The Exploding Kinetoscope

L.A. Filmforum's Alternative Projections @ Cinefamily

2012-01-08T05:28:00.000-08:00

Notes from Wallace Berman's Underground + Sundry other thoughts, digressions, etc.

Throughout January, 2012, Los Angeles Filmforum steps out of its usual fancy digs at the Egyptian and pays a social call to the more living-roomy Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater. The occasion is Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 , a continuing Filmforum project with various programing threads weaving throughout town, at MOCA, LACMA, the Armory and so on — the pertinents are linked above — as part of the massive SoCal arts mega-event Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980. Check that website, because you'll want to see a photo of Ice Cube pretending to smoke a pipe in an Eames chair, no shit.

That all sounds like an overwhelming amount of, well, stuff, but rather than kick yourself (myself) for missing the "Community Visionaries" program (and "Film/Music/Forms" and "Puce Moment" I mean agrh oh god), look at all the neat stuff still coming! So, have you have any interest in avant-garde film and/or Los Angeles social history, do haul said interests over to the Cinefamily sofa, STAT (they got cupcakes, dude).

The January 7 program, "Wallace Berman's Underground", focused on films emerging from the Topanga Canyon art scene of the '60s — The West Cost assemblage movement, SEMINA group and associates, buddies and neighbors, and so forth. The entire Alternative Projections project is inspiring, because mid-century underground film discussion tends to focus on New York and, in California, the Bay Area. SEMINA magazine creator and assemblage master Wallace Berman served as the connecting spirit for the assembled films and his son, Tosh Berman, artists Russ Tamblyn, Toni Basil, George Herns were on hand to introduce and discuss their work. So yes, since this is primarily a pop movie blog, that Russ Tamblyn and that Toni Basil; if Los Angeles is good at anything, it is in the overlapping of high art and high glam, inspiring hip circles of weirdo legends to bump into each other like amoebae in a petri dish. So speaking of context, Tamblyn hilariously related the story of how his introduction to Berman via Hollywood pal Dean Stockwell effectively "ruined [his] life" and turned him to a second career of non-commercial art — collage, poetry, and handmade film.

The most familiar film on display was probably Bruce Conner's BREAKAWAY, but here it is in a particular context — placed in its historical Scene. That's what we're really talking about here, a social scene, an art community, which was, as art communities are, a group of folks making work for themselves and sharing it with each other. Even (especially?) the grungiest of art scenes end up as romantic legends for starry-eyed generations hence. The documentary qualities of a lot of this work help to demythologize the time, place, and personalities, and shape a coherent picture of that particular moment.

And honestly, with the Cinefamily series, it's also rare fun to see these films outside of a museum or academic setting. The guest speakers made fairly clear that these films were made to be presented at entirely private screenings, typically with audiences of one, projected on walls or, as Tosh Berman noted, refrigerator doors. The Silent Movie Theater is not, from what I understand, exactly the kind of rathole that screened undergrounds in New York, but it is undeniably of cozier charms than Cinematheque theaters.

SO! To the films:
Aleph (1956-66, Wallace Berman, 6 min, 16mm, color, silent)

Berman's only film, a pretty steadily frenzied collage, sliced and spliced and rephotographed from newspapers, home movies, other movies — even his own collages essentially collaged into a collage. The mystics in the audience may perk up when the Hebrew letters start to flash and Mick Jagger appears — those murky, secret links between underground film, Kabbalah, and 20th century magical movers-and-shakers are glinting through once more. Somewhere Kenneth Anger cracks his knuckles and Harry Smith strokes his beard. Tosh Berman relates the odd but completely perfect story that his father actually took him to the filming of The T.A.M.I. Show, where the lad witnessed the Supremes in hair curlers... but rather than shoot live footage of The Rolling Stones, Berman went to a theater when the film came out and shot the screen. Which is, as noted, perfect. P.S., Toni Basil is in The T.A.M.I. Show.

BREAKAWAY (1966, Bruce Conner, 5 min, 16mm [transfered from 8mm?], color, sound)
Pas De Trois (1964, Dean Stockwell, 8 min, 16mm [transfered to video], b&w)
A Dance Film inspired by the music of Jim Morrison (1968, Toni Basil, 2 min, color, sound)

A Basilana trio of sorts: Conner's ecstatic dance film of Basil, set to her 1966 pop single, Stockwell's expressive "making-of" document of the filming of BREAKAWAY, and Basil's own Dance Film. Crackling stuff, all. In BREAKAWAY, Conner's camera flails and motion-streaks and strobes and dances with/at/for Basil — plus if you dig '60s girlpop sounds, you already like this song. Just as the rock runs dry, the action reverses and the film and music play again backwards: Big Bang to Big Crunch with Toni Basil in between. Stockwell's film contains, apparently, the only footage of Bruce Conner in the act of filming. These are the moments that forge important links in our understanding of the story of film history; specifically, here is an "in" for hardcore AIP nerds, a connection for enthusiasts of '60s pop or of New York post-punk, here is a major link between experimental film and commercial cinema, concrete personnel crossover between Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, Camp Corman, early MTV, and... Grizzly Adams.

Basil's Dance Film (actually set to Hendrix) sees the inventive choreographer demonstrating an early knack for innovative possibilities in shooting dance. Dance Film triple-layers footage of ballerinas and street dancers, shot in a black-box void (black, not white like her stark "Mickey" and "Once in a Lifetime" videos). Screened with Basil's newly appended but vintage, original hand-lettered titles.

All of this has some added kick for those imagining Dennis Hopper somewhere nearby, trying to put together The Last Movie, and the shadows of Devo coming into focus in the distance. If I'm romanticizing again, it was bound to happen, this section being so rock-n-roll.

First Film (1966, Russ Tamblyn, 8 min, 16mm, color, silent)
Rio Reel (1968, Tamblyn, 6 min, 16mm, color, silent)

And then to the the Tamblyn portion. First Film is a snappy stream-of-consciousness rush through young Mr. Tamblyn's brain immediately after being warped by contact with Berman. As per the filmmaker's recollections, the films were originally shown with vinyl record accompanyment — rock or Bach or whatever was around Chez Tamblyn. So if this screens again, bring your iPod, I guess. We start with a tone-poem of grass billowing in the wind in crosscut weaving patterns and progress to drunken, blurring neon nightlife. The first-time film artist throws in every technique he's got, seen, and absorbed, from Berman-style flashframe editing to Sharpie-on-film animation (McLaren needn't have started looking over his shoulder, but it's charming).

A surprise highlight of the show, Rio Reel is rather like the city symphony films of yore, an impressionistic document of a time and place. Tamblyn edits with wit and some panache (spinning a sunbather around the beach by changing angles), but nabs an abundance of poetic or simply attractive images (a sapling palm black against a blazing red sky, a wasp crawling into a hole), and lets them flash by (thus: a lion's eyes turn into windmills). Again, per the filmmaker: shot while on location for an episode of the Tarzan TV show, the film includes two memorable but incognito cameos by that program's animal trainer, Dan Haggerty. In the second, his leg is clawed by a big cat. In the first, he moons the camera from a passing auto. Really, there are no words.

Evident Tamblyn trademark: shooting signage, type, titles, usually only in part, and bouncing the phrases, words or single letters off each other — they make puns, spell "L.S.D.," connect or collide. This starts in First Film, becomes more sophisticated in Rio Reel.

Selections from Topanga Rose (1960s, George Herms, 22 min, film transferred to video, color)

Sculptor-poet-etc, assemblage founding father, American Dadaist, more etc., the inimitable George Herms cut together vintage home movies of the community at work, play, meal, and living; the focus is goats and children and water and landscape and making art, always, and constantly. With an excellent clamorous bells-and-piano musical arrangement and Herms growling his fragmented poetry on the soundtrack, Topanga Rose is a shimmering, wistful sort of cap to the program, but it is also earthy, bodily, human. Some of the narration comes from Herms' Genesis theater piece: "The egg of night was floating on chaos, and out of the egg came love. And love, with his arrows and his torch, pierced and vivified all things."

Again, I want to single this series out, because it's the kind of thing with a lot of potential to bridge the unfortunate divide between audiences for popular art and fine art. There are "hooks" here, there are stories and history that flow directly in and out of commercial film history — this material can be entirely captivating and accessible to anyone with an interest in film, which is effectively everyone. So in a slightly esoteric way, Berman's Underground tells the story of how The Boy With Green Hair cast grew up, was dragged into a bohemian camp, emerged transformed into Lovecraftian wizards and Gargantua slayers, then worked with David Lynch.

If one single night of the series is bound to exemplify this nexus of studio product, modern art movements, multiple major film schools, fringe-dwellars and moneymen, future giants and old gods, it will be "Industry Town: The Avant-Garde & Hollywood" (Jan. 14). The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra is a cheat — it's from 1928: BUSTED!, but oh look, here's a George Lucas movie. And as it happens, of the Movie Bratz, Lucas easily showed the most promise at experimental films — better than De Palma, is what I'm saying. So that's my pick for those looking to wet a toe or being otherwise selective.

Experimental animation is a particularly exciting topic to me (also, ahem, psychedelia), so I point all like-minded to the "Psychedelic Visions & Expanded Consciousness" show; I am familiar with more of the films than in the other line-ups, but it is likely the most retina-dazzling program, unless the optical-printer-themed night has some thing up its sleeve. Optical Printer Theme Night, don't it just make your heart light up, folks?

Okay, one quick whine to remind us all to check the calendars on the reg: the selected Kenneth Anger films have all already screened. Could've made a whole night of it, even if that's a little obvious and unnecessary. Still, as this is about L.A. and experimental film, then one of his greatest magical works was in helping the city dream a mythology of itself — Kenneth Anger psychically terraformed Los Angeles.

Ray vs. Gumby

2011-09-29T21:54:00.000-07:00

Ray Liotta as Ray Sinclair contemplates the unexpected appearance of Gumby in Something Wild, 1986 dir. Jonathan Demme, scr. E. Max Frye.

This three-second bit of business is one of dozen of fine throwaway pleasures in a pretty goddamn rousing performance. Come to think of it, most of Something Wild's delights are in a hand-decorated telephone, a background performer's body language, the fluorescent pink letters on a t-shirt; it's a bric-a-brac movie. There is a killer moment in Liotta's final scene as the actor swipes a meaty paw across his pallid brow, leaves a bloody palm print dripping from his hairline, and it looks for all the world as though his brain is bleeding.

The film undergoes two or three major tonal shifts — part of the fun and sense of play is that one never knows what is going to happen next, even though a capsule summary of the plot would indicate a boilerplate screwball romance throwback in which a free-spirited wacky dame pesters an uptight square until he loves her. So that's Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels) and Audrey "Lulu" Hankel (Melanie Griffith) plugged into the Susan Vance and Doc David Huxley parts, or maybe the Clarence Worley and Alabama Whitman parts, because you never know when someone will get murdered or naked or, more importantly, how serious or cartoony the next curve will bend.

Now there's a sort of interesting subtext to the final movement of Something Wild, where bank-robber ex-boyfriend criminal on the lam Ray appears as a dark agent of Lulu's wicked, troubled past and his relentless pursuit has a quality of karmic horror. The first sections focus on Lulu assaulting Charlie's worldview, forcing him to transgress personal boundaries, and assisting in his ego death by way of "losing" his wallet, and helping him self-actualize through fashion therapy and a parade of new identities. Where the opening acts see Lulu broadening Charlie's horizons with the magic of her particular charms, after Ray intrudes the tables turn and the reinvented Charlie has to fight to maintain the relationship and as She fixed Him now He has to fix Her — thesis, antithesis, synthesis and all that. In counterpoint to Ray-as-Lulu's-shadow, it has (sorta) been noted by Demme, it is as if Charlie's sheer niceness through his life provides him with a spontaneous network of helpers — convenience store clerks and scruffy motel owners, rather than woodland sprites, if you will, but we're not here to plug Charlie Driggs into the Monomyth (not right now, anyway).

Ray is then a golem on the hunt (though this is just a made-up appropriate metaphor, it conveniently ties in with the forehead-wiping upon permanent deactivation — we might compare Ray to a twitchy Terminator or greaser Pumpkinhead; anyway, a vengeful ghoul animated by buried sins of the past). For a moment the universe throws him an omen, the pasty golem contemplates the Zen example of the green clay boy. Ray barks out a spazzy laugh, chucks Gumby out the window and speeds off in a hotwired car.

The Penguin Billboard Story

2011-06-01T05:02:00.000-07:00

Just this afternoon past, on the final sunny day of May, 2011, I was chatting (i.e.— complaining, making fun of things, and so forth) with the lady of the house as we inched down one of Los Angeles' finer freeways. As it turns out, traffic was slowed because some poor sap's car had stalled in the middle of the 101 or whatever the hell road, I don't know, and everyone had to go around him slow so they could point and laugh. If you are driving, you don't want me to navigate because I never, ever pay attention or have any idea where we are. So anyway, we see this fucking billboard for Mr. Popper's Penguins, opening nationwide on June 17 after its triumph at Cannes, where it took the Prix du Jury, just like The Seventh Goddamn Seal and that Clouzot movie of Picasso painting on glass. If you never did drugs and watched that movie, you should do that sometime.

Now, this billboard doesn't look exactly like the poster displayed here. But it is the same idea, basically: a horrible computer collage with the same photo of Jim Carrey but, since billboards are long on the horizontal and short on the vertical (if you have seen a billboard, you can skip this condescending explanation), all the penguins are arranged in a row. To accommodate the visual gags, the designers swapped the positions of the bird ripping off Jimbo's ear and the one rubbing its eye into his supple, Botoxed cheek. For various aesthetic reasons that run so deep they verge on moral issues, this kind of lazy, fake-looking photo collage is deeply offensive to me. I'm not crying or barfing about it, but in this case it's particularly sad, because the kiddie novel from which this picture was adapted had memorable pen and ink illustrations by Robert Lawson. Not that a wacky animal comedy of 2011 should be advertised to look like a children's book from the 1930s, but perhaps it could look like something, and its a clear example of the disintegration of everyone's standards of what is acceptable to look at with our eyes, and so on. I mean please, Robert Lawson also illustrated The Story of Ferdinand. He won a Caldecott and a Newberry. Elliott Smith got a tattoo of his drawings and everything. Come on Fox advertising department, quit ruining civilization.

