the waterfall into outer space. — True to their word, our heroes immediately resume the chase, and trail Magua’s braves to a Huron encampment, where the heavy is pitching his plea for justice to a tribal elder of great age and impressive gravitas. Hawkeye interrupts and argues his own case; the resulting Solomonic judgment is that Magua gets to keep Alice for his own plaything and the Hurons get to burn Hayward at the stake, but Hawkeye and Cora are allowed to go free. Running from the encampment to a nearby overlook, Hawkeye takes his loaded rifle from his waiting companions and with a phenomenal shot drills the flamebroiling redcoat through the heart, ending his death-agonies [and finally shutting him up.] — It remains to free the blonde from Magua’s clutches. The four pursue the Huron posse over rocky bluffs to a high, high place; one that seems to overlook the whole of the ancient natural world. Fired by love, Uncas arrives in advance of the others and, in keeping with the relevant conventions [for in these days war had rules], hacks his way with knife and tomahawk alone through the entire party to Magua himself, who guards the girl. But the race of the Mohicans is at an end; Magua cuts Uncas down and he falls, disbelief upon his features, from the bluffs to the valley far below. Magua, curiously humanized by this triumph, now turns to the girl, solicitous, as it seems, for her welfare, and beckons her to come with him. But with a look and a purpose that were, I assure you, never to be found in Fenimore Cooper, she turns away and casts herself from the rocks to join her lover in death. Hawkeye and Chingachgook now arrive, and though the Deerslayer disposes of the remaining Hurons it is the elder Indian who dispatches Magua with a prodigious blow from his tomahawk. The trio of survivors, then, standing on the bluffs overlooking this world now at an end, pronounce an elegy not only for the race of the Mohicans, but, it is clear, for the savage nobility of the natural man and the lost American wilderness. I have never seen anything like it.

There is much that is memorable about this production: the cinematography of Dante Spinotti; the elegiac score of Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman; the casting, particularly the leads. Mr. Day-Lewis makes a very photogenic woodsman, and I concur with Elmore Leonard: every great babe of the silver screen seems to have that moment when her face alone could launch a thousand ships, and this was that moment for Madeleine Stowe; certainly I’ve been in love with her ever since.

But what is most remarkable is the way that it conveys a sort of myth of the Fall: the sense of the loss of the nomadic life, the life of the Indian, of the natural man who lived in harmony with nature and with the divinity that expresses itself in nature; and of its replacement with a soulless mechanistic civilization that must always have been some kind of sick fucking mistake, even from the moment of the first cultivation of crops. — It is, of course, easy to make fun of this idea [as Mark Twain made fun of Fenimore Cooper, and everyone made fun of Rousseau], but there is a real and undeniably deeprooted anxiety that it touches, a primordial unease that is always there and whose expressions are found everywhere in the cinema, which foregrounds such concerns. It cannot be an accident that everything in modern life is about coloring between the lines, and every instinct tells us to rip the book in half; that though the hero rides into town at the beginning of the Western, he always rides out [into a sunset] at its end; that [incidentally] he never seems to need a job, and never wants a wife; that when the village mob marches out in torchlit procession to capture the Frankenstein monster, you’re pulling for the monster, and when the biplanes go after King Kong, you’re pulling for the ape; that it doesn’t seem that Beauty killed the beast, for that matter, but something more like Beauty’s hidden agenda; that Chaplin had it right about the industrialists, Mack Sennett had it right about the cops, and Mel Brooks had it right about the emperors and kings; that every action movie begins by identifying a threat to civilization that will provide an excuse for the hero to ignore every one of its strictures; that thereafter no speed limit will be obeyed, and no window will remain unbroken; that the hero will fuck every woman he finds attractive, and shoot every asshole he finds annoying; that the best line in all three of the Die Hard movies comes when Bruce Willis is driving not simply off the road and on the sidewalk but through the middle of Central Park, and admits to Sam Jackson that, yes, maybe he was trying to hit that mime. — For if man is born free, why is he everywhere in chains?

One might make another, complementary point; a point as it were about the cinema’s original sin.

There’s an interesting compilation that came out not long ago [now available on DVD], called Landmarks of Early Film, a sampler of classic vignettes from the dawn of the art of motion pictures: Edison’s shortshorts of boxers and bellydancers; some footage of presidential candidate William McKinley feigning studied unconcern as he lounged upon his porch, pretending that he still awaited the news of his nomination at the 1896 convention — history’s first staged photo opportunity; the Lumière Brothers’ early microdocumentaries, e.g. the famous platform-point-of-view of a train arriving in a station which is said to have sent people stampeding from their seats the first time it was exhibited; Méliès’ fantastic rendition of Verne’s From The Earth To The Moon [1902]; Porter’s The Great Train Robbery [the first Western, 1903]; and the like. Though all this is great fun to watch, the most striking thing about the collection is that, after a couple of hours of pioneer experiments that look, by and large, like turn-of-the-century home movies, the anthology ends with a one-reel fifteen-minute feature made by D. W. Griffith in 1912 titled The Girl And Her Trust — at that a remake of the somewhat more famous The Lonedale Operator [1911] — a little melodrama about a telegraph operator on the railroad line who is entrapped by thieves intent on a payroll robbery, kidnapped, and carried off on a handcar down the tracks while railroad men on a pursuing engine race to her rescue [and while Griffith’s cameraman, Billy Bitzer, flies along in an open car parallel to the tracks handcranking the chase from a few yards away.] — What’s striking, after all the other amateurish footage, is that this is recognizably a movie: it’s exciting to watch, beautifully photographed, and ends with a terrific chase, skillfully edited to accentuate the action. When you see this so pointedly juxtaposed with what came before it you can’t help but be amazed by how rapidly the modern narrative cinema was invented; and how completely it was the invention of one man.

Indeed Griffith appeared even to his contemporaries to be the veritable Newton of the cinema; the entire art and industry of motion pictures seemed to have leapt fully armored from his brain, like Athena from the head of Zeus. His first experiments were confined, like everyone else’s, to the fifteen- and thirty-minute confines of the one- and two-reel format. But he advanced rapidly to the exploration of longer forms, with his twelve-reel Civil War epic The Birth Of A Nation [1915] — the first and still one of the greatest of feature films, and [after renormalization] almost certainly still the top moneymaker of all time: accounting was fragmentary, and theft on the part of the distributors, systematic, but at the best estimates it may have grossed as much as fifty million dollars — before 1920. Griffith had invented the blockbuster; the distributors had invented gross point participation.

No one had ever seen anything like it — the battle scenes in particular were unprecedented in their verisimilitude — and audience response suggested not a night at the theater but the absorption of some kind of divine revelation: people were absolutely thunderstruck; they staggered out into the streets weeping, and seized passersby by the lapels and tried to stammer out descriptions of what they had witnessed.

Alas, The Birth Of A Nation does not stop at telling the story of the Civil War from the Southern point of view [it is no more objectionable in that regard than Gone With The Wind], but proceeds, in its second moiety, to tell a very unfortunate version of the story of Reconstruction — in which, after the death of the saintly Lincoln [whose noble intentions, says Griffith, no one ever doubted] the dastardly House Republicans [why does this sound familiar?] seize control of the government from more sober judgments and impose a mad scheme of retribution upon the South which results in the legislature, the courts, and the very streets being taken away from good godfearing white citizens by their brainwashed and now strangely agitated former wards and employees; necessitating, as the terminal crisis looms and even the ashblonde virgin goddess Lillian Gish is imperiled by lustmaddened darkies beating down her door, that Griffith, the veritable inventor of the chase, the guy who first contrived the lastminute arrival of the cavalry, launch a climactic Ride to the Rescue by an army of masked riders clad in white — the saviors not merely of the girl but [thus the title] of the Aryan Nation — the Ku Klux Klan. — Griffith, in short, seems also to have invented political incorrectness.

But, contrary to the received wisdom, there is no point in burying this film under a rock and pretending that it was never made; that no one ever saw it and admired it; that those who did, and did admire it [notably the sainted Woodrow Wilson, who had promulgated an identical view of Reconstruction in his very influential history of the American republic] were sports, monsters, freaks, or amoral savages. The very best people show up at lynchings; I’m German, and I ought to know.

In fact everyone ought to see The Birth Of A Nation. — I’m not sure I know how to express it properly, but the point may be this: it is a profoundly liberating experience to be manipulated by the author of a motion picture into cheering on the Ku Klux Klan. Never after that can you believe without question what you see in film or on television; never after that can your perceptions be twisted quite so easily. More than learning not to trust the author, you learn not to trust yourself. This is a difficult lesson, but an important one.

In any case the most disturbing scene of all occurs before the climax; though unfortunately it has not preserved in its entirety [public outcry resulted in extensive re-editing after the first release], enough remains in the surviving prints to make a profound impression. This is a shocking sequence in which the teenaged Southern belle Mae Marsh — not Griffith’s most beautiful nor his most accomplished actress, but certainly his cutest — is confronted by a black man as she walks in the woods alone; pursued to the top of a high bluff and faced with the unambiguous threat of savage rape, she leaps from a cliff to her death. It is utterly appalling.

And what has Michael Mann given us in reply? Jodhi May, who plays Alice Munro — not as cute as the incomparable Mae Marsh, but quite cute enough — steps back aghast from the Indian brave who has slain her lover — an Indian brave who seems for the first time not repellent, not ignoble, but concerned for her welfare, and anxious that she should understand that he has, by the rules of his culture and that of the fallen Uncas, won her hand, fair and square — steps back, considers, and makes her choice: not for the Indian who stands before her, but for the Indian who does not; and casts herself from the precipice — falling, falling; from the heavens to the earth. This is at once homage, and reproach.

So, there it is: a hymn to the American wilderness, a trenchant statement of the myth of the Fall, and an elegant apology for the original sin of the cinema; perhaps the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen.

And though killing animals for meat must invariably be evil when it is not personal, it’s always a good idea to kill your television.


____________


The case for Mars (8/8/00)


From the IMDB Movie News, verbatim: ’Sony is making public descriptions of some of the scripts that it has had in recent development and has decided to abandon. The London Sunday Times listed some of them and the studio’s descriptions: “The Brothers (’a boxing champion is abducted by Nazis and replaced by his evil identical twin’); Voodoo Song (’A world-famous composer visiting a friend’s jungle plantation is attacked by a boa constrictor and nursed back to health by the chieftain’s daughter, who inspires him to write a jungle concerto’); Kiss Off (’An unwitting beauty consultant is lined up to kill a presidential candidate with a poisonous lipstick’), Circus (’An equestrian clown runs away to the city to become a stockbroker, but ultimately returns to save the family act’) and Cheap Thrills (’A man moves into a haunted house, where his ass is possessed by a demon called Captain Howdy’).” The Sunday Times added: “At least Cheap Thrills was intended to be a comedy.” ’

Reason given by an executive for cutting “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” from the first release of The Wizard Of Oz: “No MGM star is going to sing a song in a barn.” — Posterity has not received the reason for restoring it.


Meanwhile, the hits keep coming:


Shanghai Noon. [Tom Dey, 2000.]

When agents of an exiled traitor spirit Imperial Princess Lucy Liu away from the Forbidden City to the wilds of Nevada in 1881, palace guard Jackie Chan takes up the pursuit, braving train robbery, Indian tribal initiation, dance lessons from triggerhappy cowboys, evil lawmen, railroad labor camps, whiskey, scarlet women, jailbreak, and near-hanging, and, finally, with the aid of Zen-airhead pseudodesperado Owen Wilson learns to ride and rope and shoot, defeats the bad guys, rescues the errant babe, and finds his place in the New World. Though it should be obvious that the suthors took pains to touch all the bases, the high point of the scenario, I think, was that palpable moment of anticipation when Jackie paused before entering his first saloon. “This is going to be good,” I said to myself. — I cannot tell you how good it was. Check this out.


Loser. [Amy Heckerling, 2000.]

Clueless weenie Jason Biggs comes to New York to experience social rejection at a famous university and falls for semiGoth-demigoddess Mena Suvari, whose prior commitment to despicably selfabsorbed faculty chickenhawk Greg Kinnear ensures satisfaction of the requirements of the dork-meets-girl, dork-loses-girl, dork-gets-girl structure that was either [a] dictated by the gods to Aristotle for inclusion in his Poetics [b] handed down to the Israelites on tablets of stone or [c] engraved directly upon the genetic code. — The movie that’s destined to make you an Everclear fan. I guess. And teach you valuable lessons about daterape druggies. — With a cameo by Steven Wright that leaves me straining for the appropriate simile: James Joyce doing celebrity profiles for the Rolling Stone?


The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle. [Des McAnuff, 2000.]

Moose, Squirrel, Narrator, Boris, Natasha, and a boatload of dumb jokes come back from retirement to contest the implementation of a nefarious scheme of Fearless Leader Robert De Niro to turn the American public into zombies by making them watch Really Bad Television and then convincing them to vote him into the Oval Office; a plan which, actually, first succeeded with Richard Nixon, but never mind that now. Thanks to an authentic Studio Green Light, excellent CGI, very clever casting [Jason Alexander is bearable, Piper Perabo does a fair imitation of Rosanna Arquette, Russo and De Niro are great, and somebody should actually offer the FBI director’s job to Randy Quaid], the fortuitous intervention of a travelling mattress salesman, and a stirring rendition of the Pottsylvanian National Anthem, Rocky and Bullwinkle can count their return a success. Now if we can only bring Jay Ward back from the dead.


Spies. [Spione. Fritz Lang, 1929.]

A mysterious gang of spies is running wild all over Berlin! and only Secret Agent #326, Donald Tremaine, can put a stop to their activities. No sooner has he slipped into town in disguise, however, than the agents of the sinister villain Haghi [a fiend confined to a wheelchair! by day a bank president! by night an evil mastermind bent on world domination!] discover his purpose, and a dazzling femme fatale is assigned to seduce and destroy him. Fortunately for the cause of European order, our hero is pretty cute after he shaves and changes out of his hobo costume, and the babe falls for him like a ton of bricks; amid the labyrinthine alleys of the dark city, despite the machinations of a host of shifty-eyed fops with fancy mustachios who smoke cigarettes in holders, love blossoms, Haghi’s schemes are frustrated, and the collapse of civilization is averted for at least a couple of months. — Maybe the first time anybody in a movie ever sported a miniature camera in his lapel; what did Lang not invent?


X-Men. [Bryan Singer, 2000.]

The first installment in what promises to be a series chronicling the adventures of the original teenage mutant ninjas, remarkable for the quality of its effects and the bodaciousness of its babes; organized around the voyage of self-discovery of the Wolverine [Hugh Jackman], who is not only possessed of superhuman strength and regenerative power, but also seems to have been biologically modified or engineered by parties unknown, with the result that, when he’s extremely pissed off, he extrudes Freddy-Krueger fingernails — and, maybe, snorts steam and spits acid; I might have paid more attention, but it was roughly at this point that Rebecca Romijn-Stamos showed up in blue body paint, and I was laughing too hard to absorb the nuances of this portion of the exposition. Also on display are Halle Berry, dispensing the thunderbolts of Zeus [and who better to dispense them]; Famke Janssen, who exhibits a strange power to cloud men’s minds [not exactly breaking news]; James Marsden as the lasereyed Cyclops; Patrick Stewart as the [but of course] wheelchairbound mastermind Professor X, and Ian McKellen as his rival for Principal Mutant Spokesperson, Magneto. The final shootout [at the Statue of Liberty] seems rather weak, but this was as I recall a chronic problem with the X-Men, since the necessity of simultaneously satisfying the disparate requirements of the half-dozen separate talents who would show up for the final conflict tended always to diffuse the resolution. — But: no one of consequence gets killed, and most of the major questions are left unanswered. I’m hooked. On to Mount Rushmore.


Divine Trash. [Steve Yeager, 1998.]

A then-and-now documentary about John Waters — a guy who liked to play automobile accident as a child, had a lucrative career as a puppeteer before he was a teenager, and then moved on into underground filmmaking with a series of sleazy low-budget high-concept features [Hag In A Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, Eat Your Makeup, Mondo Trasho, The Diane Linkletter Story, Multiple Maniacs] which culminated in what still must be regarded as the perfect date movie, Pink Flamingos [1972] — starring the fabulous three-hundred pound transvestite Divine [“the Godzilla of drag queens”] — an exhibition of chicken fucking, cannibalism, tabloid journalism, white slavery, artificial insemination with a turkey baster, hermaphroditism, incest, castration, coprophagy, and a guy with a musical sphincter; the most disgusting movie ever made, and possibly the most original. No one was ever more brilliant in his solution to the problem of inventing himself as a director and an artist; indeed it is now difficult to remember whether, before Waters, there was an independent cinema.

Besides some priceless you-are-there documentary footage of the filming of his masterpiece [e.g., Waters coaching Divine on the right way to eat a poodle turd], there are interviews with numerous survivors of the era of underground and exploitation film and assorted representatives of the current indie cinema, including the Kuchar brothers, Paul Morrisey, Ken Jacobs, Herschell Gordon Lewis, David O. Russell, Hal Hartley, Steve Buscemi, and Jim Jarmusch; and with a variety of other witnesses to Waters’ rise to fame, among them the former film board censor for the state of Maryland, the [apparently deranged] Episcopalean priest who let Waters use his church for screenings, a couple of Extremely Serious psychoanalysts, and the univerally renowned but still anonymous Singing Asshole.


Project Moonbase. [Richard Talmadge, 1953.]

An ancient and curious Fifties television pilot which, apparently, represents the final chapter of the misadventures of Robert Heinlein in Hollywood: two rival astronauts to their annoyance are assigned to share the first exploratory flight around the Moon; when the machinations of a traitorous Red force a crashlanding on the lunar surface and a long wait for a rescue flight, the fact that one of them is male and the other female proves briefly an embarrassment to the bourgeois sensibilities of the home office. Fortunately the President of the United States [also, mirabile dictu, a woman, albeit one who sounds a whole lot like the Good Witch of the North] is able to marry them over the videotelephone before they can do anything they might regret. — A hopeless turkey, obviously, but one with occasional redeeming features: the zero-g conference in the space station where everyone is standing on a different wall is vintage Heinlein, the lunar background paintings are authentic Chesley Bonestells, and the tinkertoy lunar lander in which our heroes drift down to the surface bears an uncanny resemblance to the tinkertoy lunar lander Armstrong and Aldrin really did float down in fifteen years later. [Maybe this was just Von Braun’s design all along, I don’t know.] — And, incidentally, the obligatory heaving-bosom-on-the-acceleration-couch shot proves that those Fifties brassieres were good up to six Gs.


Boiler Room. [Ben Younger, 2000.]

College dropout but very professional hustler Giovanni Ribisi is recruited by a couple of slumming highrollers from the gambling casino he runs from his living room in Queens into a highwire brokerage firm that operates off-off-Wall-Street at the ends of Long Island; after mastering the intricacies of stocktrading and learning to exert hypnotic influence over the telephone lines, he discovers, naturally, that his obscene profit margins are not legitimate, and that the records are shredded every night, the office is prepared to move at a moment’s notice, and [this is the tricky part] the same names appear on every IPO. Even more ominous, all of his mentor-figures have memorized Michael Douglas’s dialogue from Wall Street — which, however, is nowhere near as good as Ben Younger’s: obviously this is another one of those cases [compare Michael Tolkin’s vivid portrait of telemarketing in The New Age] in which the author learned the manners and customs of his subjects by toiling among them. — But despite the Ferraris, the coke, the hotel-room gangbangs, the biker-bar punchouts with the wussies from J. P. Morgan, and the continual references to hiphop culture [“The Notorious B.I.G. said it best,” says Ribisi: “’Either you’re slinging crack rock, or you got a wicked jump shot.’ ...So I went the whiteboy way of slinging crack rock...I became a stockbroker...”], somehow I’m no longer satisfied by Imitation Gangsta. — I want the New Jack City of stockbroker movies; I want to see these guys really killing one another.


Onegin. [Martha Fiennes, 1998; after Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.]

Jaded Russian nobleman Ralph Fiennes [cutting an appropriately Byronic figure in cape and top hat] wearies of the social whirl of Petersburg and goes into the country to settle the estate of his deceased uncle. Discovering Liv Tyler living next door, he loans her a volume of Rousseau to broaden her horizons and is somewhat disconcerted when, in consequence, she conceives a mad unbridled passion for him which [having, apparently, frozen his libido in liquid helium] he cannot reciprocate. One thing leads to another, and before you know it he’s matching pistols at dawn with somebody he doesn’t really intend to kill, but snuffs anyway [ironically, this was Pushkin’s own fate], necessitating remorse, exile, and one of those fabulously Romantic moments of mutual recognition when the two principals meet again in Petersburg after a separation of many years.

The question you are inevitably asking yourself here is whether this really was the most useless aristocracy in the history of the world; could they actually have been so bad that the Bolsheviks looked good? but it is not a question that receives an answer, since, in truth, all these costume melodramas have begun to look alike, and Pushkin’s drones seem no more sterile and unproductive than Edith Wharton’s New York plutocracy in The Age Of Innocence; neither class, on the evidence of the motion pictures we have suffered through about them, having any better occupations than exchanging elevated sentiments in stilted diction at relentlessly overmannered dinner parties, aiming their glasses at one another during evenings at the opera, and casting brooding gazes out their windows at mysteriously pastoral urban landscapes.

Moreover, though all this makes excellent spectacle, for all the Petersburg living-museum exteriors, atmospheric forests, weathered peasant visages, ruined country manses, quaint native superstitions, acute discussions of The Serf Question, and deft portrayals of Coming Out In Society, it remains the case that Woody Allen closed the Russian-novel genre more or less permanently with Love And Death, and there is, alas, no turning back.


House On Haunted Hill. [William Malone, 1999.]

A remake of the William Castle classic: eccentric millionaire Geoffrey Rush invites a party of strangers to spend the night in what he claims to be a haunted house, offering a prize of a million dollars to anyone who survives until the morning. At first this seems like an elaborate scheme designed to divert attention from his efforts to kill his wife Famke Janssen; then it seems like the whole affair is a ruse to disguise her culpability when she whacks him; then it becomes apparent that the house really is haunted by special-effects technicians who are intent on voting everyone else off the island. It all worked better with Vincent Price.


Mission To Mars. [Brian De Palma, 2000.]

When the crew of the first expedition to Mars goes offline under mysterious circumstances, World’s Greatest Rocket Jockey Gary Sinise [still totally bummed by the dramatically convenient demise of his wife] is pressed into service by his buddy Tim Robbins to join the dash to the rescue — which, predictably, gets to the Red Planet just in time to run into a meteor shower that wrecks the ship, necessitating a vertiginous spacewalk only slightly inconsistent with the principles of Newtonian dynamics and a Noble Sacrifice For The Benefit Of All Mankind on the part of Robbins completely consistent with the principles of screenwriting — eliminating as it does the mentor figure from the plot at the industry-standard two-thirds mark on the dipstick of the scenario, and setting up a seat-of-the-pants crashlanding from which our remaining heroes walk away with no more than a couple of motherboards and a change of underwear to make the flight back. Tracking down the lone survivor of the first-act disaster [a guy who is by now, in somebody’s telling phrase, a few mealpackets short of a picnic], they hear a harrowing tale of disaster and discovery on the Red Planet, and in short order fathom the secret of the Face On Mars [to my disappointment, seen up close it looks nothing at all like Ted Kennedy or Madonna] and get a tour of the Stanley Kubrick theme park the alien masters of the cosmos have thoughtfully left behind them to explain the origin of species. In a grand finale Sinise launches himself “to infinity! and beyond!” on a mammoth Martian Roman candle and I launched myself back into the parking lot — where, as I whistled an old familiar tune, I entertained the following questions:

Why is it only Kubrick ever had enough sense to leave off his explanations before they started to sound stupid? Was Keats right about negative capability? Is it that rare? Is it that difficult?

But the zero-g stuff was great; how did they do it?

Was that a CU Buffalo on the space station bulletin board behind Armin Mueller-Stahl?

Isn’t it interesting that, thanks to the speed-of-light delay, when the shots are properly intercut, you can interpret as simultaneous the reaction of the guys on the spacestation to the message the guys on Mars are sending, the act of sending that message, and, also, what the guys are doing on Mars twenty minutes later? [Who but De Palma would have figured this out?]

Since this is essentially the same meteor strike that waylaid the Mars expedition in The Conquest of Space [George Pal, 1955], isn’t it about time to retire this particular plot device?

If there’s a face on Mars, what’s on Uranus? [I know, I know; but how can you resist?]

If aliens did design the genetic code [not so dumb an idea, Francis Crick wrote a book about it], wouldn’t there be a copyright notice hidden in the genome somewhere?

What is Scott Steiner going to do about Kevin Nash powerbombing his girlfriend Midajah? Why can’t I get to do stuff like that?

Are there Martian twisters? would they look like these?

Doesn’t the ease with which you can contrive these accident-prone planetary-exploration plots make an excellent argument for foregoing dumb stunts like sending people to Mars four at a time and mounting a serious scientific expedition instead?

If happy little bluebirds fly/Beyond the rainbow/Why oh why/Can’t I?


But enough of this merry sport. I’ve got to talk to Captain Howdy.

Later.


____________


Rocket scientists (8/4/00)


Space Cowboys. [Clint Eastwood, 2000. Written by Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner.]

Go ahead, make Chuck Yeager’s day: When an elderly but extremely large Soviet satellite of mysteriously ambiguous function threatens to crash from its decaying orbit into the earth, despicable NASA bureaucrat James Cromwell is forced to his mortal embarrassment to ask cantankerous old fart [but engineering legend] Clint Eastwood to come out of retirement and repair the errant orbiter’s guidance system; which was, apparently, stolen from Eastwood’s own design [now as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls] in a Cold War spy caper which, suspiciously, no one seems to be willing to discuss. Our hero takes this opportunity to strongarm the pencil-pushers into rocketing himself and his team of crusty old buddies [Donald Sutherland, James Garner, and Tommy Lee Jones] into the wild blue yonder to fix the busted bird; naturally they end up saving the world. — Real rockets [and, I guess, real rocket geeks] are the principal attraction here, but though we get to see a shuttle take off it isn’t half as impressive as the fabulous night launch in Armageddon; the real showstealer is the cameo by the SR-71 Blackbird — still the most beautiful plane ever built, and the epitome of everything in the American aeronautical genius that was stomped flat into bland homogeneity by the creation of NASA. As always, Eastwood knows who the bad guys really are.


____________


Me, Myself, and Samuel L. Jackson (7/4/00)


Onetime bigshot screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, his career in a tailspin after the ungenerous reception of Showgirls and Burn Hollywood Burn, has taken the writer’s last recourse and penned a tell-all expose of the seamy side of Tinseltown; though, fearing that his merciless delineation of the characters of Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, et alia may prove actionable, he is said to have adopted the device of Primary Colors and clothed the naked truth with a thin fabric of fictionalization. — Titled, apparently, Hollywood Rhapsody [presumably because Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls was already taken]; coming soon to a supermarket near you. I can hardly wait.

Ms. Stone, in the meantime, has agreed in principle to Basic Instinct Two; something tells me Eszterhas will not be providing the script.

Meanwhile, back at the multiplex:


Me, Myself, And Irene. [Farrelly Brothers, 2000.]

An Evil Twin plot that represents roughly the geometric mean of MI2 and Fight Club: after decades of repression by the patsy without, the inner psycho in Rhode Island State Trooper Jim Carrey erupts in a moment of stress and the two halves of his personality contend for the hand of witness-in-peril Renée Zellwegger as they flee the wrath of an improbable alliance of cops, Ivy League mobsters, real estate developers, and zombies from the gates of hell [it was something like that]; this necessitating [naturally] a variety of ancillary observations on dwarves versed in the martial arts, sausages, the sanctity of the confessional, the propriety of whacking off over a mugshot, bugs, dead cows, the difficulty of pissing with a hardon, nursing mothers, albinos, the use of the dildo as blackjack, and, of course, multiple personality disorders. — Is it true about black guys and quantum mechanics? Or, as Carrey says of the Zeppelins popping out of a young lady’s blouse: Oh, the humanity.


The Straight Story. [David Lynch, 1999. Written by John Roach and Mary Sweeney.]

The auteur of Blue Velvet removes yet another mask, and this time reveals himself to be Garrison Keillor — and, like Keillor’s stories, this one is mostly true: cantankerous old Iowan geezer Alvin Straight [Richard Farnsworth], himself suffering from a degenerative hip condition and incipient emphysema, receives word his brother in Wisconsin [who else but Harry Dean Stanton] has suffered a stroke; determined to mend fences with his estranged sibling, to whom he hasn’t spoken in ten years, he decides to do ritual penance by negotiating the three hundred fifty miles that separate them. Since diabetes has rendered him nearly blind, he has no car and cannot, in the ordinary sense, drive; undaunted, he grafts a homespun camper onto the back of a John Deere tractor-mower and, over the stuttering protests of daughter Sissy Spacek, sets off on a pilgrimage across America’s heartland. — On this premise Lynch constructs an entirely antiCalifornian motion picture, one embued with an almost Heideggarian sense of communion with nature [I think I want the German for “being-among-the-cornfields”] — in which most of the characters are old, and none are pretty; in which no one seems to have sexual intercourse, but everyone seems to have children; in which no highway spans more than a couple of lanes, and no business district more than a couple of blocks; in which [in pointed contrast to the recent exploits of Nicolas Cage] the hero’s velocity never exceeds one or two miles an hour; and in which the closest approach to action/adventure is an utterly static but profoundly moving scene in a bar in which Farnsworth and another lifebattered old fart, with nary the hint of a flashback, weep unashamedly into their beers as they recall their travails in the campaign against the Germans. — I am long past the point at which I can be surprised by Lynch’s originality, but it’s still remarkable just how good he can be, when that alone is his purpose. — A great motion picture.


Diary Of A Lost Girl. [G. W. Pabst, 1929.]

An unscrupulous business associate of a respectable bourgeois family takes predatory advantage of innocent young daughter of the household Louise Brooks; since a deficient spermcount is never a problem in these morality plays, she promptly bears issue, and, when an evil governess [who has, ironically, hosed her way into a position of influence] whispers ill counsel into the ear of Paterfamilias, the infant is transmitted to a cutrate orphanage and Lousie is packed off to a reform school run by protoNazis. Here she takes her place at a long table of terrified schoolgirls who, like galley slaves, lift soupspoons to their mouths in robotic synchronization as Boss Woman [in the conductor’s place] beats metronomic time. Busting out when the inmates riot, she attempts to recover possession of her child but discovers it has expired from neglect; desolate, she takes refuge in a house of ill repute, where though she adopts the uniform of the flapper she protests her intent to preserve her only slightly-compromised virtue. Alas, somebody hands her a glass of champagne, and before she knows it the Twenties are roaring in her ears; when she comes to she discovers to her chagrin that she has been ravished again — though of course this time the gentleman has had the good grace to pay her; shrugging, she accepts her destiny. From here only a few more twists of the plot and several occasions of magnanimous refusal to take revenge on those who have wronged her suffice to advance Louise from hooker with a heart of gold to wife of a millionaire Count; and, remarkably, at that inevitable culminating Velma Vilento moment when she is unmasked as a fallen woman who has attained social position, she disdains evasion of the facts of her past and faces down a host of blackmailing harpies by dint of sheer nobility of character. — A kind of Weimar rewrite of Way Down East; though of course Griffith never would have allowed Lillian Gish to take up prostitution. — Pabst doesn’t have a wow finish like Griffith’s chase over the ice, of course, but does evince a gift for striking visual imagery comparable even to Hitchcock or the early Lang.


The Lost Continent. [Samuel Newfield, 1951.]

When an experimental nuclear rocket sails off their radars to the ends of the Earth, the Air Force dispatches intrepid flyboy Cesar Romero and a planeload of German-accented scientists to the terra incognita of the South Pacific to find it; crashlanding on a Polynesian island where mysterious radiations seem inimical to electronics, they are directed by a native bimbo in a grass skirt toward a taboo Sacred Mountain whose vertical cliffs are thick with poisonous fogs and whose summiting plateau harbors giant lizards and is bathed in a weird green light which is apparently supposed to remind you of what gamma rays did to the Incredible Hulk. Sure enough, they find the rocket; but somehow the act of yanking the recorder out of the nosecone triggers a volcanic eruption, and they escape in dugout canoes in the nick of time as everything sinks beneath the waves. When I figure this one out, I’ll let you know.


Shaft. [John Singleton, 2000; written (mostly) by Richard Price.]

Vexed beyond measure when a racist scumbag spoiledrichboy murderer [none other than the American Psycho himself, Christian Bale] skips bail and evades justice, police detective John Shaft the Second [Samuel Jackson] takes the advice of his uncle John Shaft the First [the redoubtable Richard Roundtree] and tells the Man, the Department, and the System to take their job and shove it; following which act of self-liberation he runs wild in the streets of the Big Apple shooting it out with the gangs of intermediaries the script keeps interposing between him and the one witness who can put the brat away. In this enterprise he is assisted, naturally, by the Good Guys, and tramples on the rights privileges feelings and sensitive corns of the Bad Guys — which is, I suppose, as it should be, though it proves unusually difficult to tell the black from the white hats, thanks to an inconsistent coding scheme that alternates political correctness with the cheapest kind of racist stereotyping: black guys are cool, except for the worthless hiphop gangsta niggaz; Latinos are cool, except for the Dominican drugdealing greasy spics; cops are noble warriors for justice, except for the cocksuckers on the take; only affluent Wasps and the amoral lawyers who preserve them in their privileged coigns of vantage can be trusted always to be evil. — But what the hell. Someone has to be trusted to waste scumbags indiscriminately, and it might as well be Samuel Jackson and Vanessa Williams. — Silly, but a pleasure to watch from the first tones of the wah-wah pedal to the closing credits; I read the very favorable audience reaction as an indication of how nostalgic people have grown about the golden age of the driveins. Indeed, the one thing that seemed to be missing was a Planet of the Apes movie to fill out the double feature. But rest assured Burton is working on it.


Battlefield Earth. [Roger Christian, 2000. Written by Corey Mandell and J. David Shapiro; from an abominable novel by L. Ron Hubbard.]

A thousand years after the conquest of the Earth by the evil race of Psychlos, a ragged tribe of survivors hiding in the remote wilderness of the Rocky Mountains [picture Cro-Magnons clad in skins who inexplicably possess Hollywood teeth] pause during the ritual contemplation of their expository cavepaintings to expell rebellious youth Jonnie Goodboy Tyler — who, denouncing the smallminded cowardice of his elders in words familiar to all of us from a thousand earlier rite-of-passage pictures, leaps onto his horse and rides forth into the world beyond to seek the truth behind the legends of the conquerors. A mere mouthful of popcorn later he happens on a ruined amusement park which must undoubtedly be the work of the fallen gods, and no more than a couple of swallows after that he’s seized by hovercraft which fairly reek of alien menace and hauled off to the remains of Denver to pursue a rewarding career as a slave laborer. Here posed amid some striking CGI matte paintings he meets the principal representatives of the race of conquerors [John Travolta and Forest Whitaker, dressed for success in slimy evil-alien garb and sporting very bad unHollywood teeth], who are explained to be quasiSpanish conquistadors preoccupied with amassing plunder and scheming incessantly to stab one another in the back [referred to internally as employing/exerting “leverage”] so they can get their butts off this stinking colonial rock and back to “the Home Office” — which, naturally, several hundred commentators speculated must be in Milwaukee. Seeing in Jonnie an unusually bright animal whom they may exploit to increase the output of their gold mines, they plug him into an educational engine which [in keeping with the law of unanticipated consequences] teaches him enough about mathematics and the physical sciences to lead a revolt. — In short, another of those heroic-resistance-to-alien-tyranny stories, once a staple of the genre; doubtless inspired by historical precedents like the brilliant military campaign of Crazy Horse that drove the white man out of North America.

It should be explained about L. Ron Hubbard that, long before he decided to reinvent psychiatry for his personal profit, he was a very prolific science fiction writer in the golden age of the pulps; that the pulps paid by the word; and that this economic environment encouraged the evolution of a breed of artist who could type faster than he could think [admittedly not always difficult] and then con an editor into buying all of it. This does not guarantee the development of a good prose style: thus the original of this story was a gigantic pulp novel of about a thousand pages filled with vacuously repetitive dialogue and inane conceptualization; the gist of which has been faithfully transplanted into the screenplay, a scenario rich with banal prattle and burdened with annoying stylistic habits carried over from the magazine fiction of the Forties — e.g. dropping the word “planet” into the conversation several times a minute to give everything an air of astronomical verisimilitude. [Indeed, the most famous journal of the era was called Planet Stories. One might compare the contemporary insistence on connoting network savvy by labelling every business plan with an entirely superfluous “dot com”.] — Alas, this is not the kind of inspired bad writing that produces lines people quote in wonderment decades later — like that, e.g., of Ed Wood: “You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!” — “And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.” — “Saucers? You mean the kind from up there?” — etc., etc.

But, putting aside the political necessity of trying to minimize the unfortunate influence of the Church of Scientology, there isn’t much objective reason to dislike this movie [which is no dumber than Independence Day, albeit without such overpowering effects]; save for the sad and silly fact [mysteriously unmentioned in the many bad notices, presumably because movie reviewers as a class have never held real jobs] that Travolta and Whitaker and their fellow Psychlos are clearly characters drawn from life: cackling idiots who zestfully screw all their underlings simply because they can; and then react with baffled astonishment when their superiors treat them in the same fashion. — Indeed, most of the organizations that I have had an opportunity to observe at close hand are not governed by considerations of productive efficiency or even by the profit motive, but by the same rules as one of those tribes of baboons in which nothing matters save who gets to buttfuck whom. Thus it seems peculiarly appropriate that the imprisoned humans should hang from the bars of their cages and scream like monkeys; and ironic that they should react so strongly to the protagonist’s stirring peroration attempting to rouse them to the emulation of the greatness of their ancestors. — “Free men built these cities!” he exclaims, as he gestures to the urban ruins all about them. — Guess again, Jonnie.


Steve Martin, in The Man With Two Brains: “Ladies and gentlemen...I can envision a day when the brains of brilliant men will be kept alive in the bodies of dumb people!” Perhaps he had that backwards.

Later.


____________


A prayer for Carroll Shelby (6/19/00)


Chow Yun-Fat, on the set of The Replacement Killers, describing a day’s action: “I shot five hundred fifty six rounds, with two guns...Next morning I could not hold my chopsticks [laughing]...my hands were too shaky... .” And some people bitch about carpal tunnel syndrome.

Mike Nichols has announced his intention to remake the classic Alec Guinness comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets, with Robin Williams in the lead. Surely this is a good idea. However, Nichols [presumably by adding Will Smith to the equation] intends to modify the theme of the original: “That was fundamentally about class struggle,” he says. “The new one will be about race.” Surely this is a bad idea. “My movie will also end differently,” he adds helpfully. Why not simply remake Beverly Hills Cop instead?

On our current playlist:


Felicia’s Journey. [Atom Egoyan, 1999. From a novel by William Trevor.]

Sweet but no longer unspoiled Irish lass Felicia [Elaine Cassidy] hops a boat to Great Britain, in the naive hope that she can track down the dashing but irresponsible charmer who knocked her up and then went over the water to seek his fortune. Her darling Johnny eludes her, but her cause is adopted by the avuncular Bob Hoskins — by day purveyor of cafeteria cuisine to industry, by night sole inhabitant of an enormous mansion bequeathed him by his deceased mother [Arsinée Khanjian] — the auteur and star of a series of gourmet-cooking films which Hoskins screens as he prepares his lonely evening meals. Alas, the cook’s benign exterior masks inner turmoil, and it becomes apparent that the series of young female hitch-hikers featured in another segment of his video collection aren’t alive any longer either; complications ensue. — Egoyan continues to develop his theme of the life in video after death [a cinematic theme which, curiously enough, antedated cinema itself: cf. in particular the remarkable novel of Villiers de L’Isle Adam, L’Eve Future], but this effort falls somewhat short of the standard of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter.

The Emperor And The Assassin. [Chen Kaige, 1999.]

In the third century B.C., after centuries of civil war, provincial ruler Li Xuejian is inspired by his ancestors to unite the Seven Kingdoms by conquest and become king of all under heaven; casting about for pretexts to go to war with each of his rivals separately and sequentially, his consort Gong Li proposes to him the curious plan that she return to her homeland and persuade the court to send an assassin back to try to kill him, thus providing casus belli. Sure enough, the scheme works like a charm, right up to the point at which she tracks down World’s Greatest Assassin Zhang Fengyi, who turns out to be a severely conflicted hitman [tormented, flashbacks reveal, by essentially the same pangs of conscience that incapacitated Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles] who refuses the mission. While this strand of the plot is stalled, back home the wouldbe emperor is beset by palace intrigues and vexed by unusually acute questions of parentage and identity; in the course of resolving these with summary executions and a bloody campaign or two against the rival kingdoms his personality runs a fastforward from Thomas Jefferson to Ivan the Terrible. [The theme of the collapse of idealism into savagery lies close to the heart of Chen Kaige, who has written a memoir of his turbulent youth in the Red Guards.] Word of these excesses reaches Gong and Zhang, who have in the meantime fallen for one another; they decide that whacking his highness might be a good idea for real; providing occasion for the grand Chinese finale, which here as generally involves providing an excuse for the hero to die gloriously opposing insurmountable odds. [The siege of the Alamo would translate very well into Chinese.] — Pageantry, swordplay, phenomenal battle scenes, amazing photography [the cinematographer, Fei Zhao, has since been hired away by Woody Allen], astonishing detail in costume and production design, and really great hair; an epic drama of Shakespearean dimensions. Check this out.


Caracara. [Graeme Clifford, 1999; written by Craig Smith.]

Naive ornithologist Natasha Henstridge opens the door of her New York apartment to a couple of FBI agents who need her balcony for a surveillance job; it would be far too simple if they were what they claim to be, and, in fact, no sooner has their supervisor Psycho Terrorist Johnathon Schaech made an appearance than it becomes clear that the real intent of this merry crew is to whack Nelson Mandela [Nelson Mandela? who next? Alexander Dubcek? Willy Wonka?] with a bazooka. The embodiment of pluck, Ms. Henstridge thwarts the plan of the would-be assassins and escapes their clutches, but complications multiply forthwith, and bystanders drop like flies as Schaech attempts energetically to make good on his reputation as a man who never leaves a witness behind him. By the time we arrive at the final shootout at a diplomatic reception we’ve long since lost track who hired the guys who hired the guys who hired the guys who hired Jackal Lite; but we are permitted the satisfaction of seeing the girl [for once] nailing the bad guy all by herself. — With Lauren Hutton as the protagonist’s alcoholic former-Sixties-radical mother, and an exotic South American hawk on Ms. Henstridge’s leash. Remind me to take up falconry.


Daughter Of Horror. [John Parker, 1955.]

A precursor of Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead: A deranged young woman [Adrienne Barrett, though I would have preferred Barbara Steele] wanders at night through an atmospheric urban jungle populated by unshaven alcoholic guys battering slatternly women whose slips [so totally Fifties] keep falling off their shoulders, cackling dwarves peddling newspapers with lurid headlines, hopped-up musicians playing beebop in smoky cellars, leering, staggering drunks, and shadows which seem to possess their own personalities [this wasn’t always a joke]; picked up by a beefy character [he looks a sort of brutalized Orson Welles] in a limousine, she takes offense at his table manners and tosses him out of a window. — But is this live, or is it Memorex? and what about this vision in the graveyard? — Every guy needs a shave and smokes a cheap cigar, every wall is stained and splattered, every street is a deadend alley [the American translation of the Prague of legend?], every light is flickering neon, and every horn is a saxophone. — All this without a scrap of dialogue; occasional narration [sheesh] by Ed McMahon.


RKO 281. [Benjamin Ross, 1999; written by John Logan.]

Boy Wonder Orson Welles [Liev Schreiber] comes to Hollywood to make a movie; at a loss for a story, he follows his buddy washedup alcoholic screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz [John Malkovich] to a dinner party at the palatial mansion of famed evil news baron James Cromwell/William Randolph Hearst [“It’s the place God would have built, if he’d had the money,” says Malkovich of San Simeon], and the rest, as they used to say in the portentous narration of those opening newsreels, is history. — With innumerable cinematographic quotes, of course, from Citizen Kane itself, and a wealth of anecdotal detail which may even be accurate: to the best of my knowledge, e.g., Welles actually did learn the use of the camera by sitting down with Gregg Toland in a screening room and watching Stagecoach forty times in succession; and everyone has heard the story about the original meaning of “Rosebud”. — The denouement suggests the mutual annihilation of particle and antiparticle, and leaves no doubt about the future shape of the career of the unfortunate auteur: having held Hearst’s dinner party spellbound with a description of a bullfight, Welles is quizzed by an unamused host as to his name and his business; identifying the filmmaker-to-be, he sniffs with satisfaction. “In Hollywood,” says Hearst, “the bull and the matador are both slaughtered.” — No shit.


Gone In Sixty Seconds. [Dominic Sena, 2000; written by Scott Rosenberg (after an original by Toby Halicki).]

When daring but judgmentally-challenged little brother Giovanni Ribisi bungles a heist and incurs the wrath of a psychopathic ganglord, World’s Greatest Car Thief Nicolas Cage must reluctantly return from a bucolic retirement and purloin fifty very flashy exotic cars in twentyfour hours.

Or, something like that. Actually he starts out with the best part of a week to accomplish the task, but since the premise provides the screenwriter with no action to fill the interval between the setup [presumably the first act] and the chase [presumably the third], the intervening chasm is bridged by the assembly of a merry band of carthieves [this time including Robert Duvall and Will Patton but regrettably not Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson] and the fabrication of some fairly feeble excuses for not stealing anything until the last minute.

But at last the chase commences, and Cage outwits several factions among the bad guys and the Keystone Cops, swipes the cars, reunites his family, reconciles with his estranged girlfriend [the estimable Angelina Jolie], overcomes the jinx of the Shelby GT 350 Mustang [referred to internally as “Eleanor” or “the Unicorn”], and, in an improbable finale, hurtles across Los Angeles at the speed of light to [no surprise] a shootout in a warehouse.

As always in a Jerry Bruckheimer production, the producer is the real auteur, and the choppy editing of the development, the dumb jokes [herein, fun with dogshit], the endearing eccentricities of the characters [cf., e.g., Buscemi’s two tours of duty as a lovable child molestor], the heavily-filtered look of the daylight exteriors [really annoying once you have come to expect it], etc., etc., are identical to Armageddon, Con Air, The Rock, Bad Boys, Top Gun, etc., etc., etc.; and, alas, the trademark Third Act Whammy must always be measured against the daunting standard of that fabulous plane crash on the Vegas Strip.

Thus on the one hand this opus provides a valuable counterexample to the conventional wisdom about the necessity of a three-act structure: the thefts belonged in the third act, certainly, but it should have been the third act out of five; every really memorable action picture [e.g. Ronin] has more than one chase. On the other hand it is refreshing [particularly for an inhabitant of the Peoples’ Republic of Boulder] to see the police depicted not in the style of contemporary neofascist mythology as genetic recombinants of Sherlock Holmes and Hercules but as the Mack Sennett rejects they actually are.

In sum: fast cars and at least one beautiful woman; what more could you want?


American Movie. [Chris Smith and Sarah Price, 1999.]

Intrepid documentarians Smith and Price venture into the uncharted suburbs of Wisconsin to investigate the phenomenon of wouldbe horror auteur Mark Borchardt, a thirtysomething former wonderboy high school dropout who is, in the immortal words of Gene Wilder, going crazy in Milwaukee: a man with the soul of an artist trapped in the body of a member of the lower classes, dunned by a horde of creditors, buoyed up only by the strength of his own ambition, he supports himself marginally by sweeping floors and delivering newspapers [hypocrite auteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!] while scheming to write, fund, produce, photograph, and direct Northwestern, an essay in imitation of his hero George Romero. In this project he is assisted by an eccentric assortment of wannabes recruited from the ranks of his fellow trailer trash, most notably his best friend Mike Schank — a guitar player with a vacuous smile whose personality seems to have been erased by the chronic use of beer and weed — and his doddering old uncle, a Bathless Groggins figure who, toothless, mumbling, and unshaven, responds with a curious mixture of fond affection and incoherent irritation to Borchardt’s repeated requests for venture capital.

Gradually, of course [compare Fargo] it begins to dawn upon you that these people are not at all the witless yokels they appear to be — that Borchardt and Schank are, actually, very talented, that the drooling uncle squatting in a heap of his own trash in the trailer park has a quarter million in the bank, that this crew of Ed Wood wannabes might actually be capable of making a decent feature; were it not so incredibly difficult to make a movie by yourself. — At one point Borchardt and one of his actors shoot and reshoot a violent struggle on a kitchen floor which is meant to climax when the actor’s head is shoved through a cabinet door. But the door refuses to break, and the obviously painful scene must be repeatedly reshot. — It is the daunting implication that this is the life of the independent auteur: ramming your head into a wall again and again, until you break it down or they carry you out.

Lacking money, Borchardt gives up his principal project temporarily, backtracks, and attempts instead to complete an earlier short feature called Coven, which he describes in a typical rambling rant: “It’s a thirty-five minute direct-to-market thriller film shot in sixteen-millimeter black and white reversal...It’s an alcoholic, man, compelled to go to a group meeting by his one and only friend...but they’re not that helpful, the group, you know...you know the group thing? [His friend Mike responds, ‘Ah, yeah’] ...so that’s what we’re doing the film on...last night, man, I was so drunk I was calling Morocco, man, trying to get to the Hotel Hilton at Tangiers in Casablanca...man...is that what you want to do with your life, suck down peppermint schnapps and call Morocco at two in the morning?”

In this subproject, at least, he does succeed; and the DVD includes the completed film, which is, mirabile dictu, vivid and frightening: beautifully composed and animated by that insight of Hitchcock passed down via Romero, that gore is a lot scarier without color, that the darkest nightmares are in black and white.

But what I carry away from this, finally, is one of the great images of the documentary cinema: Borchardt parked in his battered sedan at the county airport in the dead of winter, sitting in an unheated vehicle making amendments to his script; the soul of the artist, superior to circumstance. — Perhaps talent is irrelevant after all; mere epiphenomenon, the product of an act of will. — Character is destiny, says Heraclitus.


The Bare Wench Project. [Jim Wynorski, 1999.]

Sorority sisters Julie K. Smith, Nikki Fritz, Antonia Dorian, and Lorissa McComas launch an expedition into the Enchanted Forest to shoot a documentary about legendary witch Julie Strain, with predictable results: they get lost, they hear weird noises in the night, they find heaps of erotic accessories stacked outside their tents in the morning, and their clothes keep falling off; all this leading up to the punchline, Ms. Smith’s tearful apology to all and sundry in big wideangle underlit closeup — shot from beltlevel up the naked length of her monumental torso, so that her tits really do look bigger than her [bewatchcapped] head. As dumb gags go [and the relentless march of progress entails that sendups of the Blair Witch can only get dumber] this isn’t bad. — Nor are the girls; mostly. But for those of us who scoff at the idea that a project like this might require anything resembling directorial skill, Wynorski makes sure the outtakes indicate just how many repetitions are necessary to get Ms. Dorian to remember a single line of dialogue. The man has the patience of a saint.


Peking Opera Blues. [aka Do Ma Daa. Tsui Hark, 1986.]

In the China of the Nineteen-Twenties, a couple of guys and a couple of girls play hide and seek with a bag of jewels and a mysterious document detailing a secret political agreement back and forth between the palace of a morally-challenged warlord and the showtents of a travelling troupe of players; amid shootouts, punchouts, sellouts, and song-and-dance routines, love blossoms and a relapse into civil war is confounded. Energetic and hilarious.


Gothic. [Ken Russell, 1986; written by Stephen Volk.]

In 1816, the Shelleys [Julian Sands and Natasha Richardson] pay a visit to Lord Byron [Gabriel Byrne] at his villa on the shores of Lake Geneva; they all go on a laudanum bender and scare the shit out of one another with the most famous hallucinations of modern times. — It was after first seeing this that I decided Ken Russell could do no wrong; nor have I ever changed my mind.


Small Time Crooks. [Woody Allen, 2000.]

A gang of bumblers set out to tunnel into a bank vault, and, in the process of failing miserably, make their fortunes anyway; their accidental success creates more problems than it solves. — A caper movie which turns into a comedy of class displacement. Not Manhattan, but it doesn’t suck either.


The Man Who Fell To Earth [again]:

Wittgenstein, letter to Engelmann [1/2/21]: “I am one of those cases which perhaps are not all that rare today: I had a task, did not do it, and now the failure is wrecking my life. I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky. Instead of which I remained stuck on earth, and now I am gradually fading out. My life has really become meaningless and so it consists only of futile episodes... Be glad of it, if you do not understand what I am writing here.” — This should have been the epigraph.


Later.


____________


Far from Kansas (6/7/00)


John Waters, in Cannes to pitch his latest opus Cecil B. DeMented, remarks about Hairspray [1988]: “I accidentally made a family movie. When it got a PG rating I was so ashamed I wanted to slit my wrists.”

On the other hand, a Ricki Lake striptease might have been equally mortifying.

In the meantime:


The Oz Witch Project. [Michael Rotman, 1999.]

While munchkin voices singing eerie but familiar tunes intrude upon the diagetic space, intrepid documentarian Dorothy and her assistants the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion set off to fathom the legend of the Wicked Witch of the West, get lost in the woods, and enter into the heart of darkness; all this in eight minutes and assorted seconds: brevity is the soul of wit.

Nor among hacks, crashes, server overloads, and the vagaries of network traffic did it take any more time to pluck this film from the bosom of its website that I might view it than it would have to hike to the library and read the collected works of L. Frank Baum [fourteen volumes, at least in the Oz cycle] —- no more than three or four days; the ways deep and the weather sharp; with the voices singing in my ears, saying, That this was so not cool.

[I know, I said. I know it’s not cool.]

It remains an article of my faith that in due course all this must be natural and easy, I won’t have to give myself a hernia tricking the server into letting me download the file instead of streaming it, and I’ll dance down the fiberoptic boulevard arm in arm with Meredith Salenger, never lost in the woods, never kicking my map into the river, never pelted with dung by flying monkeys.

But in the meantime, where the fuck is the yellow brick road?


Mesa Of Lost Women. [Ron Ormond and Herbert Tevos, 1953.]

A party of adventurers are kidnapped by an armed and dangerous though curiously amiable nutcase who forces them to crashland their plane on a remote Mexican highland ruled by a mad scientist in an underground laboratory whose assistants include cackling dwarves and an army of pneumatic babes whose brains have been crossed with those of giant tarantulas; all this accompanied by incessant flamenco music. [No, I am not making this up; though obviously I wish I had.]


The Man Who Fell To Earth. [Nicolas Roeg, 1976; screenplay by Paul Mayersberg, after a novel by Walter Tevis.]

Alien explorer David Bowie takes a wrong turn cruising for cometburgers and crashlands in the New Mexico desert; lurching out of the wasteland the embodiment of purpose, he masters the language and curious economic customs of the savages around him with extraordinary rapidity, and leverages his considerable technological edge into a string of patents which make him a billionaire capable of building the spacecraft that will carry him home to the Dust Bowl Planet —- where, repeated flashbacks reveal, his wife and family have been reduced to starving extraterrestrial Okies. Alas, in the course of his rise to power he discovers television, liquor, and that Earth girls are easy; his focus wavers, he stumbles into the snares of the CIA, and, rendered captive by their evil behaviorists, is reduced to the status of a laboratory rat. Escaping at the last to South America, he is left to slowly waste away in Margaritaville; the fadeout savors of Graham Greene. -— Though all this is justifiably famous, something about it rings false; maybe the motivation of the Bowie character, which comes off as unaccountably bourgeois. [The allegory here lies close to the heart of one who used to write papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, and now pens wisecracks about the contents of Jule Strain’s jogbra; perhaps this makes me unduly sensitive.] —- Be that as it may, Roeg [who began as a (pure) cinematographer] remains unique in his application of the principles of Eisensteinian montage to the fuck scene: those like myself who admired the celebrated sequence in Don’t Look Now in which Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie seem simultaneously to get it on and dress for dinner afterwards and the astonishing crosscutting in Bad Timing between an Art Garfunkel/Theresa Russell humporama and an emergency tracheotomy, will here find a striking exercise in editing that connects the erotic adventures of college professor Rip Torn with a display of ceremonial swordplay in a Japanese restaurant, and an admirably outrageous lovescene coupling Bowie, Candy Clark, and rapid gunfire.


White Zombie. [Victor Halperin, 1932; written by Garnett Weston.]

In a Haiti where the sun can never shine, a young couple taking the scenic route to their marriage ceremony stumble across a weird native ritual which has also attracted the attention of evil mesmerist Bela Lugosi; his brainless entourage of shambling zombies warn them off the scene, but not before his hypnotic gaze has fallen upon the bride-to-be and the sight of her blonde loveliness has spawned covetous thoughts. Seizing her scarf as a souvenir, he trails them to the wedding banquet, and, by dint of a bit of fetishistic wax-sculpture, drains the soul from her body in the middle of the second toast, sending her straightaway to the burial vaults and her husband to the nearest Haitian drunken-European-failure theme bar. With the aid of an spurned suitor of the late lamented [what kind of guy goes to Bela Lugosi for help scoring chicks? there should be an Ed Wood movie on that premise alone], the mad doctor hauls her out of her casket, jumpstarts her lower centers, and brings her home to take her place among his collection of human robots -— among whom, he gleefully explains, are numbered all of his former rivals and many key figures of the colonial administration. —- The interpolation of a tour of his plantation, where crude machines devour his dehumanized workforce, makes it clear that what had already seemed homage to Fritz Lang is less inspired by Der Müde Tod than Metropolis; and Lugosi’s flatlined zombies begin to look, not like Fate’s victims, the legions of the walking dead, but the brokenwilled industrial serfs of the plantation economy. -— Ensconced in her new position as trophy girlfriend, the babe takes her place in the vast hall of Lugosi’s castle overlooking the sea, staring blankly straight ahead as she plays the piano -— not at all badly for a zombie; though the sight of a white zombie playing a musical instrument reminds me inevitably of Janis Joplin’s sidemen in Big Brother and the Holding Company. All is certainly lost, and the final triumph of modern capitalism over the workers assured; but at the last moment the heartbroken husband and the helpful Van Helsing figure stumble across the castle [a shadow-infested winding-stairwell-beringed monument to Expressionism] in their meanderings. Aided by several improbabilities and the obvious desire of the screenwriter to stamp a happy face on the proceedings with the utmost expedition, Love overmasters Tyranny and the bad guys all fall off a cliff into the roaring surf hundreds of feet below -— Lugosi last, of course, though this hardly serves poetic justice: one would have preferred to see him out stumbling through the fields with his own brain unplugged, lifting that barge, toting that bale. But then I suppose this is like wishing Steve Forbes would have to get a real job.


Mission Impossible Two. [John Woo, 2000; screenplay by Robert Towne.]

It is a relief to be able to report that, by combining the talents of the author of the single finest modern screenplay, the greatest living action director, and the world’s biggest movie star, it is still possible to produce what must undoubtedly be [at least on the assumption that everyone has already seen Gladiator] the best action movie to come out this month.

Moreover it is a relief to be able to dissect the plot piece by piece without bad conscience. Obviously it means nothing if I say “and then Cruise does some stuff on a motorcycle”; it means everything [believe me] to see it.

The particulars, then, are these: we fade in on a stressedout biologist with a Russian accent, playing recombinant roulette in a hush-hush Australian biotech laboratory. With ingenuity born of desperation, he injects himself with a deadly virus in order to smuggle it out to warn the world against it; and, setting his digital watch for a twentyhour countdown [I have yet to trace the device of the timelock to its most distant antecedents, but suspect Porter must have used it in The Great Train Robbery], hops a plane for CDC Atlanta, accompanied by -— Tom Cruise? Something in his expression warns us against the scientist’s companion, and, sure enough, within the moment of his introduction the faux-Cruise is seen dosing the pilots with poisonous gas and leaping from an escape hatch with a briefcase full of scientific paraphernalia, though not before ripping a mask from his face and revealing himself to be...Dougray Scott!!! a rogue IM agent who has sold out to the Dark Side; in short, Cruise’s Evil Twin. Though the Good Guys have temporarily been caught napping, The Call goes out at once to the real Cruise, whom the black helicopters find practicing madfool dynos on a red sandstone spire somewhere in Utah; pulling a pair of cyberpunk shades out of their messenger rocket, he receives via magic-goggle display an expository pitch from Anthony Hopkins on the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Professor X, registers the familiar stylistic flourishes which foreground the fine print in the secret agent’s contract, and [as per instruction] jets off to collect bombshell catburglar Thandie Newton on his way to a European rendezvous. Cruise discovers Ms. Newton pulling off a daring jewel robbery in a picturesque Spanish villa, and that classic spymovie courtship ritual the highspeed automobile chase on a mountain road overlooking the Mediterranean [though in truth this convention is so thoroughly wired in that I don’t remember whether the Mediterranean was really there, or whether I simply assumed it] provides the segue from a remarkably energetic flamenco dance sequence to a rather flaccid rendition of the horizontal bop. Her allegiance thus ensured, in a further expository lecture from Hopkins he finds out that her relevance to the mission is that she is the exgirlfriend [and still-stalkee] of Evil Twin Scott, and that Hopkins proposes to insinuate her into the compound of the opposition to plumb the depths of Dougray’s mad scheme to destroy the world. Gnashing his teeth, Cruise agrees; protesting that her flesh crawls at the thought of the touch of any other, Thandie nonetheless gives her consent; and this, incidentally —- the solemn invocation of Hitchcock notwithstanding —- is more or less the perihelion of the plot’s approach to Notorious. Returning to Sydney -— a renowned hotbed of international subversion, and, doubtless only by coincidence, a much cheaper place to shoot action movies than Los Angeles — she sails into the camp of the enemy, rips her clothes off, and hoses the vile double while Cruise watches on satellite stalkercam. Much more of this soap would be difficult to stomach, but Cruise rounds up an abbreviated entourage [Ving Rhames and a guy to fly the two of them around], and in a brief caper involving intensive Kodak product placement succeeds simultaneously in figuring out why the Russian got whacked and giving his girlfriend away to the bad guys. Disguising himself as the ghost of the Russian, Cruise kidnaps CEO Brendan Gleeson and extracts the confession that the corporate scheme was to release a mutant influenza in order to make a killing on the co-engineered antidote; disguising himself as Cruise, Scott tricks Thandie into revealing her role as an infiltrator. Thus the plan the IM boys hatch to break into the biotech lab [located conveniently on top of a skyscraper] is mirrored by the counterplan of the antiIM group, and though Cruise’s trademark bungeecord descent into the lair of the labrats is executed with celerity adequate for the destruction of almost all of the Bad Flu, Scott and his assistants bust in just in time to save the last dose. This precipitates a patented John Woo gunfight, ending in a patented John Woo standoff, resolved when hostage Thandie grabs the hypo and injects herself with the remainder of the virus! confounding Dougray sufficiently that the beleaguered Cruise can blow out a wall and leap from the fortysecond floor into the urban stratosphere! cursing the Opposition as he rips the cord on his parachute. This sets up the final confrontation in the fortress of the Bad Corporation, where, after dropping the human disease vector off in the middle of the city, Scott explains his terms to a thoroughly bitchslapped Gleeson: the antidote straight up for grosspoint participation and membership in the billionaire’s club. Just as their laptops are confirming the stock transfer, Cruise busts in, and, with the aid of a flock of pigeons [you gotta love this thing Woo has for birds] and another identity-switch you see coming from a block away whacks just about everybody in another terrific gunfight and escapes with the antitoxin on a motorcycle. In the ensuing gunbattle/carchase Dougray’s posse drop off one by one, setting up the final protracted motorcycle joust/martial arts duel/gunfight on the beach that terminates with the demise of the Bad Double, the lastminute rescue of Thandie, and the preservation of humanity.

