There she is (12/20/00)

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Jay Mohr, holding open auditions for the perfect Barbarella tits, inspects a chorus line of naked-torso’d bimbos in his office. Staring openmouthed with glazed eyes at the row of babes, he mutters something hoarsely appreciative about Number Five: Look at those, he says. — Yes, says his assistant, they’re very impressive. — But do they make a statement?


The Sixth Day. [Roger Spottiswoode, 2000.]

In the not-too-distant future, an illegal attempt to render the darkly brilliant paranoiac vision of Philip K. Dick immortal by recombinant cloning of the plots of his novels is thwarted by subtle transcription errors, raising philosophical questions of identity which as usual can only be resolved by carchases, laserblast gunfights, a vertiginous swandive over a precipitous waterfall, many colorful explosions, and a rooftop chase that ends with the hero hanging onehanded from a helicopter skid fifty stories above the pavement of the cold cruel city. [No doubt Quine would have enjoyed better grosses had he employed these devices in Word And Object.] — One must feel a certain skepticism regarding the possibility of downloading a human genome and personality into a body-blank in less time than it takes to install Linux [not to mention the instantaneous retinal-scan brain dump, which elementary arguments show to be impossible]; but, then, there are decent effects [I particularly liked the simulated holograms], a few amusing speculations about virtual outcall massage, some exercises in memory-playback montage which suggest the influence of the Japanese arthouse hit Tetsuo [the Iron Man], a repeated-cloning joke which turns into a homage to the Road Runner cartoons, Tony Goldwyn as a villainous combination of Bill Gates and Vince MacMahon, Robert Duvall as the wellmeaning scientist who nonetheless [all together now] transgresses against the cosmic moral order; and Arnold, of course, of whom for some reason I never tire. If they want to clone him first, it’s all right with me. But let the author of Total Recall rest in peace.


American Virgin. [Jean-Pierre Marois, 2000.]

Or, the American Beauty’s Boogie Nights: porno entrepeneur Bob Hoskins [looking exquisitely sleazy in a limegreen suit, even before somebody tattoos a dick on his forehead] has an inspired vision of the world’s first virtual-reality Internet broadcast of the deflowering of an eighteen-year-old, and, after a nationwide search for a protagonist which one assumes must have been rigged beforehand to ensure his sweet revenge, singles out Mean Suvari — the darling and still at least physically innocent daughter of his estranged mentor and erstwhile employer Robert Loggia [referred to by an awestruck admirer as “the Martin Scorsese of porn”] — as the subject of this breakthrough in adult entertainment. Loggia overhears the announcement on the [live] talk show of assault-TV host Sally Kellerman, crashes the set with his bodyguards, and a melee ensues which rather prematurely provides the Jerry-Springer denouement every mediocre comedy now seems to require before twenty minutes have elapsed on the cinematic clock. — What happens thereafter is not particularly memorable, though the flick does have its moments: the unveiling of the [ludicrously boner-pocketed] VR suit, the development of a curious pornstar/stuffed animal equation, the porno remake of the trial of Joan of Arc, the mortifying bicycle accident of Tommy Salami. But essentially this is yet another attempt to turn me into Kevin Spacey — reminding me, naturally, of President Lloyd Bridges’ famous comeback in Hot Shots Part Deux: when one of his aides warns him a political opponent is trying to prove that he’s an idiot, Bridges snaps “I can prove that better than he can.”


Cobra Verde. [Werner Herzog, 1988. After a novel by Bruce Chatwin.]

Brazilian brigand Klaus Kinski [herein the notorious Cobra Verde] ingratiates himself with an obscenely wealthy plantation owner and temporarily goes straight; alas, when the bloated plutocrat discovers that Kinski has impregnated all three of his daughters, he concocts a scheme to rid the continent of this menace to the gene pool by shipping him off to Africa with orders to resurrect the moribund slave trade. Landing at an abandoned fortress on the coast, Kinski finds the country under the spell of a mad king perennially at war with his people, his neighbors, and the gods, but by dint of luck and force of personality manages to set up a brisk trade in guns and bodies that satisfies the depraved needs of all interested parties; not least himself. After an alarming reversal which leaves him at the mercy of the deranged monarch and threatened with colorful native tortures, he escapes with the aid of an even loonier [but, naturally, insanely ambitious] royal relative and leads an army of barebosomed Amazons against the incumbent to install the pretender. Alas, as must always be the case with a Herzog hero, his triumph is qualified by the reassertion of the reality principle, and Kinski once again ends cursing Fate and shaking his fist impotently in the face of an overwhelming Nature. — Shot, in Herzog’s uniquely metadocumentarian style, with authentic Africans, ineffably charming in the way that they all keep glancing sidewise at the camera [Herzog always somehow manages simultaneously to shoot a fiction film and a documentary about the natives he’s dragooned into appearing in it], real South Americans; and the really deranged Kinski; who inhabits these mad-European-adventurer roles so convincingly one cannot help but believe that, in another time and place, he would have been exactly what he portrays.