Sort of related: I know a lot of people complain about how this kind of poster is "Photoshop". That is acceptable conversational shorthand for what is going on here, but it also gives Photoshop a bad rap. Photoshop and various softwares comprising the Adobe Creative Suite are all useful and powerful tools for good in art and design. Even a hand-painted or drawn poster is going to pass through Illustrator or Quark or something at some point to adjust colors, lay in typography and create files to send to the printer. The problem is not that there is something inherently evil about Photoshop, but that this kind of poster is, if I may lapse into fancy art school terminology, some ugly bullshit.

The other feature of the billboard is that it lists the names of the penguins over their pictures. In Futura Extra-Duper Bold, designated comedy poster font of our times, it goes something like NIMROD, STINKY, LOUDY, CAPTAIN, BITEY, LOVEY, CARREY (ha ha ha). Nimrod is standing there looking stupid (I guess?), Stinky is looking down because he probably just farted and is looking at the fart (I guess?), Loudy is yelling, Captain is looking captainial, Bitey is gnawing open his master's earlobe, and Lovey is the one that wants to have sex with Big Jim. It tells about their rich, faceted personalities, you see.

When we see this billboard, my girlfriend, Linda, says "Bitey? They stole that joke from The Simpsons?" or maybe "They stole that joke from The Simpsons." So we bitch about that for awhile, because, as I point out, that memorable joke from "Marge vs. the Monorail" looks simple but is pretty elegant. As you surely recall, newly minted monorail conductor Homer is giving a tour of his workplace, introduces a family of possums which has nested in the control panel, and coos "I call the big one 'Bitey'!" So besides the hilarious way Dan Castellaneta imbues the dialogue with fatherly pride and fondness, the gag works because we infer that the ill-tempered possum has, uh, bitten him. This is funnier than if, say, we had seen it bite him and he announced "You shall be known as 'Bitey'," because we have to do some of the work. The name is funny for being so blunt and on the nose, and a cutesy diminutive of a violent action. It is also a character-based joke, because we fill in the gap that not only was Homer bitten, but he didn't take measures to evict the possums, and instead developed a one-sided affection for them — i.e. he is blithe about safety, lax in his work duties, misinterprets the behavior of others and is, generally, an idiot. I'm sure you get all that, but the point is that Mr. Popper's Penguins stole that joke and then told it wrong.

So Linda and I gripe about this for a little while, until I say something like "You realize, of course, we're bitching about how a Jim Carrey penguin movie stole a twenty-year-old joke." And I know I'm exaggerating — just a little bit, but exaggerating — but this turns into a disagreement about just how old "Marge vs. the Monorail" actually is. Because surely it can't be that long ago! Maybe ten years, max. We're in the car, so can't look at the Internet, because we don't have iPhones for religious reasons such as they cost too much. I'm proud that I am nerd enough to have explained that the episode would have aired in 1992 or '93, but also not-nerd enough that I misremembered the possums as raccoons and the show as a season three episode (it was actually season four, duh. Or "d'oh," or whatever).

Another thing is, we'd talked about this episode and where it falls in the show's run at length before, during discussions on the important subject of When The Simpsons Started Sucking. I usually use "Monorail" as a rough but fairly distinct dividing line between the first and second phases of the show. It is around then that The Simpsons transitions from a sitcom about middle-class family life and childhood, grounded in something resembling reality with a focus on humor rising from flawed, sympathetic characters in exaggerated but relatable situations and room for pathos and sweetness (like I said, "sitcom"), to a faster-paced, gag-based satire with ambitious, convoluted plots, expanded story focus on secondary and tertiary characters and a shift to absurdist humor, intertextuality and ever-increasing deconstructive "comedy for comedy writers." There are other transformations and phases later (where the "sucking" comes in), but the point is, last time we talked about the monorail episode there was similar talk of: oh my God, it didn't air that long ago — must be six years, max. And also: oh my God, has The Simpsons sucked for that long? But it was that long, and dude, that Bitey joke is old enough to buy cigarettes.

Further research, of course, always bears out the worst. Robert Lawson died May 27, 1957. Elliott Smith died October 21, 2003. "Marge vs. the Monorail", episode twelve, season four, first aired January 14, 1993. Eighteen years ago. Mr. Popper's Penguins opens July 17, 2011. I don't know when movie posters started being so godawful, but I know that in the end those penguins made me feel very, very old.

Where God Lives

2011-05-28T14:38:00.000-07:00

Synchronicity's Spine Number

2011-05-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

Item: Strange echo found in the cover illustrations of The Criterion Collection's releases for May 17, 2011. A woman's hand presses upon a man's brow and in context neither gesture is particularly soothing.

Vague opinion: It goes without saying, I hope, that both films are renowned knockers off of socks, and a better use of one's disposable income than attendance at any pictures opening this weekend, whatever the weekend.

Down Inside You're Dirty!: A Tribute to David F. Friedman — Screening Report

2011-05-03T04:30:00.000-07:00

Pioneering exploitation movie producer/ writer/ distributor/ actor/ advertiser/ theater owner/ etc. David F. Friedman died in his hometown of Anniston, Alabama on Valentine's Day of 2011. At the time, I happened to be eyeball-deep in studying his collaborations with Herschell Gordon Lewis (some of which I've written about here), and suddenly found myself at a loss for words. With a sizable filmography, leading the way or producing key films in a number of subgenres, Friedman's influence and import is something of a matter of public record, while the quality and reputation of what he made is rather up in the air. Part of the reason for that is that the audience for the sort of films he produced is an endangered species. While the groundbreaking splatter films with Lewis are certainly his most famous films, Friedman wrote so many of his own scripts that even when paired with a dozen different directors, his voice as an artist is clear as a bell.

On April 30, Eric Caidin and Brian Quinn of the Grindhouse Film Festival and Something Weird Video presented a special Tribute to David Friedman at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. Seven saucy and shocking films, sundry titillating trailers, and sensational short subjects were screened over the course of twelve and a half hours, and a bevy of special guests shared personal memories and reflections about the beloved exploitation film impresario.

All told, turnout for this all-day sleaze-a-thon was hearty, if not packed to capacity, with an increase in warm bodies in the evening and severe tapering off after midnight and maybe a dozen diehards making it to the very end. Guests ranged from character actor Bill McKinney (the Ten-in-One owner of She Freak, whose work you surely enjoy) to L.A. Times critic Kevin Thomas (about whose work you may have Opinions), and Ted Bonnitt, director of the 2001 documentary Mau Mau Sex Sex read a message from Rosa Lee Sonney (daughter of Dan Sonney, Friedman's partner in the Pussycat Theater chain). If anything came across in everyone's reminisces it is that Dave Friedman was a tremendous amount of fun to be around, loved his work, and lived heartily. The always affable Mike Vraney was on hand for film intros, anecdotes about his adventures with Friedman, historical contextualizing, and available for pestering on the sidewalk during smoke breaks. Some SWV news was spilt, so to that end:

Something Weird Blu-rays should be out around September, 2011 with Basket Case as the first title! Sorry, fellow Shanty Tramp fans. This will be followed by a Herschell Gordon Lewis triple feature with Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs! and Color Me Blood Red all on one disc. I'm sorry, for whatever reason, I just can't call that it the "Blood Trilogy."

As for the film fest, I might have organized the movies in chronological order and/or selected more representative or important productions for a sort of pedantic Friedman 101 presentation. But I'd have been wrong, because damned if the day wasn't programmed nearly perfectly. Here's the thing: you either enjoy these movies or you don't. I'm mostly talking about nudie pictures here, not low-budget horror or drive-in action, or sundry other exploitation subphylum. I do think they are a (rotten) taste that can be acquired, but there's not something to "get" before they start clicking, unless it's context or nostalgia. To me, Friedman's nudies are the heart of exploitation film, the dividing line of scum that separates the "real" grindhouse from the mainstream. So I'd like to think that everyone in Los Angeles who finds this the Mid-Century Smut anti-aesthetic inherently appealing was in the audience, and a few new pairs of eyes got a baptism by fire. The movies:

Space Thing (1968, dir. Byron Mabe as B. Ron Elliot)

Nonsensical, super-boring, and idiotic, Space Thing is about a Planetarian alien disguised (somehow?) as a Terranian (e.g.— Earthling, "from Kansas," no less) who infiltrates an enemy spacecraft, learns the art of making out with girls, wanders around a rock quarry, then concludes his mission by blowing up the ship with a bomb that he could have set off the minute the film began. On one hand starting with this movie this is jumping in with both feet, and on the other hand it worked perfectly, infusing a little SF genre flavor into the line-up, and providing the early birds with an opening salvo of interminable scenes of hairy-backed men rolling around on passably cute chicks with bad skin, unsynched audio over MOS footage and extensive whipping of bare butts. Because as much hysteria as it causes the first time, there will be a lot of whipping of bare butts. We do not, as the poster promises, visit the "Planet of the Rapes." If this is some sort of deal-breaker, be forewarned.

Presented in a print gone 500 shades of pink. Vraney helpfully explained a pointless, non sequitur prologue as an attempt to pad out the picture, which came in short when Mabe was fired.

Scum of the Earth (1963, dir. H.G. Lewis as Lewis H. Gordon)

1963 was a banner year for the Lewis and Friedman team, with a flurry of nudies, the invention of splatter films, and this J.D./ fallen girl/ pornography exposé melodrama in the vein of Ed Wood, Jr.'s The Sinister Urge (1960). Scum of the Earth might be my favorite Lewis/Friedman project. It's got the Bill Kerwin/ Mal Arnold/ Lawrence Aberwood acting trifecta chewing things up as crazy characters, the unforgettable "all you kids make me sick!" speech (among others), unconvincingly staged violence, great period cars and clothes, and a turgid, sweaty conviction that feels like it's covered with a coat of slime even though there is zero nudity. Also, 30-year-old Mal Arnold repeatedly brags that he is a minor in the eyes of the law, to the delight of all viewers.

What I like most about Scum (this goes for Sinister Urge, too) is that it is a wholly ludicrous depiction of the adult entertainment business from men who know perfectly well how it actually works. In this respect it is an interesting companion piece to their earlier Living Venus (1961), which takes a more down-to-earth approach to chronicling the professional workings and moral downward spiral of a Hugh Hefner analogue, and to Friedman's later Starlet! (see below).

Presented in a print with consistent scratching but otherwise aces.

She Freak (1967, dir. Byron Mabe)

Okay, I adore She Freak. It starts with the lowering of a Ferris wheel safety bar, and then we're off! If you want to know what Dave Friedman was about, who he was, where he came from, I suspect She Freak is the place to look. Whatever else is going on in the movie — loose remake of Freaks, ruthless maneater melodrama, love and violence among showpeople yarn, 80 minutes of barking for two minutes of horror — She Freak is head over heels for the carnival — the people, the culture, the lifestyle — and wants to show you in detail every tent stake being pounded, every midway lightbulb being screwed in, every corn dog being dipped. Where a majority of Friedman movies would have ten-minute heavy petting scenes, She Freak instead shows its carnival setting up, running, and tearing down.

Presented in quite nice condition, with color starting to go red but not entirely gone over.

A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine (1966, dir. Byron Mabe as B. Ron Elliot)

Hateful, fascinating and feverish, Smell of Honey sees seductress Sharon Winters (Friedman discovery Stacey Walker née Barbara Jean Moore) drive a string of would-be lovers into a frenzy, up until they try to peel off her panties, at which point she cries rape. And this she does over and over... until she pays the price. The roughie subgenre would obviously produce much uglier, more objectionable products, and Friedman hadn't gotten into Love Camp 7 or Ilsa territory quite yet. While Smell/Swallow is no walk in the park compared to the cuties of earlier in the decade, there is enough camp and bitter comedy to make this more entertaining than vile.

Besides almost working as a metaphor for the degree of explicitness allowable in nudie pictures, Smell of Honey strikes me as sort of a female counterpart to Raging Bull: a study of a character with single-minded, stripped-down psychology, a stunted person with one nasty trait that may be observable in real people but here is just hammered and hammered and hammered. Where Jake La Motta's entire sexuality, personality and being are focused down to "he punches things," Sharon Winters is a sadistic tease. Both one-track characters follow their patterns like rats in a maze until they spiral into hell. There's no inciting incident, no exploration, no learning, no excuses, no apologies. There is, however, a fantastic, relentless rock score by "Et Cetera" that might be described as "Exile on Shaggs Street," and a remarkable, bizarrely sexy lead performance by Walker. Cinematographer László Kovács (as Art Radford) and director Mabe are 100% on point, and this may be as close as Friedman ever got to a well-crafted picture.

Presented in an occasionally jumpy but otherwise excellent print.

-Short subject: "But Charlie, I Never Played Volleyball!" (1966)

Fun to see this stupid little nudist camp reel with narrated banter and wraparound story featuring Stacey Walker as an actress hired to judge the Miss Nude Universe pageant. IMDb says that this number, Smell of Honey and Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (all in a year) comprise all of Walker's film work, which is kind of a drag. If you need to see it, check the Fanny Hill/ The Head Mistress DVD, if you can get a copy.

This was also the point at which the audience had hit "the wall" and pushed through into "the zone." That is, things started to get a little loopy. Personally, my perspective warped, the dumb jokes became hilarious, and the prolonged softcore scenes whizzed by like they weren't completely stupefying. Case in point, Blood Feast seemed to move at light speed...

Blood Feast (1963, dir. H.G. Lewis)

This print was just about as close to perfect as one could ask, Blood Color intact and with barely a scratch but for those legs what got cut off. Hey man, it brought down the house like always. My favorite part is when Mal Arnold says "You see, I am an old man!," the same comedy in reverse as when he says he's under 18 in Scum of the Earth.

The Pick-Up (1968, dir. Lee Frost)

Vraney helpfully provided backstory on the search for this ultra-rarity, a film Friedman had asked him to locate for years, which was ultimately found in a Copenhagen film collector's vault. This nigh pristine print (with Danish subs) is the only known copy, so you can see it on SWV's DVD-R; it's only been screened publicly twice now. I'd enjoyed The Pick-Up before, but it gained a lot of power in this context, since Friedman has a large onscreen role as stressed-out Vegas crime boss Charlie Rosa. And, bonus, fellow exploitation producer Bob Cresse (you loved 'im in House on Bare Mountain!) plays L.A. mob boss, Sal. Both producers are extremely entertaining as they stress out about what happened to a missing Cadillac trunkfull of casino skimmings. Meanwhile, the hapless bagmen endeavor to retrieve the twice-stolen cash from a pair of foxy female crooks.

Besides one over-the-top roughie-style torture scene, The Pick-Up is primarily a punchy hardboiled crime thriller, stylishly stripped-down like a Richard Stark book or a proto Reservoir Dogs. I'd say it really cooks along, because it mostly does, but my brain is phasing out on the ten-minute make out scenes. If you've already watched five Friedman movies, The Pick-Up is wound up like a watch spring. Cool vintage Vegas footage at the top, too.