Our thumbs go up for the return of the Evil Twin [cf., once again, Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study; or for that matter all film noir and the collected works of John Woo] and the very plausible premise [if no bent biotech CEO has yet thought of releasing a designer virus into the population in order to promote the sale of a co-engineered vaccine, a few of them are thinking about it right now; Craig Venter wouldn’t even be the first.]

And [skipping over the stuff that is obviously impossible but fun to watch], let’s wave a few thumbs down on:

—- The girl; who was, obviously, at some point in the rewrite yanked out of the plot and jammed back into it sideways. -— Should it not defy credulity that an athletic and ingenious jewel thief hangs out the second half of the movie waiting to be rescued? -— And what did she ever see in the Evil Twin? Shouldn’t there be something attractive about him? [In Notorious, Claude Rains, Nazi stooge or no, was a fairly sympathetic character.] Shouldn’t there be some ambivalence in her feelings? some ambiguity in her motivations? -— Admittedly, this is not exactly film noir; and [say] Out Of The Past, blood and slaughter notwithstanding, is not exactly an action movie. But it’s worth remembering why it was a better movie.

—- And, though it’s a cute twist at first glance to have her as it were swallow the McGuffin [recall that Ingrid Bergman was poisoned], I’m still trying to figure out how, after being dropped into the middle of a crowd to spread the deadly virus, she apparently teleports to the top of a cliff outside the city without breathing on anyone in between. Poetic license?

-— The rubber faces are over. I forgave Woo for beating the device to death in Face/Off, since there it all served to set up the amazing mirror shot [which summed up several genres in a single image], but, please, never again.

—- The twentyhour timelock is established and reinforced a couple of times and then almost immediately forgotten; this would seem a curious breach of cinematic convention [recall, e.g., how Schwarzenegger seemed to look at his watch every couple of minutes in Commando], but may reflect a recognition on the part of the authors that even the dumbest bozo in the audience —- somebody, say, who actually believed when Bruce Willis blew up the asteroid with one second left on the digital readout that meant that all the pieces were going to miss the Earth -— will probably be able to figure out that biological processes are not like ticking bombs, and that something that will kill you in twenty hours might just be lethal after nineteen hours and fiftynine minutes. -— Of course, if the authors recognized this, they might as well have removed the gimmick altogether.

—- Somehow it has become a genre requisite that everything must build to a false climax in which a lot of guys dressed like commandos sit around a conference table studying the progress of a funds transfer on their laptops. Ninja outfits or no, this does not photograph well. —- Moreover, since now everyone in the civilized world pisses away most of his waking hours drumming his fingers by the side of a keyboard waiting for a network process to terminate, none of this exactly qualifies as exotic/mysterioso spymovie action, either.

-— Though this reads well as a spy movie it bears little resemblance to the traditional MI structure, which always involved an apparently insoluble conundrum [e.g., how to get into the Langley mainframe], a diverse team of equals, and an elaborate caper which made essential use of each of their individual talents; not just dropping Human Fly Cruise in through the roof and letting him shoot it out with the bad guys while Ving Rhames watches dots crawl around on his screen. [On the evidence of a gag or two that slipped past the producers, I deduce that Towne thinks this is silly too.] — One must presume that if Kurosawa had directed Cruise he would have been persuaded to edit out five-and-a-half of the Seven Samurai.

—- And though Sydney is beautiful I can’t believe we keep looking at all that ocean and there’s never a boat chase.

But, sheesh, what a rush. I’ll probably be over there tomorrow watching all of it again.

To summarize:

Cruise is nearly good enough for Hong Kong: very athletic, able to fly through the air firing a pair of forty-fives and spin in the air and kick somebody in the head. But Chow Yun-Fat somehow still looks better with the fortyfives [call it charisma], and Jet Li can spin in the air and kick halfadozen people at once. Never mind Jackie Chan.

Thandie Newton is terrific, but she’s been terrific for about ten years now and she still can’t find work in Hollywood; which has no use for black girls in general, let alone black girls with the kind of British accent you acquire with a degree from Cambridge. [But check her out in Bertolucci’s Besieged.]

John Woo is still in a class by himself; but I find myself wishing that Tarantino would emerge from his paralysis and make good on his promise to write the guy a decent script.

As for Robert Towne: the author of Chinatown has already cashed his check; and I’m sure he laughed all the way to the bank.


New Rose Hotel. [Abel Ferrara, 1998.]

An addendum to my earlier notice: midway through this misbegotten opus, Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe are [as usual] sitting in a bar talking and Walken tells a dumb joke about a dog walking into a bar dressed up in a business suit and ordering a drink from the bartender: “Scotch and toilet water.” —- The joke about the joke is that Walken, after taking about a minute to deliver the punchline, claims it is a haiku. —- The joke about the joke about the joke is that it is, in fact, very easy to condense it into seventeen syllables. E.g.:

Dog walks into bar
In suit and tie. Makes order: “Scotch
And toilet water.“

[The reader is invited to improve on this; and, incidentally, it suggests the program of distilling all guy-walks-into-bar jokes into haiku form, which might by recombination actually render interesting two forms which otherwise bore the hell out of me.]

The joke about the joke about the joke about the joke is that this little episode summarizes the problem with New Rose Hotel: the whole movie could have easily been recut to run in twenty minutes. -— The joke about the joke about the joke about the joke about the joke is just another joke on me: I keep watching the fucking thing anyway; maybe out of a sense of annoyance at the way Ferrara, whether illfunded or not, bungled this opportunity, or maybe because it’s the only practical means I have at my disposal for stalking Asia Argento.

I think this is an infinite regress. Or maybe I just think that I think that. But let’s stop right here.



Miscellany:


Noteworthy trailers: Samuel Jackson as Shaft [surely a role that he was born to play]; Mel Gibson as The Patriot. -— Why does it seem so obvious that the lead in a movie about the American Revolution would have to be Australian?

With the graduation season upon us, I am reminded of the words of Mary Woronov [in the character of the Evil Principal], accosting the boys in the band as, guitars drawn, they prepare to storm the portals of Vince Lombardi High School: “Do your parents know that you’re Ramones?” — and, of course, of the subsequent denouement: namely, that It All Blows Up. Though it must now be politically incorrect to say so, there is, really, no other way to end a high school movie than in Götterdämmerung.

But that was only a movie. As for high school itself: just say no.


Later.


____________


Surfin’ samurai (5/14/00)


Wistfully uttered by the blonde with Fred Astaire in Flying Down To Rio [1933], as she watches Brazilian bombshell Dolores Del Rio dancing with Astaire’s buddy: “What have these South Americans got below the equator that we haven’t?” Indeed, I wish I knew.

David Arquette, whose garments grow more garish with every outing [the latest appears to be some kind of yellowgreen mink coat worn with yellow pants, accessorized with an enormous dollarsign on a chain around his neck and a tie that looks like an oil slick] has now stabbed his sometime ally Diamond Dallas Page in the back and aligned himself with Jeff Jarrett and the rival WCW faction, The New Blood. What a scumbag! Alas, I lost track of the motivation for this betrayal amid the dizzying convolutions of the ongoing plot, which somehow employed this incident as a segue into a series of battles pitting brother against brother, husband against wife, father against son, and bimbo against undergarments; the episode concluded [for the moment, sort of] when a cowardly band of masked marauders ambushed Hulk Hogan, tossed him into the back of a luxury sedan, and drove him away from the arena to an unknown destination, presumably to give him the Jimmy Hoffa treatment. — Why don’t these people write for the movies?

In the meantime:


Gladiator. [Ridley Scott, 2000; written by David H. Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson.]

Spartacus redivivus: after winning yet another war against the Germans, noble Roman general Russell Crowe [yclept Maximus] is rewarded by even more noble Emperor Marcus Aurelius [Richard Harris] with the news that he will be designated successor to the throne and burdened with the destiny of returning power to the Senate and the People and restoring the Republic; unfortunately, ignoble Number One Son Commodus [Joaquin Phoenix] gets wind of this scheme and, after strangling his aged father, seizes power for himself, and, insanely jealous of one whom he deems his rival not merely for his father’s but his sister’s affections, sentences the unfortunate general to death. Crowe escapes his executioners, but the agents of evil manage to croak his wife, his son, and probably the family dog and some really cute bunny rabbits before he can get back to save them, and as he gnashes his teeth amid the smoking ruins of his country estate he’s seized by unspecified marauders and sold into African slavery. [As Keanu would say: Bummer, dude.] Fortunately he’s recruited into a string of gladiators run by Oliver Reed, and before you can say bread-and-circuses they’re all back in the Coliseum putting on a show for the benefit of the Fount of All Decadence himself. — Can Crowe avenge his family, restore the Republic, and keep Commodus from boinking his sister? — Well, it’s 193 A.D. and the Empire is on the skids, so I wouldn’t expect too much. But, sheesh, what a spectacle. Check it out.

[All right, all right: so those people do write for the movies. But to continue:]


The Ninth Gate. [Roman Polanski, 1999. Written by Polanski and John Brownjohn.]

Ethically challenged rare book dealer Johnny Depp is dispatched to Europe by zillionaire New York collector Frank Langella to verify the authenticity of an antiquarian volume said to have been co-authored by Satan himself; comparing the Tarot-card etchings in his copy against those in the only two others extant, he discovers disturbing discrepancies which would not of themselves convince him that he has stumbled upon the Devil’s work, were it not that everyone associated with the investigation seems to be dying in alarmingly colorful fashion. — Perhaps someone is trying to tell him something? — Meanwhile he takes in a black mass, checks out some appropriately Yeatsian abandoned castles, smokes a lot of Lucky Strikes and drinks a lot of whiskey, looks really cool walking the mean streets in a trenchcoat despite the fact he’s wearing glasses, and gets to make time with Probably-Bad Girl Lena Olin and Possibly-Good Girl Emmanuelle Seigner. — Devil or angel, it could be worse.


The Rowdy Girls. [Steve Nevius, 1999. Written by India Allen and Khara Bromiley.]

Shannon Tweed, Julie Strain, and Deanna Brooks star in an eccentric production which seems to be intended to forward the thesis that the West was won by babes with big tits. — They’ve sold me, of course; but what does that prove?


The Sore Losers. [John Michael McCarthy, 1997.]

The opening title quotes the Comics Code of America [1954]: “In every instance, Good shall triumph over Evil and the criminal punished [sic] for his misdeeds... .” The application is immediate: an alien from another dimension returns to earth after a lapse of forty years to resume a career as a serial killer which seem to have been some kind of field-homework assignment from the elders of his home planet; he is dismayed to discover the cultural decline which has removed the X-ray goggles from the eyes of the inhabitants of Mississippi and left them unable to appreciate the artistic aspects of acts like, e.g., executing a girl by nailing a copy of Weird Science to her forehead. — Thus far the beginning of the film. — In the middle the theme of shooting hippies for meat seems to predominate. — Toward the end a refugee prophetess from the Amazon Planet walks in on a meeting of UFologists and declares: “It occurred to me that I was different...that I was born under a sign...and that’s why these things happened to me. It’s always been hard for me to remember...until now. Well I was going to be married...I think...but then I was abducted by this oldtimers cult from outer space who came to Earth to kill the young. But then things got all mixed up...the cult stayed young, but the gods...the gods got older...anyway, I was taken by the Men in Black...and then arrested by the FBI...an angel kissed me with her blood, and then I saw the end of the world.” After that a couple of naked girls have a fight on an electric chair, and then there’s a nuclear holocaust. — Why didn’t I get to make this?


Made Men. [J. Louis Morneau, 1999. Written by Robert Franke, Miles Miller, Alfred Gough.]

Inadequately-protected federal witness Jim Belushi is discovered in Oklahoma by his erstwhile Chicago business associates, who proceed to try to beat the location of his twelve-million dollar nest egg out of him; a testimony to the lingering hazards of the import-export trade. Despite the best efforts of the none-too-competent gunsels, the man whose name preceded the title fast-talks his way out of every compromising situation including firefights, carwrecks, and the sight of Vanessa Angel in her underwear, and escapes with his dog to the Bahamas. Who is man’s best friend, anyway?


Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. [Jim Jarmusch, 1999.]

A film whose conceit is reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s celebrated novel Snow Crash — whose principal [Hiro Protagonist] was half black, half Japanese, half swordsman, half hacker: Forest Whitaker, a freelance hitman conversant with electronics who lives on a rooftop communing with a colony of pigeons — a student of Japanese culture who thanks to a native philosophic bent and unusual reading habits has begun to think of himself as a samurai warrior — is contracted by his wiseguy employer to terminate an errant mafioso; when after the fact the council of elders decides to grade the job on a different curve, the mob turns against him, precipitating war. — The argument proceeds dialectically, by the statement of a series of paradoxes: a black guy who thinks he’s Japanese [but seems rather more like an Indian — compare Jarmusch’s earlier Dead Man]; best friends who speak no common language; cartoon violence echoed in real violence; gangsters who have degenerated into their own parodies; the urban desperado as preserver of Nature; — to say nothing of a philosophy of action which though meticulously detailed and preternaturally rational rests motivation ultimately on the whims of a master chosen by capricious Fate — and leads to a conclusion difficult to summarize with my usual flippant brevity, but incorporating among other elements a plea for the place of tradition, a profound respect for the animate world, and a renewed appreciation of the gravitas of violence. — Easily the best American movie I’ve seen this year.


Back To The Beach. [Lyndall Hobbs, 1987; written by Bill L. Norton, from a story by James Komack.]

Twenty years after the passing of their era, Frankie and Annette return to Malibu to revisit the site of their former glories and endure many painful jokes about their hairstyles. I could live without the cameo by Bob Denver, but have to admit that Stevie Ray Vaughan playing “Wipe Out” with Dick Dale more than made up for it. — I’m not so sure about Pee Wee Herman performing “Surfin’ Bird”. But I’m willing to think about it.


High Fidelity. [Stephen Frears, 2000. Written by D.V. DeVincentis et alia, after the book by Nick Hornby.]

Everyone remembers the great penultimate scene in Annie Hall, in which Woody Allen pursues Diane Keaton to a somewhat-less-than-romantic sidewalk cafe on the Sunset Strip and receives the news that, no matter how persuasive he may think he is, she will not be going back with him to New York; and its subsequent doubling by two auditioning actors in a play-within-the-play, in which, after the [much younger] female lead makes a speech to the [much younger] male lead confessing her folly and announcing her intention to follow him home, the two of them look up from their scripts to Woody and he in turn ruefully addresses the camera, saying: “Whatta you want? It was my first play. You know...how you’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because...it’s real difficult in life.” — Admittedly this was a stroke of genius, but the fact remains that any film made after 1976 in which a male protagonist addresses the camera directly with a lengthy monologue about the travails of his lovelife — and in particular this one, in which Detroit vinyl-emporium proprietor John Cusack splits with girlfriend Iben Hjejle and then spends a couple of hours cracking wise over amusing flashbacks before [duh] the errant babe admits her mistake and they kiss and make up — must expect to provoke invidious comparisons with the definitive original. — Top five reasons to like this flick anyway: [5] Cusack [4] Joan Cusack [3] the incredible string of Cusack’s former girlfriends, including Catherine Zeta-Jones, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and Lili Taylor [2] Bruce Springsteen does the genre-requisite Well-I-have-Marshall-McLuhan-right-here cameo and [1] the geeks that work in Cusack’s record store: Jack Black [Mister Know-It-All] and Todd Louiso [Dana Carvey squared.] In particular Black’s studied display of baffled incomprehension when Cusack attempts to forward as a gedankenexperiment the idea that someone may never have seen Evil Dead Two is one of the funniest exhibitions I’ve ever witnessed; and in itself reason sufficient to check this out.


Lumière and Company. [Anne Andreu, Martine Grenier, Laurence Miller, Sarah Moon, et alia; 1995.]

To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the first films of the Lumière Brothers, some enterprising French cinemaphiles provided forty contemporary directors with an authentic handcranked walnutcased box movie camera and challenged them to try to make a fifty-second one-shot short with it. The results gravitate inevitably toward the cinematography of 1895 — parades, park scenes, figure studies, stuff involving trains — but possess some of the inexpressible charm of the incunabula of the cinema. — Of course, some humorless Ministry-of-Culture apparatchiks keep jamming microphones into the faces of the participants and asking them witless questions about their artistic motivations and their feelings about the mortality of film as an art form, but what can you expect. — With contributions not only from a bunch of Europeans you never heard of but also from Arthur Penn, John Boorman, Liv Ullmann [with Sven Nykvist], Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, Peter Greenaway, and David Lynch; locations include Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Dublin, Brooklyn, the Pyramids, and the Great Wall of China. — Lynch and Greenaway do the best, incidentally, but it’s a fairly even contest.


Alas, this must [by considerations of symmetry] provoke a brief commentary on the future of the cinema.

Suckered, I suppose predictably, by a television commercial for a digital essay in the style of Russ Meyer called Bikini Bandits, for the nth time the other night I dialed into Atomfilms to remind myself again just why there is as yet no point in even trying to download a movie from the Internet.

First: in nearly all cases the purveyors of the featured attractions will not permit downloads. The fiction [one might call this the myth of the thin client] is maintained that the burden of housing the file should be borne by the server, and that faster connection speeds have made possible streamed video in real time, e.g. via RealPlayer.

The fact, of course, is that disk drives are now as cheap as rolls of toilet paper, and that though local connection speeds are generally more rapid than they used to be, other network bottlenecks have more than taken up the slack; the maximum throughput from Atomfilms on the evening that I performed my experiments, for instance, was about 2Kbytes/second, far below the minimum required for streaming and quite obviously bounded at the server.

No, the real point is that control of the file entails control of your use of it: the intention here, manifestly, is to force the sucker to stay tuned to a single website for an extended period — during which, naturally, most of the meager bandwidth actually available for his viewing pleasure will be absorbed by banner advertising; because some genius somewhere has decided that the Web represents a golden opportunity to reinvent television with a few improvements unfortunately left out of the original, like not allowing you to change the channel during a commercial.

I cannot tell you the number of times that I have simply ripped the modem cord out of the machine in disgust and dialed in again, rather than wait an interminable interval for a truckload of “enriched content” to come through the line.

And it is ironic, obviously, that with the advent of digital recorders television itself has uninvented streaming; not only can you hit the pause button in the middle of a live broadcast, but the possibility of a real-time commercial filter is at long last palpable.

But, even though I knew this to be folly, I determined to see the matter through to a conclusion and set out to [a] download the latest version of RealPlayer and [b] watch the fucking short anyway.

And, after only three hours during which I reread Plato’s Timaeus, played all the fun parts of the collected works of Led Zeppelin, watched two full-length [albeit admittedly mediocre] movies on television, and paid absolutely no attention to the machine save on those three or four occasions when I had to reboot and reconnect — and, incidentally, saw not a single banner ad [even if I had been looking at the screen and not reading, playing the guitar, and watching television], having long since acquired a filter that removes them from the display [though it still downloads the shit to cache; there seems to be no way to avoid this] — I was able to establish that the current release of RealPlayer [1] won’t download properly, thanks to some moronic filetransfer fuckup and [2] wouldn’t run on my machine anyway because [3] the cpu is too old and [4] the modem is too slow.

These stumblingblocks represent improvements over the last release, which I obtained with much travail on a previous occasion, but succeeded in installing. Indeed, if I hadn’t done all this before — downloaded the software, plugged into the site, watched three or four frames of video over the space of five or ten minutes, and then thrown the whole thing out in disgust — I might have been sorely disappointed.

Alas, it all ought to work; and, therefore, you feel that, at least once in a while, you have to try: if not for yourself, if not for the sake of science; then for Russ, and for what he stands for.

It is difficult to remember now, but only a few short years ago it was possible to download movie files [generally in the Quicktime format] piecewise from any of a number of sites and watch them at the bandwidth of the connection between your cpu and your disk drive; with bit depth, frame size, and frame rate adjustable, depending on the quality of the product. Alas, these days are gone; more roadkill on the information superhighway. — The degenerative evolution of Quicktime — a player now optimized for streaming, with poorer performance and far fewer controls than the original — dumbed down, in short, to match the standard of RealPlayer — is depressing testimony to the strength of a bad idea whose time has come.

But of course it is possible to download movies in toto; in newer, leaner formats. The problem is that they [a] cost too much [b] look crummy [c] take twentyfour hours to come down over the line. Thus it is that I haven’t obtained a copy of the much-anticipated [though now rather poorly received] thirty-minute feature The Quantum Project [Eugenio Zanetti, 2000; starring, but of course, the ubiquitous Stephen Dorff] from SightSound.com: one can only download it all in one piece, and it’s one hundred sixty fucking megabytes. [At that, nota bene, roughly a fortieth the size of the typical DVD.]

Throttlebox offers files of somewhat smaller dimensions for free; the catch, apparently, is that they insert commercials into the movies which [since you have to view them with their proprietary player] cannot be edited out. Still, they have curiosities like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. But the prospect of an eight-hour download is still daunting, and miscellaneous other questions of software compatibility have kept me from investigating their product in detail.

To summarize: though this is certainly the future of the cinema [or whatever may replace the cinema], and the possibilities are [in principle] limitless, the traditional means of distribution [in principle] obsolete, the laws of copyright [in principle] certain to become quaint historical footnotes, the bright sun of a truly independent cinema sure to rise [in principle] over the dark abandoned ruins of the Ozymandian empire of Hollywood, etcetera, etcetera, for the moment — lacking adequate bandwidth, or the ability to run a download as a background process over a period of days, or better compression, or anyone with a business model that transcends this halfwitted idea that they’ll be able to show a profit on some geologic timescale by choking the arteries of the global network with advertising no one ever looks at — for the moment it remains a completely hopeless proposition.

In short: I can see the future of the Internet; and it is a trip to the corner drugstore to buy some comic books.


In other developments: though something called The Erotic Witch Project has now materialized upon the shelves of my favorite video emporium, as yet I haven’t been able to summon the courage to attempt its rental. Maybe next week.

Later.


____________


A nerd in full (5/4/00)


Nikki Fritz fans know her to be a girl abreast of the times, and will not be surprised to discover her riding the crest of the Prepare-for-Blair exploitation wave not only in the forthcoming Bare Tits Project, but also in the Jim Wynorski opus The Bare Wench Project. The famed exploitation auteur Andy Sidaris plans a cameo in this last, which will also feature the prodigious talents of Antonia Dorian, Julie K. Smith, and [natürlich] Julie Strain. — Point me at the woods, and, let’s get lost.


Meanwhile:


Space Truckers. [Stuart Gordon, 1997; written by Gordon and Ted Mann.]

Twentyfirst century big-rocket-rig wrangler Dennis Hopper battles a mad scientist and an army of warrior robots and saves the world but doesn’t get the girl; in this case no particular loss. — Why is Stephen Dorff now everywhere?


Reindeer Games. [John Frankenheimer, 2000; written by Ehren Kruger.]

Confused and distraught after his cellmate takes a fatal shiv [honestly, they called it a shiv] in a prison foodfight, Ben Affleck lurches out of the friendly confines of the state pen and into the scheming clutches of Gary Sinise and Charlize Theron, who may or may not understand that he is not their projected collaborator the late lamented but certainly seem insistent that he should help them knock over a casino on Christmas Eve. — Nice setup, promising caper, good sense of place [the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in winter — compare Wonder Boys: will Hollywood yet discover America?], cute Magic-Christian ending, but, indifferent sex, unfocussed violence, and too many plot twists which entail the substitution of uninspired dialogue for action. — It is gratifying that Frankenheimer after so many years in the wilderness should finally have regained his rightful place on the directors’ A-list; it would be even better if someone would give him a script that didn’t suck.


Entropy. [Phil Joanou, 1999.]

A music video director [Stephen Dorff] acquires his first feature film assignment [a period piece about Lauren Holly’s tits] and his first model/trophy girlfriend [Judith Godrèche], then loses both to drink, indecision, venal producers, the tendency of isolated physical systems to tend toward states of maximal disorder, or maybe just the machinations of the minions of Satan, it’s never really made clear. — Apparently Joanou’s attempt at his very own Annie Hall, but far, far short of the original. — With an extended cameo by U2.


Six Days, Seven Nights. [Ivan Reitman, 1998; written by Michael Browning.]

After just enough preliminary to establish without question that they are absolute opposites with prior romantic commitments, Cosmo-clone editor Anne Heche [not really Goldie, but trying as hard as she can] and hard-drinking bush pilot Harrison Ford [aiming about halfway between Gable and Cary Grant] crashland on a South-Sea isle and have a lot of predictably colorful adventures in which pirates shoot at them and tropical snakes crawl into their shorts before returning to civilization and dumping their once-significant others to set up the requisite memorable final embrace. I give them about ten minutes after the end of the third act.


Meet Joe Black. [Alan Smithee aka Martin Brest, 1998; written by Walter Ferris, after the play by Alberto Casella.]

Death takes a holiday and fucks the boss’s daughter.


A Civil Action. [Stephen Zaillian, 1998; from a book by Jonathan Harr.]

A true story: moneygrubbing personal-injury lawyer John Travolta develops a conscience [by spontaneous generation, or the descent of the Holy Spirit, or something] as he advances the case of the people of a New England town whose children were poisoned by industrially-contaminated groundwater; Satan’s attorneys, led by Robert Duvall [who is as always perfect] rip him a new asshole. — It is interesting that the conventions of this genre have become almost exactly those of Greek tragedy: Travolta, e.g., begins as a great and powerful attorney with an imposing office, a big house, and a new Porsche, and after gambling all of it and losing ends chagrined and abstracted in bankruptcy court, abandoned by his erstwhile friends and colleagues and if not precisely a broken man then at least chastened, meditative, genuinely puzzled by the fate the gods have decreed for him; an exalted sense of his own superiority, of course, is the flaw that has brought him down, but the explicit act of hubris [it is made absolutely clear] is that moment of overweening pride in which he declares that he can make the legal system serve justice. [A happy ending in such films always seems inauthentic and contrived; only deus ex machina, one will recall, saved Paul Newman in The Verdict.] — The closing titles assure us that in real life the EPA worked a terrible vengeance on the monsters at Grace and Beatrice Foods, and that Travolta/Schlichtmann [having acquired the wisdom won through suffering of the aged wanderer Oedipus] is now a successful practitioner of environmental law. I take comfort in this promise of a happier sequel, and trust that, wherever Schlichtmann is, the gods now are with him; for the Bar Association most certainly is not.


Wonder Boys. [Curtis Hanson, 2000; written by Steven Kloves, after a novel by Michael Chabon.]

Very rumpled academic and once-successful novelist Michael Douglas, a guy who likes a drink, a drag on a joint, and the occasional appeal to pharmaceutical potluck, has taken to fainting in public; though actually, it develops, it is his girlfriend France McDormand who is pregnant [Douglas himself being involved in nothing more overtly biological than the gestation of an enormous and obviously unfinishable novel], and, though her status as chancellor of the university is not necessarily germane to the situation it is predictably embarrassing that her husband Richard Thomas is the head of the English department — whose willful ignorance regarding the involvement of the two lovebirds is not shared by his blind and perpetually furious dog, who seizes every opportunity to sink his teeth into the usurper’s leg. — Meanwhile Douglas’s own wife has finally left him, his editor/agent Robert Downey Junior is coming to town [he must be out on bail] to find out what happened to that new novel everyone has been expecting for seven years, the cute little cookie [Katie Holmes] from the afternoon seminar has abandoned subtlety and started wandering around the house in her underwear, the very talented kid [Tobey Maguire] who has decided to pass out on the couch may not yet write like Hemingway, but already drinks like Kerouac, takes drugs like Kesey, and exhibits the mental stability of Robert Pirsig, and somebody else seems to think he owns that ’66 Ford Galaxie Douglas is driving around Pittsburgh in the snow. In due course you discover what Marilyn was wearing when she married Dimaggio and what Errol Flynn liked to spray on his dick: this is not exactly DeLillo, but it doesn’t suck either. — James Ellroy does a cameo at the writer’s conference, and I sat all the way through the credits just to listen to Bobby Dylan. — Beautifully photographed by Dante [Last of the Mohicans] Spinotti. Check it out.


Pitch Black. [David Twohy, 2000. Written by Jim Wheat and Ken Wheat.]

After crashlanding on a strange desert planet where all those Bedouin passengers are bound to come in handy, the protagonists [the Bad Good Guy, the Good Bad Guy, and the not-exactly Ugly Chick Pilot] discover in quick succession that [a] the last expedition to land here had their bones picked clean by the photophobic gargoyles in the caves beneath and [b] three suns or not, night is about to fall: just the right moment for a walk in the dark. — Once again [cf. Supernova] there’s way too much handheld camera work in the action sequences [this is beginning to suggest an epidemic of that Oliver Stone cinematographic disease, the one that makes people try too hard to be hip]; and the characters [all apparently transplanted from somebody’s favorite Western] spend a remarkable amount of time standing around striking dramatic poses while delivering weighty speeches — to which I guess the monsters just out of shot in the shadows must also be listening with rapt attention, since inexplicably they don’t pounce. — Ridley Scott and James Cameron, I need hardly point out, would have known better. And so should you.


Man Ray Films. [Restoration supervised by Jean-Michel Bouhours, 1998.]

The famed photographer Man Ray [nee Emmanuel Radnitzky] attempted several celebrated essays in avantgarde filmmaking during the Twenties. Here restored and compiled are: La Retour à la raison [1923]; Emak Bakia [1926]; L’Étoile de mer [1928]; and Les Mystères du châteu du dé [1929]. The first precipitated a riot at its premiere; the last boasts among other fascinating sequences a passage in which a bathing beauty lies in a pool juggling rubber balls — by throwing them down into the water and catching them as they bob up, not tossing them into the air and catching them as they fall down. — Also included are several of Man Ray’s home movies, which include bullfighting footage Hemingway shot for him at Pamplona in 1929 and scenes of Picasso clowning around with Paul Éluard. — My principal announcement, however, is this: noting that the first two films feature the famous model Kiki of Montparnasse [the Boopsie of the French avant garde], I submitted her name and was at long last able to baffle the Oracle of Bacon at Virginia: Kiki and Kevin Bacon cannot be connected by a chain of intermediaries appearing jointly in feature films; Kiki, accordingly, has a Bacon number of infinity. [She does appear, however, in one of Man Ray’s portraits which hangs upon Emma Thompson’s studio wall in Dead Again.]


Conceiving Ada. [Lynn Hershmann-Leeson, 1997.]

Francesca Faridany plays a gorgeous computer geek [yeah, right] whose forbidden experiments with computerdwelling artificial lifeforms aim to reconstruct the lost human past through some kind of datamining for which — typically — the lack of any coherent explanation is disguised by the deployment of a lot of fashionable MIT jargon. As her blonde-bimbo boyfriend points out, it is difficult to distinguish this project from an attempt to channel the spirits of the departed: in particular Francesca’s idol Tilda Swinton/Lady Lovelace, the mathematically-gifted daughter of Lord Byron; who, by virtue of her collaboration with Charles Babbage, is often regarded as the first computer programmer. — The boyfriend, obviously, knows nothing about machine intelligence but everything about motion picture scenarios; and, sure enough, Timothy Leary turns up immediately in the role of Francesca’s mentor, materializing on a television monitor intoning digital mysticism like “information is like a mist...you have to breathe it in...we are communicating in the vocabulary of light”, and Tilda’s principal “intelligent agent” adopts a dovelike avatar and flaps around in the graphical representations of her data searches like some kind of PlayStation version of the Holy Spirit. [I’m sure the scumbags at Doubleclick do it just the same way.] — Presently Francesca begins conversing directly with the sainted Ada, tracking the descent of this Woman Born Before Her Time toward her Tragic End...but wait a minute, Francesca’s pregnant.. you don’t suppose Ms. Hershmann-Leeson is about to invent digital metempsychosis?


Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen. [Even Dwarves Started Small. Werner Herzog, 1970.]

Terry Gilliam once remarked that, thanks to his habit of meticulously storyboarding every shot in advance, and the fact that [as a former cartoonist] he always drew people with heads disproportionately large, he’d never really felt that his plans and his results had been visually consonant except when he cast the little guys in Time Bandits; an experience which, accordingly, he invariably recalled with pleasure. — Even Terry, however, never cast a movie exclusively with dwarves; this was left to Werner Herzog, whose experiments with personnel have also included a couple of movies starring a schizophrenic, another in which he compelled the entire cast to perform in a hypnotic trance, and a long collaboration with the mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know Klaus Kinski, who never ceased threatening to kill him. — This early effort is, as you might expect, a variation on the tried-and-true inmates-take-over-the-asylum theme, and provides among its memorable images: an ancient van running endlessly in a circle; a chicken eating a mouse; two blind dwarves playing horsie on the back of a dead pig; a cigarbox full of insects dressed up in miniature wedding outfits; food fights; a demented little guy who never stops cackling; burning flowerpots; a horny dwarf who’s too short to climb up onto the bed to get at his girlfriend but keeps trying anyway [honestly, this is hilarious]; a cockfight; a procession led by a dwarf bearing a monkey nailed up on a cross; a guy trying to pick a fight with a tree; and the poster shot [cf. attached] a dwarf on a motorcycle. — Yeah, yeah, you’re saying; but when did this guy ever do anything really impressive, like shoot a movie about two cops in LA?


Double Jeopardy. [Bruce Beresford, 1999. Written by David Weisberg and Douglas Cook.]

Devoted wife and doting mother Ashley Judd pilots her sailboat out into the Pacific for an overnight cruise alone with her artdealer husband Bruce Greenwood; waking in the predawn hours from a drugged sleep, she follows a trail of gore out of the cabin right up to the deck and over the rail, and has just picked up a bloodsplattered knife in shock and disbelief when — conveniently — a Coast Guard cutter materializes out of the fog to bust her. At this point even astronomers viewing the movie through telescopes from other planets can figure out that it’s a setup, that Ashley is going down, and that when she busts out of the joint she’s going after the lying bastard and the conniving bitch he ran off with [Annabeth Gish] to shoot up his priceless Kandinskys and get her kid back and that Tommy Lee Jones is going to start out chasing her down and end up helping her get away. The rest is mere detail, and most of it — e.g., how the husband got the insurance money she was supposed to have killed him for, how Tommy the former law professor became an alcoholic parole officer, and why Ashley doesn’t actually bust out and at critical moments occasionally acts weak and womanly — is unimportant and unbelievable. - Very entertaining, but somebody should write this girl a real film noir. I fancy her in something like a remake of Out Of The Past: when her back is up Ashley makes even Jane Greer look like Doris Day.


The Limey. [Steven Soderbergh, 1999. Written by Lem Dobbs.]

Cockney hardcase Terence Stamp steps out of a British slammer, gets onto a plane, flies to Los Angeles, and kicks the living shit out of everyone who stands between him and finding out why the wealthy and powerful record executive Peter Fonda killed his daughter: Point Blank with a more sympathetic protagonist. — Very focussed; very elegant. — It is worth emphasizing that the composition of this picture — which relies systematically on jump cuts, temporal dislocation [indeed at times almost a kind of Burroughsian editing], the desynchronization of sound and action, and a kind of stylized cinema-verite cinematography employing not only the much-abused big handheld closeups but also the kind of unvarnished atmospheric longshots Vilmos Zsigmund devised for Altman in The Long Goodbye — is brilliant; and demonstrates that in the hands of someone like Soderbergh who knows how to use it the postmodern film grammar can produce a sort of nonEuclidean action movie that is really wonderful to watch; far more satisfying than, e.g., Walter Hill butchering a space opera or Woody Allen pretending to be French. — With Luis Guzmán and the perennially dazzling Lesley Ann Warren as Stamp’s native guides, Melissa George as the little girl lost, and a younger Stamp, in black and white — excerpted from Poor Cow [1967] — playing his own flashbacks.


The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. [Michael Pressman, 1977.]

Armed with a lit fuse and a sweet smile, Claudia Jennings busts out of the joint, and, assisted by partner in crime Jocelyn Jones, embarks upon an exhilarating career as a bankrobber whose powers of persuasion derive from her virtuosity with explosives. — The original redheaded bombshell in the original Thelma and Louise: fast cars, beautiful women, moronic cops, loud explosions, and no bullshit martyrdom. Accept no substitutes.


Breakfast of Champions. [Alan Rudolph, 1999.]

An uneven homage to Vonnegut impressive mainly by virtue of a very talented cast, including Bruce Willis, Barbara Hershey, Buck Henry, Will Patton, Ken Campbell as the eccentric zillionaire Mister Rosewater, Nick Nolte crossdressing in pink lingerie, and Albert Finney [who could convince me he’s been sleeping in a dumpster] as Vonnegut’s fictional doppelgänger Kilgore Trout.


I’m Losing You. [Bruce Wagner, 1998.]

Television producer Frank Langella discovers on the eve of his sixtieth birthday that he is terminally ill; after the discharge of an appropriate number of subplots [in particular the one originally intended as the central metaphor of the piece, the one about the Dead-Souls trade in the life-insurance policies of AIDS victims], he is reconciled with his mortality and with his children Andrew McCarthy and Rosanna Arquette; and they with their pasts and one another, though not without the ancillary terminations of McCarthy’s lover, his exwife, his really cute little girl, and [in recovered backstory] Rosanna’s mother. — Dark though this summary may make the scenario sound, it is nothing, I assure you, in comparison with the original novel Wagner has here rewritten for the screen — in which a seemingly endless parade of repugnant characters drawn with appalling cynicism from film-industry life, obsessed, without exception, with fashion, celebrity, wealth, and the petty exercise of power, are introduced, marched back and forth for a few paces upon the author’s stage, and then clubbed to death by their creator in the guise of an alien implacable Fate. [The rather vain but not wholly unsympathetic elderly woman whose selfdeluding interior monologue Wagner provides on his very first page, for example, expires of colon cancer within a few paragraphs: to be precise, she crawls under her house to die in a puddle of her own shit. And after that it goes downhill.] If writing for the screen can temper his unrelenting nihilism, one must encourage Wagner to do more of it; it’s that, or drop the big one.


I Want You. [Michael Winterbottom, 1998; written by Eoin McNamee.]

Variations on a theme of Elvis Costello: Rachel Weisz stars as a hairdresser stalked by a former boyfriend who’s just emerged from the joint and an adolescent geek adroit with electronic surveillance gear who never speaks. The dramatic reversal is predictable, but it’s still amusing trying to guess when it will come.


The Whole Nine Yards. [Jonathan Lynn, 2000; written by Mitchell Kapner.]

Very nervous Montreal dentist Matthew Perry becomes rather more so when he is introduced to his new neighbor Bruce “Jimmy the Tulip” Willis, known, apparently, to every tabloid reader in the hemisphere as the hitman who killed seventeen people on contract and then ratted out his employers; and, sure enough, not a moment is wasted as Perry’s wife Rosanna Arquette [pretending to chainsmoke and affecting an unusually silly accent] simultaneously dispatches our hero to Chicago to sell the news to the Mob and tries to seduce Willis into whacking him when he gets back; meanwhile Perry makes the acquaintance of gigantic enforcer Michael Clarke Duncan, gangster kingpin Kevin Pollak, and irresistable gunmoll Natasha Henstridge, with whom [you saw this coming] he is immediately smitten. [Henstridge to Perry: “Go slow. I haven’t had sex in five years.” Perry: “Neither have I.” Off her look askance he explains: “I’ve been married.”] But it’s at the moment when Perry discovers that even his receptionist/assistant Amanda Peet has been paid to gun him down that you realize everyone in the movie is officially obligated to kill everyone else whether they want to or not; a predicament from which the protagonists can severally be extricated only by the exercise of considerable ingenuity on the part of the writers. — Hardly deep, but undoubtedly amusing, and certainly suggesting an advance upon the rather tired traditional wisdom that every tragedy must end with a death, every comedy with a marriage: for here you observe [by transposition under time-reversal] that one might say with equal justice that every comedy begins with a death, every tragedy with a marriage; and then advance to the conception of a kind of recombinant scenario in which it must develop that everyone gets laid or gets killed. — I look forward to this new trend in romantic comedy: just think how much more fun Sleepless In Seattle would have been if Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had been packing ninemillimeters.


Man On The Moon. [Milos Forman, 1999; written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.]

Milos Forman recreates Jim Carrey/Andy Kaufman’s progress from misunderstood performance artist to misunderstood performance artist to misunderstood performance artist; establishing, I guess, some kind of hitherto unnoticed equation between Kaufman’s debut on Saturday Night Live and the premiere of The Magic Flute, and raising once again the profoundly disturbing question: do I actually want to fuck Courtney Love, or are the drugs still talking to me? — The drugs obviously are still talking to Christopher Lloyd, but one expected no less. — As for the perplexing final implication that Kaufman, having faked his own demise as a final put-on, may even now walk among us: surely he would have anticipated Jesse Ventura’s discovery of the royal road from the wrestling ring to the political arena; and, having done so, would now be a familiar face on CSPAN. But which one? Though I cannot be sure, I find that I am haunted by the vision of Al Gore — stiff, awkward, unnatural, robotic, a man seemingly born with no more rhythm than Don “No Soul” Simmons — or, well, Latka — stepping away from the microphone in the middle of his inaugural address, turning his back, and shedding that square whitebread suit to reveal the sequined jumpsuit beneath: and isn’t it about time we had a President who can do Elvis?


The Creature From The Black Lagoon. [Jack Arnold, 1954. Written by Harry Essex and Arthur A. Ross.]

Searching for the origins of a mysterious fossil which seems to represent a missing link between humanity and the lost denizens of the lizard world, paleontologist/adventurers Richard Carlson and Richard Denning venture to the unexplored headwaters of the Amazon; contending, the meanwhile, for the attentions of their megababe colleague Julia Adams. Becalmed in the murky waters of the mysterious Black Lagoon, they do what all brilliant movie scientists do in this situation, i.e., strap on their aqualungs and jump into the water to see if anything will try to eat them; thus making the acquaintance of the irascible Gill Man, an amphibious anachronism who is not at all extinct, has himself a pretty fair eye for a heaving bosom, and [as you might expect] begs to differ just who is hunting whom. — The famous submarine-stalker underwater sequences in this flick are still among the best ever filmed. — Arnold had a brief but brilliant career as a science-fiction auteur in the Fifties before settling down to pass his dotage directing the likes of the Love Boat and Gilligan’s Island; his credits include many of the classics of the drivein decade, including It Came from Outer Space, This Island Earth, Revenge Of The Creature, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and the never-to-be-forgotten High School Confidential.


Supreme Sanction. [John Terlesky, 1999.]

Balking at the order to whack investigative reporter David Dukes, la femme Kristy Swanson turns on her rogue-spook superiors Michael Madsen and Ron Perlman and, with the aid of ace hacker Tom [“Tiny”] Lister Jr., saves all the good guys and kills all the bad guys; and, wow, does she look good in ninja black. Hardly deep but certainly amusing; and an excellent career move for Terlesky, whom last I recall flexing before the camera opposite Monique Gabrielle in Deathstalker Two.


Cookie’s Fortune. [Robert Altman, 1999; written by Anne Rapp.]

In a smalltown Mississippi even Beth Henley did not discover, dotty old lady Patricia “Cookie” Neal drops dead under peculiar circumstances; dotty younger ladies Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, and Liv Tyler contend for her estate. Charming and funny and animated by a great cast [Charles Dutton, Ned Beatty, Lyle Lovett, et al.] but not exactly a conceptual breakthrough.


Miscellaneous observations:

Best trailers of the month: Jet Li in the forthcoming Romeo Must Die, directed by the famed cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak, an essay in action a la Hong Kong; Johnny Depp in the new Polanski supernatural thriller The Ninth Gate [I guess he heard my wisecracks about End of Days], also featuring Frank Langella, Lena Olin, and Emmanuelle Seigner.

An eminent paleontologist who has seen Jurassic Park estimates that the average Tyrannosaur would need to eat 292 lawyers a year to maintain its body weight; this suggests, obviously, that the introduction of genetically-engineered predators might provide a natural mechanism for the control of the legal population. — Who says that the advance of science cannot provide solutions for our most pressing social problems?

In re the Oscars: in 1964 Doctor Strangelove was nominated for Best Picture; it lost, in an exemplary exercise of the professional judgment of the Academy, to Mary Poppins. I think this says enough.

Later.


____________


Flying fool (5/4/00)


The latest development appears to be that David Arquette has been declared World Heavyweight Champion! but there’s some confusion regarding exactly how this happened, and the lawyers are looking at it. Meanwhile Diamond Dallas Page has to keep saving the pretty-boy’s skinny Hollywood ass from Tank Abbott and Courteney Cox is wringing her hands at the prospect of his imminent dismemberment; not the most original of plot lines, but obviously they’re making this up as they go along. — Of course, I have to keep watching this now because his sisters may show up in his corner and start pounding on the Nitro Girls; and if so I’ll be won over to the WCW for life. Stay tuned.

Regarding Rupert Everett’s claim [supported, apparently, by Madonna] to have rewritten The Next Best Thing with his buddy Mel Bordeaux, though the original writer Thomas Ropelewski acknowledges their input, he maintains it to have been essentially inconsequential and continues with the observation: “It seems ironic to me that an actor who makes $3 million a picture yearns to be a modestly paid and ill-respected screenwriter.” No shit.

Angelina Jolie has signed on for the role of Lara Croft in the forthcoming Tomb Raider movie, due out in 2001; Simon West will direct. I always thought Indiana Jones should have been a girl.


In other developments:


First Name: Carmen. [Jean-Luc Godard 1983. Written by Anne-Marie Miéville; from the novel by Prosper Mérimée.]

After some preliminary studies of urban traffic at night [a la Alphaville, but here in color], we repair to a sanitarium, where we discover a film director named Jean-Luc Godard [played by, you guessed it] in a hospital gown chewing Groucholike on the stump of a cigar as he stares at a portable typewriter; from which [in the tradition of Jack Nicholson] he doesn’t seem to be able to evoke any better beginning for his screenplay than a few random symbols and the words “badly seen”. The nurse enters and reiterates the threat of the staff to toss him out unless he can at least pretend to be sick; he counters by hitting on her. — Interpolate some footage of a string quartet at practice; and jumpcut thereafter into the story of Godard’s supposed niece Carmen [portrayed by Maruschka Detmer, a babe who sent me straight to the dictionary to look up the French for “hooters”], who under the guise of making a movie is planning to rob a bank; unless it’s the other way around. [In either case she appeals to the authority of Dillinger.] This involves her with the unfortunate male lead [I forget his name, but, then, I was supposed to], a wouldbe gangster who starts out kidnapping her and ends up within the space of a couple of scenes as her love slave, mooning around a hotel room while she takes meetings with her terrorist film collective. “If I love you, that’s the end of you,” she warns, staring moodily out the window while, tormented, he buries his face in her cleavage and groans “Why do women exist?” — Meanwhile Uncle Jean is playing with a sliderule the color of bubblegum. — Somehow a courtroom scene straight out of the Marx Brothers finds its way into the storyline; then presently the lover is rediscovered with his arms wrapped around a television set, seeking solace in a screenful of snow. She reenters, ignores his protests of undying love, and, casting her clothing off disdainfully, proceeds to the shower; following her he too disrobes and, in a transport of selfdegradation, corners her in the stall and whacks off on her. [Without question this scene accomplishes the reductio ad absurdum of the stalker movie; the genre should have been retired right on the spot.] Disgusted with him and with the male of the species in general, she ventures out into a restaurant gunfight [something about the service economy always brings out the Maoist in Godard]; following, he shoots her. — Meanwhile Uncle Jean gets financing. — The end. — Unbelievable. — With music by Beethoven and Tom Waits.


The Girl Hunters. [Roy Rowland, 1963. Written by Rowland and Robert Fellows, with the connivance of Mickey Spillane.]

From the novel of the same title: having been reduced by guilt over the disappearance and presumed death of his faithful Girl Friday Velda to alcoholic despair, Mike Hammer is discovered passed out in the gutter, shitfaced and unshaven, after a bender which seems to have gone on for several years; alerted by their superiors that the onetime ace private eye is needed to hear the deathbed confession of a mysterious Gman secret agent, a couple of patrolmen haul him in, and, after his erstwhile buddy police detective Pat Chambers smacks him around a bit, Hammer is dragged into a hospital room and leans into an oxygen tent to hear the name of the longlost bimbo wheezed out with the errant fed’s dying breath. Energized by the prospect of redemption, our hero tosses the bottle aside, dons his trenchcoat, primes his piece, and strides forth into the night of the city in search of the lousy punks responsible for ruining his life. Straightaway he finds a connection between his girlfriend’s disappearance and the machinations of the commie spy ring that whacked a prominent [heroic-McCarthyesque] Senator and left the solon’s blonde bombshell wife paddling around her swimming pool all by herself; and now you have to wonder whether Mike is beating the truth out of her, or whether maybe it’s the other way around. — Remarkable mainly by virtue of the fact that Spillane himself played Hammer in this production; not at all badly. — With that trademark sadistic brutality [“The medical examiner will be pulling fragments of your skull out of the wall with needlenose pliars” he tells Shirley Eaton with a sneer] and a whole lot of flesh for 1963; nothing if not politically incorrect. — And check out that Corvette.


Two Lost Worlds. [Norman Dawn, 1950; written by Tom Hubbard.]

Wounded in a fight with South Sea pirates, Yankee Clipper captain James Arness is put ashore to heal in Queensland and, after delivering a very successful series of management seminars to the local population and making time with the cutest girl in the province, organizes a counterstrike against the wicked buccaneers which mainly gets himself, the babe, his principal rival for her affections, and a couple of supporting characters stranded on a desert island inhabited by giant lizards; after the volcano erupts, the secondary romantic lead expires nobly and the rest of them are rescued in the nick of time. — I guess I can make sense of the scenario, but all this is accompanied by a portentous narration whose purpose is hidden in obscurity; is it just that there are some things man was not meant to know?


Out Of The Blue. [Dennis Hopper, 1981; written by Leonard Yakir and Brenda Nielson.]

An extended narrative treatment of a theme of Neil Young: after her trucker father goes to the Big House for absentmindedly running his rig into a school bus while exploring her panties on the pretext of looking for a bag of uppers, extremely confused little girl Linda Manz grows up obsessed with Elvis and enamored of Johnny Rotten; when in due course the old man gets out of stir, she, her trailertrash mother, and the partially-reformed hard-driving son-of-a-gun [none other, of course, than the director himself] continue their intriguing deconstruction of the nuclear family. — Twisted and bizarre; but of course you gotta love it.


Guinevere. [Audrey Wells, 1999.]

Strangely smitten by the Bohemian photographer [Stephen Rea] her snotty-rich family has hired to do the mugshots at her sister’s wedding, shy but gorgeous recent graduate Sarah Polley throws off Harvard Law [why is it always Harvard Law?] and follows him back to his romantic urban loft to pursue a career as an artist. But first, naturally, she must serve an apprenticeship as an artist’s bimbo; a role in which she discovers she has had several predecessors, among them the redoubtable Gina Gershon. — Essentially a rewrite of the Scorsese segment of New York Stories from the woman’s point of view, but entertaining nonetheless; not least because little Sarah is indeed now All Grown Up and at this rate will soon be doing shower scenes in women’s-prison flicks. — And at this rate I’ll be watching them.


Spanking The Monkey. [David O. Russell, 1994.]

Whizkid Jeremy Davis comes home from MIT for the summer and discovers his high school buddies want to beat him up, the girl next door won’t put out, his father has decided to pull him out of school to make him over as a travelling salesman, and his mother wants to fuck him. Only self-slaughter can resolve these conflicts; and at long last I understand my classmates.


The Phantom Of The Opera. [Dario Argento, 1998.]

An unfamiliar approach to a familiar story: a wholly unscarred, indeed, romantically handsome Phantom [Julian Sands] dwells in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House, where he rules as Lord of the Rats and frequently exercises his inhuman cunning and more than mortal strength ripping the limbs off the curious unwary who venture into his domain seeking the substance of his legend. Taking an interest in the dazzling Christine [Asia Argento], he draws her to his secret chambers with his psychic powers and coaches her singing while playing a gigantic pipeorgan by the light of an improbable number of candles. Feeling that he’s getting the short leg of the lovetriangle, Count Raoul De Chagny [Andrea Di Stefano] takes issue with this arrangement; precipitating confusion, conflict, and catastrophe. — I still regard the 1925 silent classic starring Lon Chaney as definitive; but admittedly that version didn’t have as much humping in it. — With numerous maimings and decapitations, a fistfight over Baudelaire between a couple of poets in a whorehouse, and lots of naked fat people. — I begin to wonder: can anything be remade as an Italian horror movie?


Fist Of Legend. [Gordon Chan, 1994.]

Japanese apologists are fond of protesting the racism of American histories of the Pacific war, claiming that their armies were greeted as liberators by the natives of the Greater Eastasian Coprosperity Sphere; somehow supposing, I guess, that anyone who hears this version of the story will have been too stupid to have bothered to ask any of the brown and yellow peoples who chafed under the burden of the white man’s domination just what kind of welcome they gave the legions of the Rising Sun. Or, more to the present point, would never have bothered to watch any Chinese war movies; e.g., the wildly popular Bruce Lee vehicle Fist Of Fury [1972], in which the late lamented welcomes several hundred of the liberators of the Middle Kingdom [many, I’m afraid, depicted in accordance with the politically-very-incorrect American wartime propaganda guidelines with buckteeth and thick glasses] by kicking the living shit out of them.

In this somewhat milder remake Jet Li, a Chinese engineering student in Kyoto [circa 1937], receives the news that his revered martial arts master has been killed in a duel; dropping his studies forthwith, he returns to occupied China to investigate the murder, and discovers immediately that unprincipled Japanese affiliated with a rival fighting school weakened his mentor with poison to enable their own leader to defeat him and place the great man’s laurels upon his own undeserving brow. Having thus established culpability, our hero goes to the Japanese school and, in a passage essentially identical to that in the classic Lee version, busts all of them up at once; finishing with the individual humiliation of the murderer himself, who, exposed as a fraud, is not even granted the dignity of execution. — After this, naturally, Jet’s own posse turns on him out of jealousy, and he hangs out in the countryside for a while, philosophizing about the ill consequences of misunderstanding between peoples with his Japanese girlfriend, before the final confrontation with the principal villain, an evil Japanese general: a dude of such surpassing badness that [reversing the sense of the old hardboiled-detective sendups] when one of the Chinese jocks throws a punch at him he headbutts the fist of the hapless assailant and knocks the poor bastard across the room. — Our hero does indeed vanquish this monster, but not without a fight that takes up most of what an American screenwriter would call the third act; and then, unlike Bruce [who died gloriously opposing impossible odds], with the aid of unnamed and none-too-clearly-delineated Japanese Good Guys escapes the vengeance of the majority-party Nipponese Pigs in an unmarked car to pursue his destiny elsewhere. — In short, the authors do their best to make the Second World War look like an unfortunate misunderstanding, but fail, on balance, to explain certain puzzling aspects of the backstory, like what the Japanese army was doing in China in the first place. Meanwhile, Jet Li kicks ass.

At one point during a lull in the action the star takes time out to exhibit some of his standard workout, which apparently includes single-fingered pushups and chinning himself repeatedly with one hand; unfortunately he leaves out the parts where he practices levitation and makes time stand still while he moves around it. But perhaps we’ll have those explained in a later installment.


Fear, Anxiety, and Depression. [Todd Solondz, 1989.]

The opening scene, which introduces the author himself [yes, Todd Solondz does look exactly like Dawn Wiener] writing an extremely funny celebrity-stalker fan letter to Samuel Beckett, gives a pretty fair picture of what is to follow in this, his first feature: Mr. Solondz, a wildhaired geek in black hornrims with a reedy voice which cracks at the slightest hint of stress, presents himself as a fabulously unsuccessful New York playwright, author of terrible quasiGreek dramas fraught with existential Angst in which actors just good enough to be embarrassed scream their lines at audiences frozen with discomfort in tiny theater-lofts; these naturally receive hilariously negative reviews in the Village Voice which drive him to ludicrously inept attempts at suicide. After falling for a punkrock chick with a Bride-of-Frankenstein haircut who regards him with baffled indifference he decides to dump the geekgirl who inexplicably loves him with a minimum of ceremony [“Sharon, I love you, I really do, and I want to help you in any way I can, but I think if our relationship is to grow we have to slow down a bit...and stop seeing each other for good”] and hurl himself at the elusive Object of Desire. This project propels him through a series of misadventures involving his parents [don’t ask], a longlost highschool acquaintance whom Fate has rewarded with an absurd measure of success [babes, limos, the movie deal], a handsome painter buddy with a cute girlfriend almost too perfectly reminiscent of Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton, and a variety of other characters drawn from New York Bohemian life; and ends, of course, in dismal failure. — In short, a Woody Allen movie; in fact one of the best Woody Allen movies of recent years. — If you think of the doomobsessed babe standing by the Jackson Pollock in Play It Again Sam [“What are you doing Saturday night?” — “Commiting suicide” — “Okay, what about Friday night?”], you have the tone of this exactly. — I can’t believe the talent this guy has. Check this out.


B. Monkey. [Michael Radford, 1998; written by Michael Thomas and Chloe King, after a novel by Andrew Davies.]

Jazz nerd and sometime DJ Jared Harris and gorgeous catburglar/graffitiartist Asia Argento meet cute in a London bar; after negotiating the usual potholes on the frequently-carpetbombed Road Of Romance [and disposing of her erstwhile gangster associates Rupert Everett and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers] their love triumphs over adversity and they retire to the chilly North to hump their way through the long British winter. — Jazz nerd is good, to be sure, but would not an itinerant theoretician and sometime film critic have been better? — Tell Ms. Argento I’m available for the remake.


Dog Park. [Bruce McCulloch, 1998.]

Luke Wilson, first among equals in a circle united by the social interactions of their dogs, suffers a traumatic break with his girlfriend, goes to the bar to drown his sorrows, and immediately makes the acquaintance of Natasha Henstridge; then falls prey to an attack of conscience on the part of the screenwriter, who decides verisimilitude might be better served if the protagonist has to wait through ninety minutes of intervening incident to the closing credits before getting into her pants. On behalf of the inhabitants of the planet Earth, I applaud this concession to realism. — But however imperfect Mr. McCulloch’s grasp of the facts of the romantic lives of humans, his observations on dog psychology are acute and funny.


The Viking Queen. [Don Chaffey, 1967. Written by Clarke Reynolds; from a story by John Temple-Smith.]

Another of those Hammer rereleases that make modern life worthwhile: in the reign of that noted party animal the Emperor Nero, handsome Roman governor Don Murray and severely stacked native Briton queen Carita are setting a positive example for the intercourse of their peoples by frequently getting lost in the woods during long chariot rides through the countryside. Those feeble excuses about hunting wild boar would probably hold up forever, were it not the case, alas, that the Good Romans have excited the jealousy of the scheming evil ambitious brutal Bad Romans, the common Britons chafe beneath the imperial yoke, the fat oily merchants have figured out they can get better tax breaks from the Bad Romans than the Good Romans [especially if they make their presence known at those big-ticket fundraisers], the rabblerousing Druids are just itching to daub themselves with woad and go on the warpath, and at any moment some wellmeaning but hotheaded relative, an accidentprone little brother for example, is bound to be duped into some incident that will provoke catastrophe, divide the fortunes of the starcrossed lovers, and set the countryside afire. — Sure enough, before you know it everyone is riding around energetically hurling spears at one another in the name of the Sacred Mistletoe and the Golden Sickle. — Hooters on horseback: talk about High Concept.


Boys Don’t Cry. [Kimberly Peirce, 1999; written by Peirce and Andy Bienen.]

A nearly mystical invocation of the sense of the Midwest: a magic, timeless, geographically undifferentiated land of boundless extent, through which teenagers are cursed in perpetuity by crushing cosmic boredom to cruise endlessly in search of some escape from the Idea of the Small Town — which is instantiated in tiny strips of burgerjoints, feedstores, gas stations, and biker bars, in trailerparks and shantytowns, in nameless agricultural packaging plants that pay a dime and a half above the minimum wage to brainbenumbed industrial serfs dressed like robot zombies in gauze masks hairnets and coveralls embroidered with the company logo, identically in every direction, as far as the longest conceivable roadtrip can carry them — worse: as far as the human imagination seems capable of taking them. In this land for which the automobile had to be invented, they are doomed eternally to explore the infinite landscape of an endless Saturday night, picking pointless fights, dragging one another behind their pickups through the dirt of boundless cornfields, sniffing Reddiwhip on merrygorounds, puking uncontrollably off highway overpasses, racing one another from nowhere to nowhere; and, of course, occasionally making sport of stomping queers to death. Into this world that can only have prepared a brutal welcome is delivered Hilary Swank/Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena/Swank Hilary, the girl who’d rather be a boy; with results which however predictable are nonetheless shocking. — The accents are bogus and the moral somewhat labored, but this is nearly as good as they say it is; Ms. Swank and Chloë Sevigny certainly deserved their numerous awards. Check it out.