Meet The Parents. [Jay Roach, 2000.]

Having resolved to marry freshfaced blonde cupcake Teri Polo, lovesick bumbler Ben Stiller discovers that he must first venture into the bosom of her family and survive a weekend with her formidable father, retired CIA operative Robert De Niro. Obviously the viewer will not be disappointed if he expects disaster; but though Stiller suffers nicotine withdrawal, sexual frustration, athletic humiliation, repeated demonstrations of his ludicrous inadequacy in comparison to Ms. Polo’s prior boyfriend [Owen Wilson], gibes at the expense of his chosen profession [male nurse], an inability to ingratiate himself with a small obnoxious furry creature [this time a cat], a mortifying lie-detector test, a flood of sewage, inadvertent arson, and getting busted on suspicion of terrorism, he never quite gets his dick caught in his zipper. — Expectations once raised are not easily lowered again: the disappointment of the audience was palpable. Better luck next time.


Best In Show. [Christopher Guest, 2000. Written by Guest and Eugene Levy.]

Though dogs belong in principle to a single biological species, they are found today in hundreds of disparate varieties which differ wildly in their dispositions, mannerisms, aspirations, inclinations, tastes, moods, and shopping habits; as do their owners, of course, suggesting a metaphor here brilliantly exploited by Mr. Guest [aka Baron Haden-Guest of Saling] in this mockumentarian study of the diverse lot of eccentrics who descend upon a dog show in Philadelphia to enter their pets in competition — among them Michael Hitchcock, Parker Posey, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, and the auteur himself, in character as a bloodhound-fancying Southern cracker and wouldbe ventriloquist. It tells you everything you need to know about the motion-picture industry that Guest has written and/or directed no more than halfadozen films [dating back to Spinal Tap] in the last fifteen years [compare, of course, the misadventures of wouldbe director Kevin Bacon in Guest’s The Big Picture (1989).] But, then, if he made more of them we wouldn’t have time to memorize his dialogue. — Easily the funniest movie of the year.


The Legend Of Drunken Master. [Jackie Chan, 1994.]

Foreign devils intent on purloining the priceless antiquities of China are thwarted by martial artist you-know-who, here represented as master of a form of Kung Fu known as Drunken Boxing, which necessitates his instantaneous transformation into a rubbery-limbed woozy-faced staggering inebriate. Since even Jackie can’t always pull this off correctly, in extremity his, uh, stepmother [yeah, right] Anita Mui must toss him a bottle of firewater — which, once chugged, renders him invincible; the parallel with Popeye’s spinach is exact. Brilliantly choreographed and unfailingly hilarious; arguably the best kung fu movie ever made.


Red Planet. [Antony Hoffman, 2000. Written by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin.]

A mysterious glitch having developed in a project designed to terraform Mars in order to save the Earth, astronaut Carrie-Anne Moss [looking very buff and somewhat more buxom than last I remember her] leads an expedition to investigate; filling out the detail are Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin Bratt, Simon Baker, Terence Stamp, and an artificial intelligence named Lucille. As per convention a solar flare disables the ship as they approach the planet [at least it’s not another fucking meteor shower]; and, while Carrie-Anne bounds around the orbiter putting out fires in zero-g, the guys pile into the lander and make a spectacular over-Niagara-in-a-barrel crashlanding down the side of a stupendous canyon. Staggering out in their spacesuits, they trek overland to their prepositioned habitat and discover as their oxygen bottles are running dry that it’s been trashed by forces or parties unknown and their supplies have been destroyed; leading up to the Grand Predicament, a situation in which our heroes are gasping out their final breaths stranded on a barren planet with no way back no hope of rescue no air no food no water, etc., etc. — and, worst of all, I didn’t have enough time [sitting in the theater] to figure out how I’d write them out of the dilemma myself. [Should you see this first on video, I suggest you pause the action for a day or two and try to solve the puzzle; it makes an interesting exercise.] Suffice it that the authors’ solution leaves much to be desired; and, as best I could determine after the fact, I’d have done it very differently. — Not all of them escape, at any rate; noble and ignoble deaths are equally apportioned [Stamp has the best], and Carrie-Anne once again gets to resurrect a cute guy who’s flatlined before the survivors rocket back from the red world to the blue. — Not as flashy as De Palma’s Mission To Mars, but not as silly either, and excellent in fine detail: the ship, the landscapes, the mad robot, the boyish glee of the astronatus pissing in one-third gee. On balance I pronounce myself satisfied with the results of this, the year that Hollywood went to Mars; and we’ve yet to hear from John Carpenter [whose Ghosts Of Mars is still forthcoming.] Meanwhile check this out.