-Aaand another goofy-ass short, "The Casting Director" (1968), also starring Bob Cresse, who sexually harasses an auditioning actress in an office full of beautiful, beautiful exploitation movie posters and lobby cards. Cresse mostly pulls faces and pours sweat, in the classic LUCKY PIERRE nudie-cutie-peeper style. Due to the lateness of the hour, excessive Junior Mints intake, and coccyx agony, I just kind of couldn't stop laughing. If you must see it, check the SWV double feature of Dr. Sex/ Wanda the Wicked Hypnotist.

Starlet! (1969, dir. Richard Kantor)

You shoot anything on the old Monogram lot, and I'm there.

Starlet! is an epic-scale (100 minutes!) portrait of the exploitation film industry and it feels rather like Friedman's final word on the subject. But it's not — he hadn't made Trader Hornee (1970), gotten into Nazisploitation, finished making those "Erotic Adventures" films or unleashed Johnny Firecloud (1975). While Starlet! isn't technically the end of an era, it does appear as the nudie cycle is winding down and — as metaphorically depicted in the opening scene — transforming into no-holes-barred hardcore. So the movie was a perfect capper for this celebration of Friedman's career, as it is, in itself, a celebration of Friedman's career, full of in-jokes and cameos and requiring of the audience at least a basic familiarity with the genre.

The tapestry-style story basically concerns the exploits at EVI Studios (the film's real production company, depicting itself within... oh, forget it) as it gears up, shoots, and releases the college-themed nudie smash "A Youth in Babylon" (a title so good or personally meaningful that Friedman used it for his autobiography). The backbone of the plot follows fresh talent Carol Yates (beautiful, funny, articulate Dee Lockwood credited as Deirdre Nelson), who we meet doing stag films for rent money and rises to become EVI's biggest new star. The emphasis is on good-natured situational comedy, but with a dozen colorful characters swirling around the fringes there is room for romance, slapstick, gripping blackmail plots, and All About Eve-type backstage drama.

The thing I like best about Starlet! is its familial, jocular tone, and though the characters are cartoonish to a degree, the film is non-judgmental about who they are, what they are doing, and why they do it. Where Scum of the Earth depicts a convoluted extortion plot just to get a girl to take cheesecake photos, Starlet! opens with its strong-willed, likable and down-to-earth heroine being convinced to turn a softcore scene into hard, and rather than weeping and screaming indignantly, Carol just rolls her eyes and shrugs. Insta-crush-object Deirdre Nelson is the rightful Starlet here, but the supporting cast is a great mix of talented vets (Stuart Lancaster, John Alderman, both kinda-sorta-not-really reprising their characters from Thar She Blows!) and unspeakably wooden topless gals. The overall warm "look what we got away with" tone is darkened and complicated with depictions of artistic frustration, the disposability of aging talent, and violent abuse of power by directors and producers. A particularly effective subplot, not played for laughs, involves a first-time nudie director learning to compromise his vision and morals, and finding out, basically, that joining the carnival comes with some personal sacrifices: those who aren't With the Show will never understand. If the nude squirming scenes were trimmed down, Starlet! could almost play to a non-weirdo audience, and I believe it belongs in the company of Ed Wood and Boogie Nights — a small family of affectionate, good-hearted but complex, conflicted depictions of particular times and places in trash filmmaking history. Starlet! does not achieve (or aspire to) the same level of fine-tuning and polish as those mainstream masterpieces, but it has something they don't: it was made by the people it is about. They lived this story, even as they filmed Starlet!

Presented in a... nice print? I was pretty out of it, sorry. Surely it is the same acceptable print used for the SWV DVD-R. Includes much vintage L.A. footage, always a joy.

Famously humorous and bombastic trailers for classic Friedman product were interspersed throughout the program, usually featuring tie-in glimpses of cast members, locations, or, in one case, a big white dog. I took no notes, but we were treated to trailers for: The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966), Brand of Shame (1968), Bummer (1973), A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine ('66), Thar She Blows! (1968), Love Camp 7 (1969), Trader Hornee (1970), and, undoubtedly, more which are lost to delirium.

I Believe It's Magic

2011-03-27T05:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one stumbles onto diverting/cute/inconsequential discoveries but has no longer piece on any related topics in the works where they might be deposited. Rather than lose this one to the wind, I present a nice little flourish from Ghostbusters (1984, Columbia Pictures, dir. I. Reitman). Or is that "Ghost Busters," as the opening titles would have it? I usually defer to what is onscreen, but this is plainly incorrect. Moving on then. This is really just about an interesting cut-on-action and as it entirely involves movement and cutting, the illustrations below aren't particularly attractive or, well, illustrative.

The context, as you surely recall, is that Consolidated Edison, under orders of EPA jagoff Walter "Wally Wick" Peck, have shut down the 'Busters' containment grid and released all manner of spookums. In humorous-eerie montage set to a jittery remix of "Magic" by Mick Smiley, several of the emancipated phantoms rush to indulge in those specifically New York City experiences they must have pined for in captivity. After shenanigans with subways, taxis, and mouthfuls of street hotdogs, we're back to our key players.

Fig. 1

Whoosh! Here's a view looking out from the apartment window of one Dana Barrett, lately possessed by Sumerian demigod Zuul, Gatekeeper and minion of Gozer the Gozerian (I type these things because it looks funny, not because you don't already know all this; sadly, we both know all of this by heart).

This sequence is rather on the cusp of the second and third acts, and designed to pull into position the relevant players who have been scattered to the wind. Namely, at this point the stage is set for the ritual union of Gatekeeper Zuul and Keymaster Vinz Clortho, but Vinz is off scampering around TriBeCa — they can't find each other.

This is followed by a brief reaction shot of Zuul!Dana, distorted through the window glass and then...

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

The idea here, as explained by Dr. Stanz, is that the building itself is constructed to serve as a massive antenna for PK energy. Hence, a good number of the pink energy balls zip straight toward 55 Central Park West. Those that don't crave hotdogs, anyway.

Before (F.2) and after (F.3) images are offered purely to communicate what is happening in this shot: the wall explodes out, sending a cloud of gray dust and debris straight at the camera. Match cut to:

Fig. 4

A flock of pigeons suddenly taking flight in the foreground. They rise up and exit frame at the top and reveal Vinz Clortho in Louis Tully's clothes staggering around in the middle distance, watching them go.

Observations, mercifully brief:

-The student of editing clichés may know that a sudden cut to birds taking wing is not entirely unprecedented. Such theoretical birds are often reacting literally, metaphorically, or both to some kind of violent shock, e.g.— echoing gunshots and a cut to startled birds escaping Dealey Plaza punctuate the opening sequence of JFK (1991). HOWEVER! While "motivated" by the PKE-charged explosion, the Ghostbusters pigeons are different in essence. Again, no screencap quite captures kinetic release of this cut, but suffice to say the effect is that the wall explodes into a cloud of pigeons.

-This sequence is a chain of motion, where flocking chunks of energyball/brickwork/birds fly at the spectator. This is also part of an image system throughout the film in which, well, special effects fly at the camera. Obviously, in the twenty-six years since, this is an increasingly typical gimmick, and it was not really new in 1984. Rather than make a case for visual innovation or uniqueness here, I just wish to point out that this bit combos an optical effect (F.1) onto a pyro stunt (F.3) onto real live birds (F.4) to convey several story points.

-As the music cuts out, the final puzzle piece is laid, completing the story concerns driving this bit. Besides the ghostie hijinks, this sequence is about Zuul moving to the window in anticipation, sensing the arrival of Clortho. Vinz has been wandering the streets and looking to the skies, finally drawn to Spook Central by the swarming spiritual turbulence. The pigeon cut signals the moment that he knows exactly where to go. Now what is interesting? poignant? weird? to me about this story thread is the screenwriter's-delight irony surrounding Louis Tully. The Gatekeeper/Keymaster gag is memorable enough that it garnered a nod in one of those "Sex in Cinema" pieces in Playboy. As the paperback novelization puts it, "She was the Gatekeeper and his key was ready. They sank down in the embrace that had been foretold and blew the roof off the building." Good one, Richard Mueller.

What the film does not play up explicitly is the character dimension to this, in which the lovesick nerd has universe-ripping sex with his dream girl while they are both under the influence of demonic possession. There is a fair amount of this sort of understated irony in Ghostbusters, right down in its foundational concept. The film is set in a world beset by real supernatural menace but the protagonist, Peter Venkman, is the sort of sham parapsychologist that skeptical investigators like to make examples of. The point being only that the core jokes of Ghostbusters are somehow those that get the least attention in favor of, say, smelly ghosts eating ten hotdogs.

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 7 — 2006

2011-03-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

Previously: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005...

Two quick notes, skippable for the disinterested. The Decade Review Revue continues because I always meant for it to take a long time, spread well past when your list-collating people are collating lists of such things. Not because we are now properly in a new decade — as a man once said, "Nobody likes a math nerd, Scully" — but because I enjoy this project and can take my time. See, reviewers and columnist types — those with niceties like editors, paychecks and readers — have to do constant pulse-taking and odometer-checking as they jog their beat. So right about now they're, what?, supposed to be writing about awards and/or festivals and/or generating think-pieces about, like, what celebrities wear to court. Daaamn, that's a harsh gig, but I ain't judgin', I'm just sayin'. Surely this is a stubborn exercise in what my sixth grade teacher politely called “divergent thinking” but the post-mortem on The 2000s is not done till we’ve weighed all the organs and sewn it back up.

One of the reasons the "Two Zero Zero X" lists take so long to write is that I make a point to investigate a lot of films from each year that I hadn't caught up with and rewatch anything I have not seen in awhile. So, logically, the more recent the year of inquiry, the less time I've had to see everything I'm interested in. But I'm finding that it doesn’t really matter. Gaze, for instance, at this original Best of 2006 round-up, and note that it doesn't look much different from a mash-up of the list below plus a couple of foreign film holdouts from 2005 and a couple of items that would show up on this 2007 list. We're entering territory largely already covered, since this journal's inception in 2005. So dread the upcoming day when I have to discover if I really have more to say about Grindhouse (2007!), but in the meantime, welcome to 2006, which isn't so different from last time we visited 2006...

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2006

10. V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, scr. Larry Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, from the comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd)

Well, you can draw this stuff, but that doesn't mean you can film it. The V for Vendetta comic that Alan Moore wrote between 1982 and 1985 extrapolates a political dystopia out of '80s Thatcherism and sets against it a sort of man-against-the-system freedom fighter missing link between archcriminal terrorist Fantômas and the proto-superheroics of The Shadow. It is an almost-direct-engagement of contemporary political situations by way of enlargement. The polemics on-page are located at the inflamed ends of a spectrum, which is the position from which, gods bless him, Moore always makes sociopolitical argument, which is to say that the comic is about Fascism v. Anarchy. The older and wiser Moore gets, the more he boils human power struggle down to these terms, which makes for compelling art and zero tolerance for, say, American and Australian filmmakers futzing around with his book. Multipurpose metaphor, of course, is how one builds things to last.

Of the transition from agitprop comic to the McTeigue/Wachowskis/Silver poli-sci-fi film, Moore offered the astute criticism that the metaphor has been remolded to a sort of contemporary American liberal response to neo-conservativism. This is, of course, meant as a complaint, but might as well be a compliment, because, Jesus, ain't that something? Joel Silver surely has his own peculiar voice as a producer, and the verdict may be iffy on the voice of Mr. McTiegue, but part of the Wachowski project thus far has been to dance a highly subversive ballet on the stage of the monolithic studio system without allowing the sundry associated pressures to interfere with their choreography. The decade's preferred commercial spectacle genres were superhero action and nerd fantasy literature adaptation, and, 2006 being Life During Wartime and a Dark Time for the Nation and Post-9-11 and all, V for Vendetta is rather a break in continuity in this pop art dialectic. It sprays graffiti on the broad, oppressive walls of Batman Begins, and, because it wears a mask, can walk right up and do its business in broad daylight.

9. Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven, scr. Verhoeven, Gerard Soeteman)

There is something of the same work being done in Black Book as in decade fellows The Pianist and Inglourious Basterds, in that cine-serious authors with hearty, ironic senses of humor have made deep-probe adventures set in non-battlefront corners of World War II, and largely in reaction to how the war is depicted and discussed at the movies. In their particular ways, Polanski, Tarantino and Verhoeven find their tendencies to puckish perversity roused by an interesting unresolvable tension: war, this war in particular, provides a marvelous toy chest with which to build stories, and is at the same time the most disgusting thing of which human beings are capable.

Black Book is then a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the ark popped open at the beginning, and the whole adventure story scorched by punishing fire. Verhoeven and actress Carice van Houten go on an epic marathon run with heroine Rachel Stein as she tries to outrun the razing of the European landscape, hopping and dodging through story-modes and transforming from refugee to resistance fighter to girl spy to revenger. If John Rambo grunted that to survive war, you have to become war, here are a dozen variations on what he might have meant, and they all boil down to the constant, increasing moral compromise. Whatever you do to survive in the moment, you pay for later. Whoever is on top after the battle needs a scapegoat. If a principle is exhibited in this formula it is the conservation of mass: all that shit is going to end up dumped on somebody, over and over, forever and ever. If there are tips provided on how to survive the ordeal of existence, they are that once in awhile chocolate can save your life, and never climb into a coffin before it is your time. This is Man's Inhumanity to Man as action-adventure spectacle, and a Thrilling Survival Tale of the Enduring Human Spirit in which history is chronicled in one endlessly long black book.

8. Gumby Dharma (dir. Robina Marchesi)

Shucks, back in 2009 I had hoped Gumby Dharma, the epic-in-miniature biographical documentary about Art Clokey, would find a good distribution channel and lead to sudden widespread interest in Clokey's animation, and there would be a bunch of exciting articles about Gumby for me to read. None of this happened, and, worst of all, Art Clokey stopped motion on this plane of existence early last year, passing away on January 8, 2010 at the age of 88. The bulk of his work remains poorly represented on modern home video formats and Gumby Dharma has shown on the Sundance Channel and was finally released on video in March, 2010.