Romeo Must Die. [Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2000; written by Eric Bernt, after a story by Mitchell Kapner.]

The uneasy truce between the black and the Chinese gangs [not quite the Montagues and the Capulets, but close enough for hiphop] who rule the waterfront property needed by an unscrupulous entrepeneur bent on building a stadium for a professional football franchise is broken when the Chinese godfather’s heir apparent is murdered; when news of this reaches Hong Kong, Jet Li busts out of the joint and flies to America to clean house. Though he does, pro forma, fall for the daughter of the black godfather [Aaliyah, cf. the tie-in video for “Try Again”], romance is not exactly the point here; but seldom have so many had their butts kicked so artistically by so slight a figure. — Nothing is forever, and it’s always possible that someone will talk him into a buddy-cop movie with DiCaprio; but for the moment, let’s face it, Jet Li can do no wrong.


Fiend Without A Face. [John Craig, 2K; from a treatment by Leonardo Garbonzo.]

On an Air Force base far off on the northern rim of the continent, an invisible creature of unknown provenance is stalking anyone incautious enough to shower with a camera crew in the bathroom, ripping the brains right out of the bodies of its victims and mounting them in specimen-jars in the trophy-case of its hidden subterranean lair. Called in to investigate by the Pentagon, noted rocket scientist and expert on psychic phenomena John “Wild Buffalo” Craig interrupts a recruiting trip through the pleasuredomes of the Midwest to plumb the depths of this enigma. Suspicion immediately falls upon radar wizard Elle “The Body” MacPherson, who has been observed by surveillance satellites performing strange midnight dances upon the Canadian moors stark naked within an enigmatic circle of gigantic stones known to the natives of this primitive land as “the goalposts of the gods”; but as he examines the photographic evidence over a triple shot of Jameson’s in the hotel bar, John notices a strange fogging of the negative, as if some mysterious radiation had worked its influence upon the image, even at orbital distance. Brooding on this puzzle, he looks up from the stack of eightbyten glossies and sees...Elle herself! who has entered the barroom and is giving him an extremely significant look. But suddenly the lights dim, and in the distance a strange glow is seen to play about the nuclear reactor that powers the gigantic antennae with which the American military has been probing the outer reaches of the solar system... . — Can alien invaders have caused the mysterious mutilations? Can material objects be influenced by pure thought? say, the arrangement of Elle’s undergarments; say, by John’s lizard-brain, now energized by alcohol. Can all this be improved by color filmstock, or is it just as well they shot it in that cheesy Fifties black and white? — All these and many other questions will be resolved; just as soon as John gets out of the hot tub, and Elle remembers where she left her pants. — Meanwhile, watch out for that doppelgänger.


And, courtesy of United Airlines/Lufthansa:


For Love Of The Game. [Sam Raimi, 1999.]

A wrenching drama about an actor whose career begins with promise but meets with premature success, resulting in a grotesque inflation of his selfimage which leaves him incapable of seeing himself in any roles other than depictions of legendary heroes much larger than life, like Wyatt Earp and Robin Hood; an elephantiasis of the ego not unlike that of those petty Asian dictators who find it necessary to erect statues in their own likeness of gigantic size. — Or was this about baseball? Mercifully, I have already forgotten.


The Bachelor. [Gary Sinyor, 1999.]

Chris O’Donnell pisses on the grave of Buster Keaton; Renée Zellweger holds his hand to steady his aim. Out of deference to the sensibilities of my audience, I refrain from supplying any further detail. Suffice it that, if I find myself again on a plane over the Atlantic with no alternative but to watch this, I’m getting out to walk.


Later.


____________


Berlin Alexanderplatz (5/2/00)


A long weekend in Berlin? I thought it would be only that, until the mysterious blonde holding a copy of the International Herald Tribune bumped into me, seemingly by accident, as I stood gawking in disbelief at the giant onion-on-a-stick which towers over the Alexanderplatz. Only after the black helicopters materialized and mysterious figures in mirrorshades leapt out to seize her did I realize that something had been slipped into my pocket... . — As for the rest of it — the chase through the sewers of the Old City, the audience with the Emperor of the Rats, the escape by balloon over the ramparts of Potsdam as the slavering hounds of the secret police bayed behind me, the trek through Bohemia, sleeping by day, crawling through the mud and slime of the rice paddies by night, the month recuperating on the Riviera at the villa of a certain Polish Countess — well, suffice it that Jerry Bruckheimer has optioned the story, and after a couple of rewrites and a quick polish you can expect to see Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie mouthing my dialogue on a big screen near you sometime in the none-too-distant future.

As for the rest of the rest of it: though I managed to land and get off the plane, everything else still seems to be up in the air. We’ll see.


____________


Life, art, bitch-slapping the media jackals (4/25/00)


David Arquette appeared this last evening on WCW Monday Nitro to fight a celebrity death match against Eric Bischoff; and Diamond Dallas Page was in his corner! — an indication, I’m sure, that the march of events has already rendered the following notice obsolescent:


Ready To Rumble. [Brian Robbins, 2000; written by Steven Brill.]

Everyone has a really dumb movie that he likes against his better judgment; and of course I have scores of them. This is one: — Dismayed and astounded by the unexpected defeat of their hero, putative WCW world heavyweight champion Oliver Platt, in a title match rescripted at the last minute in a backstage conference between Evil Promotor Joe Pantoliano and noted mat heavy Diamond Dallas Page, wrestling aficianados David Arquette and Scott Caan abandon productive careers as sewage truck drivers in their native Wyoming and set out upon a pilgrimage which leads them to Atlanta, New York, and finally the holy city of Las Vegas in search of redemption — not simply for their idol Platt [whom they do dimly understand to be as much actor as athlete], but for their conception of what he stands for, and for the nation of deranged wrestling fans who have founded their belief in themselves upon their belief in him. In the course of this spiritual odyssey they teach Van Halen to the Singing Nuns, party with the trailertrash of distant provinces, make the acquaintance of a number of authentic professional wrestlers [what is reality, if not Bill Goldberg], inspect at close quarters the hooters of the fabulous Nitro Girls [led, for the purposes of this scenario, by designated Treacherous Cunt Rose McGowan], learn the wisdom of the Ancients of Wrestling at the feet of martialarts master Martin Landau, and make a date with destiny in a steel-cage death match for a million dollars and the championship belt. — Perhaps simply because the story does by design sail so close against the reefs of the usual Nauseating Hollywood Uplift, this is entirely hilarious: Arquette, having grown as an actor, can now play dumber than paint; Oliver Platt may have been an unlikely choice for the lead, but carries off the role of the boozeaddled King of the Ring with no little panache, accepting with good grace the necessity of setting some kind of alltime record for getting kicked in the crotch in a major motion picture; and I love what they did with sewage. — To be sure, I keep thinking this would have worked better as a story about a couple of halfwitted political operatives who seek out a washedup movie star and over his feeble inebriated protests that he never really played football for Notre Dame, led cavalry charges for the Confederate army, or fired torpedoes with the Hellcats of the Navy, sober him up, paper over the loathing felt for him by his family, convince him to believe in himself, orchestrate his comeback, and eventually despite his inability to master even the most trivial details of domestic or foreign policy get him elected President of the United States. — After all, though David Arquette is wonderfully risible in the uniform of the Wyoming State Patrol, I can’t help but think he would be even funnier as a campaign manager promoted to Attorney General. — But admittedly this would be fantastic.


____________


Tempus fugit (2/8/00)


Paul Newman [as Governor Earl Long] addresses his dick in his best Louisiana accent for the benefit of Lolita Davidovich: “Come on now! you on the state payroll...now wake up!” — “I’d fire the damn freeloader if I could,” he explains. I’ll bet he would.


Scream Three. [Wes Craven, 2000; written by Ehren Kruger.]

About halfway through this third and [we are repeatedly assured] final chapter of the franchise that made Kevin Williamson a multinational conglomerate, heroine Neve Campbell takes a wrong turn on her way out of the studio restroom and finds herself exploring the deserted soundstage on which the cast and crew of [a cough behind the hand] Stab Three are filming the conclusion of a slasher trilogy based upon her own real-life adventures — or were, until someone began hacking up the actors — and, with a mounting sense of relived horror and ever louder voices in her head whispering dialogue from the previous episodes, wanders dumbstruck through sets that reproduce with uncanny accuracy the hometown scenes on which mysterious and seemingly superhuman masked psychopaths with large knives stalked her in North Carolina far away, in a past she seemingly cannot escape — and, incidentally, what’s that noise? is someone...following her? — The real joke here, of course, is that the movie sets depicting the “real” town of Bayboro are the real town of Bayboro, not eerie doppelgängers — not reality depicted, but depiction as reality — and that Neve is actually a scream queen pretending to be a real person dismayed to discover that a masked slasher is following her around the soundstage on which a scream queen has been pretending to be Neve in peril from a masked slasher. [I think I have that right.] — This is either right before or right after Carrie Fisher turns up in the studio dungeons bitching about getting shafted out of the part of Princess Leia because she wouldn’t fuck George Lucas, and right about the time that it sinks in that David Arquette and Courteney Cox really did fall in love during the shooting of the original Scream and now really are married and that the halting problem is provably unsolvable for a universal Turing machine because you can program it to emulate itself. — At this point, however, two paths diverged in the scriptwriter’s wood, and the one that led to a grand surreal conclusion in the classic style of Blazing Saddles [and a review that would only be expressible in the lambda calculus], was, alas, the one not taken; instead [I reveal no secrets of real consequence] after casting a certain amount of suspicion on everyone in sight the culprit is revealed to be...the Evil Twin!!! [well, almost], and the climactic battle in [how very] a screening room begs interpretation as an argument over Final Cut. — But you don’t need me to tell you that this movie could have been better; you have Ebert for that. Suffice it, instead, that it is not without charm; that it is directed by one of the great masters of the genre; that the serial victims of the mad slasher [Lance Henriksen, Jenny McCarthy, and Parker Posey, among others] take their falls with great good grace; and that the cameo by Jay and Silent Bob is actually pretty cute. — After all, so long as Kevin Smith is taking the studio tour in someone else’s movie, he’s not making one of his own.


Eye Of The Beholder. [Stephan Elliot, 1999.]

An essay in the evergreen stalker genre: master spook and technopeeper Ewan McGregor, tracking the errant son of a government bigshot to a fatal assignation with woman of mystery Ashley Judd, is stricken by her indefinable fascination; trailing her by plane, train, and automobile from one city to the next, he accumulates much grainy pseudosurveillancecam footage of the Object of Desire getting into and out of hotel bathtubs and bears witness to her numerous whackings of feckless dickheads who seem [conveniently] to deserve their fate — all the while seething inwardly at the dark unnameable desires which draw him ever onward into an obsessive whirlpool of forbidden cinematographic quotes from Vertigo. — Now, obviously: if he doesn’t follow her [quite literally] to the ends of the Earth there is no movie; and, therefore, he must. But the rationalization for this behavior, which has something to do with Ashley’s taking the place of Ewan’s invisible companion/longlost daughter, and he in turn replacing her guardian angel/longlost father, is completely incoherent: chemical bonds work like this; human bonds do not. — Ms. Judd however does a great Kim Novak, and the locations are excellent: Washington, New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, San Francisco, the great American desert, Alaska; and never a hint of Los Angeles.


Twin Falls Idaho. [Mark and Michael Polish, 1999.]

A hooker with a heart of gold falls for a pair of Siamese twins. Incredible. — With Michele Hicks as the lady of the evening, Jon Gries, Garret Morris, William Katt, and Lesley Ann Warren as members of the dramatic chorus, and the auteurs themselves in the suit with three legs. Check this out.


Magnolia. [Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999.]

“And so it goes,” muses the narrator toward the end of the third hour of this wonderfully complex and wholly remarkable motion picture; “and so it goes.” A dead giveaway; but the observant viewer will have noted long before this the influence of Kurt Vonnegut upon the structure of the narrative — which follows, in essence, the fortunes of the several members of a Bokononist karass — a group of persons whose lives, should they glimpse the scheme or not, are intertwined by the machinations of an unknowable fate [or the complexities of an unseen narrative] — through an eventful [and, nota bene, a rainy] day in Anderson’s native milieu, the San Fernando Valley. Vonnegut, of course, was a sort of comedian; Anderson is rather more a tragedian, and, therefore, the thematic similarities that link the fortunes of the members of the ensemble — which includes present and former child stars of a television quiz show [compare J. D. Salinger], the show’s asshole MC, the MC’s selfdestructive daughter, a dying producer, his emotionally disturbed [second] wife, his geek male nurse, the charismatic but unbalanced organizer of selfimprovement seminars that teach wouldbe sexual predators how to seduce and destroy, a bungling lonely-guy policeman, and a preadolescent rapper — are the varieties of misery: drug addiction, child abuse, cancer, a selfobliterating desire not simply to deny but to annihilate the past, adultery and gnawing guilt, incontinence, vomiting, the sense of lost opportunity and wasted talent that haunts the failed Wunderkind, and the debasement brought about by television exposure. Naturally this encourages the actors to contest for most spectacular meltdown; Cruise may indeed win narrowly over William H. Macy and Julianne Moore, but at best he is first among equals. — As for the moral: Vonnegut always seemed to hint that it was something spelled out in an alien tongue, which could only be read from the perspective of another world. [Douglas Adams carried the joke even further, but the answer to this movie is something other than forty-two.] I suspect that this is the point of the weird but obviously deliberate references to the celebrated chronicler of the paranormal Charles Fort; from whose pages, with startling originality, Anderson plucks his denouement. — But rest assured [in despite of my whining only a couple of weeks ago about the interminable length of Ripley] I sat entranced all the way through this to the end of the credits; and can testify, accordingly, that no frogs were harmed in the filming of this motion picture.


Jungle Moon Men. [Charles S. Gould, 1955. Written by Jo Pagano and Dwight Babcock.]

Intrepid explorer Johnny Weissmuller [here for some reason addressed as “Johnny Weissmuller” and not as “Jungle Jim”] and his laugh-a-minute sidekick Kimba the chimp are enlisted by a chick archaeologist to guide her into the forbidden Baku territory guarded by the fierce pygmy warriors [whose ferocity is somewhat obscured by the fact that they dress like Swiss Munchkins in lederhosen] known as the Jungle Moon Men; there she expects to find the mislaid secrets of the ancient Egyptian worshippers of Ra. After shooting a few wild animals and launching the essential subplots involving diamonds and unscrupulous White Hunters bent on plundering the treasures of the hidden lands, they stand presently before the portals of a lost city; within whose catacombs, they discover, a blonde goddess surrounded by Egyptian production design awaits to drug and mesmerize their party and toss them into her stinking dungeons. When an earthquake brings the city down about them and the priestess of the Moon is forced from her hidden chambers into daylight, will the sun-god wreak a terrible vengeance? Stay tuned.


Speaking Parts. [Atom Egoyan, 1989.]

A strange and complex story about a laundry woman [Arsinée Khanjian] in a fancy hotel who has developed a romantic obsession for a janitor [Michael McManus] who works as an extra in motion pictures: she rents the movies in which he has appeared, and watches all his scenes; even though he’s never had a speaking part. This changes abruptly when the cast and crew of a movie in production arrive and he leverages an affair with the writer into a more substantial role; at least until he has to choose between saving his life and ruining hers. — Mainly this is about the twisted postmodern alchemy that has effected the transmutation of video into reality: the most powerful principal character [the inevitable Evil Producer] appears only on a videoconferencing screen, the subject of the film-within-a-film [the writer’s dead brother] is seen only on tape, a crucial suicide by a hotel guest is witnessed only by surveillance cameras, the writer and the actor engage in videophone sex, and the charming Arsinée and her wouldbe lover meet only once [and then of course do not speak.] — But [as always with Egoyan] it is simultaneously about much else: freedom, mortality, the creative anxiety of the artist, the curious purity of unrequited love. — Meanwhile his latest feature [Felicia’s Journey] hangs in limbo between a halfhearted theatrical run and the video release that will give me a chance to see it; doesn’t anyone else care what a genius this guy is?


The Haunting. [Jan De Bont, 1999; written by David Self.]

Unprincipled [well; maybe just misguided] psychologist Liam Neeson recruits three subjects [Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lili Taylor, Owen Wilson] for what he claims is a study of the causes of insomnia; when they arrive at the site of the experiments and discover it to be the largest and most obviously haunted Gothic mansion in the history of the world, even these exemplars of naivete immediately discern that he is actually interested in the causes of mad gibbering terror. But who really is experimenting on whom? and how about those filmy nighties?


Mahler. [Ken Russell, 1974.]

Fellini in the third person: the composer, returning from America to Vienna, travels upon a train with his wife; the two of them take turns lapsing into surrealistic flashbacks which recapitulate his struggle to succeed and her remorse at her own selfeffacement. — E.g.: a female figure wrapped in mummy’s bandages writhes about a rocky beach as she struggles to emerge from a chrysalis — emerging, she inchworms up to a stone visage resembling that of Mahler and kisses it; a shrouded female shadowfigure follows Mahler through an adoring crowd [I think this is a quote from Magritte]; Mahler imagines his own funeral, his face screaming silently through a window in his coffin as his wife dances obscenely atop it — an urn emerges from the crematorium with a couple of staring eyeballs posed upon the ashes; his wife responds to this relation with a flashback of her own from which Mahler [in a nested flashback] recalls visiting his colleague Hugo Wolf in the asylum — writing music furiously stark naked in his cell — wiping his ass upon his composition — returning to her flashback, she indulges herself in a ritual burial of her own music [this construction is, strictly speaking, illegal, as a point of film grammar: it reminds me of the old Steven Wright joke about getting busted for walking in someone else’s sleep]; and Mahler’s approach to Valhalla to petition the goddess Cosima Wagner for acceptance — he carrying an enormous Star of David, she [with whip in leathers, very Ilsa of the SS] posed before a huge sword stuck in the ground behind her like a cross — he jumps through burning hoops, takes a sledgehammer and trashes his Star as she goosesteps in the background, poses before the Sacred Heart as she throws knives at him, slays [reluctantly] a firebreathing dragon in a cave, emerges with its pig’s-head and eats it from a platter, and sings with her a duet [to the tune of the Ride of the Valkyries] celebrating his renunciation of the religion of his fathers as they perch upon the swordlike cross and gold coins rain down upon them. — Indescribable; incredible. — Robert Powell plays Mahler; Georgina Hale plays his wife Alma; Dana Gillespie [obviously more talented than one might have guessed from her carer as a Hammer bimbo] plays Anna von Mildenburg; Antonia Ellis plays Cosima. You can guess who wrote the soundtrack.


Voodoo. [René Eram, 1995. Written by Brian DiMuccio and Dino Vindeni.]

Corey Feldman follows his girlfriend across several time zones and enrolls himself in the university where she is attending medical school; announcing his presence to her, he is dismayed to discover that she is not pleasantly surprised but rather pissed off that he has thus injected himself into the fabric of her school life without prior consultation and may now interfere with vital careerbuilding activities like hanging around the lab letting male medical students hit on her. Rejected, humiliated, and at a loss for a place to live, he takes up residence in the fraternity house of the Voodoo Zombies; complications ensue. — A harmless latenight entertainment, this would require no comment were it not [by uncanny coincidence] almost exactly the story of my school days.


Best trailer of the month: David Arquette and Rose McGowan in a wrestling movie [Ready To Rumble]. — I’ve been watching a lot of wrestling lately, I rather enjoy it, and I regret having said that politics is as phony as wrestling; because I’ve also been watching a lot of politics lately, and politics is actually much, much phonier than wrestling. — Who would you believe, anyway? Goldberg or George W. Bush?


____________


Father Time, Mother Night (1/22/00)


Helen Mirren on her role in Guccione’s Caligula [1980]: “It has an irresistable mixture of art and genitals in it.”

Compare the following:


Play It To The Bone. [Ron Shelton, 1999.]

When freak accident eliminates the scheduled warmup act at a title fight, washedup middleweights Antonio Banderas and Woody Harrelson get a call from a sleazeball promoter to fill the Tyson undercard on short notice; since neither has a car or can afford to fly, they persuade their mutual exgirlfriend Lolita Davidovich to drive them to Vegas, providing us once again with the familiar spectacle of two guys and a girl cruising through the desert in a muscle car [an Oldsmobile 442 Cutlass, and now I want one] with the top down. — But that’s what made this country great. — What makes Shelton great is his gift for character and dialogue; not here on best display, but, nonetheless, check it out.


Girl, Interrupted. [James Mangold, 1999; screenplay by Lisa Loomer and Anna Hamilton Phelan, from the memoir by Susanna Kaysen.]

A tale so improbable that one must believe it is, indeed, true: Winona Ryder graduates from high school [no, really] in 1967 and gets tossed into a mental hospital because she feels sad and confused and makes a feeble attempt at suicide. Once in the joint, she and her fellow sad girls take some downers, watch some television, and bond in a restrained sort of way; meanwhile, as everyone remembers, thirty million functional schizophrenics were running loose in the streets taking over the country. Really, this is absurd. — Whoopi Goldberg and Vanessa Redgrave do their best in a bad cause trying to make the psychiatric profession look good [the shrinks’ vacuous definition of “borderline personality” brought down the house, and provided a perfect illustration of why psychiatry is barely a borderline science]; but the really memorable performance is that of Angelina Jolie, who despite the constraints of an inadequate script is little short of phenomenal in the role of the bull-moose loonie. — Rumor has it Ridley Scott is considering her for the Starling role, now that Jodie’s bailed from the Hannibal project; I say give the girl a shot. Maybe she’ll vote for Eisenhower again.


Black Mask. [Daniel Lee, 1996.]

Jet Li, who gained prominence a couple of years ago as the only guy in Lethal Weapon Four who didn’t suck, here appears in the role of a biologically-augmented martial-arts superman who dons a mask to combat his fellow Übercommandos — who, betrayed and abandoned by the police authorities, have decided to get even by taking over the Hong Kong drug trade. On those few occasions when Li’s own remarkable virtuosity is not sufficient in itself to suggest that he is more than human, the fight choreography of Yuen Wo Ping [now famous as martial arts director of The Matrix] ensures the suspension of disbelief. Excellent.


The Red Violin. [Le Violon Rouge. Francois Girard, 1998.]

An interesting variation on the familiar theme of metempsychosis: the spirit of a dying woman passes into a violin [or sort of], whose adventures we then follow through halfadozen hands from Europe to Shanghai over three centuries until the auction that forms the frametale. Good cast, nice photography, no dramatic tension.


Run Lola Run. [Lola Rennt. Tom Tykwer, 1998.]

Redheaded technopunk Lola gets a call from her cute but apparently incompetent boyfriend Manni, who sold some smuggled diamonds for a very dangerous gangster and then lost the money and now has twenty minutes to find a hundred thousand marks before the payoff is due. Dropping the phone, Lola runs out the door and across the city to save him. And she never stops running. — Nor does this movie, which [employing a variety of media including film, video, montages of still photographs, and animation] loops three times through different variations of the story [and different relationships of action to consequence] before it nears a conclusion. In the process everyone gets killed at least once, and Herr Tykwer manages the weirdest quote from Vertigo I think I’ve ever seen. — A brilliant essay on the themes of chance and necessity; an endlessly inventive exploration of the simple but profound truth that motion pictures ought to move; a German Breathless. Check this out.


The Bone Collector. [Phillip Noyce, 1999. Written by Jeremy Iacone; after the book by Jeffery Deaver.]

Rookie investigator Angelina Jolie tracks a serial killer through the catacombs of Manhattan under the remote-control direction of quadraplegiac detective mastermind Denzel Washington. — Dressing up Sherlock Holmes as Stephen Hawking not only serves to promote Seven Lite to Seven-and-a-Half, but also provides that all-important excuse to keep Denzel’s hands off Angelina; for though Hollywood harbors no compunctions about showing us a guy eaten alive by rats, apparently it can’t show us a black guy making out with a white girl.


Supernova. [Walter Hill, under the pseudonym Thomas Lee (Alan Smithee’s career seems to be over); final cut (uncredited) by Francis Ford Coppola. Story by William Malone and Daniel Chuba; screenplay by David C. Wilson.]

It has now been several years since Siskel and Ebert devoted a feature segment of their program to the evolution of the Hollywood action cliche of people outrunning explosions; that summary already could conclude with the reductio ad absurdum of the clip from Chain Reaction in which Keanu Reeves rockets away from a near-nuclear detonation on a motorcycle. Thus I spoil nothing — nay, it should be selfevident from the title — when I reveal that the grand finale of this opus is a scene in which a spacecraft outruns the shockwave of an exploding star. The surprise lies in just how dull the rest of the movie is: a medical vessel [apparently some kind of deep-space ambulance/hospital ship] responds to a distress signal from a remote orb [I guess nobody here saw Alien] and finds a lone survivor of some mysterious disaster who seems to have derived malign superhuman powers from the weird alien artifact [a sample of “nine-dimensional matter”] he dug out of the ice on a chunk of rock everyone keeps referring to as a “Rogue Moon” [I can’t remember the origin of this turn of phrase, but I think it was a title of Alfred Bester’s]; after hosing all the women and beating up all the guys he gets tossed into the stellar catastrophe, and James Spader and Angela Bassett [first guys on the title cards and, duh, last guys standing] escape to fight galactic evil another day. — This film is a marvel of production design: the exteriors and the spaceship models are wonderfully detailed, and the CGI background paintings, beautiful; but though the interiors are not inelegant, because of an excessive use of big handheld closeups [which blur annoyingly in the action sequences] most of the movie might as well have been shot on the back stage at the Elks’ Club. — Further quibbles: giant stars are red, not blue [though admittedly that would spoil the color scheme]; at last report the universe is at least ten- or eleven-dimensional; and I am still wondering what the Woody Allen android from Sleeper was doing on this ship. — Whatever the failings of this opus, it might have been worse: while I was waiting for the main event to commence I had to suffer through the trailer for Battlefield Earth. Apparently in space no one can hear you yawn.


Sorceress II: The Temptress. [Richard Styles, 1999.]

Sister witches Julie Strain, Jenna Bair, and Julie K. Smith hire a new marketing executive into the family cosmetics firm; he becomes embroiled in a quest for supremacy between their black magic and the white magic of Sandahl Bergman. — An episode of Charmed, only with better boob jobs. — The student of the output of the Corman exploitation empire will note much familiar recycled footage, including a personal favorite, the car wreck that killed Monique Gabrielle in 976-EVIL 2 [The Astral Factor]: now there is a scream queen.


The Talented Mr. Ripley. [Anthony Minghella, 1999; after a novel by Patricia Highsmith.]

Working-class chameleon Tom Ripley [aka Matt Damon] is mistaken by the father of a rich ne’er-do-well for one of his son’s Princeton classmates and dispatched to Italy to bring the wayward lad back to run the family shipping concern. Once there, he develops a taste for the good life, murders the dissipated scion and takes on his identity, and then has to murder everyone else who may unmask him: Zelig as hitman. — I sat all the way through this wondering why it reminded me of Strangers On A Train; but then of course discovered that Patricia Highsmith wrote that too. — Which provokes the inevitable comparisons. — Let’s simply note that, first, Hitchcock was very careful about the visual symbology of his casting, and, Ivy League Wasps or no, he would never have crashlanded like this on the Planet of the Blondes: Damon, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, and Gwyneth Paltrow put together make a musical number by Julie Brown; and even I can detect the dye jobs. [Ms. Paltrow is emphatically not Grace Kelly, incidentally; the original remains the definitive ice blonde.] Second, he would have cut back on the carnage, because, third, he would have managed to tell the story much more succinctly. Minghella handles the recurrent near-unmaskings of Ripley deftly, to be sure, but the crises are too many and too similar: I kept thinking I didn’t need to go back for more popcorn, because the latest murder simply had to be the last; I kept thinking that for an hour. — And though comparisons with Hitchcock are doubtless unfair, comparisons with other Hitchcock homages based on Highsmith novels certainly are not; one can’t help pointing out that this movie falls far short of the standard of Wim Wenders’ remarkable The American Friend [1977] — in which Dennis Hopper, a much darker Ripley, much further advanced in his perpetual identity crisis, stalks unforgettably about the fringes of the Hamburg artworld in a cowboy hat, embroiling the hapless Bruno Ganz in a series of contract killings. — With cameos, incidentally, by Samuel Fuller and the legendary Nicholas Ray; check that out instead.


Tinseltown. [Tony Spiridakis, 1997; after the play by Spiridakis and Shem Bitterman.]

Down on their luck in darkest Hollywood, writers Tom Wood and Arye Gross break into a selfstorage lot on Christmas Eve, looking for a place to crash, and discover it populated by an entire colony of starving artists; mistaking chief resident and manager Ron Perlman for a notorious serial killer, they pitch the idea for a snuff docudrama to sleazemeister producer Joe Pantoliano [who himself seems to be sleeping in his Mercedes], only to find that they’ve mistaken an actor’s preparations for actualities, and the murders they thought they’d witnessed were only scenes played in the film project of aspiring director Kristy Swanson. Combining forces, the four put together a joint proposal that seems to be taking in the money guys; at least until the real killer finds out about it. Clever and funny.


Return To Savage Beach. [Andy Sidaris, 1998.]

Action/exploitation auteur Sidaris continues his ongoing deconstruction of the spy thriller, combining once again his trademark elements: dumber terrorist plots, more musclebound secret agents, lamer expository dialogue, more ridiculous gadgets, flashier locales, more unmotivated chases and explosions, sillier ninjas, phonier martial arts masters, and girls in unbelievable outfits with even more unbelievable tit jobs; captained by the redoubtable Julie Strain. — Is this a formula, or what? — Fuck the money; when they come up with a game show that lets you win a chance to be this guy’s director of photography, I’m going after it.


SLC Punk. [James Merendino, 1999.]

Matthew Lillard takes the first person in this fictional autobiography of the only punk in Salt Lake City [circa 1985]; Michael Goorjian plays his best friend, and Annabeth Gish the proprietor of a head shop. Of course you know all along that he’ll give in to his father’s wishes and go to Harvard Law; but if more lawyers started out like this, we wouldn’t have to kill them. — Great soundtrack.


Shandra The Jungle Girl. [Surrender Cinema. 1999.]

Something about a jungle girl who is captured and brought back to civilization, where she fucks people to death. — I’d have a better idea, but after a couple of minutes I hit fastforward and scanted all detail.


Any Given Sunday. [Oliver Stone, 1999. Written by Stone and John Logan; after novels by Rob Huizenga and Pat Toomay.]

The student of molecular biology who views this movie will inevitably be reminded of the structure of the genome; in which, it has been discovered, the portions of the text that code for proteins [the exons] are interrupted by apparently irrelevant and accidental interpolations [the introns], which seem to represent genetic instructions left over from earlier stages of evolution, and must be spliced out and discarded in the processes of transcription and translation. — Similarly here we have the best football game [or games] I’ve ever seen, interrupted at unpredictable intervals by plot segments incorporated at random from earlier football movies; which one must, accordingly, skip over in the process of making sense of the viewing experience. [The fastforward on the tape machine is not the right idea; you need a conditional branch, an actual discontinuous goto.] — Thus it was, I must say, fascinating to see the audience [myself included] shouting encouragement like a sportsbar mob at a receiver streaking down the sideline and rising from their seats in anticipation when he leapt for the ball — even though the outcome of the play was decided in the final draft of the screenplay a couple of years ago and could hardly be considered to be, in any ordinary sense, in doubt. — Unfortunately to see these passages of action you have to sit through the intervening segments in which you are introduced to the all-too-familiar characters and their even-more-familiar mutual conflicts: the embattled coach, striving against all odds to make the playoffs one more time; his trusty sidekick, the defensive coordinator; the veteran quarterback who is one hit away from a wheelchair; the veteran quarterback’s wife, who [slightly against type] does not want him to retire; the upstart backup quarterback who scratches plays in the dirt and listens to rap music [but not of course the coach]; the upstart’s loyal girlfriend, dumped when he becomes a starter and a star; the mercenary running back who used to be a star until the upstart stopped handing off to him; the old team doctor, who dispenses drugs like candy; the new team doctor, momentarily a voice of conscience until he too starts dispensing drugs like candy; the veteran linebacker who is one hit away from a wheelchair; the skyboxdwelling MBA megababe team owner intent on micromanagement; her dead father; her alcoholic mother; the mayor she’s trying to bludgeon into building a new stadium with the thinly-veiled threat of moving the team to LA; the Machiavellian football commissioner who’s one hit away from a wheelchair; the supermodel groupie who’s one hit away from a wheelchair; the braindamaged scriptwriter who’s one hit away from a wheelchair...[sorry, I was drifting off] — played, variously, by Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, James Woods, Dennis Quaid, Edward Burns, Ann-Margret, LL Cool J, Tom Sizemore, Lauren Holly, Matthew Modine, Charlton Heston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, G. Gordon Liddy, K. Farley Dingwipe, and, shucks, just about everybody who is anybody. — Pacino does, in fact, do a respectable imitation of Mike Shanahan after a bender, but the real jocks are the best part of the show: familiar faces include Frank Gifford, Lawrence Taylor, Johnny Unitas, and the great Jim Brown, who remains a pretty respectable actor [nearly up to the standard of Buster Crabbe], and [for whatever reason] the only guy who looks like he really belongs here.


Galaxy Quest. [Dean Parisot, 1999. Written by Robert Gordon and David Howard.]

A movie which simultaneously celebrates and satirizes the Star Trek cult: the cast of a longcancelled television show about a motley crew of space soldiers who cruised the galaxy blasting evil with rayguns are abducted from a convention by helpseeking alien fans who have received all the old broadcasts but don’t understand the concept of fiction; after amusing misadventures, the gang defeat an enemy menace and bond not merely with one another but with their followers on Earth and on other worlds. — The Three Amigos, only this time funny. — With many startling special effects, including a mysterious spacewarp that looks like a movie of the eversion of the sphere, sex with tentacles, a giant Michelin rockman, and the contents of Sigourney Weaver’s brassiere.


The Stendhal Syndrome. [La Sindrome di Stendhal; Dario Argento, 1996.]

Undercover cop Asia Argento is introduced hustling into an art gallery, where, it develops, she has received a tip that a serial rapist she has pursued from Rome to Florence may be taking in the great masters amid a mob of tourists. Scanning the crowd for suspicious characters, her attention is somehow seized by the paintings around her, which begin to expand, develop threedimensionality, and absorb her into their internal spaces. Swooning, she cuts her lip against a table. In a dream she is underwater. A fish with the face of a really gnarly-looking guy swims up to her. They kiss. She comes to with a bloodstain on her blouse. She staggers out of the gallery. A guy follows her with her purse: the villain, naturally. She paws through it uncomprehendingly, apparently amnesiac. Finding the key to her hotelroom, she returns and attempts to collect her faculties; a Rembrandt hanging on the wall [but of course, The Night Watch] starts talking to her, triggering a flashback to a crime scene that explains the backstory. Unfortunately while she’s swimming around inside the space of the painting the rapist is entering the space of the hotelroom, and when she returns to the present she is at his mercy. With a profoundly disturbing motion of the tongue he produces a razorblade from his mouth and cuts her lower lip — because, he explains, he wants to taste her blood when he kisses her — and has his way with her. She passes out. She recovers consciousness in the back of a car, where he is raping another girl whom he shoots as Asia leaps out the door and flees down the street. — Thus ends Act One; and, you may rest assured, what follows is even stranger. Suffice it that though she tracks down her assailant and kills him, the action [with Hegelian logic] only engenders its opposite, and that the relevance of Stendhal to all this is presently explained via that wholly familiar expository device, the conference with a psychotherapist. — Ah, yes, and she changes her hair for every act. — Who but Argento would cast his own [incredibly beautiful] daughter as the victim of a serial rapist?


Groundhog Day. [Harold Ramis, 1993.]

In Kaufmann’s translation: “[Suppose] a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you — all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again — and you with it, a grain of dust.’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?’ would weigh upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” [Nietzsche: The Gay Science, §341]?]


Escape From Ramseyville. [Leonardo Garbonzo, 1999.]

Leatherclad sociopath Snake Plissken falls into the hands of the fascist stooges of the New World Order and seems destined for a mortifying end until agents of the CIA and Mattel-XXX arrive at the eleventh hour with news that deranged ecoterrorists have kidnapped the prototype of the new lifesized Rollergirl Barbie and spirited her away to the Colorado Rockies, where they plan to hold her hostage against the capitulation of the android industry to unacceptable environmental demands; only the terminally attitudinal dude with the eyepatch, it seems, can rescue her from being rendered biodgradable. Though Plissken mocks their concerns and sneers at their offers of clemency, before the first act is out we find him tossed from a Stealth bomber into the stratosphere and plummeting on a parasail into the forbidden Walled City of the Überbourgeois, whence the terrorist broadcasts appear to originate. Captured by shambling psychopaths who call themselve executive recruiters, Plissken is chained in the dungeons of an employment agency and beaten for his refusal to amplify certain portions of his resume, marched at gunpoint through a succession of demeaning jobs from which he is fired by a succession of imbecilic employers, hounded by the Internal Revenue Service for failure to provide adequate documentation of a nonexistent income, evicted from a series of ratinfested apartments by pricegouging landlords, prosecuted for nonpayment of utility bills, and finally arrested on suspicion of poverty, tried for lack of affluence, and sentenced to lobotomy and a subsequent career as a systems administrator before he turns the instruments of torture upon his captors, busts out of the stinking cellars that house the victims of class warfare, and [as a dramatic chorus of the unwashed and underemployed sing “Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker”] executes a sizeable fraction of the population with a startling variety of weapons which provoke an unusually colorful series of explosions. Climbing over the wall with a stogie clamped in his mouth, as he is silhouetted against a reddening sky a familiar profile confronts him. — “Baby,” he says, “it’s you.” — “I have one word for you, Snake,” says Rollergirl Barbie [for indeed it is she]: “Plastics.” — As they embrace against the backdrop of the burning city, he lights a nuclear grenade with the butt of his cigar and flips it behind him into the remains of the metropolis. As a brilliant fireball forms behind them, in longshot profile they are seen walking toward the camera: out of the artificial sunrise, into the dawn of a new world.


Later.


____________


Die Jungfrau von Orleans (12/24/99)


Bill Warren in his encyclopedic history of movie science fiction, Keep Watching The Skies, quotes a prominent critic’s analysis of the films of Roger Corman: ““At this juncture in Corman’s work, women begin to operate on four different levels. Beside their basic dramatic function as companions for men, they carry meaning on the level of sociology, in their assumption or rejection of female roles, at the level of myth, in that they represent the renewal of life and thus the running down of Time, and on the level of psychoanalysis, as the anima.’” Warren notes dryly: “This appears over a picture of Lori Nelson being carried off by the three-eyed mutant from The Day The World Ended.”

A picture which [incidentally] I’d never seen until a couple of weeks ago; and on which I plan extended commentary, as soon as I can come up with another two or three levels of interpretation for the feminine principle and then finish the rewrite in the appropriately Heideggerian German. — It would probably also help if I could turn up a few of the still-missing ancillary sources: Lust For Frankenstein; The Killer Barbies; Bimbo Cheerleaders From Outer Space.

Items I have managed to turn up:


The Mistress Of Atlantis. [G.W. Pabst, 1932. From the novel L’Atlantide, by Pierre Benoit.]

When you open on a couple of Legionnaires smoking pensively and staring out over the enigmatic vastness of the Sahara, you know that within moments one of them is going to sigh, stub his butt out in an ashtray, and with the words “It was on such a night as this that Malebranche and I first caught sight of the Mountains of the Moon...” commence a tale in flashback of the discovery of the lost continent of Atlantis, buried beneath the shifting desert sands; and of a mysterious and terrible Queen of indeterminate age and immortal beauty who breaks the hearts and spirits of European adventurers for her own cruel sport. — But you gotta love it. — With Brigitte Helm [the heroine/robot in Lang’s Metropolis] as the fell Antinea, real camels, real leopards, and the real desert [in Hollywood in 1932 they would certainly have faked all this on a soundstage], and not a single nickel in royalties for the estate of H. Rider Haggard.


Supercop 2. [Stanley Tong, 1993.]

After being dumped by her boyfriend, angstridden policewoman Michelle Yeoh kicks butt all over Hong Kong; assisted, intermittently, by the supporting cast from Jackie Chan’s Police Story series. — Jackie himself makes an appearance midway through the feature in drag, recycles all the dumb jokes that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis did for Billy Wilder, runs down a fugitive in traffic [bounding over cars, etc.] while wearing stiletto heels, and then disappears from the story; probably just as well, though Michelle is as always spectacular. — Sheesh. Somebody get this girl a plot.


New Rose Hotel. [Abel Ferrara, 1998; screenplay by Ferrara and Christ Zois, from the story by William Gibson.]

A tale of twentyfirst century industrial espionage: cyberpunk corporate headhunters Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe form a plan to pluck scientific megastar Yoshitaka Amano from the clutches of one multinational and deliver him into the clutches of another; a scheme which [it is immediately apparent] must revolve around the seductive person of Asia Argento [daughter of the famed Italian horror auteur], upon whom Dafoe develops a very unprofessional fixation that dissipates his focus and saps his precious bodily fluids. When the caper goes south, he is left to brood over its failure in that stack of human storage bins the New Rose Hotel. — Alas, it’s all too obvious just who betrayed them and how; moreover, the empty repetition of the last act suggests strongly that the principals lost their funding midway through the shoot and had to resort to recycling their footage to get a movie in the can. — Given the starcrossed history of the project, which seems to have lingered in development hell for most of the decade [it antedated Johnny Mnemonic, and was originally attached to Kathryn Bigelow], this can hardly be surprising. — Not to say the flick isn’t interesting: it has a nice postmodern-video look to it, the cellphone/palmpilots display motion pictures [though I still await that long-anticipated Killer App, videophone sex], and even if most of the action seems to revolve around three people hanging out in a hotel room, the three people are Dafoe, Walken, and the spectacular Ms. Argento [a sort of Italian Uma; and, incidentally, already a director herself.] — The titles run simultaneously in German, Japanese, and English: how perfectly Gibsonian.


The Big Carnival. [Aka Ace In The Hole. Billy Wilder, 1952.]

Wilder’s personal favorite among his films, a brilliant anticipation of the Age of Geraldo: onetime big-city newspaperman Kirk Douglas, having parlayed a taste for whiskey and a gift for insubordination into a one-way ticket to Palookaville, casts about desperately for the big story that will buy him his ticket back out of the Arizona outback to the bright lights of Broadway; seizing on the predicament of a trapped miner as the needed opportunity for shameless selfpromotion, he conjures up an exploitative media circus [the carnival of the title] that corrupts everyone drawn into its vortex. — Though this story proved too dark for his audience and was a commercial failure, and the author was rebuked for his cynicism, measured against the realities with which we’ve lately become acquainted it now seems a naive piece of moralizing: Wilder shows Douglas at the last racked by conscience and destined for an ugly alcoholic end; now, of course, he would rocket forward into a wildly successful career in television.


Pushing Tin. [Mike Newell, 1999. Written by Glen Charles and Les Charles. Based on an article written by Darcy Frey.]

Air traffic controllers John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton push their competitive rivalry to the limits of the envelope, burning one another’s fingers, busting one another’s chops, and fucking one another’s wives, despite the annoying distraction presented by the occasional necessity of keeping airplanes full of people from running into one another. — Somebody ought to nominate the guy who cut the trailer for this turkey for an Academy award; somehow he managed to make it look like it would be mildly interesting and at least occasionally funny.


End Of Days. [Peter Hyams, 1999. Written by Andrew W. Marlowe.]

Yes, it’s New Year’s Eve in Times Square ... and Satan is crashing the party! — Indeed, as every Hollywood producer knows from flipping through to the end of the Bible to find out how it comes out, the Prince of Darkness [here portrayed by the redoubtable Gabriel Byrne] awakens every thousand years, and [naturally] the first thing on his mind is getting laid. Nor will any ordinary bimbo do, for the mother of the Antichrist; in fact [unfortunately] only Patricia Arquette will really do, but since she wasn’t available Robin Tunney is pressed into service as the prospective Babe of the Black Mass. Naturally against so dire a threat to universal order only one guy can be called upon to save the world from chaos and the endless night; and, give him credit, Arnold does his best, though you have to wonder whether that unshaven-alcoholic look is really part of his character or whether it’s just something that happened after he read the script.

A few questions:

— Can the Devil be a character? In Dante, certainly, he’s only a part of the production design; in the Faust legends [and by derivation then in Goethe] he’s a Mephistophelean prankster; in Milton he’s the prototype of the Romantic hero; in Dostoevsky he’s the voice of doubt, in Thomas Mann a critic. But somehow The Exorcist erased all this progress, and we’re back to a medieval bogeyman. — On reflection [and I’m entirely serious], after having now variously admired Nicholson, De Niro, Byrne, and Billy Crystal in the role, on balance I think the best depiction of Satan that I’ve seen in recent motion pictures was the one in South Park: certainly it was silly, but it had the overriding virtue of originality.

— Isn’t it strange that Vatican councils are now always shot just like the equivalent scenes in The Godfather? as if the Pope were Don Corleone. Is it just the part where they kiss the ring?

— At one point the authors explain that the number of the Beast is actually 999, since in the original Greek they wrote numerals upside-down. Didn’t it occur to them that the decimal notation hadn’t been invented when the New Testament was written?

[Incidentally 666 is 1010011010 in binary: a conjugate palindrome. Coincidence? Or...the work of Satan?]

In sum: if Arnold is really thinking about going into politics [and why should he not], this might be a good moment to make the move. Another turkey like this can only, shall we say, endanger his legacy.

As for the black-mass genre, unless Polanski wants to stage a comeback, you can stick a pitchfork in it. — Happy New Year 11111010000.


The Messenger. [Luc Besson, 1999. Written by Besson and Andrew Birkin.]

The not-exactly-unfamiliar story of Joan of Arc, which parses just like the Oppenheimer case: act one, she sees visions; act two, she wins battles; act three, a grateful nation burns her at the stake. As one must expect of the brilliant visual stylist Besson, this is an extraordinarily beautiful film, and for that reason alone probably the definitive medieval war epic; though of course it owes a lot to Terry Gilliam [and indeed a few of the recurring characters seem to have been transplanted with only minor variation from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.] — I have no idea whether Milla Jovovich can act or not, but she certainly makes a very photogenic Maid; John Malkovich plays the smirking Dauphin, Faye Dunaway his scheming mother-in-law, and Dustin Hoffman the voice-of-conscience/Grand Inquisitor invented by that noted Schoolman Fyodor Dostoevsky.


La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. [Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928.]

Any cinematic treatment of the story of Joan must bear implicit comparison with this, one of the legendary masterpieces of the silent cinema; though it was thought for fifty years that [the original negative having been, ironically, lost in a fire] no complete copy survived. Then, incredibly, in 1981 a release print in salvageable condition was discovered tucked away in a closet in a Norwegian mental hospital; after prodigious labors on the part of the film scholars of the Cinémathèque Française, a restored version believed to be a close approximation to Dreyer’s original cut was completed in 1985 and may now be viewed on DVD. — And it is stunning. The story is very carefully confined to Besson’s third act, the trial: the compositions are claustrophobic, the angles, deviant, the shots mainly huge tight closeups of Joan [Maria Falconetti] and her inquisitors, projected against a featureless white background; that the stark spare Scandinavian rigor of this single film must have had a definitive influence upon Bergman, for example, seems obvious in retrospect. — For the soundtrack of this new video release use has been made of the remarkable oratorio composed by Richard Einhorn, which was directly inspired by the film. [His curiosity piqued by a still he chanced upon while browsing one day at MOMA, he ordered up a screening; and, dumbstruck with admiration, set at once to work.] The French and Latin libretto was assembled from writings of medieval female mystics, a few of the more inflammatory passages from the Book of Daniel [in the Vulgate], and excerpts from the letters of Joan herself.

Still forthcoming, incidentally: yet another Joan, this one written and directed by Ronald Maxwell and featuring Jacqueline Bisset, Albert Finney, Derek Jacobi, and Mira Sorvino as the Maid. There must be something in the water,


Sherlock Jr. [Buster Keaton, 1924.]

Motion-picture projectionist and wouldbe detective Keaton, thwarted in his courtship of best girl Kathryn McGuire by the local Sheik, retreats to his projection booth, dozes off, and is transported in a dream into the melodrama playing on the screen [“Hearts and Pearls, Or, The Lounge Lizard’s Lost Love”][“In Five Parts”] — where, as the dashing detective Sherlock Jr., he confounds his rival and wins his ladylove; though not, of course, without remarkable pratfalls and a wildly inventive chase. — Thus obviously the original of The Purple Rose Of Cairo, The Last Action Hero, etc. — though rather more: Keaton’s opening sequence of gags is based on the idea that his hero is trying to integrate himself not into a smoothly-flowing stream of reality, but into a carefully-edited representation of the flow of events; when he tries to sit down on a chair, for instance, the film cuts away to a city street and he falls over backwards. I don’t recall ever seeing a similar progression of ideas [save possibly in a channelsurfing passage in Amazon Women On The Moon] in any other film; which certainly says something interesting about cinematic depictions of the cinematic depiction of reality. — But at this point Wittgenstein would be telling me to shut up and watch the fucking movie. — Good idea.


La Sentinelle. [Arnaud Desplechin, 1992; written by Desplechin, Pascale Ferran, Noëmie Lvovsky, and Emmanuel Salinger.]

Returning to France after decades in Germany, medical student Emmanuel Salinger is interrogated with inexplicable violence by parties representing themselves as border guards; upon his arrival in Paris to take up an internship in forensic medicine, he finds that during the altercation somebody slipped a severed head into his baggage. He discovers presently that the border guards were phonies and that the head may have been that of a Russian scientist; but who wants him to figure out who it was and where it came from, and what has this to do with the end of the Cold War? in which his father, the sentinel of the title, was a spook haunting the no-man’s-land of the East German border. — Wonderfully complex, as one would expect from the phenomenal director of My Sex Life. — And how is it these Parisians [even doctors] get to chainsmoke like it was still the Sixties?


The Woman In The Window. [Fritz Lang, 1944; screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, from a novel by J. H. Wallis.]

Retiring academic Edward G. Robinson is struck by a portrait of Joan Bennett in a store window on the way to dinner at his club; after a pleasant evening with his friends, joking among themselves about what stale old unadventurous farts they’ve all become, he dozes off before the fire and is awakened at a late hour. Walking home and pausing at the same shop-window, as he is admiring the portrait again the girl herself [as a looking-glass girl should] appears in reflection superimposed upon the painting; he turns, astounded, to regard her, and they strike up a conversation. Naturally, this cannot end well: returning to her apartment to view her other portraits [erotic etchings and Rolling Stones records were still far in the future in 1944], he tosses back a few too many and, when her evil rich boyfriend shows up and starts slapping her around, gets entangled in the kind of wrestling match that can only end when the babe hands him a pair of scissors and he stabs the dude to death in self-defense. Obviously they can’t call the police; and after he hauls the body out into the woods and dumps it and tidies up the apartment and swears the girl to secrecy it’s clear that every plan will go awry, every strategem will backfire, and every attempt to escape will only tighten the noose around his neck. — Fortunately, just as he is about to be swallowed by the moral quicksands that this incredible contrivance of a plot has conjured up to consume him, he snaps awake in his armchair and [I am not making this up] realizes he’s been dozing after dinner all the while, and It Was All Only A Dream. — An interesting illustration of the evolution of narrative conventions; for it is, after all, remarkable that the great Fritz Lang could film such a story with a straight face — one to which only a few short decades later even Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker surely would not stoop to parody.


Body And Soul. [Robert Rossen, 1947; written by Abraham Polonsky.]

Child of the slums John Garfield seizes on a career as a boxer as his ticket up and out of poverty, but is exploited and corrupted by the puppetmasters of the underworld who rule the world of the ring. Very influential, not simply by virtue of the story but also in the fight choreography and the cinema-verite fight footage [the work of the great cinematographer James Wong Howe]; cf. the later variations on the same themes by Stallone, Scorsese, and Tarantino. — After writing this unsparing expose Abraham Polonsky wrote and directed the classic film noir Force Of Evil [1949], a wonderfully-drawn portrait of the numbers syndicate; and then, thanks to the timely intervention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was exposed as a subversive and forced into early retirement. Else motion pictures might sooner have been corrupted by art.


The Undead. [Roger Corman, 1957. Written by Charles Griffith and Mark Hanna.]

A couple of mad psychiatrists with a thirst for forbidden knowledge grab a prostitute off the streets, hypnotize her, and project her astral body back into a past life in which she is accused of witchcraft and doomed to be burned at the stake. Uncertain what consequences may follow if they allow her to die on the couch, one of them injects himself into the experiment, with appalling consequences. — Shot for next to nothing on a cheap soundstage in black and white; the principal expenditure sees to have been for a fog machine. But very, very creepy, with a really spooky black mass and a Satan far more convincing than any you’ll see on the big screen this year: Corman could do more than Peter Hyams with less than Arnold tips at lunch. — With Pamela Duncan as the good girl, Allison Hayes [the celebrated Fifty-Foot Woman] as the bad girl, and Richard Garland as the hunk.


From Dusk Till Dawn Two: Texas Blood Money. [Scott Spiegel, 1999. Written by Spiegel and Boaz Yakin.]

True, this is only a lamentable turkey I stumbled across while channelsurfing. But there must be some deep sociological significance in the opening scene, in which a couple of scumbag lawyers trapped in an elevator are attacked by a swarm of bloodsucking bats: what ever happened to professional courtesy?


Sleepy Hollow. [Tim Burton; screenplay by Kevin Yagher, after the story by Washington Irving.]

In the eighteenth-century Hudson Valley a weird little village surrounded by a haunted forest is menaced by a mysterious Rider from Hell who, apparently headless himself, seems under some demonic compulsion not merely to kill selected members of the citizenry but to whack their heads off and keep them for trophies; emissary of rationalism Johnny Depp is dispatched from the big city to find some explanation for this behavior, and, with the aid of Christina Ricci, Occam’s Razor, and a bewildering assortment of alchemical concoctions and Gothic scientific apparatus, solves the mystery and ensures the triumph of the new magic of the Age of Reason over the old magic of wood, wind, blood, and water. — Sherlock Holmes meets Edward Scissorhands: if you like Burton you’ll love this; if you don’t, you won’t. — With assorted members of the Burton repertory company in supporting roles, including Lisa Marie as Johnny’s flashback mother and Martin Landau as the First Victim. — And you can just guess whose head the horseman finally screws back on.


The World Is Not Enough. [Michael Apted; written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Bruce Feirstein.]

After a rendezvous with a Swiss banker to collect funds due a British oilman ends in a doublecross, Double-Oh-Seven makes a daring escape by leaping out a window and rappelling several stories to the street! and returns with three million in cash to report to M in London. Taking the proferred congratulatory drink, he notes a curious fizzing as the ice contacts his fingers! a contaminant! He races down the hallways of MI6 to try to stop the recipient from opening the briefcase! A boobytrap! The briefcase explodes! A hole is blown in the side of the building! A [female] sniper takes aim at him from a boat on the Thames without! He leaps into a handy speedboat [to the annoyance of Q] and rockets away in pursuit! A race down the river! Explosions! Gunfire! As Bond finally gets the drop on her and fires his torpedoes, she runs her boat aground and hijacks a balloon! He runs his boat onto the shore and leaps off into the air, grabbing a trailing rope! As he hangs from the escaping balloon, she refuses his offer of protection! and blows herself and the balloon to bits! Bond plummets to the earth, landing atop a huge domed structure! which I think I should have recognized. — And then, incredibly — for this was mere prologue — the credits commence: naked liquid-metal-Terminator women, writhing sinuously in synch with a surrealistic field of derricks pumping oil. — I stand in awe. — As for the rest of it: stolen nuclear weapons, the Russian mob, an oil pipeline through Turkey, a chase on skis pursued by parawinged commandos, a shootout in a missile silo, an escape from a sunken submarine, and a fat guy drowning in caviar. — As happens when the formula is working correctly, the flow of invention is sufficient that even the most preposterous interpolations — Bond outrunning an explosion down a tunnel, or Denise Richards pretending to be a nuclear physicist — come off as deft jokes tongue-in-cheek. — And all this while wearing those tractionless city-slicker flats. God knows what the man might accomplish if they’d get him a pair of Nikes. — With Sophie Marceau as the Bad Girl, John Cleese as Q’s apprentice, and Robert Carlyle as the evil genius. Who says Christmas comes but once a year?


Some notes on attractions, coming and going:

Things I do not need to see: Chris O’Donnell trying to pretend he’s Buster Keaton in a remake of Seven Chances; any Kevin Costner weepie; Richard and Julia; Adam Sandler, ever again.

Most baffling project: the Andy Kaufman biopic, Man On The Moon. I can accept Carrey in the role, but have to wonder, what is the point? Admittedly I’m fond of the song, but can that justify a two-hour music video? — Compare [I suppose] Denzel Washington as Hurricane Carter: great casting, but doesn’t this come a little late? where was Hollywood while Hurricane was still in the joint?

Reiterated prediction: I still expect that Kevin Williamson will bring the apparently-executed film geek back from the dead and reveal him to be the mastermind behind all the carnage in the forthcoming Scream Three [to be directed again by Wes Craven]; how else than by pinning everything on his alter ego can he let drop the punchline that The Writer Did It?

Trend I’m willing to accept: NASA may not be able to land anything on Mars, but Hollywood certainly can; both John Carpenter and Brian De Palma plan expeditions in the year to come. Sign me up.


Finally:


South Beach Sorority Ninja Carwash: The Defenestration. [Leonardo Garbonzo, 1999.]

On a covert mission deep within enemy territory the commandos of Delta Force pause at a carwash to get their humvees hosed off by some sudsy babes in bikinis and are caught with their pants down by a blackgarbed company of terrorists who take them hostage and chain them to Cybex machines in the loathsome dungeons of a beach volleyball school. Back at CIA headquarters consternation reigns, and messengers are dispatched to the four corners of the globe to find retired superagent Elizabeth Kaitan; who is discovered, presently, teaching a seminar on exploitation cinema to a tribe of African gorillas under the auspices of the Peace Corps. With the beasts of the field arrayed about her, she spurns the proffered mission, pleading a higher allegiance to the defense of the natural world against the Satanic incursions of Man and Machine. As the baffled supplicants from Langley ponder their next move, henchmen of the Ninja King kidnap Kaitan and spirit her away to the Caribbean Alps, necessitating a rescue by the daring dudes of the JetSki Patrol [led by Corey Feldman] just in time for a winner-take-all volleyball match against the tattooed Men in Black. — With cameos by Ron Jeremy, Gerhard ’t Hooft, and Trent [Bubba] Lott. — Perhaps I’ve been watching too many of these things.

Later.


____________


Sleepless (12/7/99)


A crew of cable guys in cheap plastic hardhats cruised through the neighborhood a couple of weeks ago and, while replacing the old obsolete TCI thou-shalt-not-tamper deaththreats on the little boxes with new and much more literate AT&T deaththreats, twiddled a few knobs and switched some wires around and inaugurated a brave new world of television programming. The immediate effect was that I got Showtime for a week or so before they changed the encryption, or whatever it is, at the end of the month; no great loss, I’m afraid. But then [mirabile dictu] they waved their magic wands and actually added a few channels; something which TCI always seemed to claim was completely impossible, despite the fact that the bill doubled every five years. — So it came to pass that I found myself watching Chaplin for nine hours straight this evening on the Turner classic-movie channel: Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, and the so-called Chaplin Mutuals. — The world is not so poor a place, if you can fall off the couch at two in the morning laughing at a foodfight somebody filmed in 1916. — Bring on the new century. I’m morally prepared.


____________


What if God smoked cannabis? (11/14/99)


Persuaded somehow by the lack of any other entertainment to watch the eminently forgettable Eighties Ackroyd vehicle Doctor Detroit the other evening, I was amused to discover that one of the best of the few good gags in the piece was the deadpan announcement by the principals of a small college that they were waiting on the endowment for a Harold Robbins chair. It’s always gratifying to find your own old dumb jokes bubbling out of the fetid marsh of the collective unconscious; even if you were not personally responsible for their entry into the atmosphere of the age.

A note on the famous Bond spoof Casino Royale: consulting the entry in the IMDB, I discover that the uncredited writers on the project included Ben Hecht, Terry Southern, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen. Presumably the producers were unable to contact Oscar Wilde, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and William Congreve.

And let’s put this on the record with the utmost expedition:


Dogma. [Kevin Smith, 1999.]

Midway through the action in this latest from the pottymouthed New Jersey auteur, a toilet in the back of a seedy tavern backs up and overflows and a heinous Shit Creature forms from the greenish-brown slop on the bathroom floor, rises to its feet, and lurches out into the barroom to menace the brave company of mallrats [Linda Fiorentino, Salma Hayek, Jay, Silent Bob, et al.] there met to save the universe — providing an elegant allegorical capsule summary of the relations among Kevin Smith’s imagination, this scenario, and the hapless audience assembled in the theater. — For those theological illiterates who lack the wit to attempt that punk bitch John Milton or that dickless motherfucker Thomas Aquinas, or to mess with the shit of James Joyce or Saint Augustine, this will probably look deep. The rest of us may be permitted a different opinion. — Somebody ought to explain to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck that many have been cool before them, and many will be cool hereafter; that cool is not eternal or immutable, and that most of their predecessors on the pinnacle atop which they find themselves at present precipitated the abrupt conclusion of their fifteen minutes by signing onto projects like this. [Even Janeane Garofalo had the sense to walk after her cameo.] — Does this movie suck, or what? Jesus fucking Christ.

Later.


