A prayer for Carroll Shelby (6/19/00)

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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.

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Surfin’ samurai (5/14/00)

Spider woman.

Human fly.