Documentaries about filmmakers and their work are in no short supply, and in sundry form litter the Special Features menus of a thousand DVDs. Gumby Dharma is automatically interesting for those who value Clokey’s work, but it also builds a case for its subject as a filmmaker worthy of study beyond just the recognizability of Gumby bendy toys. This work begins by telling Art Clokey's story without flinching, which means personal and professional triumphs are not inflated beyond their context, and death, drugs, disease, loss, abuse and bad behavior — those examples inflicted by Clokey or upon him — are met head-on. If that is not extraordinary for a 21st century documentary, please, please do not forget that we are still talking about Gumby cartoons, and that this is a story that has never been told with such depth and honesty. This is not to paint Gumby Dharma as some sort of scandalous exposé of Art Clokey; it is, rather, a complicated, naked, and ultimately joyous portrait of a man, an artist, an animator, a filmmaker.

Last time around, my notes focused on the film's excellent formal choices and valuable research and historical testimonies, and delicately rendered profile of Clokey. I do not want to lose sight of what I feel is Gumby Dharma's overriding thesis, which is that the animator possessed a unique vision of the world and was able to channel that into undulating, speaking, dancing clay. All that passion and pain, curiosity and fear, weirdness and love pulse through Gumby; Gumby skates and plays along the path, and he is the path, the ball of clay, the heart, the part, the enterable book, the blade of grass, the you.

7. A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, scr. Linklater from the novel by Philip K. Dick)

These things cannot be defined in tidy syllogisms or anything, and this isn't about, like, rules, man. But to help sort things out, we might say that: Obviously not all films about drugs are proper head movies. And at the risk of offending, what I'm talking about with this classification does not include a vast majority of stoner comedies, nor the sort of SFX-heavy audio-visual spectacles one might use as an in-home Laser Floyd show. A great head movie A) is about and/or is an investigation into consciousness expansion and/or warping, and/or B) examines, encapsulates, and/or explains the human experience with an eye that is part anthropological, part philosophical, part spiritual. Hints that the film might open up with a chemical key are optional. Whew!

A Scanner Darkly has those qualities, so by my count Richard Linklater has two fine head movies under his belt, and a handful of interesting experiments (the Before Sunrise/Set diptych and Waking Life, which are earnest almost-theres, Slacker, which plays better straight or very caffeinated, etc.) Where the beautiful and fuzzy-hearted Dazed and Confused wafts by on a Circle of Life/Family of Man buzz, A Scanner Darkly is paranoid, doomed, tragic, cottonmouthed. Fueled on dread, it is set entirely during that bad moment you are coming down, notice your fingernails are way too dirty, there is a stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, and maybe you're not coming down after all. So get this: undercover agent Bob Arctor goes so deep under that he ends up investigating himself, and watching with a detective's fascination as the twin serpents of Id and Superego begin uncoiling from their cosmic hula around the center pole. Do try this at home, but maybe not in public.

When last we saw Keanu Reeves on this journey, the effect was opposite: Neo staring back at the threshold of perception, seeing the code beneath the skin, and finally learning to sense the gold that unites it all — no glass, no scanner. If Robert Zemeckis' mo-cap freakout Beowulf accidentally captures the acid-vision nightmare that humans are weird-eyed puppet husks being jerked awkwardly around too-vivid sets, reenacting some kind of mythological parody, the computer rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly serves a not dissimilar function. Here the stage is made vague or simplified with outlines and color planes, while the surface of the players players crawl and squirm; the whole world is covered with a thin metaphorical hide, a construct, a mask, a cartoon envelope that can't quite be peeled back but isn't quite telling the truth.

6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (dir. Gore Verbinski, prd. Jerry Bruckheimer, scr. Ted Elliot, Terry Rossio)

Curse of the Black Pearl reformed the theme park ride’s impressionistic story of skeletal pirates, hoarded gold and the wages of sin into particularly buoyant four-quad fantasy action adventure. With the scant narrative materials of the theme park source material used up, Dead Man's Chest scrapes up the unused themed visuals (fireflies), settings (bayou), and ambiance, then goes about the business of transforming the Pirates of the Caribbean series from a potential string of cast-connected sequels into a trilogy proper, and that is an exponentially more difficult exercise. That is, Dead Man's Chest has to connect forwards and backwards to make three scheduled films into a one massive three-chapter story. To illustrate the difficulty and ambition of that task, consider that while remembered as "trilogies," The Godfather is not built like this, Star Wars is not built like this, and so forth. Pirates is outsized, long-form original storytelling, whether it is "branded" as a concern of a major corporation or not. On the business end, where all films are merchandise, someone in a suit seems to have remembered that the merchandise is still art, that despite all their cruise lines and shopping mall emporiums, The Company is still in the business of stories and characters.

This is all simply to say that despite the increasingly pre-drinking-age milieu of the Summer Movie Game, the Pirates films are unusually committed to and serious about that game. They are crafted with the belief that an audience is invested in the tale and the world, so every nook, cranny, and cannon is crammed to the brim. Completely, seam-burstingly overstuffed, to be sure, but this middle chapter in particular is a Valu-Pak film; it's so much movie. There is faith here that this story should be dense and all subplots should intertwine and motivate each other, that sets should be rich with detail, every single character should grow or change or be tested — that each of them is someone's favorite player and so should have a hero's entrance, a crowning moment of cool, and a dramatic exit — and that half the spectacle is of actors acting. That makes it noisy and exhausting, but heartening next to most of its glib, insincere competition — say, Universal's Mummy movies.

Pirates is blessed with a glinting edge of perversity— an eye for grotesque design, admiration for mischief, a hard-on for the masochistic dimension of heroic sacrifice, and not a little bit of out-of-the-blue weirdness. It is far more sexed-up than Lord of the Rings, and more tripped-out than Harry Potter, breezier than both by several factors. If the comparison to fantasy-lit classics of their kind seems unfair (or unfounded), consider that Pirates is aiming exactly that high, and that ambition alone is pretty damn cool. With this installment, it becomes clearer that in its overstimulated noggin and wistful heart, this story is about mortality, about the death of imagination and adventure at the hands of global business expansion, cultural imperialism, colonization — about fun withering in the brutal sun of finance. In this light, that the Pirates of the Caribbean movie overlay onto Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride does a tragic disservice to both the park and the films can only be bitterly fascinating.

5. The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho, scr. Bong, Baek Chul-hyun)

The monster is big, but could probably fit in your living room if you have high ceilings. We traditionally read human-size monsters as a warped Us or a feared Other, and the bigguns as metaphors for some pressing sociopolitical terror, both are favorite subjects for extensive probing with psychoanalytic theory, and fair enough to all that. The best of the best, from King Kong to Mothra Vs. Godzilla, Q — The Winged Serpent to Jurassic Park, find some magical way to make the ground-level, people-sized story as compelling as the beast rampage and about something besides mere survival. That is no mean feat.

The Host injects intense big monster mayhem into a droll dysfunctional family comedy, warping it into a search-and-rescue abduction suspenser as the Park family looks for their youngest member who has been swiped by the creature, and frames it all in Brazil-style paranoid government thriller. Somewhere near the center of this is another superlative performance by Song Kang-ho as Gang-du, the monster-napped child's scruffy nitwit slacker father. Song plays Gang-du something like Shaggy in mourning having lost Scooby, beginning with literal pratfalls and emotional slapstick, until the lovable cartoon dope is hardened and seasoned with hellfire, and somehow coming out on the other side as a lop-sided, smushy-hearted hero.

So we have here a daikaiju black comedy sprouting agitprop polyps and one can't really predict where it's going, what will happen next. This is not to say that The Host plays as a crazy quilt mash-up, or is as nuts as, say, #3 below, or dreams of being something other or "better" than a giant monster picture. Instead it dreams bigger, striving to be the best giant monster picture it can be.

4. The Notorious Bettie Page (dir. Mary Harron, scr. Harron, Guinevere Turner)

You don't get to be notorious all by your lonesome. "Notorious" is a reputation, and that requires observers to cast an opinion. It goes without saying that pinup models are the locus of much fantasy projection — that's pretty much what they're for. Besides the obvious, consider the imagination fuel of even innocuous swimsuit cheesecake photo. We might imagine the scenario suggested by the photo, or the circumstances of the photoshoot itself, the unseen photographer and the photographic apparatus. We imagine those body parts not on display, hidden by wardrobe or pose, imagine the dimensions not captured in 2D. We imagine the model in movement, imagine her voice, and imagine a personality onto the mute, frozen figure. When we look at Bettie Page, we project an imagined Bettie onto her.

Harron and screenwriting partner Turner begin The Notorious Bettie Page with a basic map of the strategy that will branch out through the film. Adult bookstore customers inquire about the selection of under-the-counter specialty photos ("unusual footwear" stuff, if that means anything to you), but in short order the shop is raided by cops: one trenchcoat crowd replaces another, and Bettie Page finds herself summoned before Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate subcommittee hearings on pornography and juvenile delinquency. So there we have it, two audiences hunting for the same photos but imagining their own Betties for their own reasons and to their own ends, and the flesh-blood-and-bangs Bettie the cause of it all, or tied up in the middle of it, or maybe just there and being Bettie.

Now any old model, real or invented, could potentially serve as subject here. Harron, Turner and Gretchen Mol — their flat-out sparkling, bubbling, fully-carbonated Bettie — never indicate for a moment that they've distilled the ultimate secret true story of their subject. Rather, the film suggests that any biography by its very existence imposes a narrative on the raw data of a life and creates a character in the process. To tell the story of Bettie Page is to make Bettie Page into a story. This, Notorious indicates, has its potential virtues and pitfalls, but is the process by which identity and legend are built.

It has to be Bettie, or at least she is a perfect subject. Page's latter-day immortality as cult pin-up is the reason this biopic exists, and that interest was stoked by the apparent mystery of What Became of Bettie Page? By the mid-'50s she'd become the most photographed model in the world. She worked in nearly every form of non-explicit adult photography, from Playboy centerfolds to 8mm catfight films to underground bondage photo clubs to burlesque revue movies. That's a lot of audience, a lot of imagined Betties. What Bettie Page meant in the middle of the 20th century is not what Bettie Page meant by the end of the century, by which time she'd become America's retro sex icon of choice, plastered on comics shop walls, motorbike gas tanks, and photobooks destined for the coffee tables of the très hip across the nation. That's a lot more audience, and more Betties. The interim is legend, speculation, rumors, stories. And where was Bettie? Unaware that this was happening, that anyone cared about antique nudie pictures, that so many ghost-Betties had come to life.

What The Notorious Bettie Page does that is so intelligent and kind — charitable, really — is suggest that all of our fantasies of Bettie Page — those sexual and political, those that would make her victim or legend, those that would see her in bondage or in angel wings — are legitimate and integral parts of her biography, and her extensive body of modeling work continues to fascinate and inspire, which is the legacy of that work. The photos and films, you can have. The story, whichever you prefer, you can have that too. But only Bettie Page lived the life, and that is not something to solve and explain. That, you don't get to have.

As she once said in Striporama (1953), her only speaking role on film, "I'm illusion!" "You mean you're not real?," gasp the baggypants comedians who would possess her. Replies Illusion Bettie: "Of course I'm real."

3. Brand Upon the Brain! (dir. Guy Maddin, scr. Maddin, George Toles, Louis Negin)

Guy Maddin — the character in Brand Upon the Brain! and director of Brand Upon the Brain! — puts a fresh coat of whitewash on the island lighthouse where he grew up, and feverishly reminisces about his childhood loves, traumas and love-traumas, dramatized as careening melodrama/mad scientist/teen detective/wild child/evil mother/incest romance/zombie horror/steampunk melodrama and made in the style of, um, a Soviet montage/German expressionist/Hollywood silent comedy/abstract cheesecake peepshow. That's all literal as it is metaphorical, and though this is poetic interior autobiography and rumination on the nature of Memory and Self, nothing could be more accessible: it's sex-fixated and silly, the plot never stops moving for five seconds and it's a knee-slapper front to back. No doctors or lit majors need to assist with the decoding, as the plum-syrup narration will do it for you, and it's impossible to be inscrutable when everything is on the table.

Maddin's lighthouse is famously stocked with out-of-fashion early cinema, pulp fiction and avant-garde clutter, but fret not, all you have to do is experience the sight of how that stuff branded his brain, and learn in short order what is so special about all that moldy old stuff. Maddin is, in these blatant ways forever fetishistically gazing at a silver-emulsioned past, a memory eating itself up like nitrocellulose decomposition, but is also forward-thinking, evolutionary. Everybody and their mom knows how to psychoanalyze a filmmaker based on how he frames a shot, can pick out Major Themes from table setting mis-en-scène, and knows which props are phallic and which ones criticize American foreign policy. So what if, asks Guy Maddin, we start with the assumption that this work is already done, and set archetypes and personal symbols on a romp through a story-space that purports to dive straight into the psychosexual miasma of the artist's head? The result is a wholly original breed of comedy, an exciting new kind of storytelling, and cliché-decimating entertainment built entirely out of clichés so disused you've never seen them before.

2. The Black Dahlia (dir. Brian De Palma, scr. Josh Friedman from the novel by James Ellroy)

Certain crimes — big, terrifying, era-defining crimes, mainly — speak to us with layered voices, at first seeming to be manifestations of some core societal fear, but ultimately telling us more about what we are afraid of than actually confirming those dangers, prejudices and myths. e.g., in the moment it can appear, through spin or sincere interpretation, that the Manson Family crime spree confirmed dark fears about hippie culture, drugs, rock music, California. Certainly those events and those figures spoke to a significant portion of the population in exactly that way. But those crimes were so singular, Manson himself so exceptional, the scene so one-of-a-kind that, really, it doesn’t say such a thing at all. In that case, we’re left with a tragedy about this particular nutjob con man, his brainwash victims and their subsequent non-symbolic coincidental murder victims. This is not a cozy thought, but in the ensuing hysteria and excitement Charles Manson is given a constant public forum, and the families of victims are forever caught in this ugly saga. That Family of victims extends on out along this fractal arm, from Roman Polanski in the micro to the entire Love Generation in the macro. When this feedback loop is turned up loud enough, somewhere in the mix Manson’s code-speak bilious rants end up being made true: you wanted a Devil, he’ll be your Devil.

After the tawdry facts of a crime, and beyond the personal aftermath for survivors, the further tragedy is in the myth-making. If we’re adept at keeping our eye on the birdie, the underlying theme tends to be how good the media is at finding an angle to sell a story. Even if we’re dealing with the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11/01 or Jeffery Dahmer, data points are not a story: you need a narrative hook. The big ones leave us all scarred, even if that mark is only across the imagination. So:

Meanwhile, over in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue, Elizabeth Short is transfigured in death into The Black Dahlia. And that particular body, with those particular memory-searing, picturesque mutilations, might have captured public imagination for a few weeks, but that’s not The Story. The Legend of the Black Dahlia is that this poor Massachusetts girl wanted to be in pictures, and ended up in pieces. That seems to say something; about this untamed town that wants to be a desert; about this Boulevard of Dreams littered with the shards of broken would-be starlets; about a Dream Factory that is really a high stakes business running on the blood of pretty young things; about a Tinsel Town adorned with razor wire.