Bedazzled. [Harold Ramis, 2000.]

A very polished attempt at a remake of the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore classic of 1967: social pariah Brendan Fraser, a minor Valley technoid ostracized even among a society of geeks, despairing of ever getting the attention [let alone gaining the affections] of coworker Frances O’Connor, sells his soul to the exquisitely Mephistophelean Elizabeth Hurley and gets seven wishes, none of which [duh] work out quite as he expects: asking to be wealthy and powerful and married to the damsel in question, e.g., he is instantaneously transformed into a Columbian druglord whose lieutenants are plotting his downfall; his wife, who, naturally, despises him, is humping the chief conspirator in every closet of his mansion. — And, so on. — Each amendment to a previous wish only creates greater opportunity for humiliating disaster; with every iteration of the scenario he moves farther from the satisfaction he covets, and closer to eternal damnation. Unfortunately this sense of comic progress was somewhat lost on me, since every motion of the plot carried Fraser farther from his original persona, whose bumbling efforts to obtain acceptance reminded me all-too-vividly of the eighth grade, and left me groaning aloud in the dark: the delayed stress syndrome of the career dork. For this reason I must recuse myself from any decision as to whether the flick works or not: Fraser and Hurley are obviously great, but the whole may be somewhat less than the sum of the parts; it’s probably indicative that I walked out of the theater trying to decide whether the moral of the picture really was that selling your soul to the devil can be a positive experience that promotes personal growth. Christopher Marlowe, after all, put it rather differently.


Committed. [Lisa Krueger, 2000.]

The spirit of Søren Kierkegaard finds itself trapped in the body of Heather Graham; should it try to escape? — When her feckless weenie of a husband Luke Wilson decides that their marriage has becalmed him in a debilitating fog and splits abruptly for parts unknown, Ms. Graham, whose preternatural honesty has made her a woman who would mate for life, interprets the desertion as a test of faith; applying some curious variety of New Age witchcraft which seems derived from the methods of Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective, she tracks the errant bumbler from New York through the Southwest to El Paso — where, curiously reluctant to confront him, she hovers in his neighborhood, half stalker, half guardian angel, intervening on his behalf with his employer, winning away the affections of his new girlfriend Patricia Velasquez [Pharaoh’s mistress in The Mummy, here at last seen with her clothing on], and protecting him from Patricia’s deranged exboyfriend. Thus somehow what seemed at first designed to be another of those weighty and fatiguing narratives in which angstridden urban twentysomethings deliver ponderous speeches about their Relationships turns instead into a flakey entertainment in which, e.g., Ms. Graham pays a mariachi band to serenade her as she sits [forlorn but curiously content, even cheerful] in her rented car staking out one of her husband’s trysts. — Charming and funny; and [since the improbably photogenic Ms. Graham appears in nearly every shot] very easy to look at. What is it about her and daisies?


Tales From The Gimli Hospital. [Guy Maddin, 1988.]

Kafka meets Garrison Keillor: the eccentric Canadian auteur [whose nicknames the IMDB lists as “Magma Head”, “Guymoe”, and “Flurpie”] sets his narrative in some mythical plague-ridden land [apparently meant to resemble his native Winnepeg] in a hospital that doubles as a [very] rude stable where the staff operate upon the patients with farming implements; the two protagonists [one of whom spends a considerable interval after his introduction to the camera shaving the space between his eyebrows and washing his hair with fisheggs], who occupy adjacent beds, befriend one another but then fall out when one discovers the other fucked his girlfriend’s corpse. [The Norse-saga-on-acid flavor of all this might best be conveyed by explaining that the three corners of this love triangle are named Gunnar, Einar The Lonely, and Snjófridur.] — An essay filled with Scandinavian dread, Lutheran guilt, and Expressionist shadows, with a disturbing look which could be described as Eraserhead black-and-white [perhaps it most closely resembles a very bad print of Murnau’s Faust]; the visual signature is a peculiar irising effect [probably a variation on the old vaseline-on-the-lens trick, though knowing Maddin he might actually have mushrooms growing in his optics] which creates the impression that the subjective eye of the camera is that of someone with blurred peripheral vision — connoting a sort of narrative migraine, actually. — But words cannot adequately convey the freakish weirdness of this feature. Maddin is unique.

