Voodoo child (3/2/99)

____________

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)