That would be the legend, of course, and it’s a good one — so good that its whirlpool sucks down L.A. “supercop” and local celebrity pugilist Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, doing impotent moron in meltdown like a champ). Poor sap only lasts, what? A week?, so caught up is he in dead white girl mania and troubling, circling questions that are not beside the point, but not conducive to solving the crime. What is this strange system by which starry-eyed women offer themselves up to men with money and cameras? Is this germane to the question that James Ellroy says is at the heart of this mystery, which is: why do men kill women? We note here, that this is the kind of thing that Short's murder makes one think about. Blanchard can't reconcile the black alchemy that discards the bodies and leaves the immortal part on a screen and made of light. He can't make it add up, and as is the hotheaded flatfoot's fate, ends up pursuing the Dahlia into Hell — that is, his throat slit and body fed into the furnace by his mob-connected informant. Blowing out of this world as a spectacular, blinding, horrifying supernova is no substitute for the dream of being a star.

After all is said, done and revealed, Blanchard was scrambling through life to protect an image. His fancy home is funded with stolen money, his career accomplishments puffed up, his promotions earned for their P.R. value, his fame-making boxing win a rigged fight, his live-in girlfriend poses well on his arm but he isn't sleeping with her. In his main squeeze, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson who, you know, poses well and adequately fills out an angora sweater), Blanchard has built a perfect rescue narrative; she's an ex-prostitute-gone-gold-hearted, and he helped her go straight. His motivations are not just covering up his culpability, living a lie or faking it till he makes it. He protects the ones with a good Story.

This is the guy who is "supposed to be the hero," as per the real protagonist, Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett wearing a hat), who holds an ice pack to his aching skull as his partner's corpse is fed into the inferno. Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice, then, promotional nicknames invented by the LAPD, which ostensibly describe their boxing styles, more or less indicate their personalities ("I can't move! I never move!" wails glacial Bucky), and indeed one rages and one is slow to thaw. But it's bullshit, too. "You're a political animal!," the Deputy D.A. chastises the broken-down Blanchard. So are they all, and for the Bucky and Lee it means they're pawns, moved to Homicide and put on the Short case because they're the Supercops. Don't you read the papers? They're characters in someone else's story.

If Bucky is tortured by Beth Short at first, it is because the media ruckus over the dead white woman — whose link to The Industry is not even a whisper of a dream, whose movie-derived nickname is entirely posthumous and newspaper-invented — is drawing him away from important cases he could be closing. And maybe, he tells Lee, this Beth Short wasn't such a nice girl. i.e., the crime needs solving, certainly, but maybe it needn't be glorified, made legend. As Charles Manson often points out, he wasn't shit until you put all those TV cameras on him. But.... there stands Kay in her underwear, and sliced into her back are the initials B.D. As it happens, that stands for "Bobby DeWitt," her old pimp. It stands, symbolically, naturally for Black Dahlia. That doesn't go away when you blink. "Who are these men who carve themselves into other people's lives?" the V.O. ponders, and as serendipity would have it, B.D. are the initials of a renowned director of thrillers, horror pictures and neo-noirs who happens to be directing the scene.

The tale connects Paul Leni's Expressionist melodrama The Man Who Laughs (1928) — a horror film for all intents and purposes — with a (fictional) stag reel starring Short. In direct connection, both are shot on the same set (a frankly insane conceit), the former inspiring the later, a beautiful link in the film's chain of mouth trauma that begins with Bucky's symbolic castration when he loses his choppers in the boxing ring. It is a chart of cinematic lineage, as well, in which German avant-garde technique moves overseas and mingles with hardboiled detective fiction, and the resultant new genre baby eventually grows up and Brian De Palma falls in love with it and has to make The Black Dahlia. In these and sundry other ways, De Palma implicates and investigates himself among those who mythologize this crime specifically, but more generally cleave bodies on screen and burn images onto imaginations.

Bucky solves this one, insofar as he learns the details of Elizabeth Short's death. He follows the money, of course. And all are implicated — De Palma and Mack Sennett and the men with the cameras, media and politicians, institutions and underlings, gardeners and carpenters. By the end, Bucky finds the housing development under the Hollywoodland sign was built of rotten wood and hides a film set with a murder shed out back. The very city itself is a façade constructed of corrupt materials. He might've guessed earlier, when the unstable town vibrates in an earthquake. When we leave Bucky, he's still hearing the crows, still seeing that body on every empty lawn. The facts and the legend are both etched on him now. The big ones leave us all scarred.

The citizens of this Los-Angeles-as-black-hole play at being human beings, covering their faces with flimsy masks to indicate profession, social strata, gender, identity and character (arche-?stereo-?)type. The faster they put on their costumes, the faster they are ripped away by the howling void swirling at the center of The Black Dahlia. It is blacker than black in there, so black we need the French to name it. We call it noir.

More on Bucky in Noir-land, symbol-chains and metafic here.

1. INLAND EMPIRE (dir., scr. David Lynch)

David Lynch's shot on video horror movie tops the very short shortlist of that lowly genre's unabashed masterpieces. It is not as bizarre spectacle as Boardinghouse nor as depraved and feverish as Splatter Farm, but it has many fine qualities and is scarier. INLAND EMPIRE was received, ignored, and criticized in a manner that means mounting a defense, writing a simple appreciation and beginning a cursory exploration all amount to the same thing. Insofar as INLAND EMPIRE is a difficult work, three roadblocks consistently greet those having difficulty, and rather than demerits, they are simply its qualities. 1) INLAND EMPIRE is a piece unabashedly shot on digital video, and arriving in theaters with the announcement that Lynch has no future plans to shoot on film. 2) INLAND EMPIRE announces itself as a narrative feature and contains abundant plot information but is firmly rooted in modes of avant-garde cinema that include the non-narrative and entirely abstract. 3) The narrative of INLAND EMPIRE is consistently oblique, but explicitly links itself to mystery stories. It seems to offer thousands of clues and few conclusions. At its most explicit it seems to suggest that it might be solved, at its most opaque it seems to suggest that something crucial and meaningful is being missed.

Speaking of solutions, these problems are all, naturally, intertwined. If there is any help to be found below, I would suggest instead that perhaps if you are sitting in front of INLAND EMPIRE with your eyes pointed at the screen, then you do understand INLAND EMPIRE. Unless your eyes are closed.

Lynch often foregrounds the materials used in the creation of his art — like Jackson Pollack the fabric and construction is the subject. Even his figural paintings are dollopped with paint and scribbled on, flat-planed and collaged. Think of the puppet robin meant as real in Blue Velvet or his film-loop-on-sculpture "Six Men Getting Sick" or the incandescent "Premonitions of an Evil Deed", a stunt film of poetry and prowess shot on a Lumière camera. INLAND EMPIRE is boldly, proudly a video project, exploiting and exploring those things only video can do. The result is Lynch's most abstract feature since 1999's The Straight Story and most experimental since Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1990). That is, a true experiment of the let's-see-what-happens variety, this one exploring the visual qualities and editorial rhythms of consumer grade digital video, and in shooting hours and hours of scenes with no master blueprint for assembly.

How to Watch INLAND EMPIRE may be, as Ebert once opined of Dune, to let it wash over you like a dream. This is, in this case: don't fight it. It is the same advice Lynch gave Martha Nochimson when they looked at a Pollack together: you do understand it, he told her, I saw your eyes moving across the painting. To engage that dream any more analytically will find one scrambling for purchase, just as in a dream or maybe as when trying to explain one. Some things that happen, you're at a loss to articulate, some are intuitively understood. Anyhow we're squarely (well, asymmetrically) on the shoulders of Laura Dern as actress Susan Blue, who is warned off making the film On High in Blue Tomorrows, and then walking alongside Susan playing Nikki Grace, who is perhaps her own person or several people. An issue that frequently arises when discussing Lynch's film is that the filmmaker finds increasingly sophisticated ways to preserve what he loves about Mysteries, and that love is not in the solving but of luxuriating in Mystery itself. As Sandy asks Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, "you like mysteries that much?" And Jeffrey answers: yes. So analytical language will be wrongheaded at worst, coy-sounding at best. It is not that Lynch films can't be written about, but the task is like tracing letters in smoke or drawing diagrams on wet paper with a fountain pen filled with perfume. And yet, here we are.

This free-associative ebb and flow creative process births a work about a film struggling to be born — or perhaps resisting its creation — and documents the challenge put forth to Laura Dern. Never positive during shooting where her character had been, or where she was going, Dern is ultimately playing an actress grappling with a role. This is a film of linking and connection, disparate geographies, identities, chronologies that peer at one another through torn membranes, down dark hallways, through burn holes in fabric, ruptures in spacetime. Passageways are often important in Lynch's work. In Lost Highway, Fred Madison wanders into a dark corner of his windowless home and emerges somewhere in his own echo chamber head. Blue Velvet famously tilts down from the sky, dives underground, enters a severed ear, reemerges from a reconnected ear and gazes back to the heavens. INLAND EMPIRE is a series of tunnels sliding into one another, connecting back on themselves.

Susan Blue's task is to fully understand Nikki Grace, and to do so she ventures all the way inside and inside out — for Susan to understand and become Nikki, she'll have to plumb the mystery of herself. Along the journey she finds and embodies a replicating chain of Lost Women, ventures all the way to the heart of the universe to find the most lost of souls, and in the end perhaps she does not fix everyone, but finds them. Susan gathers the lost to her and they rejoice.

And these are the keys to INLAND EMPIRE, but there are so, so many keyholes to be tested. Like Mulholland Dr. on back to Eraserhead, INLAND EMPIRE begs to be played with, have its pieces shifted, riddles catalogued and links tested. The puzzle-solver is not on a fool's errand, but is engaging INLAND EMPIRE as designed: playing an infinite game.

Providence's Garbage Can

2011-01-26T00:32:00.000-08:00

The ninth season The X-Files two-parter "Provenance"/"Providence" is pretty much the series' last great Mythology installment, the remaining eight episodes being half done-in-ones and half housekeeping before closing up shop. So not the last of the Mythology, but the last of the story's forward upward thrusting momentum. The plot backbone of "Providence" has Baby William in extreme peril while captured by UFO nuts (who actually have a UFO!), and Scully being rude and closed off as she has been all year, trying to be supercop, scientist, protector, nurturer and mother to the Christ child ALL AT ONCE. She is cracking up, and her laconic chronic-masturbator BFF is still in hiding! As final battle cries go, this one rather has it all, or anyway has the best of the many pleasures of Season Nine for those helpless to its charms. An infant rescued from a flaming pit, Bible quotes, people not appreciating the Lone Gunmen's free services, Deputy Director Kersch being a tightass, A.D. Brad Follmer being an unctuous snot, and some weirdo baby-stealing motherfuckers getting burnt up by a spaceship!

These are just pictures of heads, and this is still the best-looking TV show.
Since something feels "important" about this one, there are a lot of beautiful giant-head heroic close-ups of the cast which seem to highlight their unforgettable faces with a kind of, I dunno, mythic aura. In these: Agent Reyes looks huge-featured, like a lioness, glowing and wide-hearted and a little manic. Poor Agent Doggett is stuck in a in a coma, of course, because 1) The X-Files puts everyone in a coma, usually several times, and 2) this show especially loves to hospitalize Doggett. Conscious and unconscious, he is chiseled and wound-eyed — a wood-carved self-flagellating saint! The B-story, such as it is, revolves around prayers and temptations offered in the tiny hospital chapel, all interesting but not the point of this missive.

A.D. Skinner is naturally gritting his teeth, glaring and/or pursing his lips through all of this. That is often Skinner's usefulness as a sort of surrogate for the potentially frustrated viewer — okay, I bought this and this, helped with X and Y, and now you're telling me Z? Come on already. So in the scene below, a task force has been assembled to retrieve Baby William, but Scully storms out because she doesn't trust Follmer and Kersh. After a confrontation with Skinner over this matter, Scully strides off to the elevators to pursue the matter through alternate channels and Skinner watches her go. This is not our last glimpse of the stoic Assistant Director by any means, but the shot in question has a stamped home, iconic quality, sums up this aspect of the relationship between Skinner and his X-Files teams: Scully needs to be unencumbered by traditional investigative technique, and Skinner is sympathetic but entrenched in the institutional culture of the FBI. That is why he is both useful to and forever divided from the X-Files. A nice minor but meaningful image, of Skinner alone in the corridor...

... or it would be, if there weren't a crew dude wearing shorts crouching behind the garbage can. A gaffe that flashes by but gives the shot a bit of dissonance — the first time I noticed it something just seemed off, and on rewinding it fully creeped me out. The point of the shot is that Skinner is left by himself, yet it is not at all outside the realm of The X-Files' themes that a faceless someone might be spying on a conversation. Here is A.D. Walter Skinner, a man of fidelity, bravery and integrity, who, despite it all, wants to believe in the FBI even if he is the last of his kind within its walls. And here is someone who should not be there, concealed by garbage, tucked in the corner, watching it all.

This is the typo that enriches the text.

Taxi Schwarzwald

2011-01-16T04:13:00.000-08:00

Blonde Venus, 1932, dir. Josef von Sternberg

Suspiria, 1977, dir. Dario Argento

Two images of hired autos in the German wilderness, or, as Herbert Marshall says in just before the top image: "As I live and breathe, a taxicab in the middle of the Black Forest!"

Now, while Sternberg centers a light comedy scene around the parked taxi (that's a 27-year-old Sterling Holloway as a nerd in a goofy hat, pestering the brusque German driver), Argento's cab is on what I believe Wesley Willis might refer to as a "Hellride." These are not by any means the first shots in their respective films, but both are key mini-/sub-scenes in the films' opening sequences. Certainly they are very different scenes about taxis in the Black Forest, from very different films by very different (but secretly not-so-different) filmmakers, but they are also doing some similar duties, those odd parallels that concern us below.

As Tim Lucas points out in this fine little piece, a) Suspiria's cab ride is not the first interesting scene and b) the section in which the car passes through the Black Forest is all about these trees (also the music), one of which bears the lightning-thrown, inexplicable shadow of a knife-wielding hand just before the car slides out off screen. Incidentally, that sickle shadow is there not just because of its association with Cronus or as chibi version of the Grim Reaper's scythe; the curve-bladed boline is of the type used in actual ritual magic. In real life these are rarely, if ever, used for cutting up ballerinas.