____________


Through the looking glass (11/11/99)


I was watching Joe Bob Briggs on TNT the other night, shepherding his audience through the complexities of that old Seventies classic The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. In the middle of a plot recap he referred to Caroline Munro’s performance as “opening up a can of estrogen whupass,” and, I’ll have to admit, for a moment there I considered hanging it up. — But the violin couldn’t end with Heifetz, could it. One must soldier on.

This week’s Prepare-For-Blair award goes to The Oz Witch Project, directed by one of Bill Maher’s writers and starring my favorite B-movie babe of the hour, Meredith Salenger. I don’t think we’re in Maryland anymore.

Meanwhile:


Being John Malkovich. [Spike Jonze; written by Charlie Kaufman.]

Unemployed puppeteeer John Cusack takes an office job between floors in Manhattan and discovers a rabbithole behind a filing cabinet that leads into the brain of John Malkovich; complications ensue. I may have laughed louder when first I saw Duck Soup, but I don’t think I’ve laughed so loudly since. — Not to give too much away: the romantic triangle defined by Cusack, Cameron Diaz, and Catherine Keener may be the weirdest in cinematic history [and should put a period to the sexual-identity genre once and for all]; the concluding chase is the most original I have ever seen [this includes the finale of Dead Again]; and you might ask yourself, if you were Malkovich, to whom you would turn when you needed therapy. — On balance, I’m reminded of the remark of an envious mathematical colleague about the paper in which Lawvere and Tierney invented topos theory: “It is not so much that they proved these things, but rather that they dared to believe they were provable.” I don’t understand how Messrs. Jonze and Kaufman had enough nerve to think of something like this in the first place; after that, problems like digging up a few million dollars for the production and persuading Malkovich to go along with the joke seem mere trivialities. — And if everybody buys a ticket, they’ll be able to do it again. Check it out.


Bringing Out The Dead. [Martin Scorsese; screenplay by Paul Schrader, after the novel by Joe Connelly.]

Students of Monty Python will not be disappointed to hear that there is, indeed, a moment early in this dark disturbing and entirely beautiful epic about an ambulance driver in New York City when an incredulous physician asks the attending EMTs how they can be wheeling a victim of cardiac arrest into the emergency room when they’ve already pronounced him dead, and Nicholas Cage replies, deadpan: “He got better.” — though hardly, one must hasten to add, with the inimitable panache of Eric Idle. — As for the rest of it, it recalls the Walpurgisnacht passage in Catch-22 [in the chapter titled The Eternal City] in which Yossarian descends into the Roman Inferno: Cage, a guy who is now cast for roles like this on the basis of his eyes alone, careens in a deranged frenzy from one escapade to the nest, hurtling through a nocturnal urban nightmare [did anyone before Scorsese see night in the city in color?], haunted, the while, by the ghosts of a girl he couldn’t save and a man he should have allowed to die. — This won’t make anyone forget Taxi Driver [as if that were possible], and the cinematography [the work of the celebrated Robert Richardson] is a trifle too selfconscious in its exploitation of the grammar of rock video, but on balance this will serve as yet another reminder why Scorsese is generally regarded as the greatest living director; and why Schrader thinks that he’s responsible. — With a remarkable supporting cast, including John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Patricia Arquette.


A brief note in re the television cheapie Sweepers, a polemical action/adventure preaching the evil of land mines [no, we still haven’t signed the treaty] and starring the ubiquitous Dolph Lundgren: in among the numerous quotes from and homages to the Indiana Jones movies — but, come on, you gotta love that hat — there’s a sequence in the concluding chase in which Lundgren jumps onto a convenient dirtbike and rockets down the tracks in pursuit of an escaping train; hurtling, presently, from an adjacent rise onto a flatcar, and directly into a spirited punchout with the agents of evil. Apparently this is intended as a nod to Michelle Yeoh’s famous stunt in Police Story Three. However I can’t resist pointing out that, though Lundgren was very obviously replaced by a double [and indeed why should he risk the repeated bisection of that celebrated physique], Michelle did the whole thing herself; and, until she filmed the stunt, had never ridden a motorcycle before. — Anyway, which one would you rather have beat you up?


____________


Putting on the hits (10/29/99)


Producer and former Playmate of the Year India Allen on her acting career: “I always got scripts for movies in which I took a lot of showers... I wasn’t a particularly good actress, but I was a very clean one.”


Fight Club. [David Fincher; screenplay by Jim Uhls, from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.]

The Student Of Prague meets The Lord Of The Flies. Not at all what I’d expected: maybe it was the way they established the equation of the banking system with testicular cancer that won my heart, or maybe it was that homage to Allen Ginsburg. — Brad Pitt does G. Gordon Liddy and Helena Bonham Carter does Courtney Love; do we still need the originals?


Devil In The Flesh. [Steve Cohen, 1998; screenplay by Kelly Carlin-McCall, from a story by Kurt Anderson.]

Rose McGowan, exemplar of everything no one wants to hear about the contemporary high school girl, develops a romantic fixation on her writing teacher that provides all the excuse she needs to kill everyone that crosses her path, including her sweet silverhaired granny and her granny’s dog. — I can’t believe even Marilyn Manson has the nerve to sleep with this chick.


The Sixth Sense. [M. Night Shyamalan, 1999.]

Really scary, and not simply because Bruce Willis is playing a shrink; but can Hollywood finish reinventing the gothic before the end of the century? It’s still a long way to Melmoth the Wanderer. — And wasn’t this the kid that Lucas needed?


American Beauty. [Sam Mendes; written by Alan Ball.]

A pastiche: Mena Suvari plays Denise Richards in Wild Things, Annette Bening plays Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom, Wes Bentley plays Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People, Kevin Spacey plays William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Jack Lemmon in one of those patented midlife-crisis roles, and Jeremy Irons/James Mason/Humbert Humbert in Lolita, and Thora Birch plays Christina Ricci in practically anything, Despite occasional moments of outrageous hilarity, on balance this is good but not great. Still, no one can shoot roses like the old master Conrad Hall. — A note in protest: after everybody’s favorite scene in The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam told Uma Thurman “It’s all over for you now. You can’t go back to high school; I’ve taken your clothes off in front of the entire world.” — And it was still a joke. — It isn’t a joke anymore. The two little girls are cute, obviously, but I can’t watch them pulling their shirts off without feeling as depraved as, well, one of the producers who insisted that they do it.


Three Kings. [David O. Russell; story by Russell, screenplay by John Ridley.]

Everyone knows the story of the Warsaw uprising: how in August, 1944, with the German army in headlong retreat on the Eastern front and the sound of Russian guns audible across the Vistula, the Polish underground rose up against the Nazi occupation — and how the Red Army stopped within sight of the city and halted its advance for two months while the Germans systematically slaughtered two hundred thousand people; refusing, incidentally, the use of their airfields to the British and American attempts to fly supplies to the resistance. — This was a monstrous act, and by itself an adequate casus belli for the ensuing Cold War. — Forty-six years later, by way of putting a period to the perfectly splendid little police action that ushered in the New World Order, George Bush encouraged the inhabitants of Southern Iraq to rebel against Saddam Hussein; and, then, by refusing to come to their aid with the formidable army that had routed Baghdad’s legions only days before, ensured their martyrdom. He did this not because he was like Stalin consciously wicked; not because he wanted to work evil with malice aforethought, as Stalin did, not because he was like Stalin a man who knew what he was, who was what he was. Rather, Bush did this because he was a rudderless imbecile with no grasp of the consequences of his actions: that quintesentially postmodern creation, that soulless cipher, the American politician.

Perhaps this explains why Special Forces malcontent George Clooney is pissed off at the way the Gulf War has been so abruptly concluded as this narrative commences; and why, when Marky Mark and Ice Cube turn up a treasure map pulled from the ass of an Iraqi prisoner, one indicating the location of a stash of Kuwaiti bullion stolen by the Republican Guard and destined for the coffers of Saddam, he improvises an inspiring peroration about the role of Necessity in human affairs which seems at first an appeal to an ethics of convenience: if no one can tell them what they’re doing here, why shouldn’t they seize the moment and get rich? Moved by his eloquence, they all hop into a Hummer and — pursued by that stock character of Hollywood postmodernism, the Ambitious Female Television Journalist — take off across the border to grab the loot. — Thus far, obviously, we have a simple warzone caper movie, the kind of ironic exercise in the style of Tarantino that allows [very amusing] exploration of such questions as the relative political correctness of “towelhead” and “sand nigger”, what happens to a steer that steps on a cluster bomb, where the electrodes should be placed to facilitate the employment of modern interrogation techniques, and whether it is Lexus or Infiniti that makes the convertible. — But David Russell, unlike Bush or for that matter Tarantino, has no problem with the vision thing; and it becomes apparent that, as his heroes inevitably become entangled in the civil war they’ve been ordered not to intervene in, the dramatic arc he has designed has a moral dimension beyond the grasp of his supposed mentors: indeed though the situation of the first act is one of ironic detachment from reality, the conflict of the second, characterized by an explicitly surrealistic cognitive dissonance, can only be resolved by a re-establishment of the reality principle in the third; and you arrive gradually at the realization that Clooney’s appeal to Necessity isn’t at all a nod to some kind of vacuous relativism, but an acknowledgement of fate or destiny, of what must be, and must be done; something like the recognition of the will of the gods.

So this isn’t, finally, about whether you get to shoot the guy who tortured you, or whether black guys can play quarterback, or even whether American GIs with hearts as big as the land that gave them birth can still hand out candybars to darkeyed war orphans and teach them in their needful hour the power of hope. What it is about, rather, is what Nietzsche called the revaluation of all values — the transformation of reality, the reinterpretation of appearances: you have a glimpse however brief of another reading of the phenomenal text, of an alternative world, one in which the cinema offers moral choices and the foreign policy of God’s country can accomplish the liberation of oppressed peoples; a world with a different ethical map, one that wasn’t pulled out of somebody’s ass. — If Buñuel had lived to make this movie it would have been better; but I’m still tempted to call it a great motion picture. Check it out.


Paris, Texas. [Wim “Wild Buffalo” Wenders, 1999.]

Exterior. Desert. Day. The barren landscape of the American Southwest. Empty, desolate. Nothing moves...there is no sign of life...save perhaps...there: a faint distant dark speck stirs in the white expanse at the right edge of the frame. — The camera is perfectly still; it waits with infinite patience. — Gradually, the blot grows larger. Finally we can make it out: a human figure, clad in hat and trenchcoat despite the desert sun, the burning heat. It walks toward the camera...closer...closer...finally close enough that we can make out his features [for indeed it is a male figure of a certain age]. It is John “Wild Buffalo” Craig [played by Harry Dean Stanton]. He stumbles toward the camera, apparently oblivious to his surroundings, his eyes fixed on something impossibly remote, infinitely distant. — He lurches through the frame. — He passes on.

Later. A desert highway, twolane blacktop. A car hurtles past. The camera turns to follow it and fixes on a highway sign: “Lubbock: 300 miles.”

Another car approaches; slows, and pulls off the highway onto the shoulder. The driver lights a Lucky Strike and studies a roadmap. It is Douglas “Mad Dog” Hoye [played by Dean Stockwell]. He takes a pull from a flask of bourbon. Perhaps he is lost.

He plucks a cellular phone from his pocket and, after dialing a few dozen digits, converses at length with parties unknown. We cannot hear what he is saying, but infer from appearances that he is consulting either satellite reconnaisance or the Psychic Pussy Network.

Presently he concludes. He restarts the car. He drives on.

The camera follows the car into the desert sun. Fade up into white and out. Try it with that cool whooshing noise.

Fade in.

The Starlite Motel. Late afternoon. The sun is sinking behind the low mountains beyond a row of cabins to the West. The Dog’s car pulls into the parking lot.

Within the office, the exotic beauty behind the desk [Sherilyn Fenn] explains: “We found him two days ago, wandering in the desert. He does not move or speak. He chainsmokes Camel straights and consumes a quart of gin every four and one half hours. Bimbos find him strangely irresistable.”

By the pool of this desert oasis, amid an assortment of cheesy lawn furniture, John reclines upon a chaiselounge. Half-a-dozen bikiniclad starlets [Maria Ford, Monique Gabrielle, Andrea Dorian, Michelle Bauer, Nikki Fritz, Griffen Drew] surround him. They affect a variety of arresting postures as they adjust his umbrella, fan him with stadium programs, bring him drinks, and apply cool towels to his fevered brow. He stares straight ahead into the distance.

“John,” says the Dog, with evident emotion.

John makes no response.

In a lengthy monologue which shows the influence of the Hong Kong cinema and the campaign speeches of Fritz Mondale, the Dog describes his search for the errant scribe, which has led him to every drivein burger joint, billiard parlor, and roachinfested whorehouse in the Southwest. “We might never have found you,” he says, “had not the proprieters of this desert oasis not recognized you from a picture in the Enquirer.”

John stares at him blankly.

Fade out.

Fade in.

Montage at poolside:

The Dog talks patiently to John, who makes little response save occasionally to light another cigarette.

The Dog shows film of upcoming opponents: the Sooners, the Huskers, the Serb militia, the House Judiciary Committee.

The Dog displays his latest recruiting posters, which feature stampeding buffalo and live nude coeds.

The Dog holds up a football, demonstrating how to hold it, the proper alignment of the stitches, the appropriate throwing motion. The bikiniclad babes run elaborate routes around the pool, illustrating his intricate offensive schemes. While the Dog explains their various assignments with pointer and blackboard, the babes all run into one another and fall down; strangely, he does not seem to notice. John chugs another pint of gin.

The Dog plays a medley of stirring football melodies upon the electric piano. The babes sing backup.

The Dog watches, making noises of encouragement, as John reaches for the football...picks it up...turns it over in his hands with unaffected apelike curiosity...makes a few tentative passing motions...and then flips it to one of the girls, wide open all by herself at the end of the pool. In slow motion the ball describes a perfect spiraling arc toward the babe, who, laughing in excitement, jumps up and down [with remarkable concomitant mammary oscillation]...until the ball arrives and she freezes like a doe in the headlights and the pass bounces off her hands into the shrubbery. — The Dog claps enthusiastically and shouts words of encouragement. — John smites himself on the forehead and reaches for another drink.

Fade out.

Fade in.

The motel manager [Dennis Hopper] hobbles out on a cane. After declining the Dog’s offer of a full scholarship, he tells a tale in flashback of a long voyage by dirigible, a crashlanding on a desert isle, a race of genetic deviants half man half beast whose mad-genius creator had been banished from the civilized world for performing forbidden experiments, a volcanic eruption, a week adrift on a floating coffin listening to the Fugees on a tinny Walkman, a rescue by two couples on a passing yacht, a passage to California fraught with murderous intrigue and sexual tension, a shipwreck on the beach at Venice, a drug deal gone bad, a firefight in a warehouse, a long motorcycle ride into the rising sun, and a couple of decades of cheap whiskey and cable television. This inspires the Dog to hypnotize one of the pool girls, who retrogresses to a past cinematic life in which [as Allison Hayes] she was burnt at the stake for witchcraft after being subjected to a variety of colorful medieval tortures by a leatherhooded assistant to Vincent Price. Exerting the techniques of mesmeric influence taught him by his Tibetan masters in a dangerous attempt to meddle with the integrity of the temporal continuum, Dog tries to use her to interfere in the Satanic ceremony in which the founders of the Nebraska football dynasty sold their souls to the Devil, with the intent of thwarting the Huskers’ rise to dominance. Alas, the evil necromancer Doctor Tom Osborne perceives this plot developing in his magic retroscope, and, placing a phone call on his private line to Satan, confounds the Dog’s scheme and ensures that a curse will descend upon Buff football that cannot be raised until a coach sacrifices his firstborn at an Alumni Black Mass. The ensuing double-reverse flashback traps the Dog and several assisting starlets in the second act of Satan’s Swinging Cheerleaders, and many twists of the plot must be resolved before they can find an egress.

Escaping this cunning snare, the Dog flees even further backward into the mists of time, into a lost-world epic in which stampeding dinosaurs pursue the starlets; who, clad in skins, strike arresting poses and brandish spears.

John meanwhile has wandered away again into the desert, and at a massage parlor in nearby Las Vegas, New Mexico, dictates his memoirs [“Blood, Sand, Astroturf: Camus, Valentino, and the Way of the Tantric Buffalo”] through a one-way mirror to Nastassja Kinski, who listens in motionless silence; obviously still consumed by guilt for having abandoned him at the postgame party at the Orange Bowl of 1990.

Returning from their expedition into lost time, the Dog and his assistants commence a pool party which lasts for several weeks.

After adventures too numerous to relate [and which the viewer may in any case steal as easily as I or Corman from Homer, Ariosto, and Edgar Rice Burroughs] John is initiated into the Masai tribe in a torchlit pagan ceremony and, after slaying a lion with a homemade spear made from a pool cue and a canopener, drags the carcass back to the Starlite Motel for a midnight barbecue. There he discovers that Albino has jilted the Dog and made good on her threat to wed Slobodan Milosevic, Gary Barnett’s Buffalo Stampede has acquired a new time slot on the Comedy Channel between Ben Stein and the South Park reruns, and, capitalizing on the notoriety she has acquired from the publication of John’s memoirs, Nastassja Kinski has signed a three-picture deal with ESPN.

Drunk on the gin of the Dog and and clothed in the skin of the lion, John wanders off again into the desert. The Dog tries to restrain him, but John brushes past with his eyes fixed on the horizon. “Got to keep moving the chains,” he mutters. “Got to keep moving the chains.”

The camera pulls back from the side of the pool, from the Dog, staring after John in frustration and tossing his gameplan into the air, from John, stumbling off into the empty badlands, from the bikiniclad babes, loading a microbus with gin and potatochips and a satellite TV and taking off after him, from the great state of Texas, from the vast emptiness of the Southwest...with an abrupt reverse zoom from this microscope slide in the laboratory of God the camera recedes to a bounding surface at infinity, a place beyond space and time...beyond even football, if that were possible.

And fade out.


Later.


____________


Smoke gets in your eyes (10/20/99)


Photographing Fairies. [Nick Willing, 1997; written by Willing and Chris Harrald, after the book by Steven Szilagyi.]

A photographer honeymooning in the Byronic wilds of Switzerland in 1912 loses his wife in a climbing accident; after the trivial interlude of the war, he becomes involved in the postVictorian fascination with spirit photography [embraced for example by Arthur Conan Doyle, who appears in a couple of scenes] — first as a skeptic, then as a believer. In an enchanted wood, with the assistance of a couple of little girls who look just like Dodgson’s Alice Liddell [duh], he attempts to penetrate the veil between the worlds. — Does he succeed? or does he not? With cinematography like this, does it even matter? Convey my congratulations to John de Borman for the beauty of the shoot; and reassure Tinkerbell that yes, I still believe.


White Slaves Of Chinatown. [Joseph Mawra, 1964.]

In the dungeons cunningly secreted beneath an unassuming New York City brownstone, wicked dominatrix Olga tortures and brainwashes captive teenage bimbos, the better to enlist them in her army of drug-dealing prostitutes. After a while opium-smoking makes their clothes fall off, clarifying the evil nature of drug addiction but failing to answer the burning question: will the authors of this picture ever get around to shooting any of these scenes with real synch sound? or will we have to listen to that docudrama narration and that twentysecond loop of cheesy Chinese music for an hour and a half? — No and therefore yes, as it turns out; but if you make it all the way through you get to see the rapidfire package trailer for the Something Weird video catalogue, which includes Hoodlum Girls, Mundo Depravados, I Eat Your Skin, Tijuana After Midnight, Jail Bait, Teenage Gang Debs, Child Bride, Cannibal Island, Wild Women, The Acid Eaters, Blast Off Girls, She Freak, and Scum Of The Earth. I stand in awe.


The Naked Man. [J. Todd Anderson, 1998; written by Anderson and Ethan Coen.]

A chiropractor by day, a professional wrestler by night, mild-mannered family man Michael Rapaport is contented with his lot until the ill-fated day he returns to his father’s drugstore to find that his wife, his parents, and his unborn child have been butchered by an evil paraplegic druglord and an Elvis-impersonating henchman. Driven mad by sorrow, he wanders the countryside in a daze until he happens upon the familiar haunt of the wrestling arena, where he adopts his stage persona of The Naked Man [a deranged creature in a fleshcolored unitard painted with depictions of the internal organs], vanquishes all comers, and then announces to an enraptured audience his intention to go forth from the ring and walk among them, the better to combat the single great wrong that poisons human intercourse: spinal misalignment. Later while thrashing a barroom full of Hell’s Angels he meets a biker chick with Love tattooed on one boob and Hate upon the other [cf. Mitchum in The Night Of The Hunter] who accompanies him upon his quest for justice and the philosophic truth that lies beneath the skin. — “Do the names of things really matter?” Rapaport muses. — Or as the biker chick is always saying: Feel the marshmallow.


The Celebration. [aka Festen: Thomas Vinterberg, 1998; written by Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov.]

The first essay in the style proposed by a Danish newest-of-the-new-wave manifesto advocating the production of films without artifice, a variation on a classical theme of Renoir [cf. The Rules Of The Game] shot on video without benefit of cinematographic lighting or postproduction sound: a family gathers at a mansion in the country to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the father of the clan; after a certain amount of preliminary hard drinking, angstridden soulsearching, and recreational fucking across class boundaries, the eldest son rises before his assembled relatives and their retainers to accuse the birthday boy of having played stuff-the-paternal-sausage with himself and his [recently deceased] twin sister in their childhood thirty years before. This provokes predictable outrage, and the sense of the meeting seems to be going against the whistleblower until the fortuitous discovery of said sister’s suicide note provides a smoking gun. — So much for the ambiguity of memory. — With a bit of forethought this might have been developed into a Kierkegaardian Rashomon; but forethought is itself the kind of contrivance that must now be renounced as doctrinal anathema, and instead we have a charming cinema-verite depiction of the Ramseys at home. — Not likely to be the last such essay in mannered antimannerism, though I expect it will be less influential than the far more successful [and far more amateurish] Blair Witch Project.


October Sky. [Joe Johnston, 1999; screenplay by Lewis Colick, from the memoir by Homer Hickam.]

In darkest West Virginia, in October 1957, in a company town populated by the indentured servants of the mining industry, a merry band of high school lads are somehow seized by the inspiration to build rockets; despite the derision of their fellow troglodytes, the baffled hostility of their parents and the opposition of the school system, the incurable disease with which the one teacher who believes in them is suddenly stricken, and the dark realization that none of this seems to be getting them any chicks, they press onward to success, win a science fair, and get to go to college and live long enough to find a place where the sun still shines. — This would simply be forgettable uplifting Hollywood bullshit had it not all actually happened. — But thus it is instead an inspiring reminder of a profound truth [one which, paradoxically, Kevin Williamson will never fully grasp]: that all the great things lie in the hearts of adolescent boys; and that there is no deeper wisdom than that to be found in blowing things up.


Stigmata. [Roger Wainwright, 1999; written by Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage.]

After an apparent false start [a loose shirttail later tucked much too neatly back beneath the beltline of the plot] involving a trip to Brazil to view that stock device of Gothic fiction, the Bleeding Statue, ace Vatican investigator/priest Gabriel Byrne is dispatched to Pittsburgh [a city which thanks to the cinematographic efforts of the very talented Jeffrey Kimball looks like it may never recover from the filming of Flashdance] to investigate reports that freeliving hairdresser Patricia Arquette has begun displaying the wounds of Christ crucified. Indeed she has; though on her, as you might expect, they look good. Mysteriously she’s also begun speaking in tongues, hurling people around with fingerflicks, and levitating above her bed — i.e., displaying the wounds of Linda Blair — and has attracted the attention of flocks of doves indicating either the descent of the Holy Spirit or another remake of Blade Runner. Fortunately before the producers have time to offer the screenwriters any more notes about cool stuff they’ve seen in other movies that simply has to be grafted into the narrative Patricia lapses into a trance and inscribes a lengthy passage in Aramaic upon the wall of the loft she is mysteriously able to afford on that paycheck from the beauty salon; this turns out to be a forbidden gospel from the NC-17 portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Vatican hit men are dispatched to clean house. Will Patricia escape their clutches? Has that dead Brazilian priest come back to haunt her, and if so, why? Will the producers insist on the gnarly green face and the projectile vomit? Will Byrne’s vow of celibacy make it to the final reel? mine certainly would not have. — And, incidentally, if all this sucked so lamentably why did I enjoy it so much?


Lake Placid. [Steve Miner, 1999; written by David Kelley.]

Cute but spunky paleontologist Bridget Fonda follows a mysterious reptilian tooth back to its place of origin, a lake in Maine; there she meets cute but bashful Fish-and-Wildlife guy Bill Pullman, cute but screwy millionaire adventurer Oliver Platt, cute but foulmouthed little old lady Betty White, and entirely cute deputy bimbo Meredith Salenger. Then they all stand around in the picturesque North woods cracking wise at one another while a giant crocodile leaps out of the water every few minutes and bites somebody in half: The Creature From The Black Lagoon played for laughs, I guess; though [obviously] one can never be sure that Messrs. Miner and Kelley appreciate that their premise is not entirely serious. — Entertaining nonetheless. — And inspiring: I’m looking through the trunk for that old script about submarine warfare in Boulder Creek. I could have sworn I had a part for Meredith Salenger.


Dark Planet. [Albert Magnoli, 1996.]

After many world wars have turned the Earth into a radioactive ashtray, a temporary truce is declared between the contending factions to allow the mounting of an expedition to the, uh, dark planet, where secrets may be found that will reverse entropy, restore the wasted home of mankind to its primordial beauty, and provide an excuse for Maria Ford to take her clothes off. Alas, halfway through the voyage I fell asleep in the middle of a fascist tirade by Michael York, and what happened thereafter I don’t recall.


Sour Grapes. [Larry David, 1998.]

A couple of guys take their girlfriends to Atlantic City for a weekend of dissipation; during the course of the merriment, one of them hits a jackpot on a slot machine [the, uh, grapes], with predictably dire consequences: the buddies quarrel, and the winner loses his job, his girlfriend, his friends, his health, his sanity, and finally the money itself; though not before I myself lost interest. — At one point an otherwise superfluous subplot is discharged when the obnoxious star of a big-hit sitcom is rolled into an operating room and by hilarious accident gets his testicles removed. Presumably this is meant to convey something profound about Mr. David’s experience in television; forgive me if I confess I don’t care to know exactly what.


Bug Buster. [Lorenzo Doumani, 1998; written by Malick Khouri.]

Though the opening composition — an overhead shot through the slowly-rotating blades of a ceilingfan: an adolescent girl in filmy negligee lying on a bed, a full moon lighting the room through a window framed by blowing drapes — and, yes, that swarm of beetles crawling all over the tender flesh of the nubile ingenue — betrays the influence of Dario Argento, the abrupt apparition of Randy Quaid in the character of a deranged exterminator sends the plot careening in a wholly unrelated direction, and what happens after that — save possibly the parts where teenaged vixens get munched by mutant insects — makes no sense whatsoever.


Creature From The Haunted Sea. [Roger Corman, 1961; written by Charles B. Griffith.]

In the chaotic days following the fall of the Batista regime, a group of fascist sympathizers snatch a substantial chunk of the national treasury and flee Cuba on a fishingboat, escorted by a motley assortment of gangsters including a guy who speaks only in animal imitations, a gunmoll in a bathingsuit, a dude who’s seen To Have And Have Not one time too many, and that fabled master of disguise, Secret Agent XK-150. On the passage to exile the gangsters hatch an absurd plot to seize the loot which requires they impersonate a legendary monster which [they claim] keeps crawling out of the ocean to feed on the Cuban party; unfortunately for the success of this scheme the real monster crashes the party and [after a variety of intervening comic incident] eats everybody and hauls the treasure away to the bottom of the sea. [“That’s it,” Corman exclaimed when he was seized by this inspiration: “The monster wins.”] — Among other things this was probably the first spymovie put-on: remarkably, it appeared a year before even Doctor No [let alone Our Man Flint], and therefore [as the great comedies will] parodied in advance. — Another testimonial, in short, to the fertility of the imagination of the great B-movie writer Charles Griffith; also the author of Bucket Of Blood, Little Shop Of Horrors, The Wild Angels, Death Race 2000, and the twice-remade Not Of This Earth.


Search And Destroy. [David Salle, 1995; written by Howard Korder, from a play by Michael Almereyda.]

I still like it. — Just in case you wondered, the scream queen in the last scene is Racquel Welch’s daughter.


Worst trailer of the month: Oliver Stone’s football movie. Please somebody stop him, before he directs again.

Best trailer of the month: Luc Besson’s forthcoming film about Joan of Arc, starring Milla Jovovich as the Maid of Orleans: LeeLoo hears the voice of God. — Jean Reno says he asked for the part, but was turned down. “No,” Besson said. “Not even if you shave.”


Trainspotting. [Danny Boyle; screenplay by John Hodges, from the novel by Irvine Welsh.]

Having now found the script at godsamongdirectors.com, I can report that it reads very well; in fact [since those Scots accents were completely impenetrable] it read well enough that in several passages I had my first chance to figure out just what everybody was talking about. — Really a brilliant specimen of dark comedy; for the sake of a sequel, one must hope Mr. Welsh’s success has not led him to hang out in better company. But next time let’s consider subtitles.


Of course, after that Ewan McGregor met George Lucas, and his career took a turn for the worse. — A few more questions about The Phantom Menace:

What Phantom? Which menace? [I know, I know. But I’m still wondering.]

How can the Jedi dudes swim in those heavy robes? How do they manage to step out of the water absolutely dry?

Why is there so much light underwater? Didn’t any of these guys see Titanic?

What is the “planet core”? and how are they supposed to take a shortcut through it? The center of the Earth, for instance, is molten iron at astronomical pressure; the centers of Jupiter and Saturn are probably even more exotic, perhaps metallic hydrogen. Does Lucas even know this?

Doesn’t Neeson look bored when he’s pretending to talk to those CGI characters? Don’t you think he’d have walked if he’d ever actually seen the Jamaican frogs?

If the frogs and the surfacedwellers have a “symbiotic relationship”, what is it? Which are the ants and which are the aphids?

Why can’t any of these professional mindreaders figure out that the Queen is travelling incognito? Was it just that this particular twist of the plot didn’t make any sense to them either?

If the same droids were involved in all these earlier episodes, shouldn’t everyone have recognized them in the later ones? Wouldn’t C-3PO have narked Vader to Luke and Leia? Or vice-versa?

Aren’t there a lot of three-line scenes in here? It reminds me of the worst of the old serials: “We’d better get the film from the Professor’s laboratory.” “Yes, when it is developed it may reveal the identity of The Crimson Ghost.” “Let’s take the car.” — Cut to the henchmen listening in. A radio message from the Ghost: “Intercept them in Brook Canyon.” — Cut. — Carchase. — Stock footage of a car hurtling over a cliff. — Fistfight in the warehouse. — Shouldn’t Lucas have taken a hint from Mike Myers and just introduced a character named Basil Exposition to walk in every few minutes and explain the action to everybody?

How can the Jedi knights run out of money? Has this ever happened in the history of science fiction? Never mind walking into a bank and writing a check [“You don’t need to see identification...you don’t need to check the balance...”]; if you can send a holographic projection across the galaxy, shouldn’t you be able to wire funds?

Isn’t the virgin-birth thing a couple of tokes over the line? Doesn’t Lucas remember what the Pope said about Godard’s Hail Mary?

How is this kid supposed to bring order to the franchise? He isn’t exactly a prodigy of the order of, say, Drew Barrymore or Sarah Polley; or Natalie Portman herself, for that matter. — There’s nothing dark about him; not that a kid can play dark — maybe the young Christina Ricci could have pulled it off, but even then it would have gone for laughs; nor is it any accident, obviously, that when you think of acting prodigies, you always think of girls. — And it’s inconceivable that he’ll improve over the next couple of pictures. Is it just Lucas’s plan to gradually morph him away into a digital clone?

Is there anyone who can stay awake once Yoda starts explaining how Fear leads to the Dark Side? I always feel like Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda: “What was that...middle...part again?”

What is this story about the little people living in your cells as the source of the Force? Is this some reference to mitochondria? [Has Lucas actually been reading up on molecular biology?] Or are these just like the South Park underpants gnomes?

Is The Line Integral of The Force over The Path through The Configuration Space equal to The Change In The Potential Energy? What is the Dark Side of that?

And who was that babe in the slavegirl outfit standing next to Jabba? What’s his secret? Why does he get all the chicks?


Later.


____________


Lang in Hollywood (9/11/99)


Lang in Hollywood in the Forties: “Fritz had a wonderful Western shirt with a silver bull’s head holding the kerchief, and cowboy boots,” [a frequent female companion said.] “I wore ruffled petticoats and skirts. We went square dancing all over this town for about a year and a half. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like a man square-dancing in a cowboy suit with a monocle.”

I’ll bet.


____________


CSU 41, CU 14 (9/11/99)


The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. [Sonny Lubick, 1999.]

At a secret base far to the north of the Arctic Circle, devilmaycare flyboy Douglas “Mad Dog” Hoye prepares his B-17 for a daring flight over the polar wastes. Without, the roar of the warming engines can barely be heard over the howling Alaskan winds. Within, as his WAC assistant Judith “Mad Cow” Albino looks on with adoring eyes, the Dog pours coffee from a thermos laced with Ten High bourbon and explains his mission in a grimvoiced monologue. Somewhere in the trackless snows of the polar region lies a mysterious fortress, lost for generations to the knowledge of mortal men. Here under the protective aegis of an evil race of Nepalese Jesuits the armies of the night have found refuge; here are harbored the fugitive operatives whose activities everyone suspects but no one can admit — the doctors who performed the alien autopsies in Roswell, the behavioral psychologists who programmed Oswald, the educational consultants who taught Generation X to spell. This citadel has stood beyond the reach of civilized power since the dawn of the present age. But now it is the dawn of a new millenium; now everything has changed. It has been the sense of a meeting at the highest levels of power — a meeting at which no word was spoken and no look direct — that this secret Arctic fortress, repository of the last and darkest secrets of the Cold War, of the Old World, must now at last be utterly destroyed. As his speech reaches its emotional climax and the music of the “Marseillaise” swells beneath stock footage of marching Nazis, stampeding elephants, the Bikini tests, and the Nebraska game of 1986, the Dog calls upon the gods to witness his oath that the right shall prevail. Zipping up his flight jacket, he takes a last swig from the thermos and smooches Albino farewell before walking out the door into the shapeless mists that cloak the unfathomable mysteries of the Arctic. — Meanwhile, beneath the waves of the Atlantic, intrepid archaeologist John “Wild Buffalo” Craig descends into the depths in his newly perfected bathysphere in search of the ruins of Atlantis. As his support crew listens above on the deck of the research vessel “Arthur Rimbaud”, he describes by suboceanic telephone the world of wonders revealed for the first time to human eyes: the strange glowing fish, the pulsing octopi, the colored vowels ... and beneath, appearing dimly through the murk, the longburied towers of the sunken continent. — Meanwhile the Dog motors onward through the ozone. Lighting a Lucky Strike and taking another pull from his thermos, he unlocks the attache case containing the arming codes for his nuclear weapons. — At the Pentagon in Washington Secretary of Defense Fyodor Dostoevsky is briefed by the brass. Dismissing the Joint Chiefs with an impatient wave of the hand, he places a call to the Alaskan base. — Albino answers. — “It’s me, Fyodor,” says Dostoevsky, “and I’m not wearing any pants.” — Descending deeper into the sunken ruins, John passes the ancient library ... the molecular biology building ... the stadium, a huge edifice erected about a curious rectangular grid, one hundred yards by fifty-three, with pillars raised at either end ... the site, John conjectures, of the religious observances of the Atlanteans ... . But wait ... what is that strange shape that seems to stir amid the ooze of the sea floor? Are those ... tentacles? What ancient evil has been awakened here that might better have been left to sleep another hundred centuries? — Meanwhile on the floor of the Aurora Stock Exchange the Dog’s broker takes a short position on Frigidaire. — Albino breathes heavily as Dostoevsky recites passages from the works of John Grisham. — Calling on Phoebus Apollo to guide his spear, the Dog drops the Big One. — On the deck of the “Arthur Rimbaud”, the crew gathered around the speakerphone look at one another aghast. — The heat of the nuclear detonation melts the polar icecap and awakens an army of prehistoric monsters. Animated by a gameplan born from the darkest recesses of the lizard brain, they march to the South; coming upon Mile High Stadium in their shambling advance, they take the field against Colorado and commence stomping the hapless Bison into buff-jerky. A screaming mob of spectators stampedes for the exits; Moschetti throws another interception. — The globegirdling system of continental plates, knocked askew by the polar detonation, commences a retrograde motion; North America begins to sink slowly beneath the waves of the universal ocean. — From the gondola of a blimp circling overhead, a scholarly figure observes the catastrophe and annotates his copy of Plato’s Timaeus. Can it be ... John? Or is it — his Evil Twin? Stay tuned. — With brilliant stop-motion animation effects by Ray Harryhausen — applied not merely to the movement of the dinosaurs, but also to an almost convincing imitation of life in the Colorado offense.


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Godard in the Balkans (9/2/99)


Forever Mozart. [Jean-Luc Godard, 1996.]

Following a game of hopscotch in the park [cf. Blowup] and a series of auditions [“War is easy ... it’s sticking a piece of metal in a piece of flesh ...”] for a cinematic project called “The Fatal Bolero” [“Why fatal?” everyone keeps asking], the [unemployed] granddaughter of Albert Camus forms the scheme of putting on a production of Musset’s One Mustn’t Play At Love in Sarajevo; amid existential reflections, she and her party journey to the war zone, where they discover mud, cold, hunger, shellfire, and a deranged corps of partisans engaged in the rape and slaughter of the innocent. — And this is the film within the film; or is it. — Mozart is invoked finally, but only in a last desperate appeal to the memory of a greatness European civilization seems to have abandoned and forgotten in the ugly reality of its Balkan collapse.


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The scourge of Shannen Doherty (9/1/99)


Moby Dick. [Herman Melville, 1851.]

Boy meets whale. Boy loses whale. Whale gets boy. Followed by the lesser-known sequels Dick Two, Dick 3D, Dick: The Revenge, and Beach Blanket Moby. — However far James Cameron may have recovered in my esteem by making fun of himself in Brooks’ latest comedy, it remains my fervent hope that he has never heard of Herman Melville; and that no one will ever tell him.


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Nine ball (8/27/99)


The Muse. [Albert Brooks, 1999.]

Energized by baffled desperation after receiving the cryptic intelligence from his producer, his agent, etc. that he has somehow Lost His Edge, screenwriter Brooks lurches wildly about Hollywood seeking the appropriate whetstone; finding it, finally, through the offices of his friend and fellow writer Jeff Bridges, who confesses the font of his own inspiration to be the mysterious dingbat Sharon Stone — a woman who, indeed, between midnight phone calls for takeout and randomly targeted shopping expeditions does seem to dispense advice to an impressive lineup of insiders, including Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, and James Cameron. Gaining access to her mythic presence, Brooks does in due course succeed in bringing his project [a Carrey vehicle simultaneously derivative of Fierce Creatures and Free Willy] home to conclusion and resuscitating his career, though not without unforeseen consequence and a variety of comic incident. — It would be unfair to suggest that Brooks’ own wit stands in need of honing, though this story doesn’t seem his best: there are moments of startling hilarity — Cameron’s cameo in particular is priceless — and the casting of Stone, who exhibits a vivid comic presence, was certainly inspired. — And is the moral, finally, a deliberate echo of Freud’s observation about the paradox of the artist? — Perhaps Brooks might have done better, but you could certainly do much worse. — With Andie McDowell as the Cookie Maven.


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A romance of Semi-Happy Valley (8/27/99)


Dudley Do-Right. [Hugh Wilson, 1999.]

Though I knew all along [of course] that this project must necessarily be Doomed To Failure, theory must at least occasionally be confronted with experiment; and so it was that midway through this feature I found myself sitting with my feet up in the second row stuffing popcorn into my face and wondering exactly why it was I couldn’t stop laughing. — Indeed, contrary to all expectation this is all very funny, though [as always] a bald summary of the narrative facts does little to explain why. — Still: after diverting the attention of Our Hero [played by the omnipresent Brendan Fraser, than whom none can boast a squarer jaw] with a preposterous tale about vampires at large in the North Woods, moustache-twirling villain Snidely Whiplash [Alfred Molina, and give that boy a contract extension] buys the town of Semi-Happy Valley out from under its inhabitants, seeds the streams with manufactured nuggets, and sets off a gold rush that brings yuppie wetbacks stampeding across the border straight into the casinos, hamburger stands, and miniature golfcourses now newly staffed with his blackgarbed minions; with inestimable benefit not simply to his own personal exchequer but to the Canadian balance of trade. Naturally this wins the hearts and minds of the beancounters in Ottawa; worse, it piques the interest of Dudley’s childhood sweetheart Nell Fenwick [Sarah Jessica Parker], prompts Dudley’s own dismissal from the Mounties, and [unkindest cut of all] somehow causes the mysterious disappearance of Dudley’s faithful steed Horse. Fortunately drunken miner/martial arts master Eric Idle is at hand to offer counsel to Do-Right in this, his darkest hour; and, after an extended series of homages to the Eddy/McDonald musicals, a few explosions, some great motorcycle stunts, and a bit of hedge sculpture with a chainsaw, the good triumph, the wicked fail finally to prosper, and the faithful Horse returns just in time to lead a cavalry charge. — Fraser has now done Dudley and George of the Jungle; will he yet return as Tom Slick?


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Film threat (8/13/99)


Bowfinger. [Frank Oz, 1999. Written by Steve Martin.]

Ne’erdowell producer/director Martin, a guy whose fondest dream is that someday, somehow, the Federal Express truck may not pass him by, makes one last desperate stretch for the brass ring, improvising around a preposterous alien-visitation script an inspired exercise in guerilla/paparazzi filmmaking: knowing full well that he can’t persuade action megastar Eddie Murphy to appear willingly in his movie, he determines instead to follow his intended lead around Hollywood and shoot the scenes around him without letting him know what’s going on. Since Murphy is already teetering on the brink of nervous collapse under the weight of his paranoid delusions, these repeated close encounters with the Ed Wood brigade must certainly drive him completely over the edge; complications ensue. — Though the execution of this scheme is occasionally ragged, the premise is absolutely brilliant; I can’t believe there isn’t a wannabe with a film crew out stalking Schwarzenegger already. Moreover Murphy [who plays both the action star and his halfwitted brother] is terrific: it had become hard to recall why he used to be one of the funniest guys in the world, but if he keeps working with Martin, he will be again. Check this out. — With Heather Graham as an ingenue fresh off the bus from Ohio, determined to fuck everyone who stands between her and stardom; would that I lay in her path.


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Reuben and the Jets (8/11/99)


The Warriors. [Walter Hill, 1979. From the novel by Sol Yurick.]

The original Escape from New York: the charismatic Cyrus, a gangleader with Napoleonic ambitions, calls a nocturnal meeting in the heart of Manhattan to which come delegations from hundreds of gangs under flag of truce. In a spellbinding oration filled with revolutionary rhetoric, he proposes that they all unite to rule the metropolis. The gathered masses are inspired by his argument, but just as it seems they may be prepared to mount Cyrus upon a white horse and march on City Hall, a rival in the audience pulls a gun out and whacks him. In the ensuing pandemonium, as the police bust in and the crowd scatters, the murderer points the finger at the leader of the Warriors, a gang from Coney Island. The frame sticks, and within moments the tom-toms have spread the word to everyone: pursued by cops and gangs alike the Warriors now have the whole night long to fight their way across the city and return to their home turf. Notwithstanding a train derailment, a firefight with Molotov cocktails, a punchout with some dudes in Yankee uniforms who call themselves the Baseball Furies, a chase through the subways, a near-seduction by a Siren-gang of gangster-girls, a beautifully-choreographed fight in a Union Station men’s room, and a final faceoff with their pursuers on the beach at Coney Island itself, they succeed and survive; though the triumph, obviously, is qualified. [Looking down upon the rollercoaster we all remember from Annie Hall, their leader asks: “We fought all night to get back to this?”] — All this of course is supposed to have transpired in that romantic golden age of gang warfare [cf. West Side Story] before everyone started packing an AK-47. — A powerful narrative developed from a simple, elegant premise, very nearly attaining the cinematic perfection of a continuous chase. A great motion picture.


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Stonedhenge (8/11/99)


The Song Remains The Same. [Peter Clifton and Joe Massot, 1976.]

The world owes an eternal debt of gratitude to Christopher Guest and Rob Reiner for having [with Spinal Tap] killed this genre for all time; else there might have been an endless succession of pretentious two-hour concert movies filled with enigmatic cloaked figures out of Arthurian legend moving through mistfilled Scottish landscapes intercut with backstage documentary footage of screaming road-managers, drugaddled groupies, security thugs bouncing gatecrashers, and lowangled shots of backlit guitar players blowing all the licks they managed to hit in the studio. True, we have instead an endless succession of two-minute videos on MTV; but it could have been exactly sixty times as bad. An Academy award can’t possibly do justice to an accomplishment of this magnitude; is it too late to nominate the authors for the Nobel prize?


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Blame it on the Casanova (8/6/99)


Mystery Men. [Kinka Usher, 1999. Written by Neil Cuthbert, from the comic by Bob Burden.]

In an imaginary metropolis derivative of Gotham, famed costumed crusader Captain Amazing [aka Greg Kinnear], worried about the sagging ratings which may cost him his Pepsi endorsement, appears in civilian incognito at the seventeenth parole hearing of his ancient archenemy Casanova Frankenstein [played with malevolent relish by Geoffrey Rush] and delivers testimony designed to sway the psychiatric review board toward a bizarre decision to release the fettered Master of Menace; the better, apparently, that he might return to his Gothic mansion, gather up his entourage, bring forth assorted instruments of super-science from his dungeon laboratories, and resume the Conquest of the Universe. Amazing’s hidden purpose, of course, as he more or less confesses to the evil genius in a midnight visitation, is to defeat his rival once again in a thoroughly prepared and meticulously promoted rematch between Good and Evil, from which, presumably, commercial revenue might rival that of the Super Bowl. Alas, Casanova’s plan is simpler: he overpowers the Captain, straps the captive into a nuclear electric chair, and throws a party so that all his evil buddies [fraternity boys! evil suits who downsize their opposition! Big Tobacco! disco dudes and dolls! gangsta rappers!] can watch him toast the hapless superdude with a new and improved Death Ray. — Only one thing can save our putative hero: the timely intervention of a motley gang of costumed wannabes led [after a fashion] by Mister Furious Ben Stiller and featuring the talents of The Blue Raja Hank Azaria [who throws forks], The Sphinx Wes Studi [whose stock of eightball wisdom like “When you doubt your strength, you give strength to your doubts” seems bottomless], the Spleen Paul Rubens [who farts], the Invisible Boy Kel Mitchell [who really isn’t], the great William H. Macy as The Shoveler [“I shovel,” says Macy; “I shovel really well”], and Janeane Garofalo [all right, all right: I forgive her] as The Bowler. — Actually even their powers can’t save our putative hero, but at this point no one really cares. — After an open audition for new costumed talent that will recall to everyone his worst memories of a Star Trek convention, a meditative Retreat in the Deep Woods that bids fair to redefine the conventions of the martial-arts genre, and the fortuitous intervention of a Gibsonian mad scientist dwelling in an amusement park whose inventions include a Blame Gun and a gadget “based on standard drycleaning technology” that immobilizes the opposition by shrinking their clothing [said wizard played by Tom Waits, and I must say, he was to the manner born], the final battle looms. Will evil be vanquished? Will Casanova take the fall? Will our heroes validate their shaky selfesteem? Stay tuned. — Note to Cocktail: you’ll like the blimps.


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Virgin queen, my ass (8/1/99)


Elizabeth. [Shekhar Kapur, 1998; written by Michael Hirst.]

Did anyone notice that Shakespeare In Love was not only not the best movie of 1998, but that it wasn’t even the best Elizabethan costume drama starring Joseph Fiennes?


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An audible silence (7/31/99)


Film. [Samuel Beckett, 1965.]

A beautiful albeit enigmatic twenty-one minute silent short, written by Beckett for Buster Keaton.


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Sex objects (7/28/99)


Some Nudity Required. [Johanna Demetrakas and Odette Springer, 1998.]

Ms. Springer, an erstwhile composer of soundtracks for the Corman B-movie empire, here directs an documentary examination of the manufacturers of exploitation film, one that seems, finally, to savor of a kind of tainted love: though her original intention was, obviously, a scathing denunciation of the industry as an instrument that perpetuates the subjugation of women — a view certainly supported by her interviews with those celebrated auteurs of sleaze Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski — in the course of the investigation her honesty gets the better of her and she admits the guilty pleasures of cinematic trash. Interviews with prominent scream queens run the gamut: though Maria Ford [Burial of the Rats] feels perpetually violated, Julie Strain [Return to Savage Beach] loves to take her clothes off for the camera and begs to differ who’s exploiting whom; Lisa Boyle [I Like To Play Games] takes an intermediate position. The directors for the most part seem guarded and defensive; though Corman himself seems indifferent to the implied accusations if not evasive, and [to take his part] a system that provided the first breaks to Scorcese, Coppola, Spielberg, Ron Howard, Paul Bartel, and Jonathan Demme — for that matter to women like Katt Shea, who began as a spearchucker in Barbarian Queen and now directs in the mainstream — requires no defense. Were there not an exploitation cinema, where would talents like these find the opportunity to learn their craft? — As for Ms. Springer herself, she winds up stripping for the camera and examining her torso in the mirror, trying to decide whether she too needs a boob job. — I’d advise against it. But she should consider another documentary.


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Sharks wha hae (7/25/99)


Deep Blue Sea. [Renny Harlin, 1999. Written by Duncan Kennedy and Wayne Powers.]

Brilliant bombshell molecular biologist Saffron Burrows, obsessed with the quest for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease [you can guess the backstory], discovers the requisite silver bullet in the biochemistry of the shark cortex and constructs a seagoing laboratory [said to be some kind of floating submarine pen but resembling more an offshore drilling platform and having in any case no real design requirement save that it should flood easily during the hurricane the writers conjure up to end Act One] for the purpose of breeding sharks with oversized brains, the better to harvest her magic protein. The sharks, thus mentally amplified, develop their own ideas, with the predictable result: really smart sharks eat really dumb people. Naturally this is entertaining as hell. — With Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rapaport, and LL Cool J [an actor who promises to be every bit as good as Ice Cube] as the preacher/cook. Try to guess who gets munched first.


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Lawyers in love (7/8/99)


Night Of The Lawyers. [Philip Koch, 1997.]

Indescribable. But what a night of mortal terror it was.


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Dead babies (7/8/99)


Jawbreaker. [Darren Stein, 1999.]

Another weak attempt at black suburban comedy: Rose McGowan and her fellow highschool Überbaben accidentally kill one of their friends and spend the next couple of acts trying to avoid the consequences before the denouement; set, with astonishing originality, in yet another Prom. — Or, Heathers Lite. — To think I once supposed that high school could ever end.


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Father of The Bride (7/8/99)


Gods And Monsters. [Bill Condon, 1998. From the novel by Christopher Bram.]

James Whale/Ian McKellan in an unlikely love triangle with Georgie Girl and George of the Jungle; which eccentric summary hardly serves to explain why this is a great motion picture. Check it out.


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Vera historia (6/30/99)


Wild Wild West. [Barry Sonnenfeld, 1999. Written by Jim and/or John Thomas.]

In May of 1869 the lines of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads met near Ogden, Utah, spanning the continent with a marvel of engineering that was the wonder of the age. The occasion was marked by the ceremonial driving of a golden spike and the attack of a giant steampowered mechanical spider designed by a wheelchairbound mad scientist bearing a striking resemblance to the upper half of Kenneth Branagh. Fortunately this plot was thwarted by the timely intervention of Will Smith and Kevin Klein; unfortunately, they seem not to have been able to step between Branagh and world domination without simultaneously stepping between Salma Hayek and the camera, dramatically lowering my appreciation of their exploits. Mysteriously these incidents have been suppressed from the historical record; rather as, I suspect, this motion picture will be quietly removed from the resumes of Messrs. Smith, Klein, and Sonnenfeld. — Branagh, of course, can afford the occasional joke against himself; anyway he can always claim he left his brain in his pants.


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The Devil made them do it (6/30/99)


South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. [Trey Parker, 1999. Written by Parker, Matt Stone, and Pam Brady.]

Canadian filmmakers are determined to have taught foul language to the children of an unspoiled American mountain town and sentenced to death; the Canadian Air Force bombs Hollywood in retaliation, killing the Baldwin family and precipitating a war that is destined to establish the rule of Satan over the Earth. With a variety of remarkable musical numbers, a wristwatch that tells the time in acts, and many celebrity casualties, including Conan O’Brien, Saddam Hussein, the Arquette family, and Kenny. — I don’t think they killed Winona Ryder, but as her attorney I advise her to file suit anyway.


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Dumb and dumber (6/27/99)


A Night At The Roxbury. [John Fortenberry and Peter Markle, 1998. Written by Steve Koren and Will Ferrell.]

Apparently an attempt at comedy, though the joke [if ever there was one] runs out before the conclusion of the credit sequence. The rest is absolutely pathetic.


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Women in skins (6/16/99)


Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. [Jay Roach, 1999.]

Curiously enough, after you factor out e.g. the appearances on the Jerry Springer Show you realize that the plot of this second episode in the adventures of the furrychested anachronism is lifted straight from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: returning from extraterrestrial exile, Dr. Evil perfects a time machine and dials back to 1969, where he extracts from the cryogenically frozen body of the world’s greatest secret agent a vial containing not Orlando’s wits but Austin’s Mojo, which then he spirits away to the Moon; our hero must pursue him from the Nineties back into the heroic age of Mods and Rockers and Apollo spacecraft to retrieve the purloined vital essence — and, incidentally, save the world, though [what with the fart jokes and the go-go girls] it was hard to pay attention to that part. — Heather Graham appears in the role of Felicity Shagwell; I have no doubt she does. — Great musical digressions, including a cameo by those unlikely bedfellows Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello. Don’t miss it.


Creatures The World Forgot. [Don Chaffey, 1970.]

Another Hammer homage to our cavedwelling ancestors, in the spirit of When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth and One Million Years B.C., with Julie [“former Miss Norway!”] Ege in the role of Victoria Vetri in the role of Raquel and [in a rare concession to realism] no dinosaurs. Despite the excitement of the antelope hunt, the struggle for tribal supremacy, the volcanic eruption that pelts everybody with paper-mache boulders, the trek across the burning desert, the savage copulatory beat of the tomtoms accompanying the firelit dance routine of a naked maiden, and that curious genre requirement, the war between the Tribe of the Blondes and the Tribe of the Brunettes, you come away with the impression that the world forgot these creatures because nothing much ever happened to them.


Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. [Claude Sautet, 1995.]

Michel Serrault plays a retired business tycoon who takes a fancy to newly-divorced Emmanuelle Beart [I can’t imagine why] and hires her to edit a memoir of his early career as a judge in the colonial boondocks. Sure enough she’s a terrific editor, but she seems to fall for his publisher Jean-Hugues Anglade rather than for him. Presently she changes her mind and dumps the publisher, but by this time Serrault has reconsidered his position vis-a-vis his estranged wife, dropped the writing project, and left to circumnavigate the globe. — Alas; poor Emmanuelle. She must probably remain unattached for as much as thirty minutes.


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Burning love (6/15/99)


Mighty Peking Man. [Ho Meng Hwa, 1977. Produced by the Shaw Brothers.]

Hong Kong does King Kong: a Chinese adventurer leads an expedition into the nearest convenient jungle [I think this was supposed to be in India, or Nepal, or somewhere like that] in search of a giant ape, and, after various exploits that serve to illustrate his derring-do and separate him from his colleagues and attendants, finds the Big Guy hanging out in the deep woods with Evelyne Kraft, a blonds bombshell jungle girl who swings through the trees, speaks to the animals, and keeps falling out of her cavegirl outfit. After she gets bitten by a snake and he sucks the poison out of her thigh romance blossoms, but before the ape can figure out what the two of them are doing in the upper berth our hero sells the babe on the idea of a return to civilization. This proves to be a Bad Idea. Evil exploitative Hong Kong hucksters [like, well, the Shaw Brothers themselves] cage the noble savage, embroil the hero in an inappropriate romance, and threaten Sheena with poor performance reports if she fails to satisfy their base bestial cravings. Enraged by a chance glimpse of the inner workings of the Oval Office, Bigfoot busts out, climbs the nearest tower, and battles the colonial air force to a standstill before [a nice touch] falling to his death in flames; the cavegirl, alas, expires nobly after stepping into the line of fire trying to protect her pet primate from the final onslaught. Our hero is left gnashing his teeth: what a moron.

Slipping into the midnight show with other matters on my mind, I failed to notice the drawing for the door prizes and missed my chance to collect a poster of the spectacular Ms. Kraft in costume. But now that I’ve seen this flick I won’t rest until I find another.


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The phantom of the space opera (6/3/99)


The Thirteenth Floor. [Josef Rusnak, 1999.]

The motion picture that asks the question every other motion picture has been asking lately, namely, What is Reality? and answers it in pretty much the same way. Vincent D’Onofrio does well as a deranged hacker; Gretchen Mol, on the other hand, seems to have been cast only because Patricia Arquette can’t be everywhere at once. [But rest assured computer scientists are working on it.]


Lust In The Dust. [Paul Bartel, 1985.]

One of the great absurdist Westerns: two frontier harlots [Lainie Kazan and Divine, and a large part of the joke is their striking resemblance] discover while contending for the hand of strong silent gunslinger Tab Hunter that they are sisters separated at birth and that the matching tattoos on their buttocks combine to form the map leading to the famous lost treasure of Chile Verde. With memorable musical interludes.


Reform School Girls. [Tom DeSimone, 1986.]

The title says it all. A personal favorite, because of the casting of Wendy O. Williams as Dormitory Boss Bitch, and the appearance of that monumental challenge to the modern brassiere Sybil Danning as the evangelical warden.


The Secret Cinema. [Paul Bartel, 1967.]

Bartel’s first [thirty minute] minifeature, made illicitly on weekends during the late Sixties with borrowed cameras and stolen film: a girl discovers that her life has been filmed without her knowledge, and that everything that happens to her is designed to make her the butt of an elaborate joke. Funny, sinister, brilliantly original; everything The Truman Show pretended to be, thirty years in advance.


The Dream Life Of Angels. [La vie revée des anges. Erick Zonca, 1998.]

A couple of girls working at a garment factory in Lille fall in with one another, hang out with a couple of bikers who work as bouncers, and, presently, drift apart. Very simple, very moving, very beautiful. I even forgave the authors the device of the Coma Baby. [Rest assured that this does not signal a general change of heart; I still want to kill Jay McInerney.] Check it out.


Caged Heat. [Jonathan Demme, 1974.]

Demme’s celebrated directorial debut under the sponsorship of Roger Corman, the definitive women’s-prison movie, with Erica [Vixen] Gavin as the New Cookie and the incomparable Barbara Steele as the Wicked Warden, appears in a new video edition prefaced by a dazzling string of Corman trailers which provide a veritable encyclopedia of exploitation: Big Bad Mama (“She makes money the old-fashioned way...she steals it!”), Candy Stripe Nurses (Keep abreast of the medical world!”), Eat My Dust (“When they get their hands on seven hundred horses, they’ve got to get into trouble!”), The Big Doll House (“Women...locked behind walls of concrete and steel!”), Deathsport (“In the year 3000, all freedoms are crimes!”); and with an interview with Corman himself by Leonard Maltin. With a chase, a shootout, a girlfight in the shower, some fascinating experiments with electroshock therapy, and brain surgery attempted with a powerdrill. Undoubtedly one of the few flicks in the female-jungle genre to have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art.


The Phantom Of The Opera. [Rupert Julian, 1925.]

The silent interpretation of the venerable classic, with Lon Chaney the Elder as the troll under the bridge and Mary Philbin as his bimbo protege. No subsequent version can compare to it. — If only because of the poetry of the titles: “From hidden places beyond the wall, a melodious voice, like the voice of an angel, spoke to her.” — How much was lost, in the transition to sound.


The Phantom Menace. [George Lucas, 1999.]

As if it mattered what I think. Still, a few notes: — The undersea city is yet another homage to the Flash Gordon serials; the planet/city is Trantor exactly as Asimov pictured it; the pod race [or whatever they called it] is of course the chariot race from Ben-Hur; the dogfights derive from the assault on the Death Star, and the final saber-duel [again composed about a well of infinite depth] is straight out of the Empire Strikes Back. But here, as always, what Lucas steals, he improves upon; and, obviously, there is much here that no one before him ever dared to imagine. — The interaction of the real and the virtual actors is imperfect; and in general Neeson et al. seem prone to a certain dissociation from their environment which could only be corrected by some means that might allow them a direct perception of the persons and things which are in the present state of the art only added to the greenscreen months after the fact. The practice Lucas apparently employed of mixing and morph-matching disparate takes in postproduction is not [in this view] a step in the right direction. — The editing seemed a trifle choppy. — As for the obligatory scene in which the gifted lad bids good-bye to the stinking desert town that gave him birth, I think we have now seen enough of these ritual re-enactments of Lucas’s farewell to Modesto; I liked it best in American Graffiti, and [unless he plans on bringing back Wolfman Jack] it’s time for him to put it to rest. — But, sheesh, what a spaceship. Bring on the next episode.

Later.


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Sein und Zeit (5/14/99)


One discovers weird things when rummaging through boxes of old videotapes: not simply the movies themselves, but the promotional oddities the cable channels used as fillers between them. — Kathy Ireland explaining how her role in Alien From L.A. was helping her to grow as an actress; O.J. Simpson talking about his career in action movies. No wonder I keep going out.


The Mummy. [Stephen Sommers, 1999.]