This appears on DVD with the companion semishort feature The Dead Father [1985] — possibly [as the title suggests] inspired by the late great Donald Barthelme, though not nearly so funny.


Spaceways. [Terence Fisher, 1952.]

Squarejawed rocket scientist Howard Duff triumphs over recalcitrant bureaucrats, Commie spies, leaking fuelpumps, and his scheming bitch of a wife to launch the first satellite into orbit and himself after it; assisted by Eva Bartok, here in character as an East-European mathematician with nice tits. [Uh-huh.] Great spaceship, but somebody will have to explain to me why the camera goes out of focus at the end of every shot.


U-571. [Jonathon Mostow, 2000.]

After a plot setup which seems to imply the theft of the German Enigma machine [which by itself may have determined the outcome of the Second World War] was a coup of American intelligence, this turns into a fairly ordinary submarine drama — i.e., an ode to claustrophobia fraught with strained sweaty oilstained faces with eyes cast upward in that signature reddish sepulchral submarine runninglight as they listen for the depth charges which [intercut, intercut] we perceive are drifting right past the hull: not Das Boot, but not really bad either. — As for the premise, it is inaccurate and unfortunate, but not so integral to the development as one might have feared; still, don’t be surprised if you now hear of impending projects celebrating the brilliant Yankee victory at Jutland, Andrew Jackson’s rout of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, and the triumph of the American longbow at Crécy. Those ignorant of the lessons of history are condemned to relive Hollywood’s versions of them.

The movie itself is less interesting than the occasion it provides to remark the proliferation of personal-assistant credits in major motion pictures: I had, in truth, hardly noticed the existence of this crew category before Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994) — when, as it were out of the blue, while sitting through the trailing litanies I happened to observe that Kim Basinger had demanded an additional personal assistant to ensure that she would have two to Sophia Loren’s one; the gesture seemed so risibly pretentious that I burst out laughing on the dark. — The present example illustrates the lengths to which this kind of behaviour has been taken: Mr. and Mrs. De Laurentis get four assistants; Mr. Mostow gets three; Mr McConaughey gets two [one for “security”, presumably to protect him from himself.] Mr. Harvey Keitel, whose career has been more valuable to the cinema than all of the above put together, has none at all.


The Filth And The Fury. [Julien Temple, 1999.]

A documentary study of the meteoric career of the legendary Sex Pistols: the reductio ad absurdum of the rock and roll band, an apparently tonedeaf assemblage of workingclass radicals who exploded out of obscurity in the late Seventies, playing chaotic anthems of violent protest to clubs full of spastic androids; conjuring an alarming sound, look, manner of dress, and mode of behavior out of the pregnant ether overnight and impressing them upon an audience which seemed to grow with the terrifying rapidity of bacterial multiplication; inspiring the denunciation of every British figure of authority [and baffled putdowns even from their precursors, the Rolling Stones] before imploding under the weight of their own too-well-practiced selfdestructive impulses — all in the space of a couple of years.

Mr. Temple has here assembled footage of the band [and their audience] in their heyday and intercut it with colorful newsreels of London in the elsewhere-placid Age of Disco [buried under garbage and on the brink of class warfare], television programming meant to illustrate the cultural milieu [including several episodes of the Pistols’ own war against the media], presentday interviews with the surviving members [discreetly backlit in witness-protection fashion to preserve their mystique], and occasional scenes from a cheesy production of Richard III, whose relevance to the character of Johnny Rotten is rather too heavily underscored.

Points of trivia: A&M Records fired the lads after keeping them under contract for a single day; Johnny explains that the first line he penned as a songwriter was “I am an Antichrist”, which left him stuck for a rhyme [somebody else suggested “anarchist”]; the other bandmembers describe Johnny’s original audition by saying “he sang Alice Cooper like the hunchback of Notre Dame” and observe approvingly of replacement bassplayer Vicious that “Sid couldn’t play a fucking note”; all of them are still pissed off at one another and at their erstwhile manager [Malcolm McLaren] — indeed, they all stress the colossal irony that despite their definitive incarnation of the antiboyband, they were just as completely manipulated by their handlers and cheated of their money. — The story about the four of them wanking into an omelet does not appear, however; nor does their pilgrimage to South America to visit the perpetrator of the Great Train Robbery. For this and other details of the legend interested parties are referred to Johnny’s autobiography and Temple’s earlier [albeit McLarencentric] quasidocumentary, The Great Rock And Roll Swindle.