The first scenes proper:
Blonde Venus begins with a group of young women bathing in a pool under the titles, then has a half-page scene of Joe (Holloway) bitching about the length of the hike and bumming a smoke from his companions before they stumble upon the taxi. Suspiria, of course, opens at the airport where Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) "arrived in Germany at 10:40 p.m. local time." So Suspiria's car is carrying its heroine, after she has some difficulty hailing a cab in the thunderstorm. In Blonde Venus the scene is about how these boys are not able to hire the taxi because the group of actresses currently splashing in the pond has rented it for the day. One of those ladies is Helen (Marlene Dietrich) who will effectively become the heroine, even if we don't know it yet. Point being only that the taxis are hired by the respective female protagonists of each story.

Now, using both my entirely inept trip-planning skills and highly developed make-believe skills, it seems that the closest international airport to Freiburg is actually in France. Since Suzy clearly lands in Germany, the two closest candidates are Baden Airpark and Stuttgart (as Lucas points out, this was not shot at a real airport). Obviously we don't know exactly where the fictional Tanz Akademie is located in the geography of the city. However, just for laughs, let us pretend the school shares an address with the Haus zum Walfisch (House of the Whale) that provides its exterior and that Suzy arrives at one of the above airports. According to Google Maps, at best, she's an hour from Freiburg. Maybe we're only witness to part of this cab ride, then. But I don't think so...

As is communicated with some difficulty between Suzy and her cabbie, the Tanz Akademie is situated on Escher Straße: perhaps you can get there any way you choose, perhaps you can never quite get there. The taxi takes an infinite path, an impossible path. In later scenes characters are able to quickly move from the Akademie to perfectly urban parts of the city — first victim Pat and blind pianist Daniel both do so. As it happens, Haus zum Walfisch is only blocks from the forest. But the effect in this opening sequence, which transitions straight from the woods to a shot of the school framed to block out surrounding buildings, is that the Akademie is set deep inside the forest. Parallel to Blonde Venus, in which dialogue situates the action some ten miles from the next town: the taxis are conveyances into fairyland.

With color schemes inspired by Disney's Snow White, and more importantly a primal, cruel logic that makes no sense to the brain but too much sense to the guts, Suspiria's fairy tale underpinnings and overtones are fairly apparent to anyone wandering into its path. What with all the taxicabs and prog rock, it might be difficult to ascribe an Aarne-Thompson folktale index number to Suspiria (for those unfamiliar, that's nothing fancier than the industry standard for cataloging folktale themes and types. If you don't have a copy, er, don't worry about it). It is probably closest to an AT 327 variant ("Hansel and Gretel" being AT 327A, for example), with a slew of selections from the Motif Index. I think it is not entirely unrelated to those "neck riddle" stories found under AT 851 "The Princess Who Cannot Solve the Riddle": Suzy, as per Argento tradition, is offered a riddle in the beginning that she does not even recognize as a riddle until it is time to solve it at the end.

Blonde Venus is also a fairy tale. Or at least that might be an instructive way of looking at it. It is not unusual for Sternberg's singular way with ornate mise en scène and Old World grotesquery to lend a certain storybook quality to his films anyway, and Venus takes as a motif the retelling of its own narrative as a bedtime story.

The plot here goes that on that fateful hike, American student Ned Faraday (Marshall) discovers music hall star Helen bathing in that pond. They marry and domestic bliss ensues until Ned discovers he is slowly dying, having been poisoned by his laboratory work with radium. Naturally he needs an Expensive Medical Procedure, and Helen is forced back into nightclub singing. With swift inevitability, she finds the fastest way to procure the cash is to sell herself to well-heeled cad Nick Townsend (Cary Grant), and long story short, ends up a Fallen Woman and takes off cross-country, with Ned in pursuit of his abducted son. During those early scenes of the Faradays' happy home life, a family tradition is depicted in which the parents jointly recount their cutely met romance to put their son to sleep, reframing the events in fairy tale terms (e.g. — Helen is a "princess" and the surly cabbie a "dragon in an automobile"). This storytelling is, eventually, also the means by which the couple reconciles. Within the story, then, Blonde Venus is explicitly tied to fairy tales and variant retellings.

I recount the plot as a frame of reference, because it seems to me a vague variation on the "Swan Maiden" tale (Aarne-Thompson type 400) with a focus on the story from the Swan Maiden's point of view. In skeletal form, that goes: Hunter (a king, often) enters the woods, finds an enchanted lake wherein swims a magical swan. She turns into a woman — this often happens as the hunter swipes her feathered robe while she swims, and he will not return it — they marry and reproduce. Through some means — usually the playing children reveal the secret hiding place, or a Gypsy pulls some maniacal Gypsy stunt (I know, I know) — the swan maiden gets her feather robe back, and flies away. An impossible pursuit is required should the husband wish to reclaim the Swan bride. Sometimes he embarks on the quest, sometimes not, but if so, it often ends with the task of identifying the Maiden among a group.

Taking it from the top, in the Black Forest Ned threatens Helen with the very prank that nets the Swan Maiden. Her Swan-ness here is, on the level of surface transposition, her nightclub singing — so read: her association with that glamorous but debauched world and identity as an artist. One level down, this is tied up with sexual freedom, but on the deepest level, down where the Swan has always been paddling, this is about freedom from male control. Sternberg's complicated relationship with Dietrich is one of cinema's great living kōans, where universes are built and destroyed, gods created and desecrated in the course of single shots. In his hands/in her thrall, he makes her/she is a figure of identification, an effigy of contemplation, an ideal and a demon-goddess. The Sternberg-Dietrich dialectic is beyond love-hate. In Blonde Venus, all sympathies are with Helen as men try to define her, buy her, own her, push her out of society, pursue her, but ultimately cannot live without her. When a detective tracking Helen questions her devotion to her child's welfare, in one of those chilling defining moments she casually scoffs "What does a man know about mother love?" Don't need you, don't need your world! Times like this, it seems Helen ought to head back to that magic pond and leave this mess behind.

She doesn't, quite, not physically, but returns metaphorically to where she began, reuniting her family mainly through that mythologized version of their shared history in which she is a princess and her son springs forth from a kiss; she resurrects — or retreats back into — the folktale. If this is uneasy, a cop-out, a betrayal of character, triumph or a tragedy, well, why pick one? Meanwhile, at the dance school across the way, Suzy Bannion faces down the nightmare, stabs it in the neck, and burns it to the ground. This closes as she staggers in the direction where there once was a forest, in one of those patented Argento closing shots of someone who just went through Hell and just may have snapped in the process. So both Blonde Venus and Suspiria, like any mysteriously powerful folktale, end with all the definitiveness of a Thematic Apperception Test, which is to say none at all.

As Suzy leaves the Akademie, it has begun to rain once more, and though we seem to have driven for miles on Escher St., we are back where we came in.

Once upon a time
two taxis drove into the Black Forest
where they dropped off two women
and then the trouble began.

Pink, Pretty, Bleeding Out on a Mattress: BLACK SWAN's Reality Show Aesthetic

2011-01-12T04:58:00.000-08:00

Pardon my single-mindedness, but boy, this swan movie sure could have used a lot more Winona Ryder. Because, y'know, that's someone I like to see anyway, but Ryder is at her best when she locates something in the material that is squirmingly, uncomfortably close to personal biography. For examples of such performances, see under: Beetlejuice, A Scanner Darkly, Reality Bites, Girl, Interrupted, The Informers and her five glorious minutes of Black Swan. The trick to any and all of these examples is not that Ryder is ever playing her"self" (I wouldn't presume to know), but that in these roles and chunks of others, an emulsion-bubbling static electricity builds up as she dredges up whatever-it-is in the part that is most excruciatingly close-to-home and rubs it against the character. In the case before us, the 39-year-old actor is not in precisely the career-and-mental-health-related dire straights as her character, an "aging" ballerina edged out of the biz by even more waifed-out youngsters. But, you know... given the Way Things Work, she knows this Dying Swan routine as headspace or reality. With her eyeballs burning the whole time and mascara congealing in the heat, Ryder tumbles through a flaming rage-anxiety-rage cycle and exits with an expert dismount (that is, screaming and self-mutilating). Would that there had been another five minutes with Beth/Dying Swan!

The rest is RIFE WITH SPOILERS and is ALL SPOILERS even though the story is just Swan Lake. Sort of.

If utter straight-faced commitment to the joke and high-styled post-camp camp is your bag — and it is a scene with which I am often down — then Lee Daniels' Precious and any one of sundry offerings from Lars von Trier are about a thousand times funnier, nastier and more stylish than Black Swan.

Most of the rest of what I feel compelled to say about Black Swan itself has been covered by any number of outlets less prone to rambling. While the below dips into some of Black Swan proper, I am slightly more interested in the way the film is being discussed and the films discussed in its company.

Unless I'm not looking in the right places, there is a good deal more of Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) in Black Swan's DNA than indicated in most press. To, really, the point that what we have here seems to just be Repulsion paint stripped, primed with garden variety backstage bitchiness in the manner of (I was gonna say All About Eve almost!) Showgirls and fitted with aftermarket ballerina hood ornaments. The first problem of Black Swan is that it is difficult to discuss without making it sound exciting and fabulous in ways that it is not.

Right, Repulsion: basically, yes, that is about riding on one character's shoulder while she goes bonkers, replete with subjective crazy-hallucinations and, like, major Sex! Issues! and Food! Issues! Catherine Deneuve's nigh-catatonic character Carol does not manage to eat anything but half a cracker and some sugar cubes during the course of Repulsion; Swan has a funny horror suspense bit centered around whether Nina will have to eat a slice of cake. This is what Black Swan does the best. Developmentally arrested swanchild Nina's psychology, relationships and attendant hang-ups and tics are thoroughly mapped out and Natalie Portman hammers them home with solid, steady blows, work face constantly set in one panic-eyed about-to-barf expression. Her technical performance is impressive in that she brushed up her ballet and lost weight to the point of looking like complete shit, but, you know, Robin Williams grew a beard, learned Russian and saxophone for Moscow on the Hudson, so whatever.

The flowchart build to Nina's various conditions is fairly affecting and accurate, based on, well, honestly, self-harmers, girls with eating disorders, compulsive scratchers, and the OCD-afflicted that I have known. This body phobia/abuse/resentment business is tied in nicely — if not necessarily sympathetically — with Nina's work as a dancer, dynamics with her mother (Mickey Rourke) and blah blah. Also straight from the Repulsion Files comes a fragile-to-busting-apart protag bombarded by the lecherous, shaping, all-consuming male gaze. And though Polanski did this stuff better 45 years ago (!), it is the most interesting material, and I like the tension inherent; a world driven by voracious, objectifying male sexuality built Nina and did this to her, but at the same time: Jesus kid, grow up. In likely the funniest scene a little old man makes pervo gestures at Nina on the subway and she is PARALYZED WITH HORROR! The audience I was with, women included (women especially), was in hysterics, and I assume it was because that is how they would react in real life: they would laugh in that man's face.

Anyway, charting Black Swan's lineage might place its title in the unfortunate proximity of a short list of masterpieces. From a highly non-scientific sampling, the films most often cited as cousins, outside of Aronofsky's own work are: Repulsion (shrinking violet undergoing crack-up, appalling cuticle trauma, etc.), The Red Shoes (1948; character relationships and, of course, an off-stage narrative that increasingly resembles the show being rehearsed), and Suspiria (1977; I guess there's, like, weirdness, blood and ballerinas?). To this list I would add INLAND EMPIRE (2006; actress gradually subsumed by role, emerges triumphant on other side, with possible ironic caveats). But that is a list of some of the best films ever made, and Black Swan is not a patch on any of those. While it swipes/shares/resembles story materials from the above, much of that is just plucked from the ether. When you're telling a story about performers, the show is going to parallel their lives, and backstage drama is going to be frothy and romantic or catty and backstabby. Check out this interview in which Aronofsky discusses the non-influence of The Red Shoes on his film. Some things are simply in the air, which is a nice way of saying "cliché." The real issue is how one shoots and cuts those clichés.

Without singling out anyone, the general line from a lot of Black Swan enthusiasts is that the film is gloriously overheated, spectacularly weird, and maintains an exciting, sustained hysteria. Some but not all also indicate that it is some kind of intense, inventive, lush and swoon-making A/V experience. That is also the first and major association I have when someone invokes The Red Shoes.

But that's not Black Swan's agenda and it is Black Swan's undoing. It is not fevered and/or extravagant in design, feel or form. It is formally sloppy, consisting entirely of handheld footage sticking to Portman's top third as much as possible as she makes her way through sets mostly decorated with cinder blocks and lit with florescent tubes. Primary color gels pop up only when diegetically motivated by dance clubs and stage lighting. In the matter of ars gratia artis, there are no individual arresting images until the very last seconds of the film, even during the depicted ballet production where Aronofsky might have felt more comfortable breaking with his shaky-handed "naturalistic feel" (see: interview linked above) to put bodies in tableaux on interesting sets. Besides wrangling Portman into an arch-backed masturbation pose that one might witness in any number of American Apparel advertisements, the most memorable image in Black Swan is at its close, and just as tawdry: the scrawny, pasty, glass-eyed victim bleeding out on a bare mattress on a barren stage. This is bested only by my personal favorite shot, a rousing fade to a blank screen, which is marred only because the roaring white noise on the soundtrack is also supposed to be thunderous applause.

The effect attempted seems to be the forcing of a kind of lazy identification with Nina by virtue of camera-stalking her, which in turn makes all hallucination fake-outs disorienting simply because it violates our expectations of the quasi-documentary technique. Or maybe it would, had The Blair Witch Project not been made in 1999. This is, of course, best-guess type criticism. The handheld you-are-there vibe is mucked up by a slightly more stylized MDMA rollin' sequence and goofy CG effects throughout. Point being that the film is gritty and dingy and its images almost entirely uncomposed, one might recall what it showed, but not how it is shown.