Despite my frequently-expressed admiration for Deep Rising [undoubtedly the best giant-octopus movie ever made, and certainly the only one that was intentionally funny], it never occurred to me that Stephen Sommers might be able to write and direct anything to top it. — Wrong again. — In the Middle East, in 1923, a crew of Brits led by bombshell Egyptologist Rachel Weisz and guided by neoBurroughsian hero Brendan Fraser, a competing party of American fraternity boys, and the Arabic priesthood that guards the secrets of the ancient gods of Egypt converge upon a lost city buried beneath the desert sands in search of the gold of the Pharaohs; while scavenging for treasure in the subterranean tombs they inadvertently turn a wrong page in the Book of the Dead and awaken the accursed priest Arnold Vosloo from a sleep of three thousand years. Since he was buried alive and left to rot, his attitude leaves something to be desired; and, indeed, it develops that in the process of reviving his longdead girlfriend [erstwhile mistress of the king of kings and proximate cause of his political difficulties] he will probably destroy all life on Earth. There follow a wonderfully realized series of Biblical afflictions — a plague of locusts, several infestations of scarab beetles, some fancifully animated sandstorms, waters turned to blood, the sun put out, a rain of meteors upon the city of Cairo, a general plague of boils, and some spirited swordfights with the legions of the rotting dead — to say nothing of the vision of the Mummy himself, who spends half an hour walking around with big holes rotted through his torso before he devours enough living flesh to restore a recognizable human form — which engender much anxiety and [somehow] necessitate a great deal of fancy gunplay before our heroes can undo their mistake and put Arnold back to sleep. — Not merely a spectacular exercise in CGI, but hilarious from beginning to end; probably the best comedy I’ve seen out of Hollywood this year. — I know not what Sommers intends for his next project, but rumor has it Fraser is preparing the role of Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties: save me a seat, and can we consider Ms. Weisz in the role of Nell?


She Demons. [Richard Cunha, 1958.]

Blown off course by a tropical storm, a crew of shipwrecked mariners [the intrepid adventurer, the rich bitch, the native-guide captain, and a Chinese/Hawaiian dude named Sammy] find themselves cast away upon an island shore not found on any chart, where mysterious naked footprints in the sand, the sound of distant jungle drums, the fact that one of their number turns up skewered by a few dozen spears, and, oh yes, the mutant female corpse that washes up on the beach indicate that something out of the ordinary is transpiring. Sure enough, the company of cave girls they espy dancing about a campfire in the woods are seized by Nazis in SS regalia and hauled back into a system of caves containing the secret laboratories of a mad German scientist who has been experimenting upon the native babes with radiation treatments as part of an ongoing project to restore his wife to youth and beauty and put the finishing touches to the creation of the master race. Naturally, once he gets a look at the castaway blonde bombshell [Irish McCalla, known in her day as The Girl With The Moreso Torso], his focus begins to waver. Do you think that volcano will erupt? — Of course the best shot in the whole thing may be in the framing video, in which Elvira wears Groucho nose/moustache/glasses not merely on her face but also in her cleavage; this creates an effect which must be seen to be believed.


Nude For Satan. [Paolo Solvay.]

Nothing I can say about this Italian exploitation shocker can add anything significant to the conception you must already have formed of it; it is exactly what you expect. — Well. — Except for the part where the girl gets raped by the giant spider.


eXistenZ. [David Cronenberg, 1999.]

In a future not distant, when computers have transcended silicon and again become organic, famed virtual-reality game designer Jennifer Jason Leigh appears in person to a focus group made up of her devoted fans for a product launch [in a church!] of a new multiuser game environment called eXistenZ. Threats have been made against her life, and security is tight, but a wouldbe assassin slips past the metal detectors with a strange organic bonelike gun that fires teeth rather than bullets. She escapes with a company PR flack who by virtue of some misguided neoMormonism has never been fitted with a modern computer interface, a bioport at the base of the spine that looks like a sphincter and accepts a data cable that resembles a length of intestine; this shortcoming is corrected at a country gas station by unlicensed biomechanic Willem Dafoe, who gleefully performs the operation [which he obviously interprets as a species of homosexual rape] before revealing himself to be allied with the ubiquitous agents who wish Ms. Jason Leigh’s demise. The designer and her assistant escape again nonetheless and, safely ensconced in their motel room, jack into the world of her organic gamepod [a crablike creature which she cuddles like an infant and refers to as “my baby”] to determine whether or not the resident software has been damaged by the stress attendant to their precipitous flight. Once immersed they become players in a strange industrial-espionage melodrama involving another game, another computer company, and another plot against the designers of virtual environments by the agents of something called the Reality Underground. Obviously, game and reality at this point have become hopelessly confused; and grow only more and not less so as this incredibly convoluted narrative moves toward its conclusion. — Those familiar with the author’s work will recognize the themes of the distressed organic, the sense of the abattoir [in which we murder to dissect], and the interpenetration — the ghastly miscegenation — of man and machine; moreover, since his computers are organic, his technicians are always busy with something that looks and sounds [and would certainly smell, could he arrange it] like vivisection, and indeed at one point his protagonists find themselves working on a hardware assembly line that looks like a fishing-industry slaughterhouse. — Of course all this is wonderfully ingenious: the whole film together could scarcely have cost as much as any single scene in The Matrix. — Now: obviously Cronenberg is as fascinated as anyone with the idea of an artificial world functionally equivalent to reality; lacking the prodigious resources available to Hollywood in the way of special effects, he must attempt to explore the theme with conceptual and not visual sophistication. But this just makes it a contest between Hollywood’s army of technicians and programmers and Cronenberg’s wits; the result makes it clear that this is a fairly even match. — A final note: Cronenberg’s analysis of the cult of virtual reality underlines the extent to which it all looks backward to the drug culture rather than forward to the Brave New World of the MIT Media Lab; the transparent irony is that we see that the drug culture had more conceptual depth. — Who could have guessed it? — Jaron Lanier and the editors of Wired have succeeded in making Timothy Leary look deep. And they say there’s no such thing as progress.


Confidentially Yours. [Francois Truffaut, 1983.]

A real-estate broker [Jean-Louis Trintignant] fires his secretary [Fanny Ardant] for insubordination, then thinks better of it when he discovers his wife and her lover dead and himself the prime suspect; who better than the impertinent typist to carry out the investigation that will clear his name while he hides out in the back of the office? Though this, Truffaut’s last movie, is obviously intended as a final homage to his idol Hitchcock [a protagonist wrongfully accused in black and white, etc.] the premise is actually reminiscent of Siodmak’s classic film noir The Phantom Lady [1944, based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich], and, despite the noirlike trappings — night exteriors, spying, the intruder in a darkened bedroom, casual slaughter — in many ways it reminds one more of earlier detective films; this is, for instance, a much better mystery than one ever had from Hitchcock [for whom mystery was never the point] or indeed in classic film noir. The humor is certainly Hitchcockian, e.g. the cameo involving the world’s fastest onefingered typist [a blonde], not to mention the outcome, which is [I can’t resist saying] that the lawyer did it. But the point, finally, is not whether this is an adequate imitation of Hitchcock: after all, a lot of people have imitated Hitchcock; few have imitated Truffaut. Like all comedies, this one concludes with a wedding: in the final scene, a photographer taking pictures of the ceremony drops a lens cap; it lands at the feet of a row of uniformed schoolgirls, who kick it back and forth among them, playing keepaway. Over this long and inexpressibly charming shot — the lenscap skating back and forth along the floor, the dancing stockinged feet of the girls keeping it in motion — the closing credits run, the film concludes. It is precisely this, a particular kind of light and playful touch of genius, that passed from the world with the untimely death of the great French auteur; and it is that, not yet another resurrection of the melodrama of suspense, that the world needs more.

Later.


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The cruelest month (5/13/99)


Leafing through Time magazine at the checkout counter the other night, I was stunned and saddened to discover that Pamela Anderson has officially retired her breast implants and intends hereafter to revert to a natural look. Say it ain’t so.

In the meantime Austin Powers won’t be back for a month or two, the Phantom Menace won’t be unveiled for a couple of weeks, the Mummy won’t rise from his tomb for a few more days, and the latest from Cronenberg may never make that critical ontological transition from Being-there-in-New-York to Being-here-by-the-popcorn-machine. But [his battle fatigue notwithstanding] your itinerant critic soldiers on:


The Vengeance Of She. [Cliff Owen, 1967.]

A spate of Hammer rereleases resurrects this obscure effort at a sequel to the classic Ursula Andress portrayal of Haggard’s Ayesha, deathless queen of the city lost within the Caves of Kor. For some reasons the studio masterminds determined to forge ahead with the project despite the unavailability of Ms. Andress, or for that matter Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee; a decision which seems baffling in retrospect, though [to give their talentscouts credit] they did manage to turn up the remarkably pneumatic Olinka Berova as a standin. — Sheesh, what a costume. If only there were a plot.


Mill Of The Stone Women. [Giorgio Ferroni, 1960.]

A Dutch variation on the classic wax-museum motif: an art student staying in the windmill/studio of an eccentric sculptor falls for a mysterious babe who either is or is not the sculptor’s daughter, is or is not in love with him, and is or is not one of the living dead, and finds out the hard way just what happened to the models who posed for the lifelike figures on display in the lower story.


Chinese Box. [Wayne Wang, 1997]

The Chinese-American auteur’s not-particularly-inscrutable meditation on the fate of Hong Kong, with Jeremy Irons [a foreign journalist who has conveniently picked 1997 to die of leukemia] as, uh, British imperialism, Gong Li as the Hong Kong beloved by the foreign devil, and Maggie Cheung [made up with a colorful scar and a pretty line of bullshit] as the Hong Kong that loves the foreign devil back. The love story is silly, the metaphor labored, and the location underemployed; but Hong Kong indifferently photographed toward a foolish purpose, like Maggie made up with a scar in an indifferent story, is still exotic, fascinating, and impossibly alluring.


Entrapment. [Jon Amiel, 1999.]

Insurance investigator Catherine Zeta-Jones baits a trap for legendary catburglar Sean Connery with a stolen Rembrandt, a golden Chinese mask, and her sweet young gymnast’s body. Or so it seems at first; as one might expect, the plot manages a few twists while the story is moving from New York to London to the Scottish moors to [no kidding] Malaysia. — Great locations and respectable action sequences [and Connery and Zeta-Jones, of course], but basically just another billion-dollar heist.

Actually, that ought to be on a double bill with:

The General. [John Boorman, 1998]

Boorman’s complex and fascinating tribute to the Irish criminal mastermind Martin Cahill, who carried off sixty million in swag [and filched a gold record from Boorman himself], fathered eight children by two sisters in polygamous marriage, and outfoxed the police at every turn before he made one turn too many, became embroiled in the politics of the Troubles, and got whacked by the IRA. — I was applauding Boorman’s audacity in shooting the story in black and white right up to the museum robbery; at which point, in truth, I was a trifle disappointed not to be able to see the Vermeer in color. — With Jon Voight as the cop and Brendan Gleeson as the robber.


Lewis & Clark & George. [Rod McCall, 1996.]

A jailbreak and a zoo robbery introduce two guys, a girl, and a poisonous snake, who take to the road to look for a lost gold mine in the wilds of New Mexico. After a really great lipsynched version of Where The Boys Are and a number of interesting reflections on gun control, tourism, the decline of literacy, and the problem of how to drink a frozen beer, they find it. — Would you shoot a fat guy for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? — With Salvator Xuereb, Dan Gunther, Rose McGowan, and cameos by James Brolin and Paul Bartel.


Smoke Signals. [Chris Ayre, from a screenplay by Sherman Alexie; 1998.]

Sundance Institute political correctness aside, this is, in fact, a fascinating idea: a road movie that takes a couple of American Indians off the reservation and out into America, rather than one that [in due course] brings America around to visit them. Occasionally thin, but on balance extraordinary.


Landmarks Of Early Film Volume Two: The Magic Of Méliès.

A documentary on the film pioneer’s career with an attached anthology of fifteen short subjects, featuring the first trick-photographic effects on record and some amusing gags involving fat ladies and the police that antedate even Mack Sennett. The real marvel, however, is a twenty-minute epic entitled Le Voyage A Travers L’Impossible, a sort of simultaneous homage to Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac which I don’t seem to be able to summarize without exclamation marks: A party of adventurers set out to circumnavigate the globe! Their customized train careens through the Swiss Alps! On an automobile with a gigantic horn they hurtle through an Alpine landscape at three hundred miles an hour! A crash! A lengthy hospitalization! Again by train to the summit of the Jungfrau! Hurtling off into space! Flying, buoyed up by dirigible balloons! They crashland on the Sun! Exploring the solar landscape, they are overcome by heat! Fortunately they’ve brought along a gigantic icebox! Unfortunately it’s too cold, and they’re frozen into a block of ice! But it thaws. They make their escape in a submarine boat! which falls from the Sun to the Earth through interplanetary space supported by a parachute. They land in the ocean! They explore the ocean floor! They see a giant octopus! The sub’s engines blow up and fling the fragments of the machine into the air! They all land safely at a nearby port! and survive to give a report to the Geographical Society. — All this is handtinted in a color process unequalled in quality for at least another thirty years. — An enduring tribute to one of the most remarkable imaginations of the Twentieth century; check this out before we lurch into the Twenty-first.


Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels. [Guy Ritchie, 1998.]

An essay in the style of Tarantino in the now-familiar genre defined by Trainspotting and The Full Monty: four workingclass British lads make a play for the big enchilada which backfires, leaving them half a million in debt to some ugly customers; after a ludicrous series of complications involving a couple of antique shotguns, a warehouse full of ganja, a heist upon another heist, and the successive introductions of an astonishingly various assortment of Really Mean Guys, they break even, or nearly, but not before a couple of apocalyptic shootouts that wipe out half the population of London. Fresh, energetic, and unfailingly hilarious: the spectacle of a hapless debtor being bludgeoned to death with a rubber dildo is in itself worth the price of admission. Check this out.


Trailer: The Blair Witch Project.

I hadn’t expected to see this on the big screen any time soon, but apparently it was a big hit at Sundance and got a distribution deal. The premise is simple: a trio of student filmmakers are supposed to have gone off into the Maryland woods in 1994 to film a documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch and disappeared; after a year their audiovisual records have been discovered, and, these are they. What is startling and original about the film is that [rather in the spirit of one of those Sixties radical-theater exercises in improvisation Andre Gregory described to Wally Shawn] this is exactly how it was made: the principals were handed the cameras and sent on a monthlong camping trip; the director and crew showed up occasionally to hand out programmatic shooting instructions and some guidelines around which the action and dialogue were improvised &$151; and, moreover, pulled unscheduled tricks which really did scare the hell out of the actors. The result, apparently, is a sort of cinema verite horror movie, a waking nightmare perhaps reminiscent of The Shining, that is extraordinarily frightening without the slightest hint of slash or splatter. — Watch for it. Coming this summer.

The Story Of Adele H. [Francois Truffaut, 1975.]

Isabelle Adjani depicts the deranged daughter of Victor Hugo, who followed an English officer across the Atlantic and died the victim of romantic obsession. Posterity does not record whether she saved a blue dress.


Teorema. [Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968.]

Don’t ask what possessed me to try to relive the leftwing bombast of the Sixties through the vehicle of this incoherent denunciation of the bourgeois; I’m still trying to figure that out myself.


The Tenth Victim. [Elio Petri, 1965.]

Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress play kiss kiss bang bang about the seven hills of the Eternal City. From a story by the great science fiction humorist Robert Sheckley; am I the only one who remembers him?


Camille 2000. [Radley Metzger, 1969.]

What can I tell you, it was one of those weeks in which some long-dormant inner voice seemed to surface and cry out for badly dubbed dialogue and babes with big hair. — Another penetrating expose of loose living among the Roman upper classes, with littleknown starlet Daniele Gaubert in the Anita Ekberg role and the eminently forgettable Nino Castelnuovo flopping around in the shoes of Marcello Mastroianni. — Why Ms. Gaubert should have remained obscure is baffling, though her untimely death could not have helped; compared to flatchested notalents like Jane Fonda she fairly bursts off the screen. I look forward to those Frankensteinian advances in CGI that will permit the synthesis of a virtual Ms. Gaubert from the dead reels of the filmic record and allow her to be cast in remakes of Barbarella, Barb Wire, and Bad Girls From Mars.


Stranger On the Third Floor. [Boris Ingster, 1940.]

Reporter John McGuire testifies against Elisha Cook, Jr. at a murder trial, securing a conviction at the expense of unease of conscience; doubt persists in the minds of the audience until we stumble across Peter Lorre skulking in the alleyway, at which point it becomes clear just how all will end well. Sometimes regarded as the first film noir, mainly by virtue of a remarkable expressionistic dream sequence.


Goodbye Lover. [Roland Joffé, 1998.]

From the opening moments, in which we discover femme fatale Patricia Arquette waking to the strains of The Sound Of Music and parroting the monologue on the selfactualization cassette she stuffs into the player in her car, we fear the worst; these fears are only confirmed when we find that she sells real estate and is fucking Don Johnson in the loft of the church. And it is indeed destined that she will destroy everyone who comes within her orbit [with one cometary exception]; albeit not without meteoric incident and hyberbolic plot twist. A guy falls off a balcony into a pool; a Senator gets blown by a transvestite; a BMW motorcycle goes over a cliff and explodes. With Dermot Mulroney as a drunken spin doctor, Andre Gregory as a minister, Vincent Gallo as a hitman, and Ellen DeGeneres as a cop who can’t stop eating. Silly but amusing, and anyway there’s lots of shopping. Check it out.


El Mariachi/Desperado. [Robert Rodriguez, 1993/1995.]

A new combined edition of these two has appeared on disc, with extensive commentary by the author explaining just how he managed to make an action movie good enough to snow the audience at Sundance and jumpstart his directing career for seven thousand dollars; and then how he spent the seven million Columbia gave him for the sequel. Just in case you wondered: he shot both movies in a small town in Mexico; to ensure positive coverage in the local media he cast the news leads from the television station in El Mariachi [and didn’t kill them off]; almost all of El Mariachi was shot in a couple of blocks around the male lead’s house, because they had to go back there to reload the camera; the footage counter on the [borrowed] camera didn’t work properly, so he made up a dream sequence to use up the random snippets left over at the end of every reel; the dialogue was postsynched, meaning that every time a character’s mouth went out of step with his voice he had to cut away while editing; thus the novel freneticism of the montage, which many admired, was actually a product of necessity; he did all his tracking shots from a wheelchair [a la Godard/Coutard in Breathless]; the squibs for the gunshot wounds were made with homemade fake blood squirted out of condoms; some of the guns were real [borrowed from the local police], the rest were just squirtguns; nearly everyone in the cast turned out to be related to everyone else, even if he didn’t realize it at first; the bad guys keep getting smaller throughout the movie because he killed off the most likely looking gangsters in the first half and had to make due with the talent available in the second; and every time anyone flashes a wad of cash in the film Rodriguez had to borrow it from one of the actors because he didn’t have any himself. — As for Desperado, the studio insisted the [Mexican!] female lead should be played by a blonde until he battered them about the head and body with Salma Hayek’s screentest; presumably they also wanted Bruce Willis rather than Antonio Banderas, but it is better not to know. — An invaluable guide to guerilla filmmaking, and a muchneeded reassurance that, at least once in a while, talent will out.


The Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus. [Leonardo Garbonzo, 1999]

Brainy geek Johannes, the smartest kid at Wittenberg High, wearies of the ceaseless quest for knowledge that never seems to get him any babes and hacks into a necromantic server, conjuring up legendary Goth Mephisto, who offers him twentyfour days of popularity in exchange for his soul. Transformed into an epitome of cool, Johannes scores with the cutest chick in school, Helena, and plays many pranks upon the administration before his bargain becomes due at midnight the day of the Prom, when his soul is sent gibbering to eternal detention and his mindless body is condemned to remain in high school forever. With Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a truckload of kids from Dawson’s Creek. — The producers promise us forthcoming remakes of Volpone, The School For Scandal, and The Seven Against Thebes. And there are those who still wonder why we need to keep our nuclear deterrent.


____________


Too many notes (4/14/99)


Never Been Kissed. [Raja Gosnell, 1999.]

Toward the end of this mostly charming romantic comedy, in which she depicts a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times [a clever choice, ensuring automatically a favorable review from Ebert] who goes undercover at a local high school [as Cameron Crowe actually did to write Fast Times At Ridgemont High] to try to develop a story about Kids Today, Drew Barrymore makes the obligatory speech to the boys and girls at The Prom about the complete irrelevance of their school days to their later lives, saying, predictably: that what they are now means nothing to what they will become; that status, social prominence, cool, are empty vessels; that high school and what we laughingly refer to as Real Life are, in short, wholly unrelated. And at this point I was, briefly, furious. For manifestly the entire point of the story had been that the exact opposite is the case: since Drew, who portrays with surprising success a recovering geek, had been motivated throughout by an overwhelming desire to relive high school not as a pariah but as one of the incrowd; since her colleagues at the Sun-Times had been represented as following her adventures via spycam with a compulsive attention plainly energized by their own vicarious participation in her project [“Wow,” says one of them, “this is the Humiliation Channel”]; since her very job, in the penultimate crisis, had been represented as dependent on her ability to attain social redemption; and since the participation of everyone involved in making this movie [as confirmed by the cute touch of the addition of the graduation photographs of the cast and crew to the trailing credits] and the obsession of Hollywood with teenage romances in general only serve to reinforce the conclusion that real life is a mere epilogue to high school in which the correlation between popularity and socioeconomic status has the kind of rigorous mathematical exactitude you usually encounter only in theoretical physics. — Then I calmed down and reminded myself that this is Hollywood after all, where text is inconsequential epiphenomenon and subtext everything: as if one could ever believe that Drew Barrymore had never been kissed. — I guess I could believe she’s never been hosed on the topside of the Goodyear blimp. But if she needs a volunteer, have her call me.


Go. [Doug Liman, 1999.]

Doug [Swingers] Liman directs a specimen of postPulp fragmented narrative which explores the curvature of space: Sarah Polley et al. follow a family of geodesics which diverge from a grocery store and reconverge upon a rave after hours on Christmas Eve. Very clever and energetic, albeit unrealistic: the audience may have forgotten that radio the cops planted in the actor’s shorts, but he certainly would not have. But check it out.


The Matrix. [The Wachowski Brothers, 1999.]

Without question the definitive essay in cyberpunk to date: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Laurence Fishburne, looking extremely cool in black leathers and mirrorshades, wage war within cyberspace and without for the triumph of the Soul over the Machine. Astonishing effects, fight choreography as good as Hong Kong [thanks to the assistance of Yuen Wo Ping], and a variety of themes [the matrix itself, the idea of physically jacking in, the kinship of hacking to the martial arts, death by black ice, avatars, voodoo, etc., etc.] stolen verbatim from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. One might quibble with the plot, which isn’t really coherent, and for that matter with the governing conception of applying a pseudophysics to virtual reality [an idea Keaton had already implicitly transcended in Sherlock Junior] but who cares; I’ll probably be watching this once a week until Memorial Day.


Phenomena. [Dario Argento, 1984.]

In the Swiss Transylvania, a killer stalks the babes at the Richard Wagner School For Girls, awakening the dormant telepathic abilities of a very young [but precociously cute] Jennifer Connelly, who has an innate sympathy with insects. With a wicked schoolmistress, a mad scientist in a wheelchair, a midnight swim in a pool of rotting corpses, and an enormous Moon obscured by a cloud of flies.


Ed TV. [Ron Howard, 1999.]

Great cast [Mathew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Jenna Elfman, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Elizabeth Hurley, Rob Reiner, Ellen DeGeneres]; weak plot [amiable slacker McConaughey is discovered by the agents of a reality-based cable channel desperate for product who decide to put him on the air twentyfour hours a day, catapulting him into a celebrity which makes his life a living heck.]


Six-String Samurai. [Lance Mungia, 1998.]

I’ve always been an admirer of the Mad Max genre, which allows neophyte filmmakers to shoot palatable action movies with great economy of means. This might be the best I’ve seen since the original: In the world after the apocalypse, a Buddy Holly clone wearing taped black hornrims and toting a Gibson hollowbody and a Samurai sword makes a pilgrimage through the Nevada desert to the mythical city of Lost Vegas, where he plans to assume the vacated title of King of Rock and Roll. Accompanied by a small boy in a coonskin cap, he hacks up a variety of savages and quasimythological personages, including The Three Bowlers, The Red Elvises, some guys in spacesuits, assorted denizens of an underworld ruled by The Spinach Monster and the Windmill God, the remains of the Red Army, and finally Death [who dresses like Slash and plays metal on a white Strat] before coming into his kingdom. Beautifully photographed [albeit on that cheapshit Fuji filmstock] and with maybe the best original rockandroll soundtrack I’ve ever heard; the work, apparently, of Brian Tyler and the aforementioned Red Elvises. — And the swordfights are excellent. If this is playing on Showtime at three a.m., hope for insomnia.


True Crime. [Clint Eastwood, 1999.]

Clint Eastwood as Bruce Willis and Isaiah Washington as Julia Roberts in an apparent realization of the project Tim Robbins was using to ensnare his competitor in The Player; right down to the lastminute rescue from the gas chamber. Of course that was meant as a joke; and anyway [as Robbins explained gleefully] it didn’t have a second act. Come to think of it, neither does this. Hmmm.


Analyze This. [Harold Ramis, 1999.]

Unmanned by anxiety attacks on the eve of a gang war, mobster Robert De Niro seeks professional assistance from psychiatrist Billy Crystal, disrupting the latter’s attempts to get married to Lisa Kudrow. Though it would be less than generous to suggest that this idea was stolen from the classic Belushi portrayal of Don Corleone in group therapy [“You’re blocking, Vito...you’re blocking...”], particularly since that in turn was probably stolen from an episode in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is more than fair to point out that none of this would go anywhere without De Niro and Crystal. Fortunately, they’re perfect. — Nor does it give anything away [incidentally] to say that Tony Bennett’s cameo is the punchline. Check this out.

The Doom Generation. [Greg Araki, 1996.]

The intrepid chronicler of Hollwood youth pens a gripping drama about three beautiful losers [a couple of guys whose names I forget and that chick who goes out with Marilyn Manson] who slip the surly bounds of custom and wander the Earth in quest of enlightenment until they discover the finger up the asshole during intercourse and finally the sandwich. Perhaps the first road movie I’ve ever seen which never even gets out of Los Angeles, raising the question: is this meant to express the idea of Los Angeles as a metaphor for the inescapability of civilization, with the endless freeways which lead only to one another a symbol of the doomed circularity of the urge to flight, that yearning for a freedom which cannot actually exist? Or is it just that idiots like Araki really cannot imagine any life beyond the boundaries of the city, and think that anyone who leaves Los Angeles falls off the edge of the Earth?


Sink Or Swim. [Gary Rosen, 1997.]

Burntout television writer/producer Stephen Rea makes the pitch on automatic pilot [“Monks...with an edge! ...I must have been speaking in tongues...”] and gets a go from the network for twenty-two shows, but has no idea what to do with them. Inviting all his unemployed writer friends over for a poker game, he need not even drop the hint to provoke a feeding frenzy. Complications ensue. — Full of inside jokes and occasionally clever but [must I say it] not very well-written. Perhaps this explains television. — With Illeana Douglas, David Foley, Richard Kind, Robert Patrick, John Ritter, Lisa Kudrow, Ryan O’Neal, and Tom Arnold as the agent who sleeps with his headset on.


The Thin Red Line. [Terrence Malick, 1999]

The legendary Terrence Malick, the Thomas Pynchon of American film, left off a career as a professor of philosophy to make two brilliant and much-discussed features — Badlands and Days Of Heaven — in the Seventies and then disappeared; for two decades rumor fancied him a hermit in the desert, a hitch-hiker in Paraguay, an aspirant in a monastery. He returns here as abruptly as he disappeared with a movie that has excited no little critical commentary, much of it baffled protestation that this isn’t very much like other war movies in particular or like other movies in general. True enough, this is not at all like other movies; but, then, this is a work of genius. Perhaps that explains it.


Looking over the box office statistics for the fiscal year just concluded, two unfortunate facts demand attention: The Waterboy placed fourth in total grosses, meaning that we can expect more of Adam Sandler drooling down his bib; and Godzilla [presumably by dint of unrelenting promotion] finally made money, which will certainly entail a sequel. One can only hope that it isn’t too late to pitch a project that appeals to the synergistic impulses of the studio executives: you know, Godzilla meets The Waterboy. Maybe the lizard will step on him.

Terry Rawlings on the editing of Blade Runner: “After I’d finished my first assembly of the whole film...Ridley and I went into a screening room at Warner Brothers and ran the picture...The entire time, we never said a word. Then, when the film finished and the lights came up, Ridley turned to me and said, ‘God, it’s marvelous. What the fuck does it all mean?’”

Jean Reno on his acting career: “The problem with France is that eighty percent of the films I do are standard, intimate, romantic things, and I don’t like that. It’s always from the director’s point of view — you know, his dick.”

Later.


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Hits and misses (3/16/99)


The Corruptor. [James Foley, 1999.]

Chow Yun Fat and Marky Mark play Tango and Cash in another inept attempt to transplant a Hong Kong action star into the ecology of Hollywood via the tired device of a cop-buddy movie. I might summarize the plot, which involves drugtrafficking, the Tongs, police corruption, and the white [or maybe yellow] slave trade; and which provides excuses for several impressive explosions and any number of energetic gunfights. But forget it, John. It’s only Chinatown.


Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht. [Werner Herzog, 1978.]

The celebrated remake of the great German expressionistic classic is now [finally] available on video, with Klaus Kinski as the angstridden bloodsucker and Isabelle Adjani as his favorite throat. I sometimes think Murnau’s original of 1922 was the only really scary movie ever made; though this is hardly such an unforgiving essay in terror, Herzog’s genius elevates it far beyond the tepid standard of mere homage.


Eight Millimeter. [Joel Schumacher, 1999.]

Schumacher, a guy who [after The Lost Boys, Flatliners, and the last couple of Batman movies] is not exactly afraid of the dark, here outdoes himself in directing this elegant but unrelievedly gloomy homage to Raymond Chandler, in which private eye Nicolas Cage, from his opening audience with an invalid millionairess [in a house not quite as large as Buckingham Palace, with fewer windows than the Chrysler Building] through the interrogation of the boozy widow who takes a shine to him through the wadslimesplattered tour of the pornographic underworld of Los Angeles [far slimier now than in Philip Marlowe’s day] through the rats’ alleys of New York to the inevitable deathbattle in the rain, bids grimly eloquent farewell to yet another fallen lovely. Though in fact the plot seems only a device to excuse the look, which can only be described as Miltonic [yet from those flames/No light, but rather darkness visible/Serv’d only to discover sights of woe] — interiors apparently lit with AA cells, exteriors so heavily filtered that they all seem to have been shot in December at dusk — and which is apparently intended to illustrate the paradoxical thesis that modern color filmstock allows one to shoot something even bleaker than the traditional black and white of the classic film noir. — Indeed the screenplay has a sort of sunny side which, under the circumstances, can only be regarded as inappropriate: Cage is provided with a backstory and a domestic life which seem to have been imported from some other movie, or indeed another genre. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s derisive remark about the impossibility of imagining a married philosopher; he’d have heaped even more scorn on the idea of a married private eye. — But why quibble. At this point I’d watch Nicolas Cage in Showgirls Two; let alone in this beautiful and terrifying tale of the transformation of a wandering knight into an avenging angel. — “I’ll never get tired of hurting you, Eddie,” he remarks matter-of-factly as he’s kicking the shit out of one of the villains. Nor will you want him to. Check this out.


Shakespeare In Love. [John Madden, 1998.]

I’ll admit it: when a movie — let alone one in which Joseph Fiennes is supposed to be writing Romeo And Juliet for the benefit of Gwynneth Paltrow — has received several hundred awards and been nominated for all the ones remaining, I know in my heart that it has to suck. I was still wondering why this one did not when, halfway through the trailing credits, I discovered Tom Stoppard [who rewrites half the scripts in Hollywood without attribution] admitting to a share in the screenplay. — No wonder then. If anyone knows how to make a decent story out of a Shakespearean play within a play, it is he. — Still, without the borrowed Shakespearean substance this is pretty flimsy stuff: Ed Wood without Johnny Depp, Patricia Arquette, Bill Murray, or tongue in cheek. — Good therefore but not great; which probably means it will win all the rest of the awards too.


Office Space. [1999]

Mike Judge elaborates the thesis that Work Sucks; the result is just about as deep as Jennifer Anniston.


My Sex Life. [Comment Je Me Suis Disputé (“ma vie sexuelle”); Arnaud Desplechin, 1996.]

There’s a memorable moment in the otherwise forgettable slackers-after-college comedy Reality Bites in which aspiring video producer Winona Ryder, distraught, sets out looking for underemployed intellectual Ethan Hawke and finds him at last sitting in a cowboy bar, reading Heidegger. I remember thinking at the time that if the cowboys had all been hanging around the bar arguing about Heidegger [rather in the spirit of that classic passage in the adventures of Zippy the Pinhead in which he went to the Kierkegaard Memorial Launderette to find the last five intellectuals in America] that that could have been a great movie. — And sure enough, here that movie is, and it’s even better than I would have thought. — Though difficult to summarize: suffice it that it does [for the most part] concern itself with the romantic misadventures of the protagonist, a Parisian philosophy professor named [in obvious imitation of Joyce] Paul Dedalus whose external circumstances have begun to mirror the labyrinthine complexity of his interior life; and that, though he and his friends talk about pussy just as much as Tarantino characters would, they don’t talk like morons. [Paul, verbatim, to one of his girlfriends: “Take those things off. You look like...an Ostrogoth.”] — The scenario is rich with literary and philosophical references: Paul’s nervous breakdown in the middle of the picture, for instance, owes more than a little to Sartre’s Nausea. But this does nothing to detract from the wonderful originality of this picture, which by itself more than justifies the talk about a new French New Wave: three hours long, and not a moment wasted. Check it out.


Hercules Against The Moon Men. [Giacomo Gentilomo, 1964.]

My interest tweaked by a passing reference in Geoffrey O’Brien’s The Phantom Empire [a work I recommend without reservation, incidentally], I checked this out in its latest rerelease. And, really, it isn’t bad: the brawny demigod [Alan Steel] is summoned to assist the heroic Resistance in a city ruled by a wicked queen in cahoots with alien monsters who have [literally] dropped from the Moon to lunch on the occasional human sacrifice while they perfect their schemes of universal conquest; after a variety of exploits at the expense of the bandits, mutants, soldiers, and telephone solicitors who stand in his way, Herc beards the aliens in their mistfilled lair beneath the local volcano and by dint of energetic flexing saves the girl, the city, and the planet. — No dumber than a Van Damme movie, and a lot more fun to watch.


The Astounding She-Monster. [Ronnie Ashcroft, 1957.]

Made with the connivance of the legendary Edward D. Wood Jr., this eccentric feature presents the adventures of an alien babe in a shimmering unitard who crashlands on the Earth with the apparent intent of warning us against the development of nuclear weapons; somehow this is to be accomplished by wandering into a weird little subplot involving three gangsters who have kidnapped a socialite and taken her to a cheap stageset representing a cabin in the California mountains. With many of those endearing touches one might expect from the Master himself, including lengthy passages shot wild to save the expense of synch sound, stock footage inserted at random, uncertain continuity [e.g. shot and reverse shot not agreeing on the weather], and dialogue that expands the frontiers of English syntax.


26 Bathrooms. [Peter Greenaway, 1985.]

A documentary exhibiting an English bathroom for each letter of the alphabet. S is for the Samuel Beckett memorial bathroom. As if you hadn’t guessed.


A Romance Of Happy Valley. [David Wark Griffith, 1918.]

Very like its companionpiece True-Heart Susie, with the same stars [Lillian Gish and Bobby Herron] in the same setting [turn-of-the-century rural Kentucky] with nearly the same plot: Bobby goes to the big city to seek his fortune; Lillian waits for him faithfully back on the farm. Will he be seduced by the flappers of New York, or will he return to the idyllic countryside that begot him? — Duh. — Inexpressibly charming. When they clone Lillian, remember I wanted her first.


Kurt And Courtney. [Nick Broomfield, 1997.]

Unquestionably the worst documentary I have ever seen. Mr. Broomfield, who seems to have been dispatched to Seattle by the BBC simply because they couldn’t figure out any other way of getting rid of him, careens around the Pacific Northwest filming himself trying to puzzle out why no one will give him an interview; pausing, occasionally, to take in the wisdom proffered by a pathetic collection of junkaddled toadies, burnout remoras, and halfwitted bullshit artists. — Indeed, who killed Kurt Cobain? Zombies from Pluto, for all I care. I just hope they get Nick Broomfield next.


Blast From The Past. [Hugh Wilson, 1999.]

As the bombs are about to fall in October, 1962, mad scientist Christopher Walken and his dotty wife Sissy Spacek [everyone’s idea of the nuclear family] step into their fallout shelter; when the timelock expires after thirty-five years, their son Brendan Fraser steps out to explore the world after the holocaust. Since he steps out into the Valley, it takes him a while to figure out the holocaust never actually happened, but in the meantime he meets Alicia Silverstone, here mounting a vigorous campaign to recover her title as World’s Cutest Human. After that [as the pitchmen say] the movie practically writes itself. — Obviously Fraser is not new to the role of stranger-in-a-strange-land, but he’s very good at it: that first glimpse of the ocean is particularly memorable. And [unless they slipped in a stunt double when I wasn’t looking] he can dance like the King of Swing. Check this out.


Vampires. [John Carpenter, 1998.]

Even I can’t catch every cheap exploitation thriller that lurches across the local screens, and this was one that slipped through my net during its theatrical release. But, hey, it isn’t bad. A merry band of geeks in vans and Jeeps led by James Woods not Bill Paxton are chasing vampires not twisters through the Southwest not the Midwest under the auspices of the Catholic Church not the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration; then [oops] they all get betrayed and killed [this part is Mission Impossible], leaving Woods and his trusty sidekick Daniel Baldwin [the fat one] to pursue the legions of Hell alone, with the unwilling assistance of neophyte vampire Sheryl Lee, who is telepathically linked to the boss bloodsucker. Against all odds they prevail. — The sexual connotations of vampirism aren’t developed at length, but the expression on Sheryl’s face when the Vampire King goes down on her is by itself worth the price of the rental: How can those terrified vague fingers push/The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? — Sheesh.


Happiness. [Todd Solondz, 1998.]

Much though I admired the great John Hughes cycle of teenage romances, they were fairy tales: in each one the dormant princess Molly Ringwald came into her kingdom after she managed to figure out just which frog she was supposed to kiss. But the only accurate portrayal of an American adolescence ever attempted was Todd Solondz’ Sundance hit of 1996, Welcome To The Dollhouse. Predictably this was greeted with dismay and consternation by many critics, who found the portrait of Dawn [Wiener Dog] Wiener — a homely bespectacled postpreteenager trapped in suburban New Jersey whose parents really do ignore her, whose siblings really do hate her, and whose only romantic option isn’t the football hero/rockstar she desperately wants to notice her but the youthful psychpath who tries to rape her — cold, cruel, bleak, and nihilistic. With this second feature, Solondz forges onward into New Jersey adulthood, taking as his apparent point of departure the famous dictum of Tolstoy, that though every happy family is alike, every unhappy family is unhappy is its own way. Solondz suggests what Tolstoy would not have cared to admit, that happiness is a delusion, a sort of banal corollary of willful ignorance; and to the examination of the domestic arrangements of three sisters — a writer whose success has been founded on fantasies of pornographic violence, a daydreaming innocent whose every plan goes awry, and a contented hausfrau unaware of her husband’s penchant for raping small boys — he brings the satiric ferocity of Jonathan Swift and a savage unblinking honesty one might seriously compare to that of Wittgenstein or Nietzsche. — Of course this isn’t making him any friends. It is hardly an accident that many of the most interesting films of recent years — one thinks not only of Lyne’s Lolita, but Cronenberg’s Crash and Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter — for that matter one might think back to Gilliam’s Brazil — have proven nearly impossible to distribute. — This film is brilliant, dark, funny, and appalling; something that Terry Southern would have admired, and John Waters must wish he could have made. But it’s a safe bet that you won’t see it at the multiplex. Nor will Blockbuster stock it on their shelves; lest you be tempted to buttfuck the kid behind the counter.


Rushmore. [Wes Anderson, 1999.]

A mere summary of the plot [which has something to do with the prep school career of an alter ego of the director] cannot possibly do justice to this new feature from Wes Anderson, director of the underground hit Bottle Rocket [1996]. Suffice it that it simply isn’t like anything else: though the protagonist is an energetic and imaginative teenaged boy, he isn’t Ferris Bueller; though Bill Murray is the second lead, it isn’t a Bill Murray movie; though boy meets girl and boy loses girl, boy actually ends up giving girl away. Something about the syntactic elaboration of jokes so cryptic and complex that no one else would attempt them might remind you of Albert Brooks; but this isn’t much like Albert Brooks either. — Very original; very amusing. Check it out.


Payback. [Brian Helgeland, 1999.]

Essentially a remake of the celebrated film noir Point Blank [John Boorman, 1967], with Mel Gibson in the Lee Marvin role as the relentless killer determined to wreak revenge upon the Syndicate [the Outfit, the Organization, whatever]. Not so Jacobean as the original; but, then, it hardly could be. — What can you say about Mel? It’s impossible to dislike him. Last year he was attractive in the role of a paranoiac stalker; this year he’s attractive in the role of a psychopathic killer. Next year he could probably be attractive in a Milosevic biopic, though I hope he doesn’t try it. — The bad guys die; the dog survives; Mel gets the money and the girl. I loved that Oriental dominatrix.


Forbidden Zone. [Richard Elfman, 1980.]

An eccentric little operetta with a goofy little libretto: a secret doorway in the basement of a slum dwelling in Venice, California, leads to the Sixth Dimension, a land of naked babes and surrealistic stagesets ruled over by King Fausto, who used to be the dwarf on Fantasy Island. Music by Danny Elfman, who also plays the Devil. I wish I’d made this.


Gloria. [Sideny Lumet, 1999.]

When I stepped into the theater at seven o’clock on a Thursday night and found that I had it all to myself, I knew this flick was destined for an early extinction. But it might have done better. Sharon Stone after all is still Sharon Stone; and when was the last time you saw George C. Scott? still one of the greatest actors of the American cinema. Perhaps this will meet with its just reward in the video afterlife.


20000 Leagues Under The Sea. [Stuart Paton, 1916.]

Another rereleased silent classic. Weird and unintentionally funny, but my commentary would be superfluous: see S. J. Perelman, Roll On Thou Deep and Dark Scenario, Roll.


Atomic Submarine. [Spencer Gordon Bennet, 1959.]

Intrepid sailors of the American military voyage to the far North, where undersea vessels have been disappearing beneath the Pole. There they discover a flying saucer piloted by alien monsters from the Bible Belt, who are plotting to seize control of the government and undo the outcome of the 1996 elections, get even for Iran/Contra and the Watergate scandal, reverse the cultural revolution of the Nineteen-Sixties, and then continue to rewrite history back to the English Civil War. Only true grit, nuclear torpedoes, and the repeal of the independent counsel statute can save the day. Watch for the cameo by Henry Hyde: you’ll love him in tendrils.

Later.


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Slouching towards Ramseyville (3/15/99)


Personally I find my knowledge of Oriental languages thus far confined to the Cantonese you pick up from Jackie Chan movies: useful colloquial phrases like “whiskey”, “cash”, “hard disk”, and “dickhead”. — I fully expect we’ll soon discover they really do speak English on other planets, just like in the Doctor Who reruns.

I’m not sure what computers are actually good for, besides leaving my personal preferences among megabimbos permanent prey for data mining. [What have things come to when you have to lie to your own software?] The things I always thought they would be good for turn out to be so easy they’re hardly worth doing: a couple of hours fucking around with a Scheme interpreter usually suffice to generate enough conjectures about the distribution of the primes to defy proof until the millenium after next.

As for the grand tabloid scandal, it’s nothing other than what you would expect. Boulder, like the other great Boomer magnets, is a place where people live only because they want to be able to say that they live there. This entails an economy and a culture predicated upon narcissism. Above and beyond the obvious corollaries, e.g. a health club on every corner, whole housing developments comprised of fake Victorian mansions, traffic accidents involving multiple Range Rovers, and a recent City Council election in which every candidate claimed to be employed as a consultant [though only one, as it turned out, had any measurable noninvestment income], there are strange and eccentric consequences, e.g. a daily newspaper that at least once during the Nineties ran a front-page human interest photograph showing a grieving couple standing by their Jaguar, from which some kids had removed the hood ornament, with an accompanying story about the grave threat to the civic order represented by such irresponsible vandalism. [I am not making this up.] — Obviously in such an environment it cannot strain credulity that one should discover a former beauty queen reliving her pageant career through the vehicle of her daughter married to a [quote/unquote] computer executive who seems to have been dicking said sixyearold in his [abundant] spare time; that they should have broken the kid while they were playing with her; that they should have improvised a cover story based transparently on the plot of a recent motion picture; that the local police [motto: “To Serve And Protect The Wealthy From The Lower Classes”] should have swallowed this story unquestioningly and let the perpetrators clean up the evidence before their very eyes; that the city bureaucracy, once the truth became apparent, should have made every effort to obscure it; that the district attorney in particular, not simply by virtue of a reluctance to appear on The Celebrity Murder Channel in the role of the next Marcia Clark but also because the Ramseys’ lawyers [naturally] are personal friends who belong to the same ruling clique he does, should have ignored the case in the hope that it would go away; that, accordingly, to date the only person to have been prosecuted in connection with the case was the poor dolt who leaked photographs to the Globe [they found him instantly and came down on him like the wrath of God]; and that anyone who wanted to piece together these particulars would have to read them in the New York Times, since the local newspaper [see above] has been consistently reluctant to cover the story for fear that it might affect property values. — In the selfstyled Athens of the Rockies [Is Fort Collins the Thebes or the Corinth? Is Paul Danish the Sophocles or the Thucydides? Is the County Courthouse the Temple of Olympian Zeus or the Temple of Pythian Apollo?], a city where the single most common sexual practice is probably masturbation in front of a mirror, none of this should surprise you.

I heard it once that Martin Mull was asked by one of his friends after he made it temporarily big just what Hollywood was like, and he said “High school with money.” — A thrill of recognition ran through me when I heard this. But now the thrill is gone.

And, of course: I never get married. I just get divorced.

Later.


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Voodoo child (3/2/99)


Once in a while [though not often] I try my luck with a concert video; when I found Hendrix Live at The Isle of Wight in the DVD new-release bin the other night I thought I’d check it out. — Indeed this is a curiosity. Apparently it was shot less than a month before he died, in August 1970, rendering it a historical document of note whatever its failings. But it’s obvious that if Hendrix had lived to have a say the film would have been destroyed; whatever the reason [not obviously drugs, he was as straight as I ever remember seeing him], it was one of those nights when nothing went right, and he was clearly disgusted with himself from beginning to end. “Machine Gun” came off fairly well, but the rest of it sucked: one embarrassing mistake after another, forgotten lyrics, blown phrases, missing licks, and several passages where he simply wandered off into the key of Z [as we used to say] and couldn’t seem to find his way back. At the conclusion he apologized to the audience and dropped his Stratocaster on the stage as he walked off.

True, Hendrix fucking up is still better than nearly everyone else at his best. But whenever I watch something like this I feel vaguely ashamed of myself, like somebody buying a slightly used pair of shorts from one of the Roman soldiers who cast lots for the garments of Christ.

Though it’s doubtful, really, that this represents some kind of dark conspiracy to exploit the memory of the late lamented; the guys who shot the movie, like most of the listeners, probably didn’t even know Hendrix was having a bad day. — I remember a night some years ago, in a club [just down the street still] called Tulagi’s, when my brother-in-law Mick was playing a gig with his oldies band of that period, Eileen Dover And The Rhythm Kings. [This was the one after he and Harold the drummer quit Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids, and the one before they formed The 4-Nikators; a cash cow they’re milking to this day.] — They had a Sixties dance medley which was guaranteed to pack the floor, seven or eight tunes strung together in succession; I don’t recall all of them but they included “Knock on Wood” and the Mitch Ryder version of “Good Golly Miss Molly”. In the middle of this came “Midnight Hour”, during which Mick was to take his patented guitar solo, an exercise involving little real virtuosity but featuring all of his best flash moves: playing with his teeth, behind his back, jumping up and down, etc., etc. So at the appointed moment, with a dancefloor packed with boogiemonsters, he stepped forward and prepared to dazzle the peasants. — And his amplifier went out. Nothing emerged but white noise. — I was standing in front of the stage, maybe ten feet away, grinning at him. He looked at me. I shrugged, as if to say, now what? He whacked the front of the amp a couple of times, working his left hand to try to make something happen. But nothing but fuzztone was coming out. — Then he looked at the audience. And I did too. They were still dancing. A couple of people were watching him, and [since he was going through the motions of playing] they were shaking their fists in the air and shouting “Yeah!”, “Right on!”, and other slogans not usually indicative of critical acumen. — They had no idea, in short, that there was nothing coming out of the guitar. — So Mick shrugged and went through with the show, pretending to play behind his head, duckwalking, playing with his teeth, jumping up and down. And they loved it. He got an ovation. They were shaking their asses and pumping their fists in the air, dazzled by his virtuosity; despite the fact that he could have tossed his guitar in the dumpster and produced the same musical effect. — This was a kind of epiphany for me. I realized what practiced showmen like Mick had always known instinctively: that the audience was tone deaf; that music was nothing, costume and appearance everything; that rock and roll was theater.

Well. In the Seventies this seemed like a major discovery. Since then MTV has reduced it to corporate science.

Several years later I was driving through the countryside with Stefano [who had simply never understood showmanship, and always seemed to assume he was playing for a club full of jazz critics] telling this story. Since he didn’t appear to be sympathetic to the point of the anecdote, I strained for an analogy: “It’s like that passage in Catch-22 where Yossarian is telling Milo about the cook who got pissed off at the guys in the messhall because they couldn’t appreciate his cuisine and started putting soap in the potatoes to prove his point, and Milo said, Well, he must have found out his mistake, and Yossarian said No, —” — Stefano interrupted me and exclaimed, “We packed it away by the plateful and clamored for more!”

The principle explains this and much more, of course; for instance, Windows NT.

I did finally see Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, and [should you be able to find it] I think you’d like it. It seems to have been shot [in several languages] in Japan and Hong Kong, and employs many of the devices he used in Prospero’s Books: windowing, overlays, long slow tracking shots, naked fat guys, etc. The story is about a girl who writes books on the skins of her lovers [and vice-versa], which can be read a number of ways, I suppose, but serves if nothing else as an excuse for a series of fleshbased studies in [mainly Japanese] calligraphy. The female lead is someone named Vivian Wu, unknown to me; the principal male lead is Ewan McGregor, the star of Trainspotting.

The local video archive seems also to have added a couple of short subjects he made for television. One is a documentary called 26 Bathrooms; this I think I’ll have to see.

Walking past a row of newspaper racks the other day and trying to ignore a series of headlines with the name “Lewinsky” in them, my attention was abruptly seized by the announcement of The Onion: “Congressional prosecutors demand Lewinsky re-enact blowjob on Senate floor — ’We need to have the facts,’ say investigators.” Of course I thought for a moment this was serious. And why should it not have been.

Later.


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Cops and robbers (2/3/99)


American Strays. [Michael Covert, 1996.]

A couple of young adventurers are cruising through the desert in an open Pontiac convertible. “Tell me how much you love me,” she suggests. “Well,” he replies, “Samson had his Delilah...Achilles had his heel...Napoleon had his Waterloo, and I...I got you.” This somehow prompts a lengthy disquisition on the evolution of consumer electronics, which she concludes by tossing an eight-track cassette out of the car onto the highway. Another car zips through the frame, crushing it: drive your chariot over the bones of the dead. Meanwhile the yuppie couple with the bratty kids in the minivan are arguing about whether he’s having a nervous breakdown or just throwing a tantrum, the two niggaz in the Lincoln are discussing that punk bitch, Francis Scott Key, the two wiseguys in the Caddy are changing a tire, and the narrator is trying to hang himself. Just about everyone will end up at Red’s Desert Oasis [Live Petting Zoo 70 miles], a diner run by a woman with a European accent who carries her dog around behind the counter. When the serial killer who pretends to sell vacuum cleaners meets the lady who kills travelling salesmen, will it be love at first sight? Stay tuned. — With John Savage, Jennifer Tilly, Luke Perry, Eric Roberts, James Russo, and Carol Kane.


Hilary And Jackie. [Anand Tucker, 1998.]

Her sister’s memoir of the short brilliant career of the British cellist Jacqueline du Pre, from childhood to her untimely death of multiple sclerosis at the age of forty-two. A spectacular soundtrack, obviously [I particularly liked her version of You Really Got Me], but bring a change of hankie.


A Simple Plan. [Sam Raimi, 1998]

The extravagent stylist Sam Raimi — a cult favorite who has never previously made a movie without the words “Dead” or “Dark” in the title — appears here in the unlikely role of Albert Camus, directing a sort of Fargo Two: the tale of a trio of northwoods bozos [Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, and Brent Briscoe] who stumble onto a planecrash, drag a bagful of money out of the wreck, and then seem helpless to prevent it from killing everybody. Though [again] the pervasive snowfall conveys perfectly a sense of moral whiteout, rather as did the allseeing desert sun that scrambled the brains of The Stranger, still, all this seems rather excessive: the protagonists are so completely the prisoners of Fate [or Plot] that one must wonder whether Raimi is really talking about the dire consequences brought on by an errant moral choice, or about blood money that bears a curse like the treasure of the tomb of Tutankhamen; as if this were a horror movie after all. As well to admit that first drag on a joint will lead to heroin addiction; or that an office blowjob must entail the collapse of civilization. — An intriguing piece of work nonetheless. With a dramatic chorus made up of crows, and Bridget Fonda as Lady Macbeth,


Boogie Boy. [Craig Hamann, 1997.]

The liner notes for this video release insist that you should understand that the executive producer, Roger Avary, was cowriter of Pulp Fiction, apparently by virtue of the fact that he used to work with Quentin Tarantino at the video store. Such tortuous derivations of the Descent Of Cool are now obligatory, as once were the liner notes that would explain just which band member used to play bass for just which splinter group formed from Buffalo Springfield; and doubtless possess the same earthshattering significance. — Of course, once you get past the liner notes this isn’t bad, though hardly original: a goateed excon decorated with many colorful tattoos steps out of the joint straight into the company of junkie bikers in black leather who embroil him in a drug deal that goes violently bad; on the way out of town he finds himself becalmed at that oasis so beloved of neonoir, the rundown old motel in the middle of the desert, occupied by a weird old exhippie and his bimbo wife. The bad guys catch up; a shootout ensues; he rides off into the sunset without the girl. — Plots are cloned more readily than actors, or we’d see Mickey Rourke, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and Patricia Arquette rather than the relative unknowns with which the scenario is actually populated; but we do have Joan Jett as the lead singer for a punk band and Traci Lords as a B-movie scream queen. If I thought they’d worked at the video store, I’d actually be impressed.


Yes, Madam. [Yuen Kwei, 1985.]

Kung fu cop buddy babes Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock run all over Hong Kong chasing a couple of buffoons who’ve inadvertently acquired a damning piece of microfilm wanted by evil corporate mobsters, highkicking their way through a small army of stiffs before the impressive punchout that concludes the feature. This doesn’t suck.


Lolita. [Adrian Lyne, 1997.]

Despite a meticulously distanced production design so completely evocative of the blue highways of the Nineteen-Forties that it all seems like some kind of creation myth to explain the origin of trailer trash that might have been prefaced Once Upon A Time, this latest adaptation of Nabokov has proved so completely untouchable that, until it was finally acquired by Showtime, it languished two years in the can without a distributor. In consequence, though I recommend this film without reservation — among its numerous virtues it is beautifully photographed and [however politically incorrect] entirely hilarious — I haven’t the faintest idea where you might be able to see it. With Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert, Dominique Swain as the teenaged vixen, and Melanie Griffith as her illstarred mother. — Irons’ car, incidentally, is a woody. As if you hadn’t guessed.


The Wild, Wild Planet. [I Criminali della galassia. Antonio Margheriti, 1965.]

Somebody is kidnapping the people of Earth and shrinking them to the size of Barbie dolls; squarejawed spacemen whose mouths move out of synch with their voices track the evil mad scientist responsible to his planetary lair and blow everything up. Walt Disney spaceships; big Italian babes with big Italian hair. I love this shit.


Plump Fiction. [Bob Koherr, 1996. Written by Julie Brown.]

A couple of exterminators bearing a suspicious resemblance to Messrs. Travolta and Jackson go cruising for cockroaches, encountering those celebrated serialkilling tagteam wrestlers the Natural Blonde Killers, the formidable gang of Reservoir Nuns, a couple of convenience-store clerks who talk like Kevin Smith, and assorted other characters familiar to students of postPulp film fiction. Julie Brown puts on Uma’s black Anna Karina wig: whatever you do, don’t let her eat Mexican.


Hard Boiled. [1992]

Further expression of my admiration for the genius of John Woo would be superfluous. Suffice it that if every action movie ends [one way or another] with a shootout in a warehouse, then this, the last and most “American” of Woo’s Hong Kong pictures, contains the definitive shootout in a warehouse; and that isn’t even the definitive shootout in this movie. — Since I watched this four times in succession, I picked up a number of useful words and phrases from the Cantonese, including “Yes Madam”, “whiskey”, “cash”, “hard disk”, “jazz club”, “out out out!”, “This is a fucking order!”, “percentage”, “penthouse”, “office”, “agent”, “mousse”, “passport”, and “dickhead”; and learned at long last from the example of Chow Yun Fat just how to drink Tequila.


The Thief of Baghdad. [Raoul Walsh, 1924.]

Douglas Fairbanks [Senior] braves the Valley of Fire, the Valley of the Monsters, the Cavern of the Enchanted Trees, the Old Man of the Midnight Sea, and the Citadel of the Moon, fights a giant spider on the ocean’s floor, resists the song of the sirens, obtains a magic chest wrapped in a cloak of invisibility, rides off on a Wingéd Horse, saves the city from the Mongol Horde and wins the hand of a beautiful Princess. Not to mention the flying carpet, the giant bats, the magic crystal ball hacked from the eye of a gigantic fourarmed idol, and the golden apple whose savor cures all ills. They don’t make them like this anymore.


A Bug’s Life. [John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, 1998.]

The Seven Samurai played for laughs: an ant considered expendable by virtue of a socially inappropriate screwball originality is dispatched by his tribe to try to find warrior bugs to defend them from a marauding gang of grasshopper bikers; thanks to a risible series of misunderstandings he returns instead with a group of refugee clowns from a flea circus. All nonetheless turns out for the best. — I begin to think these CGI extravaganzas suffer from the same flaw as the MGM studio productions of the Thirties, namely, flat and too-even lighting. MGM was always trying to show off their expensive sets; Pixar is trying to show off their background detail. Both tire the eye. Pixar also has a weakness for pastel colorings, and the characters all look too shiny, like they’re made of plastic. Somebody ought to lock them in a screening room with the Godfather movies for a few days. — As if I weren’t in awe of these guys. — Watch for the outtakes in the credit sequence.


Destiny. [German title Der Müde Tod. Fritz Lang, 1921.]

Separated from her lover by his untimely demise, a young woman [Lil Dagover, star also of The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari] tracks Death to his citadel and petitions him for the return of her betrothed. The weary god leads her into a chamber filled by the light of thousands of flickering candles. “These are the lives of men,” he explains. “They burn briefly and flicker out when God wishes it.” She protests that Love is said to be stronger than Death. Alas, he says, this is not so. But he’ll give her a chance to try to prove it. “Look at these three lights flickering out,” he says. “If you can save even one of them, I will give you back your lover.” Thus Lil enters three tales in succession: a Burton-in-Mecca story of a European adventurer disguised among Mohammedans, discovered and slain when it’s discovered he’s been popping the Caliph’s sister; a tale of jealous murder in the Italy of the Renaissance; and the story of the unfortunate consequences brought upon a Chinese magician called to entertain for the Emperor’s birthday when his daughter’s beauty excites the Imperial libido. [This last piece is a showcase for some great pioneering trick-photographic special effects, including a flying carpet, a variety of transformations engendered by a magic wand, and a magic scroll which unrolls itself and stands up to be read.] — Her efforts go for naught; in each case Death and Fate prevail. — These failures notwithstanding, Lil still insists upon her lover’s return, and Death offers her one last bargain: if she can find someone else with life remaining to take her lover’s place, he’ll make the swap. She re-enters the world of the living, and asks in succession an old man, a starving beggar, and an elderly woman complaining of her ailments, and each refuses with the formulaic response: “Not one day! Not one hour! Not one breath!” Despairing, she lingers by the entrance to a crowded infirmary. It catches fire; a rush of humanity escapes. A woman screams for her baby, left behind in the burning building; Lil dashes through the flames to rescue it. As she pauses before running back out, Death appears and beckons her to give up the child. She refuses, and tosses the baby through a window to its mother. Death claims her, and the lovers are reunited. — Call this a Hollywood ending. — A classic of German Expressionism.


Zero Effect. [Jake Kasdan, 1998.]

A variation on the theme of A Scandal In Bohemia, with Bill Pullman as Darryl Zero as Sherlock Holmes, Ben Stiller as Lawyer Steve Arlo as Doctor John Watson, and Kim Dickens as the bimbo whose name I’ve already forgotten as The Woman, Irene Adler. Elementary, my dear Kasdan.

Pierrot Le Fou. [Godard, 1965.]

Jean-Paul Belmondo sits in the bathtub with a cigarette hanging from his lip, reading aloud from a book about Velázquez. His small daughter listens. His wife bursts in and drags him out to a party, where French protoyuppies converse in advertising slogans for Maidenform, Alfa Romeo, Odorono, and Oldsmobile. Briefly he discusses the nature of the cinema with an American film director named Samuel Fuller [played by an American film director named Samuel Fuller], who claims to be in Paris making a movie version of Flowers Of Evil. After throwing handfuls of wedding cake at the other guests, he leaves and goes home and runs off with the babysitter; as would you, if the babysitter were Anna Karina. She’s involved somehow with gunsmugglers; they commence a life of crime on the run. — Above and beyond this illustration of Godard’s oftquoted dictum that all you really need to make a movie is a girl and a gun [the Ford convertible he took for granted] there are multiple allusions to Proust, Balzac, Rimbaud, the Vietnam and Algerian wars, the Esso tiger, and Robinson Crusoe, an amusing bowling sequence, several bizarre musical interludes, and [inevitably] an ongoing examination of the process of filmmaking from within the film itself.


