A nerd in full (5/4/00)
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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)
