The phantom of the space opera (6/3/99)
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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.
____________The cruelest month (5/13/99)