Virus. [Allan A. Goldstein, 1996.]

The dark schemes of the biological-warfare arm of the military-industrial complex are thwarted by cleanlimbed purehearted squarejawed exfootballhero Secret Service agent Brian Bosworth; and try to tell me he’s a worse actor than Van Damme. Poorly edited, weakly plotted, and lacking an adequate complement of leatherclad Pamela clones, but give this boy a Hong Kong director and there’s no telling how far he might go.


Virus. [John Bruno, 1999.]

A malign burst of electromagnetic energy takes possession of a Russian scientific vessel conveniently stocked with computers and robotic devices; when a tug captained by Donald Sutherland and crewed by Billy Baldwin and Jamie Lee Curtis stumbles across the abandoned hulk after a hurricane, everyone gets to play haunted house. Scary cyborgs; but in the space of an empty theater, no one can hear you scream.


A Better Tomorrow. [John Woo, 1986.]

Leslie Cheung and Ti Lung are brothers on opposite sides of the law in Hong Kong’s gang wars; gunslinging buddy Chow Yun Fat dies gloriously and steals the show. I think this was the movie from which Tarantino learned to walk around in a long black trenchcoat, chewing on a toothpick. Certainly I’ve started doing it.


Earth Girls Are Easy. [Julien Temple, 1989.]

Still a personal favorite: Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum meet cute when his flying saucer crashes in her swimming pool. She’s smitten, of course, particularly after a makeover at the Curl Up And Dye salon reveals him to be a Hollywood hunk beneath his coat of blue hair, but hesitates to consummate the relationship: “You’re an alien and I’m from the Valley.” Love triumphs; the wicked are confounded; Julie Brown writes and choreographs. Do you have margaritas on your planet?


The World, The Flesh, The Devil. [John Craig, 1999.]

A freshfaced young football coach takes a position at a lessthangreatbutmorethenmediocre EastofWesternbutWestofMidWestern university; after a promising start, his fortunes and those of his team take a turn for the worse. In a wrenching midnight confession at the House Of Chow in Columbia, Missouri, he pours out his selfdoubts to a nubile young cheerleader, who listens with glowing face and shining eyes. As she dons her kneepads and crawls under the table to satisfy his Presidential aspirations, he rips the rubber mask from his face and reveals himself to be Slobodan Milosevic, played by Brad Pitt. Not to be outdone, she rips the rubber mask from her face and reveals herself to be Madeleine Albright, played by Famke Janssen. Snarling his frustration, he rips more masks from his face, revealing himself in succession to be Pol Pot, Doctor Tom Osborne, and Amos Alonzo Stagg, played by Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, and Robin Williams. Laughing derisively, she reveals herself to be the Paula Jones Jane Does, played by Judy Davis, Charlize Theron, and Natasha Henstridge. Grinning his defiance, he reveals himself to be Chuck Fairbanks, played by Matt Dillon. Farting her contempt, she reveals herself to be Judith Albino, played by Fairuza Balk. Albino, erstwhile president of the University of Colorado and longtime mistress of Maximilian, Count Dog, heir to the throne of Saxony, pulls a roll of sheetmusic from her pocket and sings an expository flashback aria from which we discover that the Count, rendered amnesiac by a blow to the head, has been residing in the slums of Kosovo, where he drinks heavily and gives lessons on the bazooka to the children of the New World Order. Only the facts that he can cure hip pointers by the laying-on of hands, addresses his houseboy as “Big Number 72”, and is prone to trancelike seizures in which he scratches offensive plays in the dirt give any indication of his true identity as once and future football coach of the University of Colorado. The atrocity slaying of a group of Buff recruiters paying a visit to a young Albanian prospect with breakaway speed brings on NATO airstrikes, which restore the Count’s memory not of his real identity, but of a previous false identity assumed during an earlier bout of amnesia, in which he thought himself a computer executive with a firm based in Boulder. Reinvigorated by this apparent selfdiscovery, he dons a suit and begins calling on corporate offices in Sarajevo, trying to sell dedicated wordprocessors with five-and-a-quarter inch floppy drives; the uncomprehending reception accorded his frequent mentions of CPM and Fortran 77 provokes a relapse into a catatonic state in which he stares blankly at a wall for hours, seemingly studying film of an invisible opponent. Emerging from this stupor, he calls for a secretary and a bottle of Stoly and dictates his Concerto For Rocket Launcher in D Major. Ripping the mask from her face, she reveals herself to be Angela, representative of the NCAA War Crimes Tribunal... . — But I can’t give it all away. Suffice it that, at the last, the coach and the recruits go to the Pac Ten; and the Buffs, obviously, go nowhere.

Later.


____________


Christmas in Hong Kong (12/30/98)


Seduced by the picture of Alyssa Milano on the cover, I purchased a copy of the TV Guide the other day [I think this is a first] and thus discovered quite by accident that the great Sammo Hung, like many other of his colleagues from the Hong Kong cinema, has come to America and is marking time on a copshow while Hollywood tries to decide whether to let him direct. I think Keaton would have to do a copshow, if we could bring him back from the dead; what irony there, and would it be better than winding up his career on the beach with Frankie and Annette?

Fortunately DVD has spawned a new wave of video releases from the mysterious East, allowing us a clearer look at the accomplishments of Sammo and his colleagues. A few titles off the top of the list:

The Heroic Trio. [Johnny To, 1993.]

Not unlike a classic Marvel comic: an evil sorceror dwelling beneath the streets in a subterranean grotto is kidnapping the infants of Hong Kong; motorcycle babe Thief Catcher, masked marvel Wonder Woman, and elusive wraith Invisible Girl, aka Magggie Cheung, Anita Mui, and Michelle Yeoh team up to confound his scheme. The choreography goes a bit over the top, but you’ll love their outfits. Followed by a sequel, The Executioners.


Moon Warriors. [Sammo Hung, 1992.]

Another one of those inscrutable Oriental plots: an emperor travelling incognito [Kenny Bee] in hiding from his evil brother who’s usurped the throne is befriended by a simple fisherman [Andy Lau] who then falls for the empress-to-be [Anita Mui] while escorting her back to her assignation with the emperor, who meanwhile is being betrayed out of jealousy by his courtesan [Maggie Cheung]. All this provides occasion for some really great swordfights, culminating in the grand Shakespearean bloodbath which swallows all the starcrossed lovers at the end of Act Five. — Spectacular. Did I mention the killer whale?


Armour Of God. [Aka Operation Condor Two; Jackie Chan, 1986.]

The first adventure of Indiana Chan, rich in thrilling chases and spectacular stunts. The outtakes at the end show Jackie jumping off the wall of a castle into a tree, missing, falling, and fracturing his skull. — This was the second try; apparently he decided the first take [the one used in the movie] wasn’t flashy enough. You could have fooled me.


Royal Warriors. [David Chung, 1986.]

Michelle Yeoh kicks copious butt in the service of the Royal Hong Kong police. Rumor has it Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton studied this to learn how to act like tough girls. Stallone certainly stole a sequence outright; but has yet [to my knowledge] learned to act like a tough girl.

Magnificent Warriors. [David Chung, 1987.]

In that age of adventure the Nineteen-Thirties, advance men for the evil Japanese army are trying to build a poisonous-gas plant in a lost city in a quasiTibetan corner of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Fortunately for the future of civilization, their plans are thwarted by the intrepid Secret Agent 001 and Indiana Jones’ longlost Chinese sister, gunrunning superbabe Michelle Yeoh, completely accessorized with yellow biplane, leather flying helmet, scarf, bomber jacket, and of course her everready whip. Even allowing for the quality of the fight choreography, there are some incredible stunts and a level of athleticism far beyond the capabilities of Harrison Ford and his standins. — With a game of dice among nomads, a bow-and-arrow firing squad, a harrowing chase [or three], a walled city put to siege, and a dogfight with a Zero which Michelle wins by plugging the enemy pilot with a well-aimed revolver shot [why didn’t my uncle think of that when he was in the Flying Tigers?] — Amazing.


Millionaires’ Express. [Sammo Hung, 1987.]

Something like a Chinese version of Blazing Saddles: halfadozen competing interest groups, including the cops, the Army, a gang of bandits, a bunch of mobsters, some Japanese dudes of unspecified motivation, and Sammo and his troupe of goldenhearted hookers all simultaneously attempt to rob the same train; complications ensue. With Yuen Biao, Richard Norton, Cynthia Rothrock, Yukari Oshima, and a whole lot of other people who can kick fruit out of the trees.


Wheels On Meals. [Sammo Hung, 1986.]

Yuen Biao, Sammo Hung, and Jackie Chan bring kungfu comedy to southern Europe. An international moratorium on the use of the skateboard should have been declared after Jackie’s stunt exhibition in the middle of this picture. — A droll effect is created by the dubbing, which suggests that people in Spain speak Cantonese. Everyone knows they speak English in Spain, and for that matter on other planets.


God Of Gamblers. [Wong Jing, 1989.]

Chow Yun Fat stars as the master of the gambler’s arts, invincible, apparently, in any game of chance, but most at home in those in which a cold smile, calculation, and charismatic influence can be brought to bear; i.e., poker. Not since Connery played Bond has such a magnetic screen presence been let loose in a casino, and even Connery didn’t look so radiantly confident in evening clothes; one can only think of Cary Grant. — Since there aren’t a lot of dramatic possibilities in the spectacle of Chow winning every contest he enters, the writers trot out the old bump-on-the-head-inducing-amnesia ploy to drop our hero among the struggling lower classes for the middle third of the picture; another well-timed bump on the head, as always, suffices to restore his faculties in time for the climactic poker game that ensures the victory of good over evil and the handsome reward of those who befriended him.


God Of Gamblers Returns. [Wong Jing, 1994.]

Retired in the South of France, Chow Yun Fat is persuaded to go back to Taiwan to face an adversary when he comes home to discover his pregnant wife has been butchered and his unborn son left floating in a specimen jar on the mantelpiece. After this revolting beginning another screenwriter seems to take the helm, and Chow’s comedy sidekicks dominate the middle of the picture, highlighted by a really dazzling game of kung fu blackjack, before the final highstakes poker confrontation in which, understandably, our hero terminates his enemies [and, of course, their bank accounts and real estate holdings] with extreme prejudice. — I am still trying to figure out how they managed to work a swordfight into this.


And meanwhile in neverneverland:


You’ve Got Mail. [Nora Ephron, 1998.]

Nora Ephron writes and directs, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan star in another romantic comedy guaranteed to warm your heart and drain your sinuses: two people who are enemies in real life meet anonymously online and fall in love. Can the ugly Darwinian reality of urban New York be reconciled with the untrammeled romantic fantasy spawned by cyberspatial flirtation? Take a wild guess. — Measured against the daunting five-hanky standard of Sleepless In Seattle, this falls somewhat short; I’m sure you can get through it with three. — Based just closely enough on The Shop Around The Corner [Lubitsch, 1940.] With Parker Posey, Greg Kinnear,and a really cute dog. Albeit no kung fu.


Star Trek: Insurrection. [Jonathan Frakes, 1998.]

Picard and the gang save the Garden of Eden from the evil Leper People, led by F. Murray Abraham, who is still trying to kill Mozart. The android sings Gilbert and Sullivan; Picard does the mambo and by inference the horizontal bop. — Question: wasn’t something lost when gunslingers started aiming those clunky flashlight lasers rather than twirling their sixshooters? There are a couple of overlong fight scenes here that even Tom Mix would have ended in seconds; let alone Chow Yun Fat. And why are these guys riding around the Enterprise in elevators when they could teleport? — Mere quibbles, of course; I wish I owned this franchise.


The Faculty. [Robert Rodriguez, 1998.]

Or, The Breakfast Club Versus The Puppet Masters. I could try to say something deep about the phenomenon of Kevin Williamson, a guy who has made his fortune from his fundamental inability to leave high school behind him, and who is, therefore, I guess, an inspiration to the developmentally disabled of all races creeds and colors. But why bother. — This further evidence of what Hollywood has done to debase the talent of Robert Rodriguez might have proved more depressing had the trailers not advertised a forthcoming action feature pairing Marky Mark with Chow Yun Fat: I cannot wait.

Later.


____________


’Tis the season (12/29/98)


After much vacillation I got a DVD player and I’ve run a few disks through it. My feelings are mixed. On the one hand the picture quality is obviously better, since bitdepth aka color information per pixel is very much improved, at least if you make the [considerable] investment in a television receiver with component video input. On the other hand picture quality is improved not in the slightest, since real resolution is just the same as it was before, or in 1939, for that matter, and you still have the abominable interlaced display. On the one hand the disks are a more manageable size, there are already at least a thousand titles out, and they’re not much more expensive than CDs [I’ve picked up a few at random, e.g. The Seven Samurai, La Femme Nikita, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Irma Vep.] On the other hand even at twenty bucks a pop what I would regard as the essential cinematic library would cost as much as a house. On the one hand you have the corollaries of the pure digital format, good freezeframe, slowmotion, random-access frame-addressability, features which didn’t usually work on classical laserdiscs, and you have [in principle] sound better than the theater. On the other hand this usually just means you waste a lot of time trying to get the right angle when the starlet pulls her shirt off, and I still can’t afford a decent stereo. — Some day [of course] they’ll go through the film library and rescan it at something like the resolution appropriate to thirty-five millimeter, probably something like 3600 by 2600 at ten bits a channel. [By comparison D1, the ceiling of video standards, is about 720 by 480 at half that bitdepth.] At that point, yes, DVD will scale and nothing else will, but, of course, none of the players you can buy now will play the disks. — But all this will take years, and meanwhile my videotape collection is rotting. So [on balance] what the hell. If I is someone else, whose money is this anyway.


____________


Pigs and Nazis (12/15/98)


Life Is Beautiful. [Roberto Benigni, 1997.]

Having formed an imperfect impression of the intentions of the Italian comic auteur Roberto Benigni before the fact, I did not know precisely what to expect of this film until I saw it: a comedy about the death camps? Harpo’s List? But Mr. Benigni’s aim is far subtler: to humanize an experience of such monstrous proportions that it seems to lie beyond the reach of comedy and tragedy alike by depicting the efforts of a gifted clown to protect his child from a realization of the meaning of their incarceration; the magnitude of the crime of the Nazis is intimated [and it can only be intimated, it cannot be grasped as a whole] by the superhuman energy and ingenuity he must expend to achieve even this small triumph over the gigantic machinery of evil. Though Benigni does demonstrate a rare talent for physical comedy, his powers are employed in the service of a grim story [and one that would have been cheapened by a happy ending]; this is emphatically not that feelgood movie about the Holocaust one would have dreaded had a Hollywood studio taken the pitch and attached Jim Carrey to the project. — One of the best pictures of the year, or the decade for that matter [winner already of a prize at Cannes]; don’t miss it.


Careful. [Guy Maddin, 1991.]

The Canadian cult director dresses up his cast like the Student of Prague and dresses down his filmstock like overexposed SuperEight, but despite stage-interior mountain settings, ghostly visitations, cottages out of Hansel and Gretel, and not a little gratuitous Oedipal conflict, he ends up with something that owes less to German Expressionism than to Bad Acid. — Try Nosferatu or Caligari instead; they’re relatively easy to find. [I don’t know about good acid.]


Babe: Pig In The City. [George Miller, 1998.]

After an series of misfortunes leave his owner at the mercy of wicked mortgage bankers, the celebrated talking pig sets off on a journey to save the farm and ends up lost instead in the cruel Metropolis [an ingenious surreal composite of Venice [Italy], Venice [California], Hollywood, Rio, New York, Paris, and San Francisco] among pocketpicking apes, mad dogs, animalhating operalovers, and evil scientists in need of laboratory specimens. All turns out eventually for the best, but not without the kind of lengthy exploration of the fears of childhood that made all the great fairytales seem too dark for the eyes of their audience. — Directed [mirabile dictu] by the great action auteur George Miller; and, indeed, the final shootout at the society dinner owes as much to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome as to the Marx Brothers; if you try to picture Margaret Dumont taking the place of Tina Turner, you won’t be far off. — Really excellent [I’m not kidding]; check this out.


James Ellroy, Demon Dog Of American Crime Fiction. [Reinhard Jud, 1993.]

A guided tour of Los Angeles conducted by the remarkable Mr. Ellroy [author of White Jazz, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, etc.], whose personal star map is dotted with lurid crime scenes out of the dark forgotten past of the City of Angels. A striking specimen of documentary; but why did a German have to come to the home of the film industry to make it?


Ilsa, The Wicked Warden. [Jess Franco, 1978.]

A sequel to the cult quasiclassics Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia, Ilsa, Offensive Coordinator of the Cornhuskers, etc., etc.: leatherclad sadist Dyanne Thorne experiments upon the inmates of a mental institution in the South American jungle. Memorable moments include the boss inmate running out of toilet paper and commanding the New Cookie to wipe her with her tongue and the remarkable bathtub scene of Ms. Thorne, who somehow succeeds in getting both floats in the water at the same time. [I don’t think this could be done in my tub.] Illogical, tepidly plotted, weak in characterization, and burdened with unnecessary scatological detail; suggesting the next sequel, Ilsa, Republican Counsel to the Judiciary Committee.


____________


Holiday cheer (12/5/98)


Home Fries. [Dean Parisot, 1998.]

A twisted but charming romantic comedy with a convoluted plot involving fast food, unanticipated pregnancy, an Oedipal quadrilateral, murder [sort of] by helicopter gunship, and a guy and a girl who have their first date at a Lamaze class. Drew Barrymore is hard enough to handle ordinarily, but in the guise of a pregnant redhead she is almost certainly the cutest girl on earth. Check this out.


Cannibal. The Musical. [Trey Parker, 1996.]

The celebrated directorial debut of Trey Parker, already an underground classic; a tuneful tribute to Colorado’s first tabloid sensation, Alferd Packer. An essay adopting the traditional Boy Meets Horse/Boy Loses Horse/Boy Gets Horse three-act structure, this begins with Parker riding on his soulmate LeAnn and declaiming in his finest Oklahoma! fashion

The sky is blue
And all the leaves are green
My heart is warm
Like a baked potato
I think I know
Exactly what I mean
When I say it’s
A schpedoinkal day

and doesn’t exactly go downhill from there, if you catch my drift: highlights include his stay among a tribe of Japanese Indians and the lengthy argument after a musical number between a gang of miners and a gang of trappers about the definition of the relative minor. The legendary underground filmmaker Stan Brakhage has a cameo. Available now on video under the auspices of the Troma Team, purveyors of The Toxic Avenger, A Nymphoid Barbarian In Dinosaur Hell, etcetera, etcetera. You could do worse; and after gorging yourself on turkey parts I don’t see why you would want to do better.


Very Bad Things. [Peter Berg, 1998.]

Let me summarize this as completely as possible, without [of course] wasting further time or effort looking up any particulars which may have escaped my apprehension: five guys [and for some reason there are now always five, though in the original of this band-of-brothers-let’s-be-gangsters genre, Reservoir Dogs, there were six] among whom Christian Slater holds the position of ringleader set off for Vegas on the eve of the marriage of one of them [not Slater, and if I knew the guy’s name I’d be trying to forget it] to Cameron Diaz, who is, it’s immediately obvious, way over the line on the phase diagram that marks the transition from sweet single girlfriend to wifely control freak; after the usual interval of deranged gambling and compulsive tequilaswilling and cokesnorting Slater calls in a voluptuous lapdancer who repairs to the mirrored bathroom with the most adventurous of the party and, in the midst of fucking him senseless, somehow contrives to throw her head back into a projecting spike [or, hook, or, something.] During the ensuing group discussion Slater persuades his fellows of the virtues of discretion, which in this instance seems to entail hacking the deceased babe into pieces, hauling her remains out of the hotel in suitcases, and driving out into the desert for a secret burial. Unfortunately a security guard wanders into the middle of this disquisition, prompting Slater to murder him in cold blood [“In the bathroom! not on the carpet! We’ve got to be able to mop this up!”] and add his body parts to the collection. There follow a long drive through the Nevada night, a heated debate on the relevance of Jewish ritual to the proceedings which necessitates the repackaging of the fragmented stiffs to ensure the eternal rest of like among like, and a solemn ceremonial vow of perpetual silence. After this they all drive back to LA and proceed one after another to go mad with guilt and anxiety, resulting successively in the automotive murder of one of the conspirators by another [I think these two were supposed to be brothers], the subsequent dispatching of the victim’s wife and [yes] brother by Slater, the discovery of all of this during the wedding ceremony by Diaz, who, unfazed and determined to be married at any cost croaks Slater herself in an antechamber and dispatches her new husband to the desert again with orders to dispose of the stiff, the last remaining coconspirator, and an unwanted dog [groans from the audience], the failure of this errand in a spectacular headon collision, and the reduction at the last of Diaz herself to a nursemaid gone bonkers caring for the two wheelchairbound survivors, the crippled dog, and the children of one of the earlier victims. All this is punctuated by some stirring oratory on the part of Slater, who is apparently supposed to have been driven over the edge by too many selfactualization seminars, some nicely tuned drunken speeches by various of the participants, and a few momentarily humorous tirades by Diaz along the lines of Fine, so you murdered somebody and hacked her to pieces, did you call about the wedding cake? — Obviously I summarize the plot in such detail to satisfy any idle curiosity that might otherwise tempt you to see this abomination yourself. — Is this black comedy, or not? I am reminded of Hitchcock’s story about the silent cinema, that melodramas the audiences laughed at were often rereleased with different title cards and thus made over into comedies. Save that here, obviously, the question is rather whether the flick would have been funnier if they’d played it straight as a drama and let the audience discover for itself how absurd it really was, rather than pretend they’d planned it all along. — But what else was I going to do? Stay home and watch football?


Enemy Of The State. [Tony Scott, 1998.]

Having inadvertently acquired evidence of a political assassination, Washington lawyer Will Smith is pursued by the minions of evil NSA bureaucrat Jon Voight, whose mastery of the immense surveillance apparatus surrounding us is of course frightening but seems to have clouded his judgment; after all, he could have whacked our hero in the first couple of minutes and saved himself the expense of repositioning all those satellites. Gene Hackman [with reference to Coppola’s The Conversation] plays a good guy for once. Produced and directed by the team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott, who have brought us Top Gun, Crimson Tide, etc.; thus slick, derivative, predictable, but [of course] vastly entertaining.


Celebrity. [Woody Allen, 1998.]

More or less as advertised, this is Kenneth Branagh as Woody Allen as Marcello Mastroianni in, well, La Dolce Woody: a journalist who might have been meant for better things finds himself caught up instead in the frenetic pursuit of the famous. This wouldn’t go far, but [to give the Branagh character credit] he racks up an impressive string of babes [he is, at least, a successful starfucker], and [to give Woody credit] there’s an amusing ironic plot in counterpoint in which Branagh’s exwife [Judy Davis] herself becomes a journalistic celebrity rather than a celebrity journalist. Whatever the moral here, there are plenty of laughs. — With Melanie Griffith [not quite Anita Ekberg], Charlize Theron, Leonardo DiCaprio, Famke Janssen, Winona Ryder, Donald Trump, Joey Buttafuoco, and probably Jesse [The Body] Ventura and Count Maximilian Dog, if I’d been able to keep track; filmed in highkey Manhattan-looks-like-Rome-in-1960 blackandwhite by Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s own cinematographer.


The Siege. [Edward Zwick, 1998.]

The feelgood martial-law movie that reminds all of us that truckbombdriving towelheads are people too. I only sat through this because I had to finish my popcorn after:


The Star Wars Trailer.

A kinetic teaser for the longawaited prequel [Episode One: The Phantom Menace] written and directed by George Lucas, who has, apparently, decided to take the development of his personal Nibelungenlied into his own hands once again. Featured players include Liam Neeson, Samuel Jackson [?!!], Ewan MacGregor as the young Obi Wan, a fresherfaced Yoda doll, and Natalie Portman, fresh from playing Anne Frank on Broadway. Obviously if you expect cute aliens, robot armies, exotic planetary landscapes, and hurtling spaceships in highvelocity pursuits you will not be disappointed. The question is whether Lucas can still do everything he invented better than everyone who’s been trying to imitate him for the last twenty years. My guess is that the Force is still with him, and that Cameron’s reign as King of the World is destined to be cut short by the return of the Master of the Universe. In May, 1999.


Later.


____________


Liquid refreshment (11/23/98)


The Waterboy. [Frank Coraci, 1998.]

Adam Sandler plays a cretin who miraculously makes good. One must suppose this is not a stretch.


Detective. [Jean-Luc Godard, 1985.]

Paris. A hotel. A detective. A mystery. Guns, money, mobsters. A boxer gorges himself on chocolate. A braless girl takes her shirt off and puts another on; takes her shirt off and puts another on. No one seems to notice, probably because she is sitting next to the television. — “I’ll KO Tiger Jones!” the fighter exclaims. “But isn’t he Tiger Jones?” a girl asks. “A champion always fights himself,” his manager replies. — “We are taking Sicily as a metaphor,” Uncle William is saying in the next room. A girl bursts into tears. — “Why are pornographic movies called X-rated?” a girl asks. “Why ‘X’? as in mathematics.” “Exactly,” someone answers, off. “Oh yes,” she says after a pause. “The unknown.” — “You think the killer will be back?” “History keeps repeating. It’s one long stammer.” — Room service sends up a dead rat on a plate. — “Ah, young girls’ breasts...” a man is sighing. A cut. A woman is folding a wad of bills. “Ah, men’s money... .” — Nobody does it better; nobody ever did.


Les Vampires. [Louis Feuillade, 1915/1916.]

A miraculous survival from the dawn of the cinema, a seven-hour serial shot on location in the streets of Paris during the First World War about a blackgarbed company of gangsters led by a succession of criminal masterminds [Feuillade kept killing them off, I think to head off contract renegotiations] but undoubtedly starring the archtypical femme fatale, Irma Vep. [Yes, it’s an anagram.] A favorite of the Surrealists, and you can certainly see why: fabulous, sinister, beautiful, inspiring. Available at last on video [I’ve looked in vain for years]; check it out.


Hugo Pool. [Robery Downey, 1997.]

Robert Downey Senior directs like an actor; Robert Downey Junior acts like a director. Malcolm McDowell has a jones for horse; Cathy Moriarty has a jones for the horses. Alyssa Milano has a blue Chevy truck and Sean Penn has a pair of blue suede shoes. I’ll pass on the shoes, the junk, and the sport of kings; but tell the babe to leave the engine running.


____________


Booger nights (11/10/98)


Irma Vep. [Olivier Assayas, 1996.]

A French director on the brink of a nervous breakdown forms the notion of a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial Les Vampires; on the basis of a morose viewing of the Hong Kong action fantasy The Heroic Trio he recruits Maggie Cheung to play the lead. The production veers rapidly off the rails, but not before everyone falls for Maggie; indeed she does look great in a Catwoman suit. — Movies about moviemaking are nothing new, but this may be the first in which one of the movies you see within the movie is a movie about making a movie; not to mention that the metatextual intention of Mr. Assayas in authoring this film seems to have been to come up with an excuse to meet Maggie himself so that he could marry her; thus [I suspect] the piquant choice of Truffaut’s erstwhile alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud to play the lead. — If we try to carry this much farther we’ll have to start writing our screenplays in Lisp.


Pleasantville. [Gary Ross, 1998.]

A beautifully crafted allegory of [among other things] the triumph of rock and roll over Stalinism. I wish George Orwell could have seen this; I hope the judge hearing the Microsoft trial has. Don’t miss it.


Orgazmo. [Trey Parker, 1997.]

Trey Parker stars as a Mormon missionary in Los Angeles who knocks on the wrong door and is propelled by comic accident into a career as the masked marvel of the pornographic cinema. The premise provides obvious opportunity for some amusing comicbook dialogue, and there are many risible kung fu sequences, but the funniest thing about this flick may be the NC-17 rating, which seems to have been awarded by someone who flipped through the screenplay without ever actually seeing the movie. — Really, a Mormon could watch this: why should anyone who voted for Orrin Hatch complain at the sight of Ron Jeremy’s ass?


Bride Of Chucky. [Ronny Yu, 1998.]

Honestly, it seemed like a good idea at the time.


Que Viva Mexico. [Sergei Eisenstein, 1932.]

Sergei Eisenstein’s lost essay in mythic documentary of 1931, restored as best possible from his notes and finally-recovered raw footage by his onetime collaborator, Grigory Alexandrov. At best a kind of first draft and not the transcendent work of genius one might have hoped for had Eisenstein lived to cut this himself, but filled with startling images and striking compositions nonetheless.


The Spanish Prisoner. [David Mamet, 1997.]

David Mamet’s critically acclaimed paranoid fantasy about a corporate serf who invents an unspecified Process on company time and discovers that everyone is plotting to steal it from him. The dialogue is too cute; the conspiracy, too complete; the twists of the plot, too arbitrary; the outcome, too predictable; the hand of the author, therefore, too obvious. — All this works better played for laughs [cf. Wild Things]. — A great cast, however, including Ben Gazzara and Steve Martin.


Soldier. [Paul W.S. Anderson, 1998.]

Kurt Russell plays a soldier programmed from birth to function as a military robot; when his usefulness expires and he’s abandoned among the settlers on the Dumpster Planet, he acquires emotional depth. Or sort of: Russell bears throughout the expression of a man who has just undergone rectal surgery. — A few nice, albeit derivative, firefights, and elegant effects and production design, as one might expect from the director of Event Horizon. But basically this sucks.


Provocateur. [Jim Donovan, 1998.]

Jane March stars as a North Korean spy whose schemes against the forces of righteousness never quite materialize. At least I think not. After the shower scene, I hit rewind.


Dancer, Texas: Population 81. [Tim McCanlies, 1998.]

Four kids graduate from high school and kill a weekend trying to decide whether they really have the nerve to leave for the Big City. — Is Texas really a better place to live than Los Angeles? Is Harold Robbins really a better writer than Tom Clancy? Is Arby’s more nourishing than Taco Bell? Is Paula Jones better-looking than Monica? — Damn, I wish I knew these things.


Deceiver. [Jonas Pate and Josh Pate, 1997.]

A couple of detectives crossexamine Tim Roth, an absintheswilling epilectic millionaire who may or may not have murdered the prostitute Renee Zellwegger; presently he turns the tables and interrogates them. Not terribly interesting, though one of the detectives somehow has contrived to marry Rosanna Arquette.


Clay Pigeons. [David Dobkin, 1998.]

Please: don’t shoot. Unless there’s some chance of hitting Janeane Garofalo.


Glory Daze. [Rich Wilkes, 1996.]

Ben Affleck leads a cast of slackers in a gripping drama about that magic moment right after they’ve all graduated from college and right before they all go to work at the convenience store and discover they’ve never learned to make change.


Public Enemies. [Mark L. Lester, 1996.]

Theresa Russell plays Ma Barker. Accept no substitutes.


The Real Blonde. [Tom DiCillo, 1997.]

Tom DiCillo, whose first feature [Living In Oblivion, starring Steve Buscemi] was an amusingly self-reflexive study of the making of an independent film, here traces the fortunes of a small circle of actors and models in New York trying to rise above the grim necessities of catering swank dinner parties, flexing in Madonna videos, and working in soaps. — Marlo Thomas plays a fashion photographer with a firm grasp of the necessity for chunky abs; Daryl Hannah [between trophy boyfriends] appears as a soap star; Elizabeth Berkley tries to find life after Showgirls. Rest assured there are no Real Blondes.


Six O’Clock News. [Ross McElwee, 1996.]

Ross McElwee, author of Sherman’s March [undoubtedly the greatest home movie ever made] returns again with a documentary study of the victims of disaster. There’s an inherent irony in this project, since though Ross is occupied herein with his own struggle to humanize the [otherwise abstract and objectified] people he sees on television by seeking them out and getting to know them directly, we see all of this on film; probably the humorous interlude in which he shoots the television crew that comes over to his apartment to interview him makes oblique reference to his recognition of this paradox, though with Ross one can never be sure. — At any rate another brilliant autobiographical essay from the master of the genre; if you can find this, check it out.


This World, Then The Fireworks. [Michael Oblowitz, 1997.]

Billy Zane and Gina Gershon as incestuous twin hustlers in Los Angeles in the Fifties; maybe they do look alike. An elegantly distressed James Cain kind of feel to it; though based, apparently, on a novel by Jim Thompson. I hope there are more of them.


The House Of Yes. [Mark Waters, 1997.]

Indie goddess Parker Posey as a dotty babe in a gothic mansion who likes to dress up like Jackie Kennedy and play assassination with her brother. Incest must be in the air. Adapted directly from a stage play and not, therefore, terribly cinematic; but nearly weird enough to get away with it.


Palookaville. [Alan Taylor, 1995.]

A cute little comedy about three buddies in Jersey City with absolutely no talent for armed robbery. And not at all like Tarantino.


Gattaca. [Andrew Niccol, 1997.]

Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman meet cute in a future dystopia run by bigbrothering genetic engineers. This was generally well-reviewed, apparently because no one remembers Aldous Huxley. — Exercise for the reader: try to make up a better proper name than “Gattaca” from the letters of the genetic code. — Exercise for the writer: try to make up a story about genetic engineering that doesn’t suck.


The Big Clock. [John Farrow, 1948.]

Ray Milland as a hunted man in the classic noir thriller. Charles Laughton as a deranged Forties media baron; Elsa Lanchester as a ditsy artist with altogether too many children.


Zero For Conduct. [Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collège. Jean Vigo, 1933.]

The boys at a boarding school stage a revolt. The first of the genre, progenitor of such later classics as If and The 400 Blows; weird but apparently true, this was banned in Europe for years after its release — Vigo made only a few movies before his untimely death; the most famous, undoubtedly, was L’Atalante [1934], a frequent mention on critical topten lists.


The Postman. [Kevin Costner, 1997.]

Interminable, abominable, incomprehensible. Who greenlighted this piece of shit? and why isn’t he working in a convenience store?


Death in Venice. [Luchino Visconti, 1971.]

A leaden adaptation of Thomas Mann, every bit as lame as I always heard it was. Alas, I had to find out for myself.


The Chosen One: Legend of the Raven. [Lawrence Lanoff, 1998.]

Tutored by a Native American sage, Carmen Electra and Shauna Sand are possessed by the spirits of the Earth and waters to get naked and combat evil.


Palmetto. [Volker Schlöndorff, 1998.]

Another neonoir thriller set in Florida; it must be the heat. Woody Harrelson as the sucker; Elizabeth Shue and Chloë Sevigney as the co-conspiring femmes fatale; Gina Gershon as the girl he should have trusted. — I still give the prize to Wild Things.


Welcome to Sarajevo. [Michael Winterbottom, 1997.]

Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei play Western journalists trying to cover the war in Bosnia. Stark and depressing picture of the New World Order. Not to sound like a Sixties activist, but how in the name of God could we have allowed this to happen?


The Missouri Game.

Tired characters. Predictable situations. Uninspired plot. So why didn’t the good guys win?


Later.


____________


Antz (10/28/98)


I saw this the other day [in fact on Nietzsche’s birthday], and thought it very impressive, though the educated eye can detect areas that need either more work or less. Everything looks as it were too simple or too fractal. No doubt you have heard the dictum, that physics is simple in the limits of very few and very many degrees of freedom, and that what’s difficult lies in between. Similarly, visual reality lies somewhere in between the realms of the geometrically primitive and the self-similar. — Or something like that. In any case my eye is tired of both texture-mapping and perfectly reflective shiny things with sharp shadows. — And what about wave optics? diffraction around edges? a real shadow [like real life] is blurry. — But: it was clever to get Woody and Sharon, the product placements cracked me up, and it’s the first time in years I’ve heard Stallone’s voice without cringing. — Not Lady and the Tramp by any means, but it didn’t suck. — An amazing number of nerds in the credits. — Check it out.


____________


Mann and Supermann (10/7/98)


Lurching along the Creek a couple of Saturdays ago I passed under the shadow of Folsom about four in the afternoon and encountered a fair chunk of the Rat Pack toasting marshmallows, hoisting their sodapops, and flashing their rapier wit as they celebrated what the pessimists among them [I will not name names] seemed to think would be the last win of the season for the — must I apply this adjective yet again? — erratic Buffs. I inquired after your whereabouts, but dared not ask whether the Dog had suited up, or whether That Woman had again intervened. By the sound of it we’re going to need him on every down on both sides of the ball in the forthcoming weeks, and I’ve put a word in with Madeleine Allbright regarding the vacant ambassadorship to Gondwanaland, which I think would suit Albino perfectly; let’s hope State can slip this one under the Republican radar before the midterm elections.

In other developments, I stumbled across another novel by Philip Kerr: Esau, an essay in the Lost-World genre set in the Himalayas; it gives nothing away to say that if you expect Yeti you won’t be disappointed. This seemed much more conventional than the other specimens of his work that I’ve read, a standard thriller albeit executed with more intelligence, and I half expected those portentous sluglines like

WASHINGTON — 1 AUGUST — 0800 HOURS

to be interpolated between scenes. But it was excellent nonetheless; have you seen it?


I stepped into the multiplex at a matinee hour this weekend, intending to see Antz, but discovered to my disgust when I’d already purchased my popcorn and walked into the theater that it was unacceptably full. Accordingly I had little choice but to slip down the hall to a screening of Urban Legend. Which sucked, of course, but at least I could get a seat.

Other notes of your itinerant reviewer:


Ronin. [John Frankenheimer, 1998.]

Robert De Niro and Jean Reno star as spyworld Samurai left masterless by the demise of the Cold War, chasing the possessors of a metal case from Paris to the South of France and back again at the behest of the mysterious Natascha McElhone. She sounds Irish, and her rivals appear to be Russians, but beyond this we have no idea who anyone really is or what they’re after; which is [as Hitchcock always said] just as it ought to be. — Rather a triumphant return for John Frankenheimer, who had little luck with The Island Of Doctor Moreau but shows here he hasn’t lost his unique flair for the thriller. — The carchases in particular are remarkable. And appearances do not deceive: he really did hire a couple of guys fresh off the track at Le Mans and let them race through the streets of Nice at one hundred miles an hour. Check this out.


Pecker. [John Waters, 1998]

The final toast, raised in a crowded pub in Baltimore to a general roar of approval, is “To the end of irony!” And certainly that appears to be the aim of John Waters in this study of the rise, fall, and resurrection of the title character [played by Edward Furlong], an innocent lad from the working class whose candid photographs of his surroundings create an abrupt sensation in the New York artworld when they’re discovered accidentally by a slumming agent, propelling himself and his friends and family into celebrity. Since his girlfriend [Christina Ricci] runs a laundromat, his best friend is a professional shoplifter, his little sister is a drooling sugar addict, his big sister annnounces strippers in a gay bar, his parents are witless buffoons, and his grandmother [the world’s worst unconscious ventriloquist] thinks her statue of the Virgin Mary is talking by itself, this sudden rise to prominence is a mixed blessing; and the contrast between these unpolished and asymmetric characters from the lesser side of the tracks and the gleaming ponytailed blackgarbed robots of Soho — between Baltimore and New York — is drawn sharply; though sometimes it seems to have been at once too emphatically underlined and inadequately detailed. In short Waters the moralist draws again the contrast between the fat oafish unwashed polymorphously perverse and unselfconscious dwellers in the Garden before the Fall and the slender wellrehearsed selfassured absolutely artifical and altogether too completely selfaware inhabitants of the latter world who have the knowledge of good and evil served up to them on silver platters with their wine and cheese [as Ms. Ricci puts it in stunned bewilderment as she stands among the crowd at a gallery, “These people don’t go to the laundromat...they send everything out to be drycleaned!”] — not without his own ironic perspective, and leaving us wondering whether a Catholic education is not unlike one of those boogers you can’t sem to flick off your fingernail. — But who else would cast Patricia Hearst as a matter of course, and who else would give you a beefcake dancer in a gstring teabagging a customer? — Whatever he’s doing, I wish he would do more of it.


Henry Fool. [Hal Hartley, 1997]

A Bohemian drifter takes up residence in the home of an apparently retarded trashman, fucks his deranged mother, marries his nymphomaniacal sister, and induces the garbageman himself to become a poet; not without personal cost. — Hal Hartley is as always brilliant and original, but here his story grows rather selfconsciously epic and drags on too long. Still, the dialogue has an astonishing acuity, and there are the usual assortment of memorable scenes: Henry’s proposal to Parker Posey while noisily voiding his bowels is in particular one of the classic moments of the cinema. If you can find this, check it out.


Star Slammer. [Fred Olen Ray, 1987.]

An essay in that neglected genre, the science-fiction-women’s-prison-on-a-spaceship flick. — What can I tell you? — I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.


Slums of Beverly Hills. [Tamara Jenkins, 1998]

A rather-too-obviously autobiographical essay [with that Sundance-writing-seminar stink all over it] about a precocious [and precociously stacked] Jewish adolescent growing up in the shadow of the upper classes, — Undeniably charming, though [naturally] you have to wonder whether having with such a theatrical display of alchemical effort dragged this personal tale out of the storagelocker of her psyche and rendered it not simply painful, but painfully funny, the author has anything else to write about.


Rush Hour. [Brett Ratner, 1998.]

Though the origins of the Hollywood buddy formula are lost in the mists of time, they must be remote indeed: the famous story conference in which Aristophanes’ producers pitched him the idea of pairing Thales and Anaxagoras as two Athenian cops on the trail of a gang of barbarian drugsmugglers, for instance, is a matter of historical record, as are the later attempted rewrites that nearly brought us Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein and the Sundance Kid and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Tango And Cash. However it may have originated, the idea has grown and thrived over the millenia, and now stands proudly beside other conceptual bulwarks of the Western tradition like ethnic cleansing, the progressive income tax, and object-oriented programming as one of the pillars that support our way of life. So ubiquitous is the formula, in fact, and so universal its application, that it cannot strain credulity to report that, against all odds, it does occasionally work; just as political speeches sometimes have semantic content and sitcoms are occasionally funny. — So, there it is: Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker; not as bad as you’d think. — The fact that Jackie Chan and Newt Gingrich, Jackie Chan and Anna Nicole Smith, Jackie Chan and Pope John Paul, or [a cough behind the hand] Jackie Chan and Jackie Chan might have worked as well or better is beside the point. We must pause here to marvel at the genius of the system. — And having thus paused for a few microseconds, we can resume admiring the genius of Jackie Chan.


Double Team. [Tsui Hark, 1997]

Sure enough, Knock Off had a prequel, another Van Damme movie directed by Tsui Hark. This one [I am not making this up] costars the lovely and talented Dennis Rodman as Jean-Claude’s accomplice in the struggle against terrorism as masterminded by the Great Satan, Mickey Rourke. — Rourke, incidentally, has either been munching a lot of steroids lately or was fitted specially with a Schwarzenegger suit for this role. — The dialogue probably should have been dubbed into Cantonese for the American release; since it wasn’t, you might be well advised to watch this with the sound turned off.


An admonition that may prove also to apply to the rest of the football season. But let’s hope for the best.

Later.


____________


Shuffle off to Buffalo (9/15/98)


Buffalo ’66. [Vincent Gallo, 1998.]

Vincent Gallo gets out of prison in the opening shots and spends the first several minutes of his directorial debut staggering around Buffalo trying to find a place to take a leak. After failing to find succor in a bus station, a coffeeshop, an alley, and at the gates of the big house itself, while lurching through a dance studio to a restroom he pauses to kidnap Christina Ricci, whom he has decided on the spur of the moment is ideally suited to play the role of his wife during the visit he is about to make to his parents, Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston. Why he should be concerned about the impression he will make upon them is unclear, since they seem hardly to remember him and are disinclined to pay as much attention to the returning prodigal and his cover story about a government job that has kept him away for five years as to the football game running in the background. Indeed a demented obsession with the Bills appears to be a family trait, and it develops that our hero’s sojurn in the joint was precipitated by his default upon an unfortunate bet placed on Buffalo in the Super Bowl; whereupon his loanshark [Mickey Rourke] suggested that a timely guilty plea to save embarrassment for “a friend of ours” might be an offer he couldn’t refuse. Since this was the game the Bills lost by the margin of a missed field goal in the closing seconds, Gallo now [as he explains to his only friend, a retarded guy named Goon] has no purpose in life save to seek out and kill the kicker, who operates a topless bar located across from the seedy motel where he and Ricci end up after a romantic evening spent bowling and dining at Denny’s. Here the further progress of their relationship is impeded by the revelation that his entire previous experience with women has consisted in stalking Rosanna Arquette throughout high school. And, clutching a revolver, he steps out into the night to meet his fate.

This summary, unusually complete though it may be by my standards, does at best imperfect justice to the weird hilarity of this film; I’ve left out Gazzara’s lipsynched rendition of a loungelizard standard for the benefit of Ricci, the twisted composition of the homecoming dinner, and the sight of Goon talking on the telephone in his underwear, let alone a dozen other goofy details. This flick is priceless. Don’t hesitate to check it out.


____________


Hours of idleness (9/8/98)


Knock Off. [Tsui Hark, 1998.]

The remarkably talented Hong Kong auteur Tsui Hark [A Chinese Ghost Story] directs the remarkably muscular Jean-Claude Van Damme in a beautifully photographed elegantly composed ingeniously choreographed and brilliantly edited piece of shit. It seems impossible that such extravagent visual imagination can ever have been exercised in the realization of such an absurdly incoherent story fleshed out by such wooden actors. One can only presume that this is some kind of elaborate joke on the part of the director at the expense of the parties who assigned him the project with prepackaged script and star; had he in mind some Chinese proverb about a silk purse and a sow’s ear?


54. [Mark Christopher, 1998.]

The Age of Disco revisited yet again. Whit Stillman was better on the same themes, but you may still want to check this out.


Blade. [Stephen Norrington, 1998.]

Wesley Snipes combats a cabal of vampires, assisted by Kris Kristofferson, who seems to have graduated from hero to mentor roles; whiskey will do that for you. There’s an obvious debt to Hong Kong, but I found myself more intrigued by the apparent influence of the early Fritz Lang. — Not great, but not too bad; if you like comic books.


Burn Hollywood Burn. [Alan Smithee, 1998.]

Joe Eszterhaz seeks revenge against the studio system, presumably for such deadly insults as paying him three million dollars a screenplay for bullshit like Basic Instinct and Showgirls. — The usual conspiracy of manipulative producers, venal agents, and bimbos for hire thwarts the heroic efforts of a talented but naive director [Eric Idle] to render palatable an abominable action picture starring Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan; driven finally to a breakdown, he burns the negative in protest and is committed to an asylum. Naturally this deranged gesture catapults him to celebrity, forcing the same people who drove him out of his mind to hire him back and give him Final Cut. — When you’ve found the moral in this, pray let me know; I confess myself baffled.


Mister Nice Guy. [Sammo Hung, 1997.]

Jackie Chan as, well, Jackie Chan, chased all over Sydney by a drug baron and his minions before he turns the tables in the final shootout; as if the plot had anything to do with it. Wonderfully entertaining. Directed by Jackie’s fellow master of Hong Kong slapstick, Sammo Hung.


L’Enfer. [Claude Chabrol, 1994]

Labored study of a hotelkeeper consumed by unfounded jealousy over the behavior of his young and beautiful wife: Othello without Iago, as it were. Thus begging unfavorable comparison to the classic teenage gang exploitation drama The Switchblade Sisters [on laserdisc with commentary by Quentin Tarantino]. — Of course, that didn’t have Emmanuelle Beart. — And neither do I, as I think on it. I knew something was missing here.


____________


Why mathematicians can’t get laid (8/23/98)


Pi. [Darren Aronofsky, 1998.]

Another instant underground classic: a deranged mathematician obsessed with solving the problem of predicting the movement of the stock market finds himself embroiled with unscrupulous manipulators, Kabbalah mystics, antinfested circuitboards, and some gruesome fantasies involving powerdrills; all this in deliciously grainy sixteenmillimeter blackandwhite. Does the theory of numbers hold the key to the Secret Name of God? Is that really the girl next door groaning through the walls, or are you just imagining it? Should you buy Anaconda Copper at sixteen and a half? For the answers to these and other questions, enquire herein.


Snake Eyes. [Brian De Palma, 1998.]

Another essay in intrigue from the wouldbe Master Of Suspense that somehow misfires: Nicolas Cage portrays a corrupt Atlantic City cop attending a boxing match at an arena who witnesses the assassination of the Secretary of Defense and thus finds himself propelled into its investigation. The statement of the problem is elegant; its resolution less so. — Much has been made of the beautiful and apparently seamless twenty-minute Steadicam shot with which the movie opens; for the record, this is yet another De Palma homage to Hitchcock, who managed to shoot an entire movie [Rope] without cuts; albeit with much less flash.


____________


Leeloo, continued (8/14/98)


Continuing my explorations of the West side, I found myself Sunday navigating the old dirt road up the mesa behind the Bureau of Standards, cursing the heat and aiming myself and the puppies down the hill toward Skunk Creek, which [mirabile dictu] is actually bearing water these days, a great convenience for overheated dogs and their barefooted escorts. Pausing to contemplate the ancient gas-liquification apparatus, the lodestar of Edward Teller’s fantasies in the days when he wanted to build a liquid-deuterium bomb, I wondered once again what would have become of this capital of political correctness if the Livermore lab had been sited here instead. — Thus did Zeus conspire to cloud my senses. — Coming to myself, I looked about distractedly to determine the whereabouts of the dogs and discovered Boris sitting politely at the feet of a handsome young lady, a brunette with a long braid running out the back of her baseball cap. She was patting him on the head, and he was submitting to her attentions with uncharacteristic equanimity; for though Boris loves nearly everyone [skateboarders excluded] his manners frequently leave something to be desired. — I wondered why she seemed familiar. — As she passed she smiled and said “Hello there” and began to trot up the hill. — Struck by delayed recognition, I turned to say something. But she was already gone.

A lovely voice, I’m sure of that. But of nothing else.


____________


Age of faith (8/10/98)


Acting on a whim that had [in truth] seized me months before but somehow lain dormant and unsatisfied, I stopped at the Music Library at the University the other night and [after browsing openmouthed for a considerable passage among their huge collection of celebrity bios] brought home the as-told-to autobiography of Marianne Faithfull. As usual I’d read the reviews of this when first it appeared, absorbed the essential lurid revelation [Mick wanted to pop Keith], and then forgotten it. But something nagged at me, some unarticulated fascination, probably just the fact that sometime around 1967 she seemed like the most beautiful creature on Earth, and the yen resurfaced as I was lugging a bagfull of screenplays home from the hunt. — So, I learn the following: [1] She was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham who saw her at a party, muttered to himself the immortal phrase “an angel with big tits”, and dragged her straight off to the recording studio [2] She always liked Keith better or at least that’s what she’s saying now [3] She never fucked Dylan or Hendrix she isn’t sure why but obviously it wasn’t their fault because for instance [4] Dylan was still carrying a picture of her around in his wallet in the late Seventies and hit on her again [5] Even she thought Girl On A Motorcycle was a ridiculous movie [6] She kicked heroin more times than I quit smoking and [7] She has a remarkably vivid recollection of her acid hallucinations but not of much else. — With regard to this last: it puzzled me for a long time that no one had ever written the Great American Novel Of The Sixties, until finally I realized that everyone involved had been too stoned to remember anything; and, appropriately, though I occasionally contemplate the project myself I keep spacing it out.

Drew Barrymore wasn’t bad as Cinderella, though the point somehow escaped me: The Princess Bride without irony? Anjelica Huston made a good wicked stepmother, and Jeanne Moreau did a brief [and as always dazzling] cameo, but I think it wanted Wally Shawn and Andre the Giant.

Later.


____________


More life and times (7/26/98)


I don’t recall the story about Dangerous Liaisons/Valmont; I think it was just one of those cases where two guys had the same idea at the same time [or, maybe more plausible, ripped off the same spec script without giving credit — I guess it does strain credulity that Frears and Forman should simultaneously have developed an interest in the same eighteenth-century novel] and one beat the other to publication. Cf., as I said, Relic/Mimic; or Deep Impact/Armageddon. — I loved Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons, in any case; and they said Von Stroheim was The Man You Loved To Hate. — Actually though I think I neglected to mention it I enjoyed The Man In The Iron Mask, at least insofar as I was successful in filtering out Leonardo di Whiningbrat. But, sheesh, Gabriel Byrne as D’Artagnan! Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, and Gerard Depardieu as the aging Musketeers! they should try this again.

I too look forward to Spielberg’s landing at Omaha Beach, though I suspect this will be another one of those cases where I’ll be hardpressed to get through the flick without hurling into my popcorn. — But, you know, the story ought to be told as it really happened, before everyone who remembers it is gone. At this point, strange but true, the Normandy landing is as distant as the Civil War was when Griffith made The Birth of a Nation.

I recall an evening a number of years ago, shortly after I got out of college and came back to Boulder. I was going out for some purpose or another, and had, as usual, packed some books and papers into an Army surplus musette bag with a long strap I’d picked up at a junkstore in Pasadena; and on my way out through the dining room came upon my old man having drinks with one of his old work buddies visiting from Michigan, a guy I knew fairly well from the days before I went off to school, a pleasant enough person but someone I had a tendency to dismiss as inconsequential — as a harmless old faggot, to tell you the truth. So I said hello and we exchanged a few pleasantries and I was about to make my way out. — And then he caught sight of my pack. — To my astonishment, he insisted that I give it to him, and he turned it over and over again in his hands, exclaiming. — And he explained to me that this had been part of the infantryman’s kit when he had been a grunt, and that, in fact [and the hair rose upon the back of my head as he told me this] the bottom of the English Channel is littered with them. Because when the troops crossed over to Normandy, the closer they got to the point at which — seasick, sleepless, terrified — they were going to have to jump out of their tincans into the surf and try to run up onto the beach through a curtain of steel, the more they threw away. Because they knew the most formidable army in the world had had four years to dig in at the top of those bluffs and was waiting for them, and every quantum lighter they could make their burden might make it just a fraction likelier that they’d live long enough to die on dry land. — Dumbstruck with sympathy and admiration, I took the bag back, and I’ve kept it ever since. Nor have I ever been quite so hasty again to judge by appearances.

As for LeeLoo, I suspect her to be some kind of messenger sent by the gods, for a purpose I have yet to fathom. Certainly she cannot be mortal. I note the particulars of each apparition, and study every clue, trying to read the riddle that she poses. As yet the sense eludes me. But I’ll have it yet.

Later.


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Life and times (7/20/98)


I haven’t the faintest idea how to summarize my current situation. The career as a consultant has thus far cost more money than I’ve made from it, and it is firmly established that I can only find work outside of Boulder; within the city, as always, lacking the appropriate contacts, I deliver newspapers. — Admittedly this is on balance more lucrative than consulting, but I’m not enthusiastic about that sevendayaweekonthenightshift routine that puts blear in your eye and slump in your step. — Then again, there’s no alternative. Expect me at the Denver Post at two tomorrow morning. — But expect me elsewhere at the first hint of another opportunity.

On a lighter note, I went over to Chautauqua Auditorium Wednesday night to watch Hank Troy accompany the silent movies on the piano and saw for the first time [after years of longing] an excerpt from the Louis Feuillade serial of 1914, Fantômas: sheer poetry. — Give me a criminal mastermind in a black mask, a sinister plot against the civil order, the bourgeois in confusion and anarchy exultant, and I’ll show you a happy Garbonzo.

The Monday previous while out along the creek with Boris and Natasha I caught sight of the elusive LeeLoo, the mysterious Babe With The Yellow Walkman. She paused just long enough to look over her shoulder and make sure we were following her, then disappeared up Sunshine Canyon. — “An overflowing of the fantastic into everyday life,” indeed. — Forget the job; where did she go and how do I find her?

Later.


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Web pages (7/13/98)


I don’t know what I should do about this. True, it seems that the only point in having a business card these days is to allow you to hand out your URL. But, then, this argues that you shouldn’t have a webpage at all if you can’t use it to make the proper impression. This would mean something addressable directly as www.whatever.com, running my own cgi scripts, keeping my own personal statistics, etc. Under the aegis of Supernet this would run a hundredsomething a month, with a potentially nasty surcharge for downloads exceeding a few megabytes per. [So much for that Pam-and-Tommy Lee subpage that was going to attract all the traffic.] The expense has therefore seemed prohibitive. But nothing less would be adequate for the purposes of selfadvertisement. — On the other hand, web consultants make money. — For that matter hightraffic sites may by now be intrinsically profitable. I haven’t kept track.

Nor am I conversant with the latest in browser enhancements. I used to collect these things and try them out, but, since everything crashed the machine almost immediately, I rapidly lost interest. Even Sandra Bullock in The Net couldn’t make the life of a betatester look interesting. — Anyway it’s all too fucking slow. — So I’m more than a little behind on what passes for website flash; and [I reiterate] the point of this is selfadvertisement and flash is essential.

Moreover when I pause to think about it it seems to me that the usual browsers suck. Unfortunately the exotic experimental jobs seem to have been designed exclusively for SGI workstations [or whatever]. — There are interesting questions regarding threedimensional representation, intelligent search mechanisms, web visualization, and the like. But [as usual] none of this will make you a nickel.

Accordingly: I dither.

I’m fond of popcorn while I’m dithering, and, accordingly, meandered over to the theater this evening to see The X Files, in which agents Scully and Mulder pursue a Truth which seemed to be Out There somewhere in Texas or Antarctica. — Predictably, Antarctica looked more hospitable than Texas; or for that matter Washington, D.C., where most of the rest of the action was supposed to be taking place. — Since I never watch television and haven’t absorbed the presuppositions of the series, I have a few problems with all this. — Why are these people allowed to do whatever they want? FBI personnel, when last I heard, had tedious daytoday obligations to their superiors, their caseloads, the beancounters to whom they submit their expense accounts, et al.; in short, they have jobs. This isn’t consistent with jetting around randomly pursuing a series of intuitive whims. — If Mulder is the most dangerous opponent of a global conspiracy which controls everything from the boundaries of Mongolia to the ingredients in toothpaste and which presumably whacked McKinley Archduke Ferdinand Kennedy King Lennon River Phoenix and Princess Di pursuant to their aims, why don’t they just whack him too? or is there some restriction we don’t know about in the fine print of the lease agreements on those black helicopters? — If the aliens want to take over the world, why don’t they just do it? why bother to cut in the Bad People In Expensive Suits? I mean, didn’t they see Independence Day? — And why does Scully wear that same outfit all the time?

Of course there’s a wow finish: a sort of simultaneous homage to Alien, Close Encounters, and the Carpenter remake of The Thing. — If only they’d got Dan O’Bannon to write it, Spielberg to direct it, and Kurt Russell to star in it, they might have been onto something.

Later.


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Essays in blockbusting (7/13/98)


The release of Armageddon was announced the preceding Sunday in the New York Times by an enormous glossy insert which unfolded into a poster; too large, alas, for my refrigerator. — What can I say? like Julie Brown, I like them big and stupid.

Lethal Weapon Four: — Well. — Maybe not this big. Maybe not this stupid.

Out Of Sight: And rapidly out of mind. — Difficult to believe that this was the work of the director of Schizopolis, Kafka, Sex/Lies/Videotape, et al. So much for the auteur theory.

The Opposite of Sex: Presumably the first third of a trilogy to include The Obverse Of Drugs and The Contrapositive Of Rock And Roll. — Cute and in patches very very clever. Christina Ricci does wonders for babyfat.

The Truman Show: Jim Carrey as, well, The Prisoner. Hardly the work of genius I’d been led by preliminary critical opinion to expect; not even close to the best I’ve seen from Peter Weir, director of The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, etc. — Obviously this would have been much better if they hadn’t given the whole thing away at the outset; just as obviously Hollywood couldn’t have it any other way. — I hope Kafka’s estate turned down the royalty check.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: This tanked so rapidly that when (after only a modest delay) I got around to going to see it, it had already been consigned to the secondrun theater. Mysteriously, the discount house was packed with an appreciative crowd. And, what can I tell you, I rather liked it myself. No one has ever mastered psychedelic cinematography, despite a number of painfully labored attempts; but Gilliam has more luck with it than anyone previous. Johnny Depp is perfect. The cameos are hilarious. And the most memorable passages are rendered exactly. — Also a great and really representative soundtrack: Joplin, Dylan, even a brief hilarious lapse into that skeleton in the musical closet of the Sixties, bubblegum.

The Last Days of Disco: The third in a trilogy [following Metropolitan and Barcelona] by Whit Stillman, the preppie anthropologist. I can’t tell you how pleasant a surprise it was to discover this at the multiplex; there may be hope yet.

Passion In The Desert: Boy meets cat. Boy loses cat. Boy gets cat. Cat gets boy. Boy gets gangrene. Boy loses arm. Boy gains a deeper wisdom. Audience loses interest. Balzac gets paid. [Well, maybe not.]

Sliding Doors: Gwenneth Paltrow either does or doesn’t just barely make an elevator, and therefore does or doesn’t come home from work unexpectedly and find her boyfriend porking a stranger in the bedroom. Thereby hangs a tale; or rather a pair of them, developed simultaneously. This sounds much more interesting than it is.

Alien Resurrection: After watching this several times in reruns, my critical estimate has been revised upward. Though not so visually striking as Jeunet’s Delicatessen or City of Lost Children, still, beautifully designed and composed. Sigourney is great. The plot is fairly silly, but, then, it would have to be, wouldn’t it.

The Fifth Element: Ditto, but somebody ought to put out a contract on Chris Tucker.

Britannia Hospital: Malcolm McDowell in a weird but fascinating comedy directed by the great British auteur Lindsay Anderson [If, O Lucky Man.] Anyone who once sees this will never be able to take an episode of ER seriously again.

A Heart in Winter: Emmanuelle Beart falls for the protagonist; fortunately, he manages to restrain himself from responding in kind. I’m sure we all aspire to such selfcommand.

The Blue Light: Leni Riefenstahl stars in her directorial debut, 1932. An essay in a genre peculiar to German Romanticism, the mountain film; it seems odd that it’s so much better photographed than the run of contemporary climbing videos. — Leni of course did her own climbing, barefoot up rock walls without rope or net. What a babe she was. No wonder Goebbels wanted into her pants.