During the first murder setpiece of Suspiria, there is the sudden shift in location that fracturously, illogically moves the victim and her attacker from an apartment to... some kind of, like... place that's over the stained-glass ceiling in the lobby? This happens between what seem to be temporally continuous cuts, is never explained, cannot be clarified by repeat viewings. It is not a mistake or a cheat, it is an element — if not the element — that makes the whole sequence truly delirious, unsettling, terrifying. It is a formal choice to violate classical construction of space and time, whether it registers among all the gore and glass or not. Black Swan is never for a moment that kind of overwhelming sensory experience. Once in awhile the music gets real loud, but these aren't even bizarre and inventive shock sound cues as in, well, Repulsion and Suspiria. Sitting in front of certain pictures by Powell and Pressburger, Argento, Sirk, Lynch, Von Sternberg, De Palma, Ken Russell, and Guy Maddin it is sometimes a good thing one is sitting down: the ceaseless stream of crazed opulence and/or juiced-up-to-overflowing melodrama could cause one to faint straight away. Despite some reports to the contrary, Black Swan's aesthetic is sadly closer to Argento's later, grimy, desaturated The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) than it is likely to induce Stendhal Syndrome. Grand melodrama has every reason to be as visually baroque as its story, and Black Swan is a fairy tale shot like a reality show.

Anyway, re: the rest — that is story, characters and Themes of Import — the whole thing is way too schematic, from 1:1 Swan Lake correspondence that borders on the nonsensical to suicide by symbolism-I-mean-shattered-mirror. The movie cannot sit still and stop jittering its legs, so cannot hope to build the kind of spaced-out existential dread that Polanski wrings out of a shot of Carol pulling a stubborn glove off her hand, and its big freak-out pieces are the sort of haunted house jump scares that make one groan during a Friday the 13 picture. To be fair, at the sight of a gross-out transformation gag in which Nina's legs mutate, the lady sitting next to me exclaimed "LORD JESUS RETURNED!," so maybe there is something to be said for simple alarm.

If there is a shock, it is that the film's central not-a-metaphor is its only idea, explained repeatedly, promised over and over, displayed in title and poster, and there is little to do but wait for Nina to turn into the goddamn swan. And so she does, but the concept is bulimic-thin. Consider some Oh So Symbolic animal visitors that appear at the end of some truly exquisite and unhinged insanity: the deer in All That Heaven Allows (1955), the robin in Blue Velvet (1986), the lizard in Opera (1987). They "mean" something, but even in those cases where we have characters discussing what they mean it is impossible to pinpoint, fully unpack and completely access what that is, exactly. They have an eerie, unspeakable, omigod-something's-wrong quality, and are surprising final manifestations of the forces rumbling around in the bellies of their films. Black Swan, however, is not so complicated, fraught or inventive, and waddles in a straight line until the swan shows up.

Not that it matters particularly, but it is difficult to say if the shrieking melodrama is at all in the realm of intentional camp. One suspects not. There are silly shocks like a room full of howling crappy paintings, which are funny unto themselves, but no notes of sly, odd, personal humor that would cut through the turgidity (e.g. — the spoon and banjo buskers in Repulsion, the INLAND EMPIRE rabbits). No slight shift in perspective that might deepen our view of Nina's predicament. Repulsion has a few scenes where the focus briefly moves to Carol's suitor at the pub, where he worries about her and gets in a fight when his horndog friends suggest an orgy. These scenes without Carol clarify her paranoia and the relative actual rottenness of the men around her and heighten the horror and tragedy when we return to her apartment.

Come to think of it, Mila Kunis as Lily the Naughty Ballerina does marginally serve these functions; she has the only real "jokes" and behaves like the only normal, vaguely-well-adjusted human being. The other function she serves is that I would rather be watching a movie about Lily. While I want to believe Aronofsky does not think the height of unleashing one's Dark Swan is to take recreational drugs once, maybe do some sex things, have a "lezzie wet dream," and that this is all only horrific from the perspective of the maladjusted Nina, the existence of Lily and Kunis' performance are the only encouraging evidence. I want to believe this, but Aronofsky's track record has not convinced me that he he does not find weird sex and drugs to be the depths of human depravity. This time they turn a crazy girl into an evil bird person.

Finally, without harping on it too much, I've generally got issues with extremely self-serious art which confirms the agonizing pain of creating great art. It is, for one, a highly suspect line of B.S., and for two, as illustrated in tragic lampoon by the not-tortured genius Brothers Coen in Barton Fink, those constantly babbling that no one understands their Art Pain do not tend to, you know, do anything very cool anyway. This jive, plus much jabber about Perfection and Letting Go, and even, if I didn't mishear it, the wisdom that part of Perfection is Letting Go, all of which is a) related and received with comically inflamed intensity, especially considering that it b) ought to sound like complete horseshit to anyone who actually makes art.

The Swan is starving, all right, but mainly of technique and imagination. Lord Jesus Returned.

ExKin Anniversary: Five Years, What a Surprise!

2010-12-26T02:20:00.001-08:00

As of today The Exploding Kinetoscope, bane of the film blogosphere, is five years old! Over the course of this half-decade we have had many adventures, you (theoretical reader) and I (me), from the Curse of Dwindling Posting Schedules/Readership to being Tweeted by Roger J. Ebert. I have fulfilled my destiny by being cited as a something-or-other in the Wikipedia article on esteemed pornography director Alex de Rezny, and IMDb boards still regularly link that essay on The Shining to demonstrate the dangers of crackpot over-analysis. This being the end of the year, most adherents of the Gregorian calendar are looking forward, which means it is time for us to look back for a moment.

The piece I really want to share here every year is my first "published" film criticism, a review of Billy Crystal's 1992 tour-de-Billy-Crystal Mr. Saturday Night, written for my junior high school newspaper. Alas, having searched for this important document for years, I seem to have destroyed all copies in my possession in a fit of late adolescent embarrassment. Suffice to say this notice in the South East Junior High Little Hawk was likely the most glowing write-up ever given Mr. Saturday Night, sole complaint being that the film's old age makeup effects were stellar but "everyone's faces look too tight and shiny." This phrase still echoes around my head, usually while witnessing the glossiest of studio spectacle pictures, be it summer action tentpole or holiday awards season prestige product: Tight! Shiny! Or: Too tight and shiny. Anyhow, this document being unavailable, I did unearth a gem from the archives, presented below.

Back in the times, it was fashionable for young people to have web-logs on the LiveJournal platform, likely due to the air of exclusivity lent by its invite-only requirements and the clubby atmosphere of its social networking elements. I did set up house there for a time, but became puzzled at my readership's lack of interest when I would enthuse about sundry European horror pictures and mid-century monster movies. A funny and mean lady of my acquaintanceship at the time laid out the straight facts: "Nobody has anything to say about movies they haven't seen." Oh, well, that makes good sense, I thought, and set about the business of setting up this joint which is not so strictly face-to-face-pals-only — i.e., a proper blog. This story demonstrates the importance of having funny, mean girls in one's life. It also reminds me to value any readers who feel compelled to comment. My sole blogging resolution for 2011 is to be more present and attentive to the comments sections.

Like any teenager who worries over his garage band's logo before writing any songs, casting about for the perfect blog title consumed many hours. I will cop to being preoccupied with presentation over content, but from a corporate-speak "branding" perspective, title, look, feel are important after all. You don't want a blog title that you will be sick of in six months. When choosing a title — I still remember this process, I swear — I tried to stick to the dicta that it should, be sort of short, evoke our topic ("the movies and T.V.") in some way, and not be too cute, punning or insidery. It should have at least one "interesting" word in it, a certain poetic ring and mystery. Overtones of sex and death are plusses. Basically it should sound kind of rock n' roll.

My first choice title was The Bloodshot Eye, which I still think is pretty good. It's simple, mildly unpleasant, and completely true. Sadly, it was already taken. Fair warning: all that happens for the rest of this ramble is that I talk about titles I didn't use.

Reproduced below is the actual scrawled list generated while brainstorming potential blog titles. Unfortunately it is undated, but it is on Standard Federal Bank (Michigan?) notepad, and has the phone number of someone called Maria on the reverse in someone else's handwriting. I assume this was scrap paper in the office of some job I have forgotten and was ignoring while making the list. Don't strain your eyes, I will decipher and annotate the list for you. And please don't judge too harshly: this is mostly storm and very little brain. It's all for charity, folks.

4 Feet Off the Ground — The tale goes that industrialist Leland Stanford (yes, that Stanford) commissioned Eadweard Muybridge to create his first photographic sequences of a animals in motion in order to settle the matter of whether a galloping horse does, indeed, simultaneously lift all its hooves from the ground. A: Yes, they do, and also this is how horses invented the motion picture. While the reference is pleasingly oblique and in secondary meaning sounds elated, it is just this side of too oblique.

The Circuit Theater — The main thing about the crossed-off ones is that they suck. This one is, I think, an acceptable pun (circuit like a computer! Computers have circuits, right?), but oh, come on.

The Continuity Sheet — Maybe the idea here was that this blog would be a thing people would check regularly for some purpose? Crossed off immediately.

The Establishing Shot — Many of my terrible, rejected ideas were later put to good use by actual websites who don't seem to know they are terrible.

How is Cinema? — The kind of excellently bad idea one has to write down for the pleasure of X-ing out. BUT I still think about this one, pointlessly mashing-up Bazin and the kind of casual, everyday moviegoer conversation that begins "You saw Movie X this weekend? How was it?" This question, understood in the vernacular as innocently intended invitation to voice one's opinion of Movie X, also has the feel of deep/meaningless question that sets aglaze the eyes of the very stoned: how is it? How is it? Woah.

Checking the Gate — Awful, but cementing the idea that the title ought to sound like a location, event or object, more than an action. More than a little mundane, inappropriately associated with film production which little concerns us here, and later used as a blog title by an animal trainer.

Road Show Exhibition — A bit too prestigious/pretentious sounding, while curiously lacking any phonaesthetic loveliness.

Two-Reeler — Nicely antiquated, maybe, but not particularly pretty or cool enough to justify that it has nothing to do with most of the eventual content here.

The March of Time — Not wanting to invoke a specific film, let alone a radio/newsreel series, pushed this one off the list. But I get it: there's an odd push-pull between current events and old timeyness in the reference, and the phrase has always had a delectable fatalistic ring about it.

The Latham Loop — Clearly grasping here, but in defense I was searching film history for a nice found phrase, not straining for obscurity. Another crappy one later used by someone else.

Black Maria Cocktail Party — This, I maintain, is completely rad, and was very, very close to being the name of this space. The words still lurk somewhere in the code of this blog, I believe. It's got everything, really: early cinema, attractive juxtaposition, and booze.

The Exploding Kinetoscope — Exploding Plastic Inevitable is turn of nonsense phrase and all-time greatest name of anything contender that I've never been able to get over since first hearing it. It's a word-string that I turn over in my head all the time, and I was kind of doomed to rip it off. Anyway, the final pick has two Good Words, classy birth-of-cinema ambiance, overtones of violence and spectacle, and sounds maybe a little sleazy. In our masthead, it is coupled with Official Blog Slogan "Film: The Deadliest Art," an irresistibly dumb, ominous, ultimately meaningless inversion of Arthur Knight's formerly popular book The Liveliest Art (1957), which never hurt anyone, but I am punk rock like that.

Laterna Magika — A heavy contender, utilizing the X-Files foreign language titling trick and looking cool in the process. I believe I simply mis-/wishfully-spelled "Magica," so it's nothing to do with the Prague theater I just read about on Wikipedia. Alas, Kenneth Anger and Ingmar Bergman got here first, thus this was nixed.

Tachistoscope Popcorn Experiment — Would that this were not quite so clunky, because it is so much down the right track, you know? The urban-legendary incident to which it refers is a long-time fascination of mine, as it is creepy, paranoid, and a total lie that lives on as casually accepted fact. It is vaguely film-related without really having anything to do with film, and it has a "scope" and an X in it. I call dibs on this phrase forever.

The House Reel — Mainly rejected for problems of boringness and corniness.

The Flower of Gower Gulch — Firstly, this is a song that Porky Pig sings in "Drip-Aong Daffy". Secondly, that song is a sorta-inside joking reference to the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Gower Street, where in beautiful times long gone, cowboy-type bit players would hang out, and screen-ready Western extras could be scooped up by the truckload. I was, at the time this blog began, living about a block from this historic location, now the site of a not-particularly-charming strip mall, Denny's and Rite-Aid. Time marches on!

Academy Ratio — Boring, and additionally too strongly suggests that this might be an Old Time Movies ONLY blog, which it is surely not. As a side note, my understanding of aspect ratios is basic, functional or slightly-above-average, depending on the room, so why bait for trouble like that? Also, it sounds snooty and doesn't go POP.

This is Cinerama! — Appealing for its exclamation point, but too specific by a mile. Again, later put into use by other blog-minded parties.

Poverty Row Babylon — ... and here is the second choice, the only one that in retrospect I sometimes wish I'd used instead. The historical Poverty Row was not a specific location proper, but several of the studios were located in roughly the same area. As it happens, the hellhole apartment where I lived back then was in proximity to some of those places, and in the meantime I have only moved closer to the heart of the Row as it were. It is important to me that I walk past the Monogram Pictures facilities all the time, a sight that never fails to send a chill down my spine. Those are the kinds of reasons that I really, actually love Los Angeles, and am increasingly disinterested in ever living anywhere else. So associating the dinge-romance of Poverty Row with the horror-glitz of Hollywood Babylon and therefore also with Kenneth Anger (and by proxy an interest in occult studies that I try to keep out of this blog), Intolerance, my actual neighborhood, etc. I reckon it only lost the race because it is sort of a parody title. Nobody steal it, because I'm gonna use it for something.

The Hanging Gardens of Poverty Row — This is, like, the same thing but unnecessarily wordy, obtuse and cute, though it's kind of pretty.
* * * * *
Speaking of L.A. history, glamor and dilapidation, I have spruced up the ol' blog code and look for the first time in several years, aiming for less oppressive and more handmade feel. The Exploding Kinetoscope of 2011: Tight! Shiny! Rising up to the right there is my fairly caricatured depiction of the awe-inspiring Los Angeles Theater. This historic treasure has been nicely preserved, but due to the general rottenness of downtown L.A. is not used for regular film screenings.

Aaaand speaking of regular usage, I know posting around here is spotty in comparison with every other blog in the universe. You know, I do try to strive for quality over quantity (present navel-gazing excepted), so for those who stick with ExKin anyway, y'all are a quality audience, regardless of quantity.

And with that, I've gone on plenty long, so to all readers who have crossed this blog's path in the last five years, whether supporters or dissenters, friends or gawkers, I thank you kindly, and invite you to drop by anytime during the next five. There's usually coffee on.