It is a fascinating question, what the cultural impact of the Sex Pistols has actually been. One might suggest two examples of the apparent pervasiveness of their influence: the obnoxious but universal practice among fraternity boys of affecting a constant need to spit descends from punk, and derives, originally, from the happenstance of Johnny’s sinus condition, which kept him hawking continuously on stage [presently the audiences started hawking back]; the curious [and now very annoying] habit of graphic designers [particularly in advertising] of using disparate fonts of different weights and sizes [as it were alternating shouts and whispers] in a single layout seems to descend from the Pistols’ first album cover, on which the title was lettered like a ransom note.

Other and deeper evidences will no doubt be visible to more acute cultural observers; I expect their research will commence with this motion picture.


Zoo/A Zed And Two Noughts. [Peter Greenaway, 1985.]

It is not enough that this narrative should commence with an automobile accident at the entrance to a zoo which results in the death of two women and the amputation of the leg of a third; no, the car has to be a white Mercury with a wingéd-messenger hood ornament, the collision has to involve an eggbound Mute Swan, the collision must take place on Swann’s Way [though if there were any further references to Proust I spaced them out], the relationship of the alphabet [as an enumerative ordering device] to the taxonomic classification of animals by species must be invoked and systematically exploited, the driver has to change her name to Leda and must turn out to be pregnant [Z is for Zeus], there should be a string of Venetian-blinds shots visually punning on the stripes of the Zebra, and the husbands of the dead women must be two Siamese twins separated at birth [Zoologists Oliver and Oswald, who are always arranged symmetrically about the central axis of the frame] obsessed with the idea that time-lapsed photography of decomposing corpses will reveal the secret distinction between animate and inanimate [Is life an accident? or, E is for Entropy.] — “Darwin was a great storyteller,” says the Dude In The Black Hat. So is Greenaway; though Darwin is usually easier to figure out.


A Better Tomorrow II. [John Woo, 1987.]

Another blood-drenched saga of the Hong Kong gang wars, sequel to a first installment which ended, as most of them seem to, with Chow Yun Fat dying gloriously in an epic gunbattle. Naively I’d wondered how the authors would manage to bring him back from the dead — worse fool I, to forget the old twin-brother-in-America ploy: and, sure enough, Yun Fat/Ken no sooner gets word of his sibling’s demise than he hops the plane from New York to Hong Kong, dons the long black bullet-riddled overcoat of Yun Fat/Mark, sticks a wooden matchstick between his teeth, puts on his shades, slaps a couple of fresh clips into his artillery, and instantly reincarnates the coolest gunslinger of modern times. The final shootout is quite as remarkable as the one that concluded the previous episode, but this time Leslie Cheung gets aced and our hero survives to avenge him. Otherwise they’d have needed to turn up a triplet for


A Better Tomorrow III. [Tsui Hark, 1989.]

— Or would have had to, were this not, as it were, A Better Tomorrow 0.7: a prequel which introduces Yun Fat/Mark as a somewhat younger guy, his cool yet unacquired, who goes to Viet Nam in 1974 to bail his cousin [Tony Leung] out of jail and try to persuade his uncle to leave the country for the relative safety of Hong Kong. This adventure embroils him in a tangled conflict involving corporate gangsters, bent military officers, and corrupt bureaucrats; and introduces him to The Woman With A Past, Anita Mui, who gives Chow his first black overcoat and teaches him the virtue of a pair of forty-fives. [This has some of the flavor of an origins-of-Superman issue in which you get to see the Man of Steel learning to fly.] A series of gunfights and reversals ends finally with the inevitable dash for the last helicopter out of Saigon, and the tragic demise of Miss Mui — who should, incidentally, reconsider her usual billing as “the Madonna of Asia”: Madonna can’t act, let alone dive across a room wielding a couple of blazing revolvers.


Suburbia. [Penelope Spheeris, 1984.]

A DVD rerelease of the first feature film of the celebrated documentarian of punk [and later director of the Wayne’s World franchise] Ms. Spheeris, whose story of a band of spikehaired teenage runaways who hang together amid the menaces of rats, cockroaches, and guntoting vigilantes in a condemned property in Orange County [as she explains in her director’s commentary] actually proved prophetic: today, she explains, the suburbs of LA again teem with punk kids living in crashpads just like this one who look and dress exactly as her Eighties characters did. — Once again Art beats Life to publication. [It was ever so.]

My sources indicate that, despite a favorable reception at Sundance a couple of years ago, the third installment in Spheeris’ Decline Of Western Civilization series was pocketed by the distributor and has yet to be released. If only Corman had handled that as well.



Dumbest trailer of recent months: for the forthcoming comedy Dude, Where’s My Car? which appears to be, roughly, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Lobotomy. Sweet.

Later.

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Angels and ministers of grace (12/19/00)

The devil is a cheerleader.