The Lower Depths: An early Renoir, hitherto unavailable. Based on a play by Gorki, and, not surprisingly, savoring throughout of the leftwing boilerplate of the Thirties.

The Beast: Call this Suckers: Peter Benchley rewrites Jaws with a giant squid and a small fishing village in Oregon. Inferior.

Deep Rising: A really great octopus movie; a better shipwreck movie than Titanic; tongue in cheek right up to the wow finish. With the perennially underemployed Treat Williams in the lead and Famke Janssen [the bad girl in Goldeneye] as the babe.

The Invader: Aliens land in the Northwest and impregnate Sean Young. Not a bad idea. Warm up my flying saucer, Grpzx; I may go slumming.

Suicide Kings: Christopher Walken as, duh, a mafia don kidnapped by a gang of college boys. Predictably, the guy strapped into the chair rapidly masters the circle of buffoons arrayed around him. Amusing.

The Big Lebowski: A personal favorite, though I’m predisposed toward the Coens and forgive them their eccentricities: essentially a parody of The Big Sleep with Jeff Bridges as a clueless LA stoner trying to play Marlowe. John Goodman assists as a loudly confused Vietnam vet. — Bridges is priceless; the fit he throws when he can’t get his cabbie to turn the Eagles off is in itself worth the price of admission. — Is this or Kingpin the greatest bowling movie ever made?

Hope Floats: Ex-cheerleader/promqueen Sandra Bullock discovers her ex-quarterback/promking husband has been popping her best friend Rosanna Arquette on the livingroom rug when they all get together on a television confessional; Sandra and her daughter then leave Chicago to re-establish contact with reality in Hollywood’s idea of Texas. — Thus far it’s been very amusing, but these were only the first couple of minutes. The rest is unbearably tedious.

Killing Time: An action movie in which most of the characters spend most of their time not even talking but staring at the floor trying to think of something to say. Incredibly bad.

Titanic: That perennial Hollywood favorite, a movie that sucks on a really grand scale. Further comment would be superfluous.

Godzilla: Alas, this did not succeed in sucking on the grand scale: the lizards are obviously derivative, indeed, mere copies of the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park; the movie runs too long, thanks to one or several of those structural errors which see to be typical of Devlin/Emmerich [compare Stargate]; and, of course, the essential turn of the plot, that the Big Green One manages to hide from the military in the ruins of Manhattan while we’re waiting for his/her eggs to hatch, seemed to pull me from my seat to shout jibes at the screen about people too dumb to find their asses with both hands. — The fact that this turkey was so rapidly rejected by the popcornmunching public may slow the meteoric rise of the auteurs, and so much the better: one might suggest they try their hands at a few small art movies, and let someone else [say, Hal Hartley or Whit Stillman] destroy New York for a change.

The Wedding Singer: Hilarious. With Alexis Arquette as a Boy George clone and Billy Idol as himself.

Travolta as Clinton: no. But I have enjoyed Clinton as Travolta.

Justice v. Microsoft: I’m betting on Microsoft. Of course in 1940 I would have bet upon the Nazis.

The Big Hit: Another effort featuring The Artist Formerly Known As Marky Mark; a better actor than you’d expect in a better movie than you’d expect.

Barry Lyndon: A Kubrick oldie re-examined on laserdisc, the better, I suppose, to find its flaws. There aren’t any.

Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine: Still hilarious. Somebody should try a remake.

Stalker/Solaris: A couple of the celebrated essays in science fiction authored by the formidable Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. The fact that Fredric Jameson regards these as works of genius says you [of course] absolutely nothing. — Deep, certainly, but not as deep as they pretend to be.

Deep Impact: Rocketships notwithstanding, I still detest disaster movies.

Les Miserables: Good albeit not excellent. Neeson is all right; Uma is luminous. The chase through the sewers is rather disappointing. I could have lived without the teenage romance.

He Got Game: We still await the Great American Basketball Movie. As always Denzel Washington is completely unconvincing as a loser.

Lost In Space: Painfully dumb but on balance enjoyable by virtue of astonishing special effects. Still I think it needed a scene in which Boy Wonder invents Xray vision and watches his sister Heather Graham taking a shower; if indeed she should not play stuff-the-electronic-sausage with the robot. — Do you remember the scene in After Hours where Rosanna Arquette explains that her husband screamed “Surrender Dorothy!” when he got off? I fancy the mechanical man yelling “Danger, Will Robinson!” —

A Chinese Ghost Story Three: after a wait of several years, finally this appears on laserdisc. It is in fact remarkable. The bumbling apprentice of a wandering Chinese sage falls in love with an equally incompetent ghostgirl, understudy to an evil demon who’s trying to train her to seduce unwary travellers. The demon kidnaps the sage; the two have to try to rescue him. Numerous magicians’ duels punctuate the development, which culminates in a fairly impressive Wow Finish. — It would be interesting to see this sort of thing attempted [again; Carpenter didn’t have much luck] with American special effects. — I don’t know what to make of the apparent moral, that dead babes are the best babes. Maybe I should reconsider that woody I’ve been harboring for Lillian Gish.

Operation Condor: Indiana Chan in the Temple of Doom. Memo to Jackie: do this again.

Scream Two: Comment would be superfluous, but I should put on record the prediction that Scream Three will resurrect the film nerd from the dead and reveal him to have been the motivating force behind the slaughter all along. — Or [rather] forward the suggestion to Kevin Williamson and hope he cuts me in for a percentage.

Doctor Caligari: The granddaughter of the original runs his asylum. A stunning essay in production design.

The Replacement Killers: Mira Sorvino assists in the English-language debut of the legendary Chow Yun Fat. — Naturally I attended the premiere attired in a long black trenchcoat. But I didn’t put a toothpick in my mouth. — For that matter I didn’t whip out a pair of fortyfives and slide through the floor of the lobby on my back in slowmotion blasting every glassy surface in the entry of the theater. — A pity. They might have given me a bigger bag of popcorn.

Having heard the fairly respectable English of Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh, incidentally, I find myself wondering how well American movie stars would do in Cantonese. [It is to laugh.]

Mimic/Relic: Actually the same movie: Mira Sorvino chases giant bugs through abandoned subways/Penelope Ann Miller chases mutant lizardmen through the catacombs beneath a museum. An embarrassment apparently to the perpetrators of Relic, who changed the setting of their flick from New York to Chicago at the last minute to try to cover their tracks. — Relic is nonethelesss marginally better.

Relic began as a grocerystore paperback, one which [strange but true] I’d actually read, one winter evening fraught with tedium, and I must say it proved amusing to see just how much excess narrative baggage the screenwriters threw out and how completely they improved the story; particularly in view of the fact that the original authors had so obviously designed their turkey for a movie sale. Apparently no one ever told those morons that brevity is the soul of wit.

Outbreak: I think my Berkeley girlfriend now has Rene Russo’s job, though I haven’t heard that she’s saved the world from any new flavor of Ebola. As if the original weren’t good enough to kill everybody.

Deadly Outbreak: Bmovie knockoff of the bigbudget version shot in Israel and starring Rochelle Swanson. Actually I think I liked this one better than the bigbudget version: Rochelle is a lot cuter than Dustin Hoffman.

Sphere: Pathetic. Big stars, dumb idea, no action.

Wild Things: A piece of trash so superlative that I went back to see it again the very next day. — The barrage of plot twists attendant on the denouement betrays the influence of The Usual Suspects; let’s see more of it. — And who is this babe? if she’d pulled her shirt off in Starship Troopers I might have paid attention to something other than the bugs.

The Sweet Hereafter: The most recent work from Atom Egoyan, the Canadian writer/director of Exotica. This won three prizes at Cannes last year but was not released in the US; at least not anywhere near me. Go figure. — With Ian Holm and the remarkable Sarah Polley, whom you may recall as the child star of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; weird but true, at twentysomething she could now pass for Uma’s little sister. — The best movie of the year until proven otherwise.

Tomorrow Never Dies: Out finally on laserdisc. — A story about Michelle Yeoh: though Jackie Chan insists always on performing his own stunts, no matter how outrageous, to maintain a sort of existential authenticity, he usually won’t allow women to attempt anything dangerous. Except Michelle. There’s a shot in Police Story Three [aka Supercop] in which she jumps a motorcycle onto a moving train; not only did she perform the stunt herself, but she learned how to ride a motorcycle [right there on the set] in order to be able to do it.

Air Force One: I finally got the video and tried to watch it, but couldn’t make it all the way through. Did Harrison Ford rescue his family? Did Gary Oldman die horribly? Was terrorism vanquished? Was patriotism rewarded? — No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.

I saw Das Boot in the the new laser rerelease, incidentally, and it’s still one of the best war movies ever made. What has Hollywood done to Wolfgang Peterson?

Burn Hollywood Burn: Joe Eszterhaz’ version of The Player, though one must expect of course that it will prove inferior in every way. Seems not to have made it to theatrical release; will appear in a month or two on video.

The Jackal: Pathetic, but I watched it a couple of times anyway just to see the incomparable French bombshell Mathilda May. — The laser edition shows an alternative ending: as you might expect, in the original version the girl shoots the villain at the last; naturally, the studio had to amend that. — Ah well: if they weren’t morons they wouldn’t have greenlighted this piece of shit to begin with.

Dark City: No worse than the second-best movie of the year. Before I saw this I had the uneasy feeling that I was being beaten to publication, but, fortunately, the authors though incorporating perpetual night the placeless city and amnesia explained too much [always a mistake, in my view; see Keats on negative capability] and left untouched the themes of the Doppelgänger the femme fatale the descent into Hades the sinking of Atlantis and surf music.

U-Turn: The title apparently refers to a manuever I should have performed in the parking lot as I pulled up to the theater. Is Oliver Stone over yet? I want to go home.

DVD: I keep looking at players, but they seem for the moment too expensive; though the lower price of buyable movies is attractive. Probably this isn’t going to make sense in the near term except as a computer peripheral; when I have another AV Mac that will play videos on a progressive-scan display I’ll look into it more seriously.

The Buffs: I keep hearing the rumors they’ll follow the example of CSU et al. and jump ship to the Pac Ten. I’m all for it. If they start playing football against schools with higher academic standards than theirs it can’t help but straighten the heads of the athletic department. Anyway, they’d have an easier time recruiting in California. And the Dog and Albino can start meeting for those notorious working lunches in the bistros of Beverly Hills. — One or two stories in the Hollywood Reporter and those two will have to face up to the consequences of their liasons. We can only hope it won’t be too late; too late for all of us...

Later.


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Conversations on the plurality of worlds (2/14/98)


Mars Needs Women. [Larry Buchanan, 1967.]

Compelled to seek mates elsewhere by a biological catastrophe which has erased the female population of their native orb and brought their race to the verge of extinction, an intrepid party of adventurers led by Tommy Kirk brave the gulf between the worlds and rocket through the void of interplanetary space to the Earth, to search for suitable female specimens to carry back to the Red Planet as experimental breeding stock.

Landing by virtue of some defect in their guidance mechanism in Texas, they stash their ship in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town, and, adopting protective coloration, set about the hunt — which, predictably, seems mainly to involve hanging around a lot of dimly lit smoky bars trying out lame pickup lines.

Their strange otherworldly hypnotic powers prove irresistible, and in short order they manage to carry off a stewardess, an artist, and an exotic dancer, pluck the homecoming queen of Delta Gamma from the bosom of her sorority, and, unkindest cut of all, seduce to their cause the very chick astrophysicist [Yvonne Craig] on whom the establishment is counting to mastermind the Earth’s defense; leaving the military-industrial complex and a lot of whitelabcoated Movie Scientists baffled, enraged, and gnashing their teeth, and the fate of the genetic purity of the planet hanging in the balance. Oh the humanity.

This cover story about the women dying off on their own world isn’t fooling anybody [though that Martian women would rather be dead than be seen with these guys is certainly plausible], but there’s an uncanny realism in the idea that five geeks like these would have to travel forty million miles to another planet to score, that the uniformed military in all its iconic Cold War majesty would mobilize to try to stop them, and that the media would react hysterically and announce the news with screaming headlines.

And, in fact, the whole thing reminds me of a friend of mine who abandoned the bars of Boulder in midcareer, and, armed only with his copy of How To Pick Up Girls, drove off into the badlands of New Mexico to try to find a mate. [He did succeed, but that’s another tale.]

Weird and funny, at any rate, and not without its moments of insight: “These ties serve no functional purpose,” sniffs one of the Martians as they don their disguises. “The Red Planet abandoned the use of ties fifty years ago...it simply reveals the environmental naivete of the Earthmen.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.


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Mistakes have been made (9/21/97)


The Glimmer Man. [John Gray, 1996.]

International Man of Mystery, sage versed in the wisdom of the inscrutable Orient, invincible Zen warrior, and of course writer/producer Steven Seagal strides coolly through this bloodsoaked tale of Los Angeles serial murder linked to CIA corruption and [all together now] the Russian mafia without so much as breaking a sweat while busting up several dozen wouldbe badasses and reducing the redoubtable Keenen Ivory Wayans to the role of Tonto. — And [what a surprise] he gets all the good lines too. — Why will anyone work with this guy?

In Love and War. [ Richard Attenborough, 1997.]

Sandra Bullock saves Chris O’Donnell from gangrene [and posterity from the title “A Farewell to Legs”], but just can’t seem to clean his bass. War is hell. Thank God for gin.


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Inside the beltway (8/29/97)


Absolute Power. [Clint Eastwood, 1997. Written by William Goldman.]

A few questions: Did Eastwood really direct this? and, if so, why is he admitting it? For that matter why is William Goldman putting his name on it? If the guy Eastwood is playing is supposed to be so smart, then why is he a Redskins fan? What kind of billionaire leaves stacks of hundreds in a closet drawer? the wealthy never use cash, they never need it; is this some kind of political bribe they forgot to write out of the plot? Why isn’t there anyone on the premises? when billionaires go on vacation, it isn’t like the Brady Bunch going up to Yellowstone: where’s that staff of thirty? Why no safe for so much jewelry? And why so much jewelry? Do these people know Deion Sanders? Is Clinton supposed to like to slap babes around? Wouldn’t it have been better if this had been a evil First Lady? in fact isn’t this some kind of thinly disguised hypothesis about Hillary and Vince Foster with the genders swapped to avoid a lawsuit? Why is Hackman adjusting his tie in the mirror when he’s about to rip his clothes off and hump himself senseless on the carpeting? is this the way they do it in Washington? Why is this the most boring sex scene in the history of cinema even after they start beating each other up? Why do the Secret Service guys shoot her dead? can’t crackshot samurai like these guys just wound people? Can Judy Davis make me a gynecologist too? Why does Eastwood show a light in the bedroom window while the bad guys are still downstairs? is this what you expect from a famous cat burglar? Why do the Secret Service guys go down the stairs after Eastwood? Why don’t they go down the rope? And why don’t they catch him? they’re running faster. Why does he run toward his car? shouldn’t he have an alternative getaway route? And even though he didn’t have the sense to call the Washington Post on a cellular phone while he was sitting in the closet waiting for the Secret Service to finish cleaning up the mess, why didn’t he call them as soon as he got home? didn’t he ever hear of Deep Throat?

That concludes Act One. I could ask similar questions about the latter two-thirds of the flick, but other business calls me away. And, sheesh, enough is enough.


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Journey to the center of the mind (7/19/97)


Contact. [Robert Zemeckis, 1997.]

There’s an old cartoon that appeared in Mad sometime during the Sixties: it depicted a scalyfaced monstrosity not dissimilar to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, just humanoid enough that it was easy to read its facial expression and realize it was pissed off past belief. The monster was framed by a television screen and apparently broadcasting a message of some kind. And what it was saying was this: “People of the planet Earth: We inhabitants of the planet Saturn applaud the scientific advances you have made which allow your television broadcasts to reach us here, eight hundred million miles from the Sun. Be advised, however, that if you continue to send us reruns of the Gail Storm Show we will have no alternative but to DESTROY YOUR PLANET!”

And that’s why Jodie Foster goes to Vega. With: Matthew McConaughey as the boy she left behind her [when was the last time a theologian provided the love interest?]; David Morse as The Dead Father; John Hurt as a mad billionaire straight out of William Gibson; Tom Skerritt as a wicked academic; Rob Lowe as a loony preacher; James Woods and Angela Bassett as the Administration’s point men; and [after eliminating Sidney Poitier’s characterization in favor of Gumpkin cut-and-paste] Bill Clinton as the President. Story by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. In a summer fraught with space opera, a serious science fiction movie; is that a good thing?

The development of radar in the Second World War not only motivated a very considerable advance in short-wavelength radio technology, but acquainted many academics who had been conscripted into the war effort with its possibilities: in particular, though low-frequency radio waves are reflected by the ionosphere [a familiar aid to local transmission], the atmosphere is transparent at higher frequencies, and one can look out into space. [Or look back in. This was poignantly illustrated in 1946 when Signal Corps engineers first reached out to touch someone by bouncing radar waves off the face of the Moon.] Thus with the cessation of hostilities scientists began to investigate the possibilities of radio astronomy, and systematic efforts to map the skies at radio frequencies began which continue to this day. Though the most spectacular discoveries in this field, the quasistellar objects, are sources of galactic dimensions at cosmological distances, a parallel interest in local phenomena has grown up as a corollary to the realization that the Earth is itself, particularly since the beginning of television broadcasting, a radio source [albeit a dim one], and that one might, as a speculative venture, attempt a systematic search of the nearby stars for signals at radio frequencies, transmissions deliberate or accidental, as evidence of life or intelligence [but most likely of advertising] on other worlds.

The optimists who dominate the literature of this subject are not usually daunted by the fact that there are billions of places to look in the sky, and that the listener is twiddling the knobs on an infinite radio dial. Quite the contrary true believers insist, in the absence of any evidence for or against, that alien broadcasts will be deliberate and designed to be deciphered and almost certainly fixed on a wavelength with some simple and universal physical significance, e.g., one around fourteen hundred megahertz associated with radiative transitions in the hydrogen atom. Moreover they insist that alien intelligences are sure to be benign in their intentions, and that therefore it can do no harm to call attention to ourselves by attempting systematic broadcasts of our own on selected frequencies aimed at the likeliest candidates to harbor life among the nearby stars. [The giant dish at Arecibo, now a familiar face on the silver screen, could be heard at a distance of several thousand light-years.] — One must wonder whether these assumptions are reasonable. On the basis of human experience certainly they’re not. We don’t stand on the shores of California sending smokesignals to the natives of Borneo, reckoning that, when they’ve advanced enough to decipher them, we’ll welcome them into the international community: we’re right there in their faces digging the minerals out from under their feet, and swapping them television sets so that they can watch Melrose Place. But it’s one of the unspoken axioms of the academic discussion that aliens will be better than we are: that they won’t have wars or the profit motive or that nagging problem with rectal itching; because, after all, they dwell among the heavens and are composed of a purer essence. — Perhaps this is reasonable, perhaps not. In the absence of any evidence, no one can say. — At any rate we’re looking. It isn’t likely that we’ll find anything. But if we did, it would change the world overnight.

And that is Sagan’s story: after a brief prelude which serves to introduce Jodie as a child whose parents die and leave her alone with her radios, we fastforward to the present, or roughly that [actually the part of the story’s argument that implies it’s 1988 has been held over from the novel, but let’s ignore it], and discover her a maverick radio astronomer in opposition to the establishment [Skerritt] who’s dug up unorthodox funding from the private sector [Hurt] to pursue a personal obsession with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which leaves her no time for frivolities like romance [McConaughey]. Since this is a movie, her dedication is rewarded with the detection of a signal from Vega; which, it develops, is a response to [in fact is encoded as a modulation of a reproduction of] the first terrestrial television broadcasts. Embarrassingly enough these were German coverage of the 1936 Olympics, and exhibit Hitler and his entourage saluting the masses with raised-arm salutes; fortunately, the aliens don’t seem to have absorbed the deeper implications of the Nazi fashion statement, and reply not with exterminator rays but with detailed instructions for the construction of a mechanism, presumably some kind of interstellar catapult, into which, it presently develops, some daredevil human cannonball must drop herself to be launched across the cosmos. Much is made of the international search to find the most appropriate candidate, but inevitably Foster, after the discharge of a few subplots, is awarded the honor.

Vega, it develops, is a mere waystation, a local terminus of the galactic subway system; and, after rattling around inside her car for several hours while the automated dispatch system pops her in and out of a series of hyperspatial vortices, Jodie arrives at the center of the galaxy, drops into a virtual reality which looks just like Bora-Bora, is greeted by a benevolent alien dressed up as her father who says some nice patronizing things about the progress the species is making, and then drops back into her car and rides back.

Obviously that part of it had to be anticlimactic. But the denouement, alas, veers straight off the rails: the aliens, it turns out, have provided Jodie with no [direct] evidence of her journey, and the whole trip [moreover] seems to have taken place between ticks of the clock in local time; thus the entire visionary episode has exactly the empirical status of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. This is an embarrassment when the inevitable investigatory committee grills her before an international television audience on her return, but ensures a more complete and satisfying reconciliation with man-of-faith McConaughey, not to mention the wholehearted adoration of the usual mobs of saucerworshippers who believe everything they read in the Enquirer anyway.

On balance, therefore, Contact begs [unfavorable] comparison with a very different kind of movie, the extraordinary film The Rapture [1991], written and directed by Michael Tolkin [author of The Player] and starring Mimi Rogers, which tells the story of a sexually adventurous telephone operator who becomes a loonytunes fundamentalist, remakes her life around the conviction that the end of the world is at hand, goes out into the desert with her daughter to await the apocalypse, makes her version of the sacrifice of Abraham, is arrested and imprisoned, lapses into profound misery, and then [since her faith was indeed the true faith!] as the Four Horsemen ride about her is taken bodily to the shores of Heaven to argue with God His responsibility for human suffering. — Now, even this won’t bear comparison with Kierkegaard. But it’s a lot deeper than Sagan.

Still, in sum: a brilliantly detailed and wholly convincing portrayal of the way our elected representatives would react to a message from space; a somewhat-less-convincing explanation of the methods and motives of the beings who sent it [unfortunately “Einstein-Rosen wormhole” and “magic” mean about the same, and you might ask the Australian aborigine or the African gorilla about their encounters with more advanced and presumably benign civilizations]; a typically imperfect representation of the spirit of scientific research; and a pathetic rehash of the science-versus-religion debate of a kind that was tired cliche before the turn of the century; with, moreover, the consistent subtextual suggestion that the aliens are God and Spielberg their prophet.

But that isn’t what pisses me off. What pisses me off is the Hollywood portrayal of the scientist.

Let it pass that the boys in the lab look suspiciously like the boys in the van in Twister: just the usual happy-go-lucky band of freaks and geeks, good enough to call upon when you need a tornado chased or a missile launched, but otherwise specimens of a lower social caste who can’t be taken seriously and must without question be kept carefully in their place. I’ll put up with that. In sharp distinction to the politicians in the movie, they look like they’re having fun; the fact that wealth, power, television exposure, and regular intercourse with starlets are the unquestioned perquisites of a different class is something that ought to be examined; but, that will have to be later.

No, the problem is Jodie. Obviously it’s dramatically convenient to invent a character such as hers whose parents were lost at a tender age; particularly convenient when the dramatic apogee of the story is a meeting with an alien clone of her father in the Ninth Sphere of the Empyrean. But it is insulting to connote, as this treatment inevitably does, that only someone whose relationships with other people had somehow suffered irremediable damage would ever turn to a scientific career; and not, say, write celebrity journalism for People magazine like a normal person. It appears that the kind of pure scientific curiosity that Foster’s character exemplifies is regarded if not by the mass of men then certainly by the mass of screenwriters as an aberration, something best explained as the result of some sort of genetic defect [that chromosomal glitch, that thing that turns you into a geek] or childhood trauma. — Restraining my fury as best I can, let me state simply that if this were the case then real humans would be depressingly rare, and would have more in common with aliens than with their own species; who would consist, on this argument, of grunting apes with fewer lice. — One must wonder whether this conclusion says more about Hollywood’s view of the scientist, or Hollywood’s view of its audience.

But I probably exaggerate the power of the Dark Side. It would be fairer to say that the flick represents a reasonably successful attempt to make something relatively recondite, i.e. the real current effort to find intelligent life on other worlds, understandable to a broader audience; and that the fact that the way the story is constructed makes it in effect an exercise in talking-down is a consequence less of the bad intentions of the authors than the fact that Sagan did too much television and that Hollywood is a factory town and must almost always rely on familiar dramatic conventions to turn a profit on its product. It’s still worth seeing; not least because the peripheral characterizations are excellent. James Woods in particular is so convincing as a sinister National Security Advisor that someone ought to offer him the job.

As for the question of who I’d select to send as the sole representative of the human race to the galactic core: I’ve considered this carefully, and, if I can’t be trusted with the job myself: I want Jackie Chan.


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Watch out for that tree (7/18/97)


George Of The Jungle. [Sam Weisman, 1997.]

Brendan Fraser as George of the Jungle; Leslie Mann as his mate Ursula; John Cleese as the erudite Ape. One can’t expect much from motion pictures based on old television shows; one must expect the least from one based on the funniest television show ever made. Relative to lowered expectation, therefore, this isn’t bad: almost as dumb as it had to be, and occasionally just dumb enough to be memorable. — George does indeed look good in Armani, and I’m still wondering how they got the elephant to act like a dog. Check it out.

Having chosen to see this with a light heart and clear conscience, I was filled with horror nonetheless when I realized I was going to have to sit through a string of Disney trailers before they’d let me watch it. — Coming soon: Robin Williams reinvents Flubber. — The nightmare continues.


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Dumb, dumber, dumbest (7/16/97)


Vegas Vacation . [Stephen Kessler,1997.]

Chevy Chase takes the wife and kids to Vegas. Never before having stooped so low as to view one of this interminable series, I’m not ashamed to admit that this one wasn’t particularly unfunny. — The morals, presumably, are that one should never sit down at a blackjack table if Wally Shawn is dealing; and that one would be well-advised to avoid any dumb comedy that doesn’t feature Randy Quaid.


Beverly Hills Ninja. [Dennis Dugan, 1997.]

Chris Farley, the legendary Great White Ninja, journeys from his native dojo to faroff Los Angeles to rescue Nicollette Sheridan from some indistinct menace [I think they were supposed to be counterfeiters, but I wasn’t paying attention], stepping on every bananapeel in the hemisphere in the process. Mr. Farley sees to have insisted, I think rightly, on gaining credit for having performed some of his own stunts: who says fat boys can’t dance?


Adrenaline. [Albert Pyun, 1996.]

Cops in biological-warfare outfits chase a mutant cannibal through urban ruins which suggest the Roman catacombs but apparently represent Bohemia and Bucharest instead. Subtitled “Feel The Rush”, as indeed I did: so fervent was my response, in fact, that I passed out in the middle of the chase and never did figure out how Natasha Henstridge got out of this movie alive. — A better question, and one which I trust she’s putting to her agent with the aid of a Zippo lighter and a cattle prod, is how she got into this movie in the first place. I wish her better luck with Species II [now in development.]


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Take two (7/7/97)


Again I paced the path along the Creek this evening with the object of catching Face/Off at the early show; and got to the wrong theater just in time to see Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding. Fortunately this wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected, mainly because the real star of the picture is not the still-dazzling Ms. Roberts nor her toothsome screen rival Ms. Cameron Diaz, but, rather, Dionne Warwick in absentia: were it not for the musical numbers, i.e., the flick would hopelessly suck; but they’re more than good enough to save it. In fact the scene in which three kids sing harmony on “Annie’s Song” in helium-induced falsettos is worth the price of admission in itself; and, I must say, renders John Denver as God intended. You might want to check this out.

As for Face/Off, I’ll get there yet. Stay tuned.


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The man who don’t know fear (7/7/97)


First Strike. [Stanley Tong, 1996.]

Jackie Chan pursues a series of malefactors from Hong Kong to the Ukraine through Russia back to Australia, all in the name of keeping what must by this time be the last remaining nuclear weapon in the old Soviet arsenal from falling into the hands of the Russian mafia and being sold to the Arabs. In the course of this merry sport he dons a variety of funny costumes which tend to make him look like some kind of stuffed animal [the Soviet military uniform included], and, but of course, snowboards off a cliff onto a helicopter, drops off the helicopter fifty feet into a frozen lake, leaps from balcony to balcony down the face of a twenty-story hotel, stages a spectacular fight with props including folding chairs and tables, scaffolding, and an aluminum stepladder which he wields against three or four guys with staves, stages another fight on stilts, thwarts another bad guy by tossing an octopus into his face and pushing him into a tank full of sea urchins, faces down most of the remaining bad guys in an underwater fight in a shark tank in which he has to keep borrowing respirators, and guns a bright red Mitsubishi sportscar off the end of a pier onto an escaping yacht. — Not his best choreography, I suppose, but at this point he’s only competing with himself; and the ghost of Buster Keaton.


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Apologia (7/6/97)


Attempting to address myself more seriously to my duties as house reviewer, I set off down the Boulder Creek bikepath this evening determined to view Face/Off for the purposes of critical appraisal; and, had, indeed, bopped absently three-quarters of the way from hither to yon, thinking the usual pleasantly unencumbered thoughts about programming semantics, image processing, and the advantages of the five-act over the three-act parsing of the motion picture scenario, when quite unexpectedly I encountered LeeLoo, the Babe With The Yellow Walkman, jogging/and/or/jiggling in the opposite direction. Duty and lust warred briefly in my bosom, with predictable results: I turned around and started running after her; not, however, without delay sufficient that she ditched me somewhere behind Boulder High School. Thus we lose on both counts, I’m afraid. At least until tomorrow night.


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Con Air (6/29/97)


Don Simpson having passed from the realm of the merely physical to become pure High Concept, his erstwhile partner Jerry Bruckheimer trudges on alone; nor are the relentless energies that brought us Top Gun, etc. etc., as yet spent. Last year Bruckheimer brought forth The Rock, which set a new low for the design of biological weapons; this year he’s begotten Con Air, in which Nicolas Cage learns what most of us could have told him already, namely, that you should never get on a plane with John Malkovich.

Once on the plane, of course, he can’t get off. — Well, he can get off, but then he has to get back on. — And so on. — And so on. — You get the picture. — In fact you doubtless could have written the picture, though Scott Rosenberg [Beautiful Girls, Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead] is given the nominal credit. In a Bruckheimer opus, however, it barely matters who writes or directs: what does matter is the gunfire, the explosions, the low camera angles and monster lighting which amplify the already considerable menace of Malkovich, and the dazzling variety of chases on land and in the air that lead us on to the signature Third Act Whammy, a truly stupendous planecrash on the Strip in Las Vegas. — Mere formula, of course. But then, Elle Macpherson is merely a woman.

Contributing psychos are played by Ving Rhames, Danny Trejo, and [winningly] by Steve Buscemi, who finds love playing Barbies with a sixyearold: expect him in Boulder soon. The assistant hero is depicted by John Cusack, though hardly with the same panache he displayed in Grosse Pointe Blank. — If Cage and Cusack are now action heroes, incidentally, I don’t know who can’t be turned to the purposes of the genre: I half expect Sir John Gielgud as a Navy Seal before the year is out.

Point of trivia: When Cage and Patricia Arquette first met, she set him a scavenger hunt to gauge the depth of his seriousness. One item he apparently succeeded in retrieving was an autograph from J. D. Salinger. — My admiration for his talents, already considerable, is now boundless. — Question: what would Rosanna require? the skull of Proust?

But lay the deeper issues aside. Believe me, it’s worth the price of admission just to see Malkovich, brandishing a weapon with his best demented sneer, exclaiming “Freeze, or the bunny gets it!” By such moments are the art of the cinema nourished.

Later.


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Travolta with feathers (6/27/97)


Possessed by that desperation that grips you when you’re standing in the video store looking over the new releases knowing that you simply have to watch something, but that you’ve already seen everything that doesn’t suck, I plucked Michael from the rack the other evening, lurched home with a mounting sense of foreboding, stuffed the tape into the machine, arranged my Australian shepherds Boris and Natasha on either side of me upon the couch, opened a fresh bag of popcorn, and punched the go-button. And sure enough.

I wonder, accordingly: why hasn’t anyone taken a contract out on Nora Ephron? surely it must have been obvious that after Sleepless in Seattle it could only go downhill. Maybe it’s expensive, but can’t we take up a collection? mark me down for twenty. And doesn’t anyone care about Travolta? a wife, a girlfriend, an agent, a drug dealer. There must be someone who can chain him in the basement between calls from John Woo.

And why did they have to kill the dog? Even if they brought it back to life, everyone knows: you never kill the dog. Particularly when my dogs are watching the movie with me, but, no matter what, you never kill the dog. Never.


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New Mexico (6/26/97)


My friend and ex-vet [when you keep sixteen goats, you get very close to your vet] Sally and her boyfriend Tom have been building their dreamhouse down in the desert northeast of Sante Fe for several years now; and if they ever make enough money to finish it they’ll move down there for good. But this isn’t my standard Sante Fe story. That one goes as follows: one year in the Eighties I rounded up the usual suspects and got them all to agree to go to the Grand Canyon for Christmas; it’s deserted then, I said, it’s absolutely beautiful in snow, we’ll drink yards of cognac and stagger out in the night and see if we can fall off the cliff, it’ll be great, it’ll be memorable, we all should do it. So everyone agreed and then erosion set in: first one, then another begged out, then we rolled it back to Thanksgiving, then more people found excuses not to do it... . Finally our truck broke down in the Safeway parking lot on the way out of town and my girlfriend and I and our friend Hilary piled into her Volkswagen and left; and let me say that about five minutes after I got into the car I swore I was never going to do anything like that again, and I’ve fairly well kept the promise. But on this occasion there were sixteen hours of Hilary singing along with her Joni Mitchell tapes [never again] with my knees bouncing off my chin [never again] in the backseat of the Beetle [never again] before we did finally get there and walked down to the river and camped out in a continuous drizzle for three or four nights till we got tired of it and walked back out. Then we had to get back, of course. Hilary had a couple of friends in medical school doing residencies in Sante Fe, which provided us with a much-needed excuse to stop and get out of the car on the way home; so we did, on Thanksgiving day itself, as it happened. We called around from a gas station and got directions to a place north of town towards Los Alamos, one of those huge elegant Spanish singlestory adobe houses with big raw wooden beams in the ceiling and a central atrium that served, on this occasion, as a dining room large enough to accomodate the host [a wealthy doctor] and thirty or forty guests, most of them unknown to him and to each other. So we lurched in out of the night, sat down among a large number of mutual strangers, and pigged out; feeling, I must say, pretty much at home. — As it happened I’d read a piece in the New Yorker a week or two before this about Sante Fe, and the author, a fairly acute observer, had mentioned that the natives [meaning as always in the West anyone who’d been there long enough to have a mailing address] tended to sort themselves in a pecking order based on the length of their familiarity with the region — not really based on how long they’d lived in Sante Fe, mind you, since too few had, but rather on when they’d first set eyes on the place: in the old days, you know, when it was yet unspoiled. So, the author continued, all conversations between two persons introducing themselves to one another in Sante Fe tended to begin with a variation on “When I first got here [in 1955] ... .” — So I was sitting at the table by myself, munching on a turkeyleg, and two guys who were obviously strangers to one another sat down opposite me and struck up a conversation. And sure enough the first guy began with “When I first came here [in 1973] ...”, allowing the second guy to trump him with “When I first got here [in 1967] ...” but leaving both of them, presumably, with a sense of shared superiority over the mob of tourists around us, many of whom [admittedly] hadn’t set foot in the Southwest before the parade at Macy’s that morning. — And I don’t know but what these two seasoned desert rats might not have found common cause on many other fronts, had I not interrupted with a loud burst of laughter and told them, without the slightest thought for consequence, that their conversation had been struck from a standard template. They both stared at me blankly as I explained this. Then got up in stony silence, and, neither looking at the other, walked away in opposite directions. — For all I know, they’re still walking.


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Haste makes waste (6/17/97)


Midway through the usual run of summer trailers, a run with which I’ve begun to grow impatient, sure enough, just as I was about to get up and go back to the lobby to try my luck again among the Gummi Bears, lo and behold and cowabunga a huge spaceship began to pass across the screen, a chorus of Brownies began singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and with a quick series of rapid cuts I was treated to a fragmentary but dazzling preview of Alien Resurrection not at all dissimilar from what the screenplay had led me to expect. — Sigourney looks good, somewhat pumped up, I think, for the role, which will require that she kick even more ass than usual; the [strong] second female lead will be filled by Winona Ryder. — This could be fun.

But we’ve got to get through the summer first, of course. And next on the agenda is Speed Two: Cruise Control, which returns Sandra Bullock to the helm of a large transportational object hurtling toward disaster. Her erstwhile partner in velocity Keanu Reeves apparently begged out of the sequel, possibly on some issue of principle or perhaps simply because the screenplay had too many big words in it, and his shoes [a pair of black hightop tennies] are accordingly filled by Jason Patric, who has also been spending a lot of time in the gym lately and can in addition form complete English sentences without swallowing his tongue. — So far, so good.

But since the success, such as it was, of the first picture rested on its uncompromising kineticism [Act One: a bunch of people are trapped on an elevator and it’s going to blow up and they’re going to die! Act Two: a bunch of people are trapped on a bus and it’s going to blow up and they’re going to die! Act Three: a bunch of people [well, Keanu and Sandra] are trapped on a subway train and it’s going to blow up and they’re going to die!] it seems odd that this one starts off so unevenly: in fact, after a fairly engaging opening motorcycle chase Jason and Sandra run off to vacation in the Caribbean and a good ten or fifteen minutes are pissed away while the authors attempt to interest us in a fairly lame rerun of the Love Boat. — Fortunately mastermind computer hacker and leechloving lunatic Willem Dafoe [they killed off Hopper in the last round, Gary Oldman is obviously overbooked, and Malkovich is committed on the other side of the multiplex, who else is left] has sneaked aboard to mingle with the cute swinging singles and the cute fat people and the really cute deaf girl and her predictably selfabsorbed and therefore slightly less cute parents, and, exerting his will over the ship’s systems by directing many wildeyed glares and maniacal grins at the screen of his laptop, seizes control of the vessel and aims it at catastrophe. After an hour during which Patric keeps falling over the side and trapping himself underwater, everything ends well; though not without the obligatory near-nuclear explosion. — Rest assured that no sympathetic character comes to significant harm; and that the dog, as always, escapes without a scratch.

JonBenet fans are again doomed to disappointment: though Sandra spends a moment watching Kubrick’s interpretation of Nabokov on her cabin television and the cute deaf girl declares her undying love to Jason after he rescues her [signing that her next birthday will be her fifteenth], the Lolita subtext is not adequately developed. — Personally, if I’d been handling the denouement, I’d have let Dafoe get away with Sandra and set Patric up with the little girl. After all, no one who enjoys this movie is pretending to be grown up. And why should they?



Incidental note: Joan Severance is up for a couple of Joe Bob’s coveted Hubbie awards for her performance as the Black Scorpion; if you want to make your voice heard you’d better hop on over to his website and cast your vote.

Later.


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Mad dogs and martinis (6/17/97)


Trigger Happy. [aka Mad Dog Time. Larry Bishop, 1996.]

A twisted comedy of manners about the gangwar precipitated by the news that the local Godfather is coming home from the mental hospital. — Richard Dreyfuss as the paranoid-schizophrenic mob boss; Jeff Goldblum as a womanizing shootist; Billy Idol, Christopher Jones, and Larry Bishop as his rivals for the title of fastest gun in the casino; Michael J. Pollard, Gabriel Byrne, Kyle MacLachlan, Gregory Hines, and Burt Reynolds as assorted casualties of war; Joey Bishop and Richard Pryor as walkons; Angie Everhart as the babe tending the door [and she can certainly tend mine]; and Ellen Barkin and Diane Lane as the Everly Sisters.


Swingers. [Doug Liman, 1996.]

A brokenhearted guy from New York hangs around Hollywood with his buddies, trying unsuccessfully to rid himself of the seeming curse his exgirlfriend laid upon him when she left him for another. After recapitulating the misadventures of the early Woody Allen with somewhat lamer dialogue, he regains his selfconfidence and instantly scores. — Not to complain, but just once I’d like to see a realistic version of this story: one in which, e.g., the guy’s friends abandon him as a hopeless loser and he goes ten years without getting laid and finally moves to Wyoming to become a sheep rancher.


Cameron’s Titanic: Today’s estimate is that it’s up to two hundred eighty-five million dollars; and the meter’s still running. What will they think of next.


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Anaconda (6/5/97)


Or, up the Amazon and down the toilet. — Hackneyed though this must sound, Eric Stoltz does, in fact, spend the whole movie in a coma; and this probably does mean he was the only one who bothered to read the script.


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Swamp things (6/2/97)


Gone Fishin’. [Christopher Cain, 1997.]

An abomination: Danny Glover and Joe Pesci depict two intellectually challenged recreational fishermen who leave their native New Jersey for a holiday in the Everglades with the intent of setting their boat adrift on the teeming waters of the Floridas and consuming much beer. Though an hour-and-a-half of Joe and Danny becalmed among the marshes chugging longneck Buds would doubtless have been more interesting, Fate intervenes, and their vacation plans are confounded by an evil, uh, bigamist, whom they alternately pursue and are pursued by until the terminal confrontation. Nothing could have compelled me to sit through this turkey had I not known that their paths of these two heroes were destined to cross those of two babes also in pursuit of the evil, uh, bigamist; and that one of them was Rosanna Arquette. — Alas, I don’t think I saw six and a half bucks worth of Rosanna; and I don’t have to see much to get my money’s worth. — I’d like to meet the guys who pitched this sucker to the studio; they could sell Windows in Cupertino.


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Just like Paul Newman with the Blues (5/14/97)


About two o’clock in the morning, after I get drunk and blow the match with Minnesota Fats, dump my erstwhile mentor, drift into a marriage of convenience with a babe who albeit attractive and intellectual is obviously a rudderless lush, sit through an extremely painful lecture from George C. Scott on the nature and properties of the loser with particular application to me, and finally get my thumbs broken in a dimestore poolgame, I remember why I never make it all the way through this movie anymore and decide maybe I ought to get up and catch up on my correspondence. — If I kill another hour I can watch Tom Selleck play a writer of detective stories who falls for Paulina Porizkova; if I work at it hard enough, maybe I can learn to identify with him instead. — If, if. — As if. — Well, it was a thought.


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A fool for love (4/28/97)


It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out, he says.

And, he continues, I am a fucking rocket scientist. I’m Hermann fucking Oberth. I’m Sigmund fucking Freud. I’m Ludwig fucking Wittgenstein. I’m Richard fucking Phillips Feynman. I’m Friedrich fucking Bubba Nietzsche. I’m the fucking Shadow, who knows what Evil lurks within the hearts of men. I’m the hurtling comet, the masked Avenger, the guy who eats chili and never fucking farts. I’m the Silver fucking Surfer, the herald of Galactus. I’m Mister fucking Fantastic. I’m Ben Grimm, the orangeskinned fucking Thing. I’m the Human fucking Torch.

And she, she’s the Invisible Girl. I thought I saw her. But she disappeared.


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April fool (4/1/97)


Ken addresses Barbie, in the pose of the melancholy lover:


Were there a thought within this empty head
It would be you: your buff-blonde fashionings
Improbable — your form, your stylish things
That fit you for the hunt, the ball, the bed.
I’d fall on you like existential dread
Tear off your several outfits, yank your strings
And bunnyhumping bust the mattress springs.
But surfaces deceive. Within we’re dead.
And void. Our plastic eyes mold vacant stares
Nor beat within these silent plastic hearts.
No plastic fingers run through plastic hairs
Nor plastic organs try the plastic arts.
One cipher to another, out of sight:
As nothing is to nothing, nothing’s right.


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High colonic, low ebonic (3/28/97)


Yesterday I wrote a sonnet and opened a bank account. I found myself wondering, naturally, whether there were many people who had, on the day in question, written a sonnet and opened a bank account; and whether perhaps we all might start a Usenet news group and flame one another for posting off-topic. After that I went to see Ransom at the rerun theater, and eliminated, reluctantly, the Ron Howard theory from serious consideration in the Ramsey murder: reluctantly, because the idea of John Ramsey running down Pearl Street exchanging gunfire with Gary Sinise is an appealing one, especially with football season still several months away. Then I ate a pizza and some ice cream. Glancing over the daily abstracts from xxx.lanl.gov, I discovered I thought I was reading something about “the quartic lovesick tensor”; and wondered, once again, whether women ought to be kept in the zoo.


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Dialing for dollars (3/18/97)


Fierce Creatures: not exactly a sequel to A Fish Called Wanda, but not exactly not: John Cleese, Kevin Kline, Michel Palin, and Jamie Lee Curtis save a zoo from an evil billionaire. Cleese does definitive work on the Freudian slip; Jamie Lee could still stop traffic on other planets.

Flirt: another effort by the remarkable Hal Hartley: three versions of the same story [with the same dialogue!] run sequentially, once in New York, once in Berlin, once in Tokyo. — Not as good as Amateur, but as good as anything else you’ll see this year.

Dead Man: Jim Jarmusch tries his hand at a Western: Johnny Depp plays an accountant named William Blake who rides the train West from Cleveland to the end of the line at a town called Machine [filled I need hardly add with many dark Satanic mills] where he’s supposed to have been offered a job. When he arrives no one will admit to having heard of him. Then he takes a bullet in the heart while shooting the industrialist’s son in accidental self-defense and a band of psychopaths chase him and his Indian guide through the wilderness. — Starts out like Kafka; turns into Little Big Man; ends up as King Arthur taking that last canoe ride to the isle of Avalon. I kept expecting Depp to cast his rifle into the waters to be caught by the Lady of the Lake. — Interesting, but more than a little scattered. — A beautiful piece of blackandwhite cinematography nonetheless. With Lots Of Stars, including John Hurt, Lance Henriksen, and [sheesh] Robert Mitchum.

The Whole Wide World: an odd but original piece about the early Thirties romance between a Texas schoolmarm and the famous pulp writer Robert [Conan] Howard. If nothing else another opportunity to be charmed by Rene Zellweger, whom last I admired as Cruise’s girlfriend in Jerry Maguire.

Zombies From Pluto: Johnny Cocktail’s investigation of the Ramsey murder; Boulder as Alphaville. I should probably hide this under a rock, but the Globe is offering me a lot of money.

Laser Tech Color: after two-and-a-half hours of interviews on Monday they apparently decided I’m too smart for the job, and indicated to the recruiter that they want to keep looking. Though of course if they give up on finding someone dumber they may call back. Go figure.

Meanwhile I guess I’d better talk to the Globe.


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Somebody stop me, before I eat popcorn again (2/23/97)


A Time To Kill. [Joel Schumacher, 1996.]

A video screening subjected to a number of interruptions, which I suppose I might title A Time To Get Up And Go To The Bathroom, A Time To Look For Something In The Refrigerator, A Time To Check For Email And Browse Through Usenet, A Time To Pause To Do The Dishes, and finally A Time To Turn The Television Off And Read.


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A strange adventure of Lemmy Caution (1/12/97)


Alphaville. [Jean-Luc Godard, 1965.]

— Stars Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina [Godard’s girlfriend]. Has a sort of pop-art sensibility; for a while Godard used the working title “Tarzan versus IBM”. — A spy dressed like Mike Hammer infiltrates the Paris of the future [no attempt is made to disguise the fact that this is just the Paris of the present, which says simultaneously that: science fiction movies are actually shot in the here and now, and that we’re already living in the city of the future], which is run by a computer named Alpha-60 [designed by a mysterious Doctor Von Braun] which is systematically turning the citizens into robotic zombies. After a lengthy homage to film noir, Eddie trashes the machine and gets the girl. — A sort of modern remake of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and a kind of anticipation of Kubrick’s 2001. Has been in turn widely imitated, sometimes by the last people you’d expect; e.g. Mel Brooks. Another urtext of cyberpunk. A work of fucking genius, at least so far as I’m concerned.


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Lament (1/1/97)


Somebody told me the other day that if I just kept looking for a job, I was bound to get one eventually. I said Harold Stassen kept running for President, but he never got the nomination. My interlocutor asked, Who was Harold Stassen? I said, when I started looking for a job, you would have known him as a standing joke. And didn't that say enough.


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Porch monkeys (12/24/96)


Walking through the student neighborhood the other evening, I passed a large boardinghouse and overheard a typical group of guys hanging around on the front porch exercising their gifts for repartee. It used to be unusual for people to stand around outdoors in thirtydegree weather, but it’s an important part of the Slacker ethos to hang out no matter what circumstances may oppose it, and, again, though cigarette smoking is once again universal it is no longer permitted indoors, even in houses full of nicotine addicts: plus ca change, etc. [or the other way around.] Usually the conversations you overhear in this fashion are imbecilic and depressing, e.g., the two guys I’d overheard the night before this holding forth on peanutbutter pussy [brown, spreads easily]: imitation Gangsta. But on this occasion out of a clear and cloudless ether I heard someone proclaiming loudly to the laughter and approval of his audience: “Don’t crush that dwarf! Hand me the pliars... .”

From which evidence I suppose we may conclude that, whatever one might have hoped, though the drivein theater, the hamburger that tasted like one, and a general appreciation of the rules of English grammar have fallen by the wayside, such pathetic fossils as mainframe Cobol and the collected works of the Firesign Theater seem destined to lurch forward into the Twentyfirst Century. — And we beside them. Go figure.


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Christmas song (12/24/96)


[To a familiar tune:]


Woke up this morning feeling lame
Had something none-too-atypical I had to exclaim
Last night I met a new girl
In this dismal slum
Uh huh
Something tells me she thinks I’m worthless scum
(something tells me she thinks, etcetera)

[uh...bridge]

I dropped my trousers
A couple of yards
She asked if she could see some major credit cards
I told her Baby
I deal in cash
She picked me and tossed me in the trash
(picked me up and tossed me in the, etc.)

She’s the kind of girl makes your eyeballs squeak
I thought for a moment I was her kind of geek
So I asked to see her next year
And she wondered How come
(I asked to see her and she wondered How come)
Something tells me she thinks I’m worthless scum.

[Witlessly cheerful organ music. Repeat chorus as needed.]


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Way, way over the top (10/29/96)


Barb Wire. [David Hogan, 1996.]

Disturbing rumors had reached my ears regarding the narrative antecedents of Barb Wire, the new futuristic action/adventure/mammaryfixation feature produced by everyone who could get a piece of it and starring the celebrated megabimbo Pamela Anderson (Lee), but I’d chosen to ignore them. My tastes, after all, are simple: I’m fond of these vehicles that serve to introduce the latest B-girls to the virtual drive-in, and if you tell me, as in the case at hand, that the year is 2017 and a dedicated Resistance is waging a heroic twilight struggle against a despotic central government, I’ll expect, at worst, leatherclad punkerbabes careening round the postindustrial ruins of the western deserts in rusting hotrods: boobs and bazookas; Mad Max Beyond Wonderbra.

But big-budget filmmaking is itself an exercise in the action/adventure genre, filled with comicbook characters, colorful explosions, and women whose clothes keep falling off, and when too much money starts chasing an illconceived project, it may, like the stuntman’s motorcycle, hurtle off the road into empty space. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that the Hollywood imagination contains so much empty space: you might strike another planet before you strike a fresh idea; or (more to the point) the appropriate stale one.

Which is to say, alas, the rumors all are true. Barb Wire is a note-for-note remake of Casablanca, with: an evil dictatorship called the Congressional Directorate as the Nazis; Steel Harbor (“the last free city in America”) as Casablanca; an industrial-warehouse nightclub called the Hammerhead as Rick’s; a magical pair of contact lenses which render the wearer undetectable to retinal scans as the stolen Letters of Transit; a conscience-stricken renegade government scientist named Cora D. as Paul Henreid; a bland hunk named Axel Hood as Ingrid Bergman; a slimy hood named Schmitz as Peter Lorre; a corrupt cop named Willis as Claude Rains; a repellent thug named Colonel Pryzer as Conrad Veidt; the last helicopter out of Seattle as the last train out of Paris; a corpulent mob boss named Big Fatso as Sydney Greenstreet; Wild Turkey (thanks to energetic product placement) as the hitherto anonymous whiskey Rick swilled to drown his sorrows; a catchall Daddy Warbucks clone named Curly to stand in for S. Z. Sakall, Madeleine LeBeau, Leonid Kinskey, and Dooley Wilson; and, preposterous though this may seem, an emphatically three-dimensional lady terminator named Barb Wire (the redoubtable Ms. Anderson) as Humphrey Bogart. Who said the fundamental things apply?

Not that this isn’t fun to watch. True, art is usually supposed to be the pure work of the imagination. But then again (as Edison said) genius is at best one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. And whatever the quality of their inspiration, no one can fault the work ethic of our authors, who send vital fluids pumping to the remotest extremities from the first frames of this opus, opening with a stunning title sequence, a flamboyantly-lit rock-video montage of Pam, solo, performing a dazzling striptease while swinging on a trapeze and being hosed down, apparently, by most of the Steel Harbor fire department. — One must admire such uncompromising candor. Feebler characters might attempt somehow to appease the critics. But Mr. Hogan and his colleagues make it clear they have nothing to offer us but blood, toil, tits, and sweat.

This introduction concludes (in apparent homage to Ursula Andress in The Tenth Victim) when our heroine — who is, it develops, performing in front of an audience — takes offense at the attentions of a particularly obnoxious patron and nails him between the eyes with a skillfully-thrown stiletto heel — passing sentence on him with her signature line: Don’t Call Me Babe. Indeed, perish the thought.

I don’t know about Pam, but here I had to pause to towel myself off. When I returned I found the story developing along familiar lines: Ms. Wire, proprietor of the Hammerhead, is an embittered former Resistance leader who moonlights for illdefined reasons as some kind of mercenary/private-eye. Her distinguished position (sooner or later everybody comes to, etc.) ensures that the magical lenses drop neatly into her lap; pursued, naturally, by her ex-boyfriend and his new spouse Cora, who flee, in turn, the evil Congressionals/Nazis. This entails the familiar dilemma: should she sell the lenses for her own profit and fly away to Paris? or give them to the good guys, and let them run the blockade to Canada?

What renders the original Casablanca distinctive, of course, is the ambiguity of the character of Rick, whose intentions remain unknown and unreadable until literally the last moment. Indeed, famously, no one — not the writer, not the director, not the actors — knew how the story would end until they’d filmed one version of the final scene, looked at it, and decided not to film another. Modern audiences, however — not to mention modern writers, directors, and would-be actresses — do not embrace such nuances gladly, and, accordingly, Pam (who is nothing if not unambiguous) is provided with a blinded war-hero brother whose welfare she’d unselfishly be advancing if she were to take the money and run. Naturally this means a way must be found to kill the sibling off before the denouement; but that’s a relatively minor detail of the narrative machinery, which must in any case effect the transformation of the oldfashioned dramatic tension which animated the antique melodrama into the now-essential third-act bloodbath. And they say there’s no such thing as progress.

In the course of this action we explore a couple of beautiful warehouse sets and an elegantly distressed shipyard, observe a number of colorful detonations, learn some really cool twentyfirst century brainscanning interrogation techniques (which, fortunately, don’t seem to have eliminated the necessity of torturing naked women), meet a junkyard dog named Camille with an amusing taste for biker dick, and study Pam attentively as she experiments with a dazzling variety of arresting postures from which to fire her many weapons. At the last, naturally, we welcome the richly-deserved demise of all of the bad guys; and find ourselves trying to take seriously the barely-disguised implication that the Second World War would have been just this simple, had the Allies displayed the appropriate combination of attitude and fashion sense.

The finale, now (in the absence of suspense about Pam’s intentions) a mere coda, is letter-perfect, complete with airplane, rain, umbrellas, fog, and the row of landinglights in the background as our heroine walks off into the night — sans faux-Claude-Rains, of course, who simply doesn’t seem to measure up. (As indeed who could: Tommy Lee must already be perusing catalogs for marital aids.) — And though none of the principals can be persuaded to wear anything so pedestrian as a trenchcoat, given the obvious effort the costumers put into designing leather bustiers, one simply can’t complain. — Again (as I think of it) though I’d have to put a call through to Joe Bob to be sure, I suspect the scene in which Pam leaps from the tub to gun down an intruder while clad in nothing but strategically-deployed soapsuds may be unique in the history of cinematic bubblebath.

Of course the moral of this spectacle is problematic.

What the narrative conveys (I find that I’m unable to throttle the urge to refer to it as the ideological substrate of the filmic text) is, at bottom, determined by the fact that it is a translation of the original Casablanca into the action/adventure genre. Though it’s easy to make fun of this, the exercise is not illegitimate a priori: after all, Kurosawa obtained brilliant results translating Macbeth and King Lear into samurai movies (Throne of Blood and Ran, respectively); projects which, before the fact, might have seemed equally silly.

In fact the problem doesn’t necessarily lie in the idea of making Casablanca over as an action/adventure picture; it lies instead in the rather narrow contemporary interpretation of that genre, which is peculiar to the culture of Hollywood as presently constituted and to the audience Hollywood has trained to share its preconceptions.

For the modern action movie instantiates a sort of demented Calvinism: throughout the gunbattles, the carchases, the explosions, and the slaughter, there are the few, God’s elect, the chosen, who will survive to make the sequel; and the many, the fallen, the mere casualties, who (riddled by bullets, flattened into road pizzas, impaled on meathooks) will not. The former are named above the title, receive gross points, and are profiled in People magazine; the latter are enumerated at the end of the closing credits, get union scale, and are lucky if they’re listed in the Internet Movie Database.

There are winners and losers, in short; and about them the classic statement is now that of Sean Connery to Nicolas Cage: “Losers are always whining that they did their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.” Clearly this is an idea that must seem profound in Hollywood, a town populated exclusively by prom queens and the guys who fucked them.

But Casablanca is a movie about losers. It is set in 1941: the war in Europe at this point has been horribly lost. If there is a prom queen to be found here, she is Paris; and the Wehrmacht is having a gangbang at her expense. Thus the story, insofar as Hollywood could now discover one, is already over; and had no happy ending. The characters who populate the scenario are the powerless — refugees, émigrés, the damaged and the dispossessed, helpless and desperate fugitives on the run; they are not larger than ordinary men and women, quite the contrary, they are eccentric, individual, small, mean — though gradually it may dawn upon us that this is something like life and not like a movie and that these are in fact just like real survivors, the quick and the fortunate who are not the dead. Indeed the purported hero, Rick, is singled out not as the bravest or the strongest but only as the quickest and the cleverest: the first rat to have fled the sinking ship. And though the modern action picture must be constructed around some kind of superman who can walk out into the street and face down, say, the German army, as Stallone or Arnold might, with a few karate kicks and some random gunfire — in fact just as Pam faces down the Congressionals — in Casablanca it is quite the opposite: the supermen are the Germans; they are invincible monsters, beyond the capability of the protagonists even directly to confront, let alone to overcome. Certainly Rick will not confront them; not until the last, and then not by choice.

Worst of all, and most unthinkable, he has to give the girl away. And though it’s always easy, really, to forget the prom queen, it is absolutely impossible to forget Ingrid Bergman.

But the moral of Casablanca is just the moral of the last good war: that one must learn to lose gracefully. For it may be that if you keep your head, wait your chance, watch for your moment, you may not have lost for good and all. That caution, a cool head, and a calculated persistence will eventually prevail, that they are in the end infinitely more valuable than brute strength and theatrical bravado; that even the nobility and élan of a Victor Laszlo, however admirable, can accomplish little against an ultimate evil wielding overwhelming force; that what will finally prevail will be the consistent exercise of rational intelligence, even manipulative cunning — the qualities exemplified by Rick.

None of this is new. In the first action movie in the Western tradition — the Iliad — the Trojan war was won not by the martial exploits of the hero Achilles but by the cunning stratagems of the wily Odysseus. — Though now, naturally, you have to wonder whether Homer would be able to get an agent; and, if anyone were to hire him, what kinds of notes the studio executives would give him on his scripts.

Why does Casablanca seem so alien to the contemporary culture of Hollywood? Perhaps it is no accident that the strutting Nazis who march into Rick’s expecting the best table as the right of the conquerors would not seem out of place in the restaurants where the brokers of the motion picture industry take power lunch. For (in fact) as the theology of Hollywood is Calvinist and its culture is elitist, the ethic of its most characteristic product, the action/adventure, is fundamentally fascist. Thus it should be no surprise that the essential lessons of Casablanca — that diversity must prevail over elitism, democracy over fascism, pluralism over monism — cannot be reproduced in a modern (major) motion picture; and certainly not in this one. There were a lot of blonde bimbos in leather in the real war against the Nazis; but they were all on the other side.

One apparent subtext begs mention: save for the obligatory overhead shot of Barb and her ex kissing in a descending freight elevator (completely unmotivated as always, but, as always, who cares: it’s a great shot), romance is absent, and (in fact) Ms. Wire seems always to choose to spurn her many suitors with fatal gunfire. I presume that this is meant to convey some kind of Revolt Of The Sex Object; with which I’m sure in other circumstances I might sympathize. But, really, when these gestures originate with a character who spends most of the movie changing her clothes in front of the camera, a character depicted by a young woman, incidentally, whose nude poses fill volumes, whose lips are now swollen to the size of bicycle tires, whose mammaries have metamorphosed into silicone footballs, and whose honeymoon video mysteriously materialized on the desk of the publisher of Penthouse on the very eve of the release of this motion picture, these protests lack, shall we say, a certain resonance.

And, indeed, whither Pam? No doubt it is presumptuous to try to guess what inspiration may next descend from Olympus onto the laureled brows of the high priests of high concept, but I can’t help but wonder: Pam as Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, The Wrath of God? Pam as Orson Welles in Touch Of Evil? Pam as Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai? Pam as Erich Von Stroheim in Grand Illusion? But take my vote for this last. I rather fancy Pam the fallen aviator ensconced in her medieval castle: screwing in her monocle, clicking her bootheels, toasting her Allied prisoners in champagne, sniffing sadly at her lone geranium, tucking herself into an amazing variety of corsets. And say what you will about Von Stroheim — that he was a great artist of the cinema, a genius, a grand auteur, a master of mise-en-scene, though nonetheless a spendthrift, a poseur, the selfinvented epitome of European decadence — The Man (in short) You Loved To Hate — say what you will about Von Stroheim, you must remember this: no one ever called him Babe.


