Far from Kansas (6/7/00)
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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)