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On “Cogito, ergo suck” (7/23/96)


— It’s always foolish to attempt to explain a joke. — But: I think my intention was not to appeal directly to the [firstorder] fans of Beavis and Butthead, i.e., those who think they’re laughing at them because they suppose they’ve finally found a couple of adolescents even dumber than they are themselves [though actually they haven’t], but, rather, to appeal by indirection to those [secondorder] cultural observers who are fascinated by this phenomenon of people who don’t realize they’re laughing at themselves; and, of course, the apologists who don’t realize the people laughing don’t realize they’re laughing at themselves. — I recall, e.g., having heard some GenX analyst expounding not long ago on the ironic dimensions of the Beavis-and-Butthead boomlet: “Just think of it!” he exclaimed. “MTV making fun of adolescent boys! its own core constituency! — You simply can’t imagine the New Yorker, say, doing anything so daring!” — indicating that [first] he’d never looked at the New Yorker and noticed, for instance, the cartoons, and [second] he hadn’t noticed that most of the people watching Beavis and Butthead on MTV, having little or no capacity for the kind of ironic distancing he was projecting, have in effect adopted them as rolemodels. — Because this imagined, this hypothetical, this fondly supposed ironic distancing, so essential to the GenX pose, is completely phony. Isn’t it. — It’s all very well to pretend that those eighty hours a week spent watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island are mere exercise for your sneer. But meanwhile your brain really has turned to oatmeal. And you’ve started to talk like Bob Denver. — So the point isn’t the [real] absence of irony, but the ironic dimensions of imagined [virtual] irony. — It’s hardly accidental that the plot of Reality Bites turns on Winona Ryder’s inability to define the word, for instance. — At any rate, when I make fun of the tendency to overintellectualize, I know perfectly well I’m making fun of myself. — I think too much. And I do suck.


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Ed Wood returns; and other misadventures (7/20/96)


Notes of your itinerant reviewer:

Independence Day: Trust me on this point of elementary physics: if a spaceship is fifteen miles across, even tactical nukes will bounce off it like spitwads from a peashooter; or [more to the point] like spears off an ironclad. — And on this elementary point of film criticism: the only good disaster movie, ever, was Airplane. — A point which seems not to have been lost upon the authors, since what this looks like, actually, is not the movie per se but rather the remake of the parody of the movie, made by some guys who though they themselves may see the joke nonetheless trust that the audience will not: the idea of President Bill Pullman climbing into his jet to lead his aerial troops into the final battle against the invading aliens, for instance, is obviously stolen from the epic swordfight in Hot Shots Part Deux between President Lloyd Bridges and Saddam Hussein; never mind the risibility of Goldblum’s plugging his laptop into an alien mainframe and instantly hacking their operating system [do they run Unix?] — The best comedy of the season, in any case; I only wish they’d gone all the way and cast Leslie Nielsen in the lead.

The Truth About Cats And Dogs: Cute. Cute. Cute. Cyrano for girls; and why not. But isn’t there another way to do it? Why does the homely girl have to win out over the cute girl at the end? Why can’t the two girls decide they don’t need the guy at all and ride off together into the sunset? Why can’t the guy turn out to have been twins all along? or two guys, you know, not indistinguishable, so that the cute guy falls for the homely girl and the homely guy falls for the cute girl... no, I think this is another one that was old when Shakespeare stole it from the Italians... But maybe the guy falls for the homely girl but she decides at the last moment that she really wants his dog, and then Uma... wait a minute...

Twister: Once upon a time, in a darkened theater, in the middle of a tedious expository speech in the middle of an otherwise harmlessly amusing Harold Robbins movie [The Betsy, I believe], I cleared my throat and remarked loudly: “Less plot.” The audience gave me an ovation. Unfortunately, Michael Crichton wasn’t there to absorb this lesson. — Still, the best I’ve seen this season.

Where the Green Ants Dream: Curiously enough, Herzog begins and ends this picture [about Australian aborigines] with footage of a real tornado. But it just can’t compare to the fake ones. Can it.

The Video Station’s Roger Corman’s Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats: I think they shot this in Moscow just because naked women are cheaper there. — Joe Bob himself couldn’t count the hooters in this flick. I had to watch it twice just to find Nikki Fritz; who could have thought this was posssible?

Casino: Great cinematography. What was it about again?

Lawnmower Man 2: Wow: cyberspace.

Sudden Death: Bad casting. — Everything would have worked out much better all around if Jeff Goldblum had been the guy who defeats the terrorists at the hockey arena, and Van Damme had been the scientist who cracks the alien code. — This would, at least, have been equally plausible.

The Rock: No. — Well, actually, Yes. But I wish I hadn’t.

Striptease: Honestly, I was on my way to the theater to check this out when I opened the paper and realized they’d already pulled the plug. — Ah well. Tell Demi to leave her clothes off, and, Better luck next year.


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Correction and amplification (5/4/96)


To quote myself:


Somewhere in How To Stuff A Wild Bikini (at least I think it was that one) Annette (backed by the inevitable dramatic chorus of beach babes) sings the usual soulful ballad to Frankie, stating the usual argument; couched (however) in unusual terms. It begins something like:

ANNETTE: The boy I marry doesn’t have to be a Hercules....

CHORUS (echoing): ...Hercules....

ANNETTE: The boy I marry doesn’t have to be Euripides....

CHORUS: ...Euripides....

At this point, of course — in Pasadena, in the Heroic Age — we all leapt severally from our decaying armchairs, regarded one another with disbelief, and cried in unison: “Hercules and Euripides?!” — The rest of it is lost in the mists of time. But this part’s good enough; isn’t it?

Later.

..................................

Our research department can now report that this isn’t entirely accurate. — The motion picture in question was, indeed, How To Stuff A Wild Bikini. The plot, however, though a variation on the usual themes, marked a departure from the standard development: in this version Frankie, summoned by the Naval Reserve to a hitch in Goona Goona in the South Seas, calls on the services of a native witchdoctor (Buster Keaton, in another of those roles that proved — as if it needed further confirmation — that there is no limit to the mortification Hollywood may require of genius) to dispatch a familiar spirit to spy upon Annette, whom he suspects of cheating on him, even as he himself is enjoying the favors of a nubile (but refreshingly cynical) Polynesian babe. The spirit takes the form either of an albatross or a buxom redhead, perhaps both; I confess some lingering confusion.. — Mickey Rooney makes an appearance; the bogus bikers become involved; complications ensue. — Midway through this merry sport Annette (who is energetically resisting the advances of Dwayne Hickman) receives an uncandid letter from Frankie, who claims to be pining away for her unattended. — Pleased with the tenor of this missive, she turns to her supporting chorus of beach babes, and bursts into song:

ANNETTE: The perfect boy
Doesn’t have to be a Hercules

CHORUS: ...Hercules...

ANNETTE: The perfect boy
Doesn’t have to be Euripides

CHORUS: ...’Ripides...

ANNETTE: Brawn or brain
He doesn’t have to be
What I mean
To say is actually
The perfect boy
Only has to be
Just true
To me.
The perfect boy
Doesn’t have to be a movie star

CHORUS: ...movie star...

ANNETTE: The perfect boy
Doesn’t have to drive a fancy car

CHORUS: ...fancy car...

ANNETTE: Fame or wealth
He doesn’t have to be (? — sic)
What I mean
To say is actually
The perfect boy
Only has to be
Faithful
— True and faithful to me!

Almost immediately, alas, she is made aware of Frankie’s deception. — Even Annette may contemplate revenge: Dwayne Hickman gains in her affections. — We fear the worst.

Fortunately, as was always the case in MCMLXV, the right prevails: the bikers are thwarted, Dwayne Hickman falls for someone else, Frankie and Annette are reunited, the weather never breaks, and no one ever pops a zit. No wonder we all grew up to be airheads.

Later.


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The four henchmen of the apocalypse (2/4/96)


I deny everything. — Or almost everything. — My connections with The Firm, The Company, The Guys In The Back of the Plane, and the Four Marx Brothers are of course known. But you ought to ask why you’d be permitted to discover them so easily. Or for that matter why I’d be permitted to discover them so easily. For we can trust no one. Least of all ourselves.

Again: A.’s address book is a forgery. — I thought you knew this. -- Still, it has served our purpose. The Dog’s henchmen wasted six months trying to crack its code, only to discover that the purported Lost Equations of String Theory were, in fact, plot summaries for the next six months of Days of Our Lives. — They have yet to realize that the plots of Days of Our Lives encode the recruiting strategies the Huskers intend to employ over the next three years. — And that the cartoons that their players watch ... but you knew this too.

Of course the relationship between the Dog and his henchmen is not what it seems.

101, 103, 105, 107, 109. 211, 205. 247, 222, 239. 132, 125, 138, 123, 122. 323. 273 [on vacation.] 262. 165, 152, 153, 161.

In Monte Carlo, in the spring of ’86 ... but you knew that as well.

In the Spring, one may throw the windows open. One may walk barefoot in the grass of Chautauqua Park, and admire the mysterious Babe With the Yellow Walkman in her baseball cap, her shorts, and her jogbra. One may throw the animals out of the house, and take breath that is not heavy with the odor of catshit. It is warm in the Spring, and the pipes do not burst.

What was it he said? I think it was this:

“After all, one man, trying for the Pole, in the dead of winter. They thought I was insane. Possibly I was, by that time. But I had to reach it. I had begun to think that there, at one of the only two motionless places on this gyrating world, I might have peace to solve Vheissu’s riddle. Do you understand? I wanted to stand in the dead center of the carousel, if only for a moment...... I’d begun to dig a cache nearby, after planting the flag. The barrenness of that place howled about me, like a country the demiurge had forgotten. There could have been no more lifeless and empty place anywhere on earth. Two or three feet down I struck clear ice. A strange light, which seemed to move within it, caught my attention...... If Eden was the creation of God, God only knows what evil created Vheissu. The skin which had wrinkled through my nightmares was all there had ever been. Vheissu itself, a gaudy dream. Of what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation.”


Obviously this weather is getting on my nerves.


____________


Exile on Main Street (1/19/96)


Bride Of The Monster. [Edward D. Wood Jr., 1955.]

In a gloomy dismal swamp in the deep dark woods, in a lonely Gothic mansion over which hovers a perpetual thunderstorm [“Maybe it’s all those atom bomb tests,” somebody suggests helpfully], lives mad scientist Bela Lugosi with his boon companions the mute giant Tor Johnson and a giant octopus. Here he experiments on unwary visitors in his secret laboratory — freezing them in the headlights with his mesmeric influence, strapping them to an operating table, sticking electrodes into their heads, and, by dint of much hurling of switches and twirling of giant radio knobs, trying to turn them into atomic supermen. Unfortunately, this usually results in their being turned into atomic burnt toast instead, but faint heart ne’er won fair maiden Cosmic Truth, let alone world mastery, and the intrepid Lugosi undaunted soldiers on; until, alas, nosy girl reporter Loretta King comes sniffing around, gets her bony ass captured and tossed in the dungeon, and prompts a charge to the rescue by dumbass cop boyfriend Tony McCoy — which, despite his getting bounced around the walls by the gigantic Johnson, necessarily precipitates a chain of events which can only end in general cataclysm and the tragic demise of Lugosi — devoured, I regret to report, by his multitentacled pet.

Wood’s formidable reputation notwithstanding, this picture doesn’t suck: it is quite as good as any other specimen of Bmovie scifi from the drivein era — better photographed, for example, than the equivalent Cormans; and though most of the writing exhibits that tin ear for dialogue for which Ed was famous, Lugosi does get off at least one great speech [meticulously reproduced by Martin Landau in the Tim Burton biopic] which says just about as much about silence, exile, and cunning as you can expect this side of James Joyce.

A certain mystery lingers nonetheless around the setting of the action, which is variously intimated to lie in the Midwest, the Louisiana bayou, and the jungles of the Amazon; and somebody, really, ought to explain what that refrigerator is doing in Lugosi’s laboratory. — When a mad scientist needs a pickmeup, what does he reach for? chilled vodka? cappucino? carrot juice? the blood of teenaged virgins? Enquiring minds want to know.


____________


Babes with big lips (1/5/96)


In a fit of Angst last night I stopped by the neighborhood video store and rented a triple feature so dismal I’ve already forgotten most of it. The centerpiece, however, was that new classic of the silver screen, Showgirls [Paul Verhoeven, 1995], for which the celebrated screenwriter Mr. Eszterhas got an enormous amount of money. I’m sure you can see every penny on the screen, but the subtle development of plot and character that justified this expenditure must have escaped me while I was fastforwarding through the last half of the movie, trying desperately to find the denouement. In fact, there was an ugly moment there when I thought the thing really was interminable, and that I would be doomed to view it for all time to come, probably as punishment for all my past defenses of abominable B-movies. — Though it is, of course, interesting to discover that it’s possible to make a movie so bad that you can’t even watch the fuck scenes. — But don’t take my word for it. By all means check this out yourself; I suggest sometime toward the end of the twenty-first century.


____________


Purple death from outer space (12/7/95)


I went down to the Saint James Infirmary
To see my baby there.
She was lying on a long white table
So pale. So cold. So fair.


............


Ming [flinging the lever that launches the fiery projectile]: I’ll crush all those who dare to balk me in my determination to conquer the universe!

Dale [seeing it in flight, throwing an arm before her eyes]: Oh Flash, it’s terrible!

Flash [grimly reflective]: Ming’s first harbinger of death...


............


... a heart attack. Apparently by fax from Neptune. I came back from an errand in the early evening and found her fallen back upon the couch with her headphones on, torso slightly twisted, lips slightly blue; her dog barking at her, trying to convince her to get up. — At such times, I observe, the certain knowledge of fatality is immediate and instinctive, and the silly shit you see in the television shows [CPR, atropine, paddles, action, excitement, snappy dialogue with girls with big hooters] seems completely pointless. — I tried to revive her; dialed 911 on automatic pilot; watched the EMTs go in and go out; explained everything to the cops, the coroner, and the victim assistance ladies; called her friends and her parents; and never once, not then and not for days, had I the sense that I was other than walking in my sleep...


...............


Mad Scientist [rubbing his hands together and cackling]: In your laboratories, Sire, I have perfected the Death Dust!

Ming: Perfected?! Hah! It is already capable of killing every living creature; of depopulating the universe!

Mad Scientist: That’s just it, Sire ... at present it kills everything! everybody! ... Wouldn’t it be better, Sire, if the Purple Death spared those millions of slaves to labor for you, and killed only those with intelligence enough to oppose you?

Ming: You can name your own reward if you can prove this to me...


.............


We wish to know how the conception of death will transform a man’s entire life, when in order to think its uncertainty he has to think it in every moment, so as to prepare himself for it. We wish to know what it means to prepare for death, since here again one must distinguish between its actual presence and the thought of it. This distinction seems to make all my preparation insignificant, if that which really comes is not that for which I prepared myself; and if it is the same, then my preparation is in its perfection identical with death itself.

[Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript.]


..............


Let her go, let her go
God bless her
Wherever she may be
She can search the wide world over
And never find a man like me.


...............


... I’d long thought it a sophomoric triviality, you know, that existentialist sentiment that you always, as it were, drop dead in the middle of a sentence. But, like most sophomoric trivialities: it’s true...


.............


Mad Scientist [indicating his two experimental subjects]: This man of low intellect has the type of mind that is easily controlled by a superior will ... and this man has the type of thinking brain that exercises a will of its own! the type we must destroy!

Thinking Man: Sire! there is no dictator in the universe powerful enough to destroy — human thought!

Ming [clearly impatient]: Place them in the Dust Chamber!


...............


Figure and ground. — The patch of white, surrounded by black.


...........


When I die dress me in straightlace shoes
Boxback coat and stetson hat
Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So the boys will know I died standing pat.


____________


The importance of being Cindy (11/11/95)


“He's a cop on the edge. She's a woman with a dangerous secret. And now they're both...”

Fair Game. [Andrew Sipes, 1995. Written by Charlie Fletcher; after a novel by Paula Gosling.]

Joel Silver does it again: Type A legal eagle Cindy Crawford is jogging down the beach one sunny afternoon when abruptly somebody [surely it couldn’t be a critic] starts shooting at her, which gets her hauled off to the police station to file a report, where she is granted a rather perfunctory interview by Billy Baldwin [after — I’m sure you’ve never seen this before — he disarms a psycho suspect who grabs a gun and starts blasting in the stationhouse] just long enough to establish that lawyers are amoral scum who let criminals go free, the Florida police are corrupt fascist tools on the take, and [what a coincidence] that he’s just split up with his girlfriend Salma Hayek, who drops by to register a protest against his dilatory approach to moving out by dumping a truckload of his personal possessions in the street. Meanwhile Dan Hedaya walks briefly through the scenario as a scumbag lawyer [indeed he is to the manner born], but, in a testimonial to his own good judgment, keeps right on going; and some very unsavory characters with Russian accents are doing something nefarious in a rusty old freighter off the coast — which, I guess, entails whacking our heroine. We repair to her beachside mansion, which sports a lot of brightly lit windows before which she habitually parades in a state of undress; here Baldwin happens by with some unfinished paperwork just as the bomb some Slavic humorist planted in her television goes off, blowing her off the balcony and into the pool. Baldwin deters the wouldbe assassin from finishing her off with machinegun fire by flying through the air firing his forty-fives just like Chow Yun Fat. "Whoever's after you, they're real pros," he remarks. “It would be embarrassing to be killed by amateurs,” she replies. How true. Having thus officially Met Cute, our protagonists repair to a safehouse, where they remain undiscovered just long enough to start taking the first of a long series of showers. Alas, the cunning Russian fiends have been busily filling their computer screens with Unix pathnames in Cyrillic characters, hack into the legendary Pizza Database, and then into the delivery guy himself [“My pizzas are getting cold!” he protests when they cut him off — "And so are you," says the hitman], with the result that Billy has to dash out of the shower and run around a darkened apartment naked with his gun in his hand [and surely there must be a song in that.] At any rate they now realize They Can Trust No One, and after that they're young, they’re beautiful, they’re on the road and on the run in a stylized southFloridian landscape with palm trees and skies so heavily filtered they look like a fucking Tiffin filter ad on the back cover of the American Cinematographer, their tshirts are torn, their faces are streaked with photogenic dirt even though the action grinds to a halt every few minutes so that they can take more showers, they bark at one another testily right up to the point at which they abruptly start sucking face and clawing each other's clothing off, they're harried by gunsels and must shoot back, they keep leaping toward the camera away from explosions behind them which fill the sky, the cops are after them, the Russian mob is after them, the geeks at the computer store are after them, the world pursues them and they must fly, fly, to the round earth’s imagin’d corners, where they’re chased through the locker room of the Miami Dolphins’ cheerleaders by a truckload of pigs and an FBI guy who has to be a phony because he smokes cigars... . — Sheesh, I think they really sank that rusty old freighter. Was that the terminal whammy? — And in the dismal annals of supermodel movie debuts, was this even close to being the worst? — "It's all right," he says, "it's over." One can only hope.


____________


Quest for dirt (8/23/95)


Waterworld. [Kevin Reynolds, 1995.]

After a new deluge [preceded, presumably, by some unspecified holocaust, but who’s keeping score] has drowned the world, webfooted misanthrope Kevin Costner sails around in an outrigger looking for the lost legend of dry land; accompanied, to his considerable annoyance, by toothsome refugee Jeanne Tripplehorn and a cute little girl with a map tattooed on her back [yes, it is a Clue] and pursued by the minions of piratical evildoer Dennis Hopper, who smokes cigarettes and sports an eyepatch. Mankind having reverted if not to savagery then to a somewhat rusty re-enactment of the Bronze Age, functioning machinery is rare [thus an occasion for theft, thus mainly in the hands of the buccaneers], and everybody dresses in rags. — This is, in other words, Mad Max in Polynesia, complete with weird cargo-cult religious rituals, deranged bikers on distressed jetskis, dredlock hairdos, a lot of recycled naval wreckage, windmills, homebrew stills, many native eccentrics [indeed everyone seems a few shrimp short of a salad], crossbows, chain mail, and harpoon guns, a lot of climbing up into the rigging [unaccompanied, for once, by mutterings of “avast, me hearties”], not much in the way of fresh vegetables, the usual weirdo flying around in a balloon, a few unconvincing hints at colorful barbaric practices like rape, pillage, and torture for sport, and guys in funny hats, and probably lacks only Frankie and Annette and a cameo by Dick Dale and the Deltones to keep it from sailing off into worldgirdling Ocean and falling off the edge of the earth.

The joke, of course, is that the Road Warrior movies represented an inspired answer to the question of how to shoot an action movie for next to nothing [no wonder they engendered a thousand imitations], whereas this piece of shit somehow cost two hundred million dollars. Somewhere George Miller is laughing his ass off.


____________


The evil twin (7/21/95)


“In our case, if we had now grown serious, it was because each of us was living under the sign of his own fate — not in the shadow of a guardian angel, nor hidden in the folds of his robe, but as if at the feet of his own double which was detaching itself from him little by little to take on a bodily and material form. They were strange projections of ourselves, these new beings, and they absorbed us to the point where we lived them as in a new skin, to the point of complete identity, and our final preparations were not unlike the process of putting finishing touches to these frightful, pride-ridden automata known in magical lore as Teraphim. Like them, we were going to destroy a city ... .”

[Blaise Cendrars: Moravagine. Chapter K.]


____________


Miller in Hollywood (5/13/95)


“...much of Miller’s time was spent ... in enjoying the unique possibilities afforded by Hollywood. The puritan reactionary in him disapproved of the place and everything it stood for, and he frequently expressed the hope that the Japanese would bomb it flat; on the other hand he was fascinated by its vulgarity and the freakish behavior of its inhabitants. In one of his notebooks he refers to tales he heard of movie-stars so fed up with the spread of syphilis and the frequency of blackmail that they had abandoned human intercourse completely in favor of elaborate sex machines. He was especially struck by the story of one man who had shot himself dead in front of a mirror while wearing some sort of masturbatory device on his penis.”

[Robert Ferguson: Henry Miller.]


____________


Henry Miller (5/11/95)


“[Rimbaud] is certain that when he gets to his destination he will find suitable employment. He is sure of himself, everything will go well. He is young, full of high spirits, and there is so much to see in this great world. It does not take long for the tone to change. For all the verve and ebullience he displays, for all his willingness to work, for all that he possesses in the way of talent, ingenuity, doggedness, adaptibility, he discovers before very long that there is really no place for a person like himself anywhere. The world does not want originality; it wants conformity, slaves, more slaves. The place for the genius is in the gutter, digging ditches, or in the mines and quarries, somewhere where his talents will not be employed. A genius looking for employment is one of the saddest sights in the world. He fits in nowhere; nobody wants him. He is maladjusted, says the world. With that, the doors are rudely slammed in his face. But is there no place at all for him, then? Oh, yes, there is always room at the very bottom. Have you never seen him along the waterfront loading sacks of coffee or some other ‘necessary’ commodity? Have you never observed how well he washes dishes in the kitchen of a filthy restaurant? Have you never seen him lugging bags and valises at the railway station?”


Modesty forbids that I should extend this rhetorical litany to janitorial work and newspaper delivery, but modesty, of course, was never Miller’s strong suit: by the next paragraph he’s segued seamlessly into his own memoirs, recounting his experiences scorching hash and scouring plates, and Rimbaud disappears from the narrative for several pages.

I loved it anyway, of course.


____________


Disciplinary action (5/11/95)


While walking with the dogs this morning on the Flagstaff trail, three young ladies came jogging up toward us from the general direction of civilization. All of them, I’m afraid, had been smitten mightily by the mammary stick, and one could only hope their jogbras had not slipped past warranty, since, given the severity of their affliction, embarrassing accident was a real and present danger. — Boris, as is his wont, picked out the leader and did his best to knock her down and lick her face; I restrained him after a decent interval [one just sufficient to discover whether he might, in fact, occasion some such embarrassing accident.] — And chewed him out, of course; vehemently. — He simply doesn’t listen. — Time and time again I have told him: Not the first one; the one with the biggest boobs. — And she was certainly the third. — I don’t know what I’ll do with this dog. I just don’t know.


____________


Desperate living (4/12/95)


Is it necessary to be so defensive? Do you seriously maintain that you cannot write something as good as, say, Cliffhanger? Tango and Cash? The Last Boy Scout? Come on.

The real problem with the screenplay as a form, actually, is that you don’t generally get the opportunity to write one, shoot it, and compare the result with your original intention. And if you don’t then absent feedback you’re just guessing: as, in fact, the people who read it are guessing, the bozos who take the Very Significant Meetings are guessing, the dorks with the red and the green lights and the bags full of money are guessing. Hardly anyone is born knowing how movies work — Renoir, Welles, Kurosawa — and, of the rest who try to write them, hardly anyone gets the chance to figure it out: Woody Allen, John Sayles. — Why, then, do so many seem to think they know? Why is Eisner powerful? Why is Shane Black rich? — Fuck it, John. Give us a few babes and a camera, and we’ll make our way.

But not this week I guess.

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was a romance Sir Philip Sidney wrote as an entertainment for his sister. It was a bestseller for a couple of centuries: an enormous specimen of Elizabethan prose [over eight hundred pages in my edition] which opens with a shipwreck which casts the two protagonists upon a rustic Grecian shore. They immediately adopt different identities, and, engage in swordplay, disguise themselves as women to insinuate themselves into the society of the babes with whom they are smitten, poetize incessantly in a baffling variety of schemes and meters, argue about the constitution of the ideal State, chase the babes some more, engage in further jousts and swordplay while x falls for y disguised as z in order to get to w who’s unaware that q is interested in pursuing r, s, and probably t as well if he can get away with it ... probably the most complicated plot in history. — I had the theory the Great American Hippie Novel ought to be like Arcadia [though of course it would instead be California.] But I seem to have lost interest in that project. [And anyway, as they say, if you can remember the Sixties, you couldn’t have been there.]

Sir Philip had a remarkable style. It’s worth a glance for that reason alone.

Anyway. — Last night I ran into a couple of people I’ve known fairly well over the last two or three years, students, a couple of long standing: Jason; Kay. They used to be supervisors on the night security crew, but they both quit last semester and I hadn’t seen them for a while. — But, as it happened, we’d been sitting at adjacent tables in the student union for a couple of hours before, my business concluded, I got up and walked over to talk. — “Are you tutoring now?” asked Kay. I must have told her I’d been considering it. — “Well,” I said. “I was intending to. I wanted to be systematic and mercenary about it. But I haven’t really gotten round to it, you see, it’s just that this incredible bombshell” — gesturing after the receding Angela — “seemed to want me to help her with her calculus.” I shook my head. “Somehow I couldn’t resist. I have no character.” — And at this they laughed. Very loudly. — For they’d seen, of course; they’d seen it all.

And, you know, I have to admit: when I came through the Northeast door to meet her in the grill and turned around the corner and found her waiting for me, I have to admit — I have to admit — I didn’t care whether she was nineteen or not. All I could think was how absurdly beautiful she was. Holy shit.

And you think you’re stupid.


____________


Fatal abstraction (4/9/95)


Yes. But somehow “Two Gentlemen of Veronal” sounds familiar. Of course, a page picked out of One Million Random Digits would probably sound familiar, at this end of the week. — You remember that one: Raquel Welch plays a Berkeley mathematician trying to find the flaw in a random-number algorithm, and parachutes into the Riviera in pursuit of those desperate agents of a foreign power she discovers are responsible for the introduction of a hidden bias into the war-game simulations employed by the CIA to determine the fate of the nation. Disguised as rampaging dinosaurs, they rip her clothes off and chase her along the beach through the plots of three Frankie-and-Annette movies before cornering her on a high rock at sunset; where, in an memorable speech largely stolen from Euripides, she calls down the wrath of the gods upon them, their progeny, and their theatrical agents for all generations to come. — With a rewrite to get some snappy contemporary dialogue into it [“Freeze, motherfucker; or I'll have to blow your face off and call Harvey Keitel”] it could be a natural for Elle. What do you think?


____________


The seven ages of man (4/1/95)


Nineteenyearolds are the babysitters who change your diapers. They giggle at your infant boners. This is embarrassing.

Nineteenyearolds are older women who ignore you. They giggle at the sophisticated conversation of older guys while you attempt vainly to obtain their attention. This is embarrassing

Nineteenyearolds are your coevals and do not ignore you. They giggle at your maladroit attempts to hit on them. This is embarrassing.

Nineteenyearolds are younger women who hit on you. They giggle at your lamest jokes. This is embarrassing.

Nineteenyearolds have begun to remind you of your friend’s daughters; if not indeed your own. Nonetheless you find you can’t stop hitting on them. They giggle at your discomfiture. This is embarrassing.

Nineteenyearolds are little girls at whom you leer toothlessly as you hobble through the park. They giggle at the bubbles of drool that form at the corners of your mouth. This is embarrassing.

Nineteenyearolds are the nurses’ aides who change your diapers. They giggle at your ancient boners. This is embarrassing.


____________


Angela (3/25/95)


Indeed: what parts terrestrial? what parts ethereal?

As John Donne might have put it: the Schoolmen taught us base matter was drawn down toward the center of the world, while the finer essences, the stuff that dwelt in the celestial spheres, bobbed up toward the Empyrean.

And thus is framed the paradox: her most substantial parts defy the pull of gravity; the carnal pull upon my eyes an emanation from angelic orbs.

Or as Garbonzo once phrased it: “With floats like these, she needn’t fear death by water.”


____________


Second derivative (3/21/95)


In re the Band of Gypsies, it’s difficult to think of any band which included Buddy Miles as having been solid. Though certainly corpulent. — Of course, they did cut “Machine Gun”.

Umberto and I await your memoirs of the Brazilian/Italian babe.

As for Miss Wonderbra: rest assured you’ll have first option on the expose, whether fact or fiction. Suffice it for the moment that it’s difficult to keep a straight face when you’re lecturing a babe of these dimensions on the taxonomy of curves: just where they swell, and where subside; just where convex, and where concave. Again, it didn’t seem impossible that I might swoon, should she stretch at an inappropriate moment. But the Shade of Leibniz stood by me in my hour of need: I steered an even course between the Scylla of dementia and the Charybdis of hypoxia, and brought my bark home safe to the farther shore. Where let me lie face down in the sand for a day or two while I attempt to recover my composure. Holy shit.

Chocolates might not be a bad idea. A bit like Gump, I suppose; but, then, I feel like an idiot. Let’s see if she calls me back.

Later.


____________


Maxima and minima (3/19/95)


In re your remarks on The Conformist: somehow the picture of Johnny Cocktail [“I’m a critic”] showing up [presumably in trenchcoat] at the premiere of an Italian left-wing movie with a bombshell of mixed provenance on his arm conjures up the milieu of Foucault’s Pendulum; making me wonder, naturally, whether Umberto Eco read your memoirs. After all, he seems to have read everything else.


Miss Wonderbra batted her eyelashes at me this morning and I agreed to drop by Farrand Hall at two a.m. Tuesday to help her out with Chapter Three. — I don’t believe myself. — Am I this shameless? — Is she that gorgeous? — After three centuries of misuse, can the calculus at last find application as a tool for picking up babes? — How would Wittgenstein have analyzed my motives in this situation? — And if I’ll do this when she bats her eyelashes, what would I do if she took a deep breath?

Stay tuned.


____________


Will work for food [albeit not qualified to eat] (3/7/95)


I hadn’t thought of it previously, but it now occurs to me that that projectile-vomit trick made famous by young Linda Blair in The Exorcist may have practical application in everyday life, particularly if you spend much of your time in the University personnel office trying to fill out employment applications. Bad enough that my mind should go totally blank for halfanhour over a question like What was the fifth-from-last job I held, but, then, to come back to the desk at the conclusion of the exercise, hand the completed atrocity over to the imperfectly-programmed bimbette who presides over these follies, and then discover that I’m not qualified [for instance] to do exactly what I’m doing at the moment — ah well. At moments like this you’d like to be able to spew chunks on command.

Tutoring does seem a possibility, though I can’t picture this as a steady income; there are, again, positions for instructors at the college-board cram schools [the Princeton Review, e.g.] — Unfortunately though these last are, of course, easily impressed by perfect scores on the GREs, they still want to see a resume; and they most certainly do not want to be presented with the evidence that test scores and employability have no correlation.

No doubt the truth was supposed to make us free; but that was on another planet, the one from which we were kidnapped in infancy. Here only lying as loudly and rapidly as possible will keep us out of the breadline. — Accordingly: I downloaded a few dozen sample resumes, the better to generalize from examples. And I’ll piece something together. Hopefully it will be plausible. But it certainly will not be accurate.

Pardon me if I conceal my enthusiasm. But I might have been happier on that other planet.


Meanwhile I continue to brood upon the mysterious appeal of the Bs. — Perhaps it’s simply that the movies represent a dialectic of Art and Sleaze, and the dramatic tension between the two poles is most effectively accentuated when the conflicting tendencies are carried to [preferably ridiculous] extremes.

Or maybe it’s just those babes. — Favorite B girls:

[1] Eszther Balint. Save for a walkon in Shadows and Fog, she has appeared, as best I can determine, in only three films: Stranger Than Paradise [the first feature by Jim Jarmusch]; Bail Jumper [a guy and a girl on the run — tornadoes — floods — a plague of locusts — their car is struck by a meteorite — finally a tidal wave destroys New York City]; and The Linguini Incident [as the bosom buddy of Rosanna Arquette.] But with credits like these, she can retire.

[2] Elizabeth Kaitan. The blonde cavegirl in Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity; star of such classics as Assault of the Killer Bimbos and Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force. Kabong.

[3] Mathilda May. In principle a serious actress, by virtue, e.g., of her presence in a Werner Herzog flick. But too beautiful, really, to be credible as such. — I direct your attention to Lifeforce , Tobe Hooper’s magnum opus about naked vampires from outer space. — Bring your own refreshments. And be prepared to change your shorts.

[4] Brinke Stevens. Also in Slave Girls. She now has her own website, her own comic book, her own video anthology [Shock Cinema], and at this rate will probably be editing her own journal before we know it. — If so, I’m planning a submission.

[5] Victoria Vetri. Playmate of the Year in 1968 and subsequent star of Invasion of the Bee Girls and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. They don’t make them like they used to.

[6] Monique Gabrielle. Amusing cameos in Amazon Women on the Moon and The Return of the Swamp Thing; the female lead in Deathstalker II. Maybe they do make them like they used to

[7] Sybil Danning. Because she’s there.

[8] Edina Ronay. Entirely for one flick, the classic 1967 version of Prehistoric Women. [The title that defines a genre.]

[9] Barbara Steele. The greatest modern scream queen. Not merely the star of such memorable classics as Black Sunday and The Pit and the Pendulum, but also, weird but true, a major presence in 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita.

[10] Shannon Tweed. If only for the classic Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death.


Now I’d better hurry up and turn this machine off, before someone discovers I’m using it without the appropriate skill codes.

Incidentally Miss Wonderbra’s name is Angela, and she needs a calculus tutor....


____________


Frog princess (2/8/95)


Thank the gods for the rec.arts.movies database, or I’d have nothing better to worry about than the futile attempt to inscribe the principles of English grammar with hammer and chisel directly upon the stony brains of our contemporaries. Fortunately I am able to announce that today is the birthday of Mathilda May, née Karima Mathilda Haim, born 8 February 1965 in Paris, and star, apparently, of a number of European motion pictures I’ve yet to unearth; though none, presumably, quite so gripping as Tobe Hooper’s opus about naked vampires from outer space.

Kabong.

Well. Back to my dick-to-mouth existence.

Later.


____________


Before Sunrise (2/5/95)


Or, Slackers on a Train: itinerant students Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet cute en route to Vienna and talk even cuter, conversing with intense animation about love, death, time travel, ideas for television series, and why dogs are beautiful sleeping in the sun but people standing in line at the ATM look like morons. When Hawke gets off, he asks Delpy to come along and [since he lacks money for a hotel] walk around the city with him all night; predictably smitten, she acquiesces, and the two tour the Austin of mittelEuropa, discussing sex, first love, what they hate, what records they listen to, the war in the Balkans, their parents, the media, the moral imperative for foreigners to learn English, and what one may learn riding on the bus. — They visit the Magic Theater; Julie gets her palm read; Ethan explains to her that we are all stardust [a line I’ve used myself, though of course it never gets me anywhere.] Finally they make it in the park by the faint diffused light of the distant and inscrutable stellar furnaces in whose bowels our atoms were all made. — The punch line, let drop at the station as they bid farewell, is that this miniature Odyssey is all supposed to have transpired on June 16th: Bloomsday. — As an afterthought they agree to meet here again in six months’ time — i.e., in the city of Beethoven, on his birthday. Thus intimating the moral of Joyce himself: that the apparently trivial and quotidian can have an unseen dimension which may be very deep indeed.

That, or maybe this is just another idea for a television series. But with two such charming talking heads, I suppose I might actually watch it.


My job sucks, of course, but there are perquisites. — The girl who tends the night desk in Cheyenne-Arapahoe, for instance: Miss Wonderbra 1995. — I’ve abandoned my standards, now. Once I might have insisted that she know quantum mechanics. Now I think if she can simply spell “quantum mechanics” then she must have my child. — Provided of course that she has no standards.


____________


Beach babe falls for syphilitic philosopher (12/18/94)


At some point (the protagonist begins) I come across the opening sentence of the fifth chapter of Chaplin’s autobiography: “Joseph Conrad wrote a friend to this effect: that life made him feel like a cornered blind rat waiting to be clubbed.” Concurring with the sentiment, Chaplin nonetheless acknowledges his own luck, which at this dismal moment (it’s only the fifth chapter, times are still hard) lands him a part in Jim, The Romance of a Cockney, “the story of an aristocrat suffering from amnesia, who finds himself living in a garret with a young flower girl and a newspaper boy ... .” — Aha, I say to myself. I always knew Perelman wasn’t making this stuff up.

Meanwhile Baywatch bimbo Pamela Anderson reveals herself attracted to Carl Gustav Jung, though she feels she has the most in common with Friedrich (Bubba) Nietzsche. — I never thought Perelman made this stuff up either, I suppose. Though the two thousand words he would have extracted from it for the moment escape me.

I convey this intelligence regarding Ms. Anderson to Dave Schmaltz while we’re standing in front of the Camera just before the major meeting with the management goons. “Hmmm,” says Dave. “Jung? Nietzsche? Those guys are dead.” — “Yeah, Dave,” I say, “but we’re still alive. I think.” — “Hmmmm,” says Dave. — Somehow this isn’t reassuring.

The meeting goes like shit (the protagonist continues.) I find myself rather at a loss to guess what Perelman might have said about this too.

Instead (the protagonist concludes) I lurch off to the theater to watch Pulp Fiction for the third time. For the third time Pumpkin and Honeybunny stick up the coffee shop; for the third time Mister Big mumbles “I’m gon’ get medieval on yo’ ass”; for the third time Uma and Travolta do the twist.

It washes some of the bad taste out of my mouth. But not all.


____________


The war of the words (12/7/94)


Addressed, with a fair imitation of naive good faith, to the acting director of circulation and a couple of his henchmen, on Pearl Harbor Day, 1994:

...........


Personae:


Thank you for your expression of interest in the concerns of the newspaper delivery personnel of the Boulder Daily Camera.

Attached you should find a memorandum summarizing the principal points on which we think any discussion should focus.

Your comments will of course be welcomed.

Again, thank you for your consideration.


[yours, etc.]


...............


In the last two years there has been a very obvious decline in the ability of the Camera’s production facilities to provide newspapers for delivery in a timely fashion. In recent months this trend has accelerated, and to many now suggests impending catastrophe.

The consequences have not been fortunate.

Most motor-route carriers are required to pick their newspapers up at the Camera; where newspapers are, for the most part, dispensed on a first-come, first-served basis. Thus carriers have no option but to plan their delivery schedules on the basis of anticipation: i.e., whether or not their draws should be available when they arrive at the dock, they must appear — and, of course, be prepared to wait —simply to establish priority. In the past this has entailed occasional lengthy waits in occasionally lengthy lines, but such difficulties have not been commonplace. In recent months, however, it has not been uncommon for carriers to spend ten to fifteen hours a week queued up to nowhere.

Waiting for newspapers has, in short, become a part-time job in itself; one for which no one receives any form of compensation.

When newspapers are finally made available, they are often miscounted and incomplete, and it is frequently impossible to guarantee their delivery before the Camera’s increasingly unrealistic delivery deadline of six-thirty a.m.

Since most carriers have other obligations, many have been forced to cut back their routes, with attendant loss of income. Since in turn there is a certain minimum compensation one must expect to get out of bed in the middle of the night seven days a week, many have chosen simply to find more profitable employment. This has transferred a very heavy burden of responsibility to their managers, who have responded predictably: no district manager remains from the first of the year.

In short: lacking newspapers to deliver or personnel to deliver them, the rather meager resources of the circulation department have been severely strained. Customer complaints have reached record levels; circulation figures have begun to suffer. Advertising revenues will presumably decline.

Now: though the basis for our interest should be obvious, repeated requests for clarification of the circumstances that have led to this situation have been met by our [numerous] supervisors with obfuscation, misstatement, and indirection.

Nonetheless it has not proved difficult to identify the causes of these difficulties. The size [if not the circulation] of the newspaper has, quite obviously, increased substantially over the last several years. In addition the number and volume of extraneous advertising supplements has increased dramatically. It is not difficult to verify that there has been an effective doubling of the throughput expected of the production facilities of the Camera in the last two or three years. But there have not been similar increases in capital investment in new equipment, in maintenance budgets, in the personnel needed to operate production machinery, nor particularly in the trained maintenance personnel essential to ensure the continued functioning of an increasingly decrepit physical plant.

Though we all recognize that it is unfair to pass judgment in retrospect, still, it is difficult to resist the temptation to state that these were rather obvious needs, which might have been anticipated by more attentive management.



As a corollary of this ongoing crisis, attention has been drawn to a number of pre-existing problems which might otherwise have escaped scrutiny.

We find, for example, that there is general agreement on the following points:

[1] The notorious loopholes in the Fair Labor Standards Act exempt publishers from applying the provisions on the minimum wage, equal pay, overtime pay, and child labor to employees engaged in the delivery of newspapers to the consumer. But though it may not be illegal to require people to wait for hours to pick up newspapers without compensation, it is certainly immoral. And no one will accept it.

[2] The piece rate which is the basis for the carrier’s compensation is set [for motor routes] at about seven cents per paper. Mysteriously, this rate has remained fixed for [at least] the last twelve years; this despite startling increases in the cost of living, the revenues of the publisher, and even the minimum wage.

[3] The piece rate is apparently meant to perpetuate the fiction that one is purchasing the newspaper at a fixed price from, e.g., Boulder Publishing, and then reselling it at the cover price to the customer. [The contracts for single-copy distributors are explicit on this point.] But nothing in this calculation reflects the fact that the actual revenue to the publisher is several times the cover price, almost all of it in advertising revenue. The relationship of the newspaper to the bundle of glossy advertising inserts it contains has, in fact, become something like that of the skin to the sausage. But for these additional items, each representing an additional return to the publisher and an additional source of delay in production, the carrier is only occasionally compensated.

[4] Moreover the carrier is billed against the piece rate for customer complaints of every description, whether or not these represent avoidable errors. Even complaints which are the direct result of production delays are billed to the carrier.

[5] Whatever limits a low fixed piece rate may place on the return the carrier realizes for his time and his effort,there are nonetheless very obvious economies of scale in newspaper delivery which he may exploit to augment his income: once you are out of bed and in the car, in other words, it represents a relatively small additional effort simply to deliver more newspapers. But stated policy sets a rather low upper limit on the size of an individual’s draw, whatever inefficiencies may result. The fact that chronic shortages of personnel force continuous exceptions to these rules is never recognized.

[6] In addition to the piece rate, the principal form of [apparent] compensation to the carrier is a reimbursement for mileage. This rate has also remained essentially fixed for the last decade, and falls well short of the allowance permitted by the Internal Revenue Service [$.28/mile], let alone any reasonable estimate of the cost of operating a motor vehicle [even for normal driving, probably on the order of $.40/mile.] Furthermore, it is reckoned only from the beginning of the route to its end, though, obviously, most carriers must take responsibility for hauling their newspapers from the dock to the point at which their routes begin [mileage for which a contract carrier would have to be reimbursed.]

[7] In sharp distinction from the policy at other newspapers, the Camera does not consistently process carrier tips: though it is known that customers frequently forward additional payments as gratuities with their bills, these funds are, apparently, applied to the extension of subscriptions, and, therefore, accounted to the Camera rather than the carrier. Depending on whom one questions regarding this practice, it is either denied [in the face of considerable evidence] or attributed to a minor [and easily corrected] error in the computer software which processes billing. Comparing this situation with that at other newspapers [and, one might add, with exactly the same set of subscribers] allows the estimate that as much as two hundred thousand dollars a year may be mislaid in this fashion. This is not a trivial sum.

[8] Since the carrier’s paycheck is computed from a piece count, since a running tally is difficult to maintain, and since no accounting is provided with the paycheck to provide a basis of comparison with whatever records one may be able to keep, it follows that no one is ever really sure whether his paycheck is correct. Those unusually compulsive carriers who keep running track of their accounts with, e.g., their own spreadsheet programs, almost invariably find systematic errors. Remarkably, these errors always seem to favor Boulder Publishing.

[9] On at least one occasion the complexity of this accounting process has been used to disguise a deliberate deception: the addition of the topping credit for Sunday deliveries was used to conceal the fact that the previous credit of three cents per piece for the monthly coupon books had been removed.

[10] For these and other reasons the honesty of management has fallen into question. Continual turnover has contributed to this perception: this week’s manager may not, after all, realize that he is perpetrating a deception originated by last week’s manger; next week’s manager even less so.

[11] General issues of health and safety are not adequately addressed. Newspaper carriers work seven days a week, without pause for weekends or holidays, in all seasons irrespective of the weather, precisely during those hours of the day [between three and six in the morning] when the human organism is most vulnerable to malfunction. [There is an extensive literature on this subject, which any specialist on sleep disorders can cite.] No one who has held the job for any length of time has escaped without some illness or injury brought on by chronic fatigue. But in practice it is nearly impossible to take a day off, let alone indulge in sick leave or vacation, without putting one’s job at risk. This contributes to the pervasive impression that carriers are not perceived as human individuals, whose efforts are essential to the functioning of the organization, but rather as disposable parts, to be replaced at the first hint of weakness.



The following points might serve as the basis for further discussion:


— Obviously it would be far more efficient to return to the traditional system, in which a small number of haulers queue up at the dock, and the majority of carriers wither receive their newspapers at home or pick them up on their routes.

— Failing this, it should not lie beyond the capacity of the Camera to provide a rational and predictable production schedule, in which carriers would have fixed dock times. It should be the Camera’s responsibility to enforce this schedule, and in the event of delay it should be the Camera’s responsibility to ensure delivery of the newspapers. Should the carrier elect to wait, he should be paid overtime.

— In keeping with precedents set elsewhere, it should be possible to pay carriers fixed salaries based on average workload. Regular increases for seniority and merit should be possible. Benefits should not be unthinkable.

— A larger number of supporting personnel should be made available at and below the district-,manager level. This would ensure better training, ease transitions during periods of turnover, allow substitution for occasional vacation and sick leave, attend to emergencies, and provide assistance on those occasions when the newspaper is burdened with something ridiculous [e.g., product samples.]

— Competent managers might be attracted by competitive salaries.

— Should it prove impossible for the Camera to resolve its current production difficulties within the existing structure, the possibility of a return to an independent contractor system should be considered. It should be understood that carriers may be willing, e.g., to take greater responsibility for the assembly of the newspaper [particularly for the insertion of advertising] if the possibility of a larger share of the publisher’s revenue is offered in return. A contract structured on the basis of a percentage of advertising revenue might not be unacceptable.


At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it should be stated: that the current situation is untenable; that the apparent costs of any or all of the steps proposed above need not exceed the real costs of constant turnover, a substandard product, inferior service, continual customer dissatisfaction, and declining circulation; and that a greater sense of contractual obligation between the Camera and its employees is an essential prerequisite for the continued survival of an antiquated vehicle for the transmission of information in a rapidly modernizing and increasingly competitive data-retrieval environment.


____________


Der Satz ist ein Bild der Wirklichkeit (10/4/94)


Wittgenstein was always exhausted by his lectures. He was also revolted by them. He felt disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. ... He insisted on sitting in the very first row of seats, so that the screen would occupy his entire field of vision, and his mind would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of revulsion. ... His observation of the film was not relaxed or detached. He leaned forward tensely in his seat and rarely took his eyes off the screen. ... He wished to become totally absorbed in the film no matter how trivial or artificial it was, in order to free his mind from the philosophical thoughts that tortured and exhausted him.

[Norman Malcolm: Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir.]


____________


Art and life (8/25/94)


I have heard the story recently (though admittedly now I cannot tell you where) that the celebrated film producer Robert Evans got married a while ago, to some equally celebrated bimbo (pardon me if I’m sketchy on these details, but my subscription to People magazine lapsed roughly with the Hapsburg empire), and in consequence felt compelled by whatever meager conscience he might possess to make a prenuptial bonfire of his immense collection of Polaroids — these, apparently, consisting for the most part of intimate studies of the vaginal apertures of every starlet he’d ever auditioned; many now famous. Thus, sighing mightily, he heaped them all up, poured on some charcoal lighter, and tossed in a match. Never having performed menial labor of this kind in his life, he had no idea that most of the Polaroids, only partially charred, would rise on the updraft from the unconfined blaze and scatter all over the neighborhood — adding, one gathers, to his already considerable legend. (And suggesting the possibility of a novel twist to the match-the-face-to-the-whatever sidebars so beloved in our celebrity literature.)

Yes, well: this appeared in print (somewhere), and didn’t seem to provoke a lawsuit. Perhaps it’s true. The curiosity, of course, is the startling similarity of this story to the one Campbell made up (or didn’t) in the LaLaLand novel, about the producer’s diary.

So: does life imitate art? does art imitate life? Or (my personal favorite) are they both imitating something else? — If so, will they tell us what?


____________


An interview with Leonardo Garbonzo


May 21, 19—

Gentlemen:

Please accept once again my regrets: I cannot attend the Barth festival this weekend Memorial forthcoming. An urgent missive from Bohemia bears word my presence is required in Toledo, to thwart a plot against the life of W. V. O. Quine by the Meinong Brigade of the Phenomenological Liberation Front; I need say no more. Enclosed you find my contribution to this year’s symposium. It had borne the working title, “Barth, Kyd, Sir Philip Sidney: The Philosopher’s Codpiece”; but, as you can see, form has once again been vanquished by content, two falls out of three. I pray it may meet with your approval nonetheless.

Through the leaded glass of my western window the afternoon sun beats down upon my desk; it is Spring. — Ah! who can forget the Harold Robbins festival this twenty-eight August last? the cleansing rain, that fell with deafening uproar atop the first dumpster south from the Ekeley chemistry building, as our liquor-saturated brains strained to follow the intricate argument of J. Cocktail’s brilliant analysis, “Kierkegaard and Robbins: The Landscape of Despair”? — Moments such as these come but rarely in a lifetime; even in football season. Nor can I doubt this year’s festivities in Aspen will prove equally memorable. Alas, I cannot bear witness. — But spare me your pity, gentlemen; though as you pace the streets of Aspen I shall be in Toledo, yet I will have my consolations: composition; reminiscence; gin.

Yours, etc.



Appendix: An interview with Leonardo Garbonzo.

(Editor’s note: When word drifted in our penthouse window that Leonardo Garbonzo, the writer Mike Douglas has called “Vienna’s answer to hash browns”, was on the make for a lucrative interview with a slick pseudointellectual nudie-photo magazine, we felt a pulse throbbing at the base of our throat. Brushing the tongue of Heather, our executive secretary, out of our ear, we placed a quick call to one of our most resilient freelancers, Johnny Cocktail. The Aurora Kid, as he is known to his intimates, was located at last in a massage parlor on the East side, where he was explaining the views of the later Wittgenstein on “a rule of grammar” to an unemployed English teacher of remarkable phrase structure. He agreed readily to the usual terms: twenty-five dollars a day, plus expenses. But let him tell the tale in his own words:)


“Please,” she whispered. “Again.”

I put the trenchcoat on, and checked my piece. “Another time, baby.” I grinned. “But not tonight. I have a headache.”

The night was young. Light rain fell through the mist that cloaked the streets. I looked up at the lights. They hung there, glowing, soft blurred luminescent spheres.

They seemed blurred. I knew better. I knew that at the heart of each of those glowing spheres a brilliant filament lay, incandescent, definite, distinct.

Music came out of the doors of the clubs. This year it was disco. Last year it was punk rock. I didn’t know what it would be next year. I didn’t care. It was all the same, all a symptom of the decline of the West.

That was tough. Night was tough. I’m tough. The West might be in decline, but I’m not. I’m Johnny Cocktail. I’m a critic.


He had a newspaper stand on Forty-Seventh Street. He sold bubble gum and little magazines, and the kids in the neighborhood knew he was a soft touch. If he wouldn’t give them a copy of the Paris Review, he was always good for a drink from the bottle he kept under the counter. His name was Stefano. He used to be a star.

He was around in back when I got there. He had a hand down his pants. I didn’t want to disturb him, but business is business.

“Hey,” I said.

He got the hand out, then he pretended he was fooling with his zipper. I waited. I had time.

His eyes were dull, and his palms needed a shave. Stefano. Once he’d been on top. He played the Fillmore, first on the bill, and thirty-five groupies stood in line after every set. Then the hippies in the cowboy hats took over, and nobody bought guitar music any more. Now he ran a newsstand, and jacked off all the time. Those were the breaks.

“What’s happening, John?” He got the bottle out from under the counter. “Drink?”

I took a shot. “The usual,” I said. “Working. You know how it is.”

He took a slug for himself. “I heard about that Pynchon caper,” he said. He chuckled. “You really fixed his face.”

I lit a cigarette, and shrugged. “Some people have the right to write, and some don’t,” I said.

He liked it. “You really fixed his face,” he said. “You really did.”

I watched him pick his nose. “Seen Garbonzo lately?” I asked.

He stopped, and stood there staring at me, with his finger in to the second joint. Then he pulled it out and wiped it on his pants and had another shot.

“I hear he’s been around,” I said.

He was careful. Too careful. “Not for a while, John. I hear something about a fellowhip at Oxford.”

“North Texas State,” I said. “And he didn’t take it.”

He shook his head. “That’s what I hear,” he repeated.

“I hear different, Stefano. I hear he’s been writing again.”

Now he was scared. Real scared. He spilled some liquor down the front of his shirt, trying to get another shot down before I noticed his hands were shaking. “I thought he’d gone straight, John. Honest, I thought he’d gone straight.”

I looked at him evenly. “Nobody like that goes straight, Stefano. Nobody. Oh, they may kick it for a while, but then it starts to come back. Maybe they wake up once or twice in the middle of the night and jot down a quick note, maybe an epigram, and then they go back to sleep. Maybe they keep a journal. But then it gets worse, and they have to try to get published. Nothing too heavy at first: a couple of pieces for Humpty-Dumpty, some science fiction. But then they’re back on the hard stuff, novels, plays, and then they can’t stop. Nobody ever kicks it, Stefano. Nobody.”

He avoided my eyes. “All I know is, they had him in that home for six months, reading Wittgenstein and Quine, and when he came out he was straight, John. Honest, he was straight.”

“All right, Stefano, so he was straight. But where can I find him?”

He looked uneasy. “I don’t know. Honest, I don’t know.”

“Come on,” I said.

He looked at the floor. “Ask Dog,” he said.

“All right,” I said. I turned to leave.

“John?”

I looked back.

He was looking at the floor still. “I have this problem with my prose, it’s too prolix. My sister says I should take a creative writing class at the Free School, but... .”

I gave him a ten. “Make it a quart,” I said.


I stopped by my office on the way across town, to make a couple of phone calls and check a reference I thought might come in handy. She was sitting in the waiting room. She stood up when I came in.

She was about five-six, maybe a hundred twenty pounds, and her hair was black as printer’s ink. She was built like a French novel. Right away I could see a couple of passages I’d like to gloss.

“Johnny Cocktail?” she asked.

“Yeah, baby. What can I do for you?”

“This might interest you.” She handed me an envelope.

What I found in it confirmed my worst fears. It was a thick manuscript with Garbonzo written all over it, and the heading on the first page said “Chapter One.”

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

“I’m the fiction editor for Playboy. This came in the mail this morning.”

I knew I’d have to move fast. I jammed a hand up her blouse and gave her one on the smacker. Then I headed out the door.


He was lying in the alley behind the Boulderado Hotel, with an empty bottle and an edition of Emily Dickenson beside him. Dog. Once he’d been a critic, one of the best. The toast of every salon in the greater metropolitan area. The lion of every literary reception. Then he’d started to slip, no one knew why. It might have been liquor. Maybe it was women. Nobody knew. It wasn’t much at first: a good review for Vonnegut, a piece in the New Yorker in praise of Gore Vidal. Then he got drunk on the Dick Cavett show, and said he liked Love Story, and suddenly everyone knew he’d lost it. Now he was lying in the gutter in a three piece suit, and nobody cared.

I poked him carefully with my foot. “Dog,” I said.

He started awake, looking around wildly. Then he grabbed me by the lapels. There was deep inconsolable grief in his eyes. “John,” he said. “John.”

“Dog,” I said. “Dog.”

I knew there was something else, but it took a minute to put my finger on it.

“Have you seen Garbonzo?” I asked.

“Garbonzo?” he asked. There was no comprehension in his manner. “Garbonzo?”

“Garbonzo,” I said. “Garbonzo.”

His voice had a sad quaver in it. “He caught that pass, John. He caught that pass.”

“Garbonzo?” I asked.

“Niziolec,” he said. “He caught that pass.”

I wasn’t following this. “Huh?”

“He caught that pass, John. Niziolec caught that pass. I saw it, John. I saw it all. He caught that pass, and they took it away from him. From us, John. The Orange Bowl. They took the Orange Bowl away from us.”

I disengaged myself, and stood up. So that was it. Liquor and drugs weren’t enough. Dog had to have football.

“He caught that pass, John.”

I shook my head. “Maybe he did, Dog.” I turned, and walked into the night.


I checked into a little bar on Pearl to think it over. It just didn’t make sense. Nobody seemed to know where Garbonzo was. Nobody seemed to care.

After three gin and tonics it still didn’t make sense, but I was beginning to see the virtues of indifference. It was then the waitress approached me with a question in her eye. I had a question in my eye, too, but it wasn’t the same question.

“Are you Johnny Cocktail?” she asked.

“Sure, sugar. What’s it to you?”

“There’s a call for you.”

I took it in the office. The voice at the other end seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Johnny C.?”

“Yeah,” I said, “what’s it to you?”

He laughed. “What’s it worth, if I can tell you where to find Garbonzo?”

My mouth was dry. “Plenty,” I said. “Who is this?”

“Never mind that,” he said. “Meet me at McDonald’s in half an hour.”

“How will I know you?”

He laughed again. “You’ll know me,” he said.


The Big Mac was fair. It might have been a trifle overdone, but it was passable. The fries were crisp. The shake was lousy. I went back to talk it over with the chef. He wasn’t listening, until he saw the piece. I got another shake, and a gift certificate, and he learned the virtues of compromise.

I lit a cigarette as I sat there finishing the shake, trying to fit the pieces topgether. There was a guy walking around in a Ronald McDonald suit. He stopped at my table, and gave me the eye.

“How’s business?” he asked.

I froze. It was him.

He grinned and handed me a note on the back of a napkin. “Keep the faith,” he said. Then he was gone.

I followed him with my eyes as he wandered toward the door. Then I looked at what he’d given me. A napkin, with three words written on it. It didn’t make sense.

It hit me, suddenly.


I kicked the door open.

He was lying on the floor, with his secretary all over him. I kicked her in the ass. She ran out of the room, bleating.

Some people make me want to puke.

“Garbonzo,” I said.

He grunted and rolled over. His hand groped for the bottle in the heap of manuscripts on the floor next to him. I kicked it away.

“Let’s talk,” I said.

He tried to sit up, but I wouldn’t let him.

His voice wouldn’t work. “Gotta have a drink,” he croaked. “let me have a drink.”

I let him have a drink.

I lit a cigarette and blew some smoke in his direction. “Let’s hear it, Garbonzo,” I said. “The word is out you’re working again. I want to know all about it.”

He pulled on the bottle, looking up at me with fear in his eyes. “It’s a novel,” he said. He tried to keep the tremor out of his voice, but he couldn’t.

I grinned. It wasn’t a very nice grin, but it was the best I could manage. “What’s the novel about?”

“Love,” he said.

I sneered. “Sure it is.”

“Love,” he said again.

I could tell he needed prompting. I let him have a look at the piece. “Tell me more,” I suggested.

He was glad to oblige. “Let love be construed as a relation; then it must be a relation between a subject, and an object. The problem then becomes one familiar to us from a consideration of the epistemological situation in its generality, that is, that the subject cannot apprehend the object directly, as noumenon, but rather indirectly, as phenomenon. Can the subject, then, have knowledge of the object? If not, then love, which is predicated upon such knowledge, must necessarily be illusion; which counsel leads us to despair.”

Maybe I’m getting soft, but I was almost interested. “But what is art?” I asked.

He frowned, and pulled on the bottle. “A revenge on life,” he said.

It was then I kicked him in the face.


I left him there, mumbling through what teeth I’d left him. I had an appointment on the South side, with a graduate student named Gwen. She was into Restoration drama. I was into her.

The night was still young. The streetlights were still obscured. I knew it, anyway, that if you looked close enough you’d see that filament, brilliant and distinct. If you looked closer you might see radiative transitions in mercury atoms, but if you did that you were an asshole, and I’d get you. Sooner or later, I’d get you.

The rain began to fall again. I took a pull from my flask, and lit a cigarette. I began to compose my review. It wouldn’t take long. My pen is quick.


____________