We Thank You For Your Patronage

2010-12-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

On the Trail of SHELBY WOO: The Case of Missing Classic Nickelodeon

2010-12-18T04:19:00.000-08:00

Those sensitive about their relative aged-ness may need to avert their eyes during the following. At some point in recent history, graduating university classes were filled with adult people who were in elementary school when SpongeBob SquarePants debuted (May 1, 1999). Poke around the Internet a bit, and one will discover a sizable population of young people grumbling that the programming of the Nickelodeon cable channel has gone down the tubes since a perceived heyday that began in the early, mid, or late 1990s and lasted until, er, whenever said young people stopped watching Nickelodeon. Gist being that this iCarly (2007 debut) is no The Amanda Show (1999-02) and that it is outrageous that Invader Zim (2001-02) be cancelled and Penguins of Madagascar (2008) exist, I guess. This particular playground hamster wheel has probably turned once, maybe twice before: when I was in supposedly engaged in post-secondary education, hit drinking games centered around participants' knowledge of Hey Dude (1989-91) and strategic placement of a Clarissa Explains It All (1991-94) reference was a surefire flirting tactic. In the short view, one's subjective Golden Age of Nickelodeon, like one's preferred Saturday Night Live cast and personal Point at Which The Simpsons Sucks, clearly corresponds with one's own youth. To which: no doy.

For those whose births significantly pre- or post-date the entire entertainment cycle under discussion, perhaps one needs to exist on that thin cusp between Generations X and Y, where the surfaces are sticky with Wacky WallWalker residue. Or perhaps all I'm getting at is that the view gets awfully strange when looking down the barrel of someone else's nostalgia.

And speaking of, it seems too that very generation must learn for itself the hard lesson that media corporations are not in the business of protecting your precious childhood entertainment memories if and when the market does not support that activity. Even in this age of astonishing availability, there's stuff that, you know, you just can't see and have. And so there is in all this a related lesson about ephemerality, the fading shimmer of halcyon days of yore, the unsoothable ache of lost youth, etc. etc. etc. forever.

There is no nefarious scheme or great mystery, of course, as to why a television network must eventually change its programming lineup. They all do it. Nothing but soap operas can stay in production for a lifetime. Ratings determine sponsorship determines lineups. Furthermore, Big Time Rush may air at the expense of All That, but something — say Fifteen — has to be cancelled to make room for All That in the first place. So petitions and badgering campaigns to the effect of "Bring Back KaBlam!" — as in begging for the return of mouldering reruns for viewers utterly outside the station's target demographic — are pointless, to which: no doy. This is also rather funny in a bent-lens way, as Nickelodeon, more than any network in memory, traditionally ran its skimpy lineup into the ground, rerunning the shows for years after production ended, as anyone who sat through the same six episodes of Ren & Stimpy one hundred times in 1991 can attest.

What such efforts do demonstrate is simply that some kind of vocal audience for vintage Nickelodeon programming exists. That audience might be sizable enough to make lucrative a zero-effort sister station to the current four primary channels (Nicktoons, TeenNick, Nick Jr., and TV Land). Frankly, I doubt it, as revival-based programming blocks have not been successful, and MTV Networks/Viacom tends to not dick around with Boomerang-sized efforts the way that Turner Broadcasting/Time Warner does. Not, naturally, that Boomerang's outstanding efforts in showing Banana Splits reruns and Ruby-Spears garbage are not appreciated. Anyway, begging a corporation for a spin-off channel that rebroadcasts your childhood being a rather unlikely goal, there ought to be some manner of DVD situation, yes? No? Maybe?

Television series on DVD are always a dicey proposition. Some ten years ago, it looked like everything ever filmed or taped was going to be released on DVD, if in no particular sequence of importance (you know, Pink Lady and Jeff being available before Roots and all. Not that I'm not personally more interested in the former, anyway). TV on DVD runs into those weird technical (surely the world would have Buffy the Vampire Slayer and X-Files Blu-rays by now, had they not been edited in SD), legal (musical clearance i.a. The Wonder Years, WKRP) and logistical issues ("do we do the first season of Dark Shadows first?") before it even has a shot at selling poorly. Time was (2002) that even a program as popular and important as The Mary Tyler Moore Show found its season set scheduling stalled for three years due to sluggish sales. If anything is certain it's that you just never know.

Back to the Nick problem, even given peculiarities particular to the network (again: children don't have money or care about season collections, and even children's programs of Boomer vintage are of limited appeal), Nickelodeon's DVD presence looks slight. MTV Networks successfully dipped its toes in the complete-season-set waters in 2003 with an imperfect but still pretty great Ren & Stimpy — Complete First and Second Seasons box. A savvy if obvious choice, as a majority of requests focus on Nicktoons titles, and of the initial 1991 trinity of original Nick animated series (with Doug, Rugrats) Ren & Stimpy has the widest crossover appeal. Indeed, as the show aired almost as frequently on MTV, continues to be widely admired by animation enthusiasts, and is, well, the single best original program Nickelodeon ever aired, the Ren & Stimpy DVDs arrived with no orange blob or Balloon lettering on the packaging to announce it as Nickelodeon product. In other words, the first major retro-Nick DVD package does not particularly rely on association with Nickelodeon, nor should it, nor does it need to do so.

The majority — but not totality — of pre-1990s Nickelodeon programming consisted of shows licensed from other sources. Perhaps the most fascinating era of the network's history, early/mid 1980s Nick was a disjointed, eclectic hodgepodge of UK, Canadian, and Franco-Japanese television, meaning they are not Viacom's to look after. This is often a happy situation; as arbitrary examples, the excellent Mysterious Cities of Gold was granted a lovely box set available in Region 1, the dumbfounding David the Gnome is available on Spanish DVD for those who wish to compare and contrast Swiper the Fox of Dora the Explorer with his ancestor Swift the Fox, and '80s Mr. Wizard's World sets are available from the official site. Sometimes a half-measure — some of the UK serials edited into The Third Eye are available, but the Nick original opening will simply have to haunt your nightmares forever. Etc., and so on, but those desiring access to Out of Control (1984-85) episodes are shit outta luck.

The 2005 launch of the "Nickelodeon Rewind" DVD collections clearly does "brand" the material. That first wave consisted of (such an air of respectability about the phrase, no?) First Season sets for Clarissa Explains it All and The Adventures of Pete & Pete (series proper 1993-96), and a second season Pete & Pete collection mere months later. Another fine choice here, as the wistful, poetic, absurdist hipster sitcom Pete & Pete — somehow wise without lessons per se, and "smart" in that unpinpointable way — was and remains ripe for rediscovery. In terms of situation comedy at full flower in the 1990s, it has the soulfulness of Roseanne, the postmodern bent of Seinfeld, the parodic built universe of The Simpsons and is plain weird in ways that, say, Lynch/Frost's On the Air attempted and failed (Side note — not that I don't appreciate On the Air). If you don't mind all the categorical qualifiers, The Adventures of Pete & Pete is likely the best live-action program Nickelodeon ever produced, and sits comfortably among the best television of the '90s. It ended when most shows are just hitting their stride and blooming — that is, third season — simply as a matter of network policy, theory being that children are as happy to watch endless reruns as new episodes. Theory being frustrating for older viewers, but not necessarily an unsound business model, though it is no longer the case.

The cessation of the Rewind line following these three releases took down with it Pete & Pete season three, the remainder of Clarissa and the dreams Anawanna campers everywhere. While sundry corporate shakeups are rumored to be the culprit behind the Rewind hiatus and its casualties, without being privy to sales figures this is all speculation. Meanwhile, the season set DVDs of animation juggernauts like SpongeBob and Avatar: The Last Airbender, modern teenybopper hits Naked Brothers Band, iCarly, et al., and a steady stream of Nick Jr. electro-babysitter discs continues to issue forth. In 2008, Amazon (of the dot-com) began selling exclusive manufactured-on-demand DVD-Rs of retro-Nicktoons in various Best of and Complete Season sets. While surely heartening for Aaahh!!! Real Monsters fans, the extensive lineup only underlines how few bright spots exist in the dull expanse of Nick animation. Suspicious occurrences such as the Ren & Stimpy disc containing de-censored shorts cobbled together from less-than-stellar sources and an incomplete Season Four of Doug (oh God, the tragedy) indicate that the network did not spend the '90s carefully preserving its assets for future exploitation.

Anyway, far more more interesting (and not less frustrating) than a bunch of goddamn Rugrats DVD-Rs is the appearance of Nickelodeon properties on iTunes and Amazon Video on Demand. The primary issue here is that like any good American I am deeply attached to physical consumer goods and love television sets, therefore hate buying digital files and despise watching art on computer screens. The manifold reasons for this don't need to be elaborated here. The digital download selections span boring/popular Nicktoons, beloved live-action series and, some forgotten obscurities (well, Gullah Gullah Island [1994-97], if you can believe that), all presented with little organizational logic, many with inexplicable new episode titles. This brings us, at long last to the case of The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, the first six-episode season of which is among those blessed/cursed with digital download availability.

Running four truncated Nick-style "seasons" from 1996 to '98, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo sees the title character (that's Irene Ng as The Shelb) living with her Grandpa Mike (Pat Morita, natch) at the Easterly Breeze bed and breakfast, interning at the police station, and living a normal high school life... except when solving exciting nonviolent crimes! Shelby Woo is amiable, low-impact teen sleuth stuff, which, for those with a predisposition to teen sleuth stuff, goes down easy and doesn't linger on the palate. The whodunits are a cut well above Encyclopedia Brown juvie nonsense, but less adventure-packed and suspenseful as good Hardy Boys nonsense or, more to the point, Ms. Woo's rhyming namesake. So the Nancy Drew template is followed and modified to lean toward an easygoing, gabby naturalism.

It is not terribly old or obscure but Shelby Woo seems to have dropped from the memory screens of ex-youths. It ran for a few years, spawned a longish series of tie-in paperbacks of which I own too many, then disappeared and is fanatically loved by no one. For these reasons, I've sort of used the show as a nostalgia gauging dipstick — "yes, but do you remember Shelby Woo?" — so it is a pleasant surprise that it should turn up in the iTunes store.

When the show debuted in 1996 I was a bit too old for it. Firstly, though ostensibly depicting high school life, most such programs, The Woo included, are better suited to junior high audiences as a gently fantasized version of the years ahead. Secondly, the brief, breathtaking run of My So-Called Life (ABC, 1994/95) had ended the year before, ruining cartoony teen sitcoms for anyone lucky enough to be the exact same age as its characters, and demonstrating that yes, are other ways to do this. After My So-Called Life it is tough to look at this kids stuff with anything but disdain.

Anyhow, affinity for Scooby-Doo tales aside, my adolescent interest in Shelby Woo was pretty well focused on the charms of leading lady Irene Ng. On revisitation, she still has a stilted, overly enthusiastic demeanor; basically she's cute, goofy and earnest. Though more money and attention was being poured into the likes of The Secret World of Alex Mack, what Shelby Woo does have is more '90s time capsule appeal than could be discerned at the time one was soaking in it. Naturally there is a healthy dollop of period hair and fashion (jean jackets, overalls), and you've got a pre-Buffy-villainy Adam Busch drawing the eye of any obsessive fan, if not demonstrating the same promise as Michelle Trachtenberg on Pete & Pete. As Shelby is a modern, tech-literate gal, plenty of breadbox-sized computers are on hand, and in a cute touch, interstitials designed as files being accessed on a PC desktop.

Though there is little point in making a strong case for anything about Shelby Woo, based on my skimpy research it the third American television series focused on an Asian-American protagonist. Discounting Bruce Lee's co-starring-but-starring role on Green Hornet ('66/67), the first in this lineage is five-episode bomb Mr. T and Tina (1976) starring Pat Morita, followed by Margaret Cho's 19-episode All-American Girl ('94/5). So Shelby Woo is likely the first US TV show about an Asian-American teenager, and one of the longest-running — and least offensive — of this handful of Asian-American-centered programs. Its episode count is about to be passed by Nick Jr.'s own cuddle-cational cartoon Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, though to be fair it is not clear where little Kai-Lan lives. That Morita should eventually play Shelby Woo's grandfather seems inevitable, if not meaningful, even if he's playing Chinese.

Speaking of these matters of cultural representation, the technique of those computer transitions, and the angle of approach re: teen life, it seems Shelby Woo is an acceptable specimen to demonstrate the gap separating late-'90s Nickelodeon and the Nick of the past ten years ramping up to Here and Now. Six episodes are probably more than enough to sate anyone's curiosity, so based on that small core sample, my findings are that this is ultimately a matter of interlocking formal and thematic questions, something beyond "my nostalgia is better than yours." On the picture-making end, Shelby Woo does some nondescript Florida location work, which lends elbow-room and breadth to the primary Orlando soundstage sets. The real surprise, the unexpected element nailing Shelby Woo into the '90s, is that the camerawork is of the completely handheld, unsteady, panny-zoomy shaky variety. Long takes meander around rooms, landing on knees and peripheral scenery before grabbing faces for dialogue. Crew shadows intrude during outdoor scenes, even falling across performers as the camera and sound dept circle their prey or jog to keep up. The Husbands and Wives (1992) aesthetic (or maybe just E.R.) is deeply felt in Shelby Woo. This lends the plot proceedings a sliver of urgency, helps the sets look less like sets, but mostly gives the show a funky, lived-in, meandering feel. It's a lazy technique, purely functional, and makes the show look offhand... second-hand. There is no flourish, there is no flash, no second coat of wax. The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo is a grunge teen detective show.

This is the difference between hiring college rock bands to do kid's sitcom soundtracks (Pete & Pete) and manufacturing bubblegum pop bands to center a show around (Naked Brothers). It is programming that speaks to kids, reflects their experience, gives them a vision of the world that they to relate to, versus a the selling of prefab fantasy lives that are so slick they can't be gripped. Truth be told, iCarly is pretty funny, the cast is talented, and it is a glossier affair than the sweat-stained, corn pone Salute Your Shorts. A tween sitcom about a hit web-series, mostly about dealing with fame, this is a hall of mirrors bouncing back the studio lights, three cameras filming themselves into infinity. It's Nickelodeon with the edges sanded, the slime washed off, the VHS tracking adjusted. It is virtually indistinguishable from Disney Channel product. I didn't go looking for anything along these lines, but is that it? The divide between '90s youth culture and the '00s? That sounds suspiciously like Old Man Syndrome talking. Maybe this is just about Nickelodeon.

Our closing theme is Polaris (most of Miracle Legion in disguise), providing music for Pete & Pete. I normally think this song is about the character Ellen from that show, but you may plug Shelby Woo into your mental music video, or indeed, your adolescence shrinking on the horizon has you trudge ahead. Winking smiley face/barfing smiley face.

Arguments for the Extermination of the Human Race

2010-12-13T00:33:00.000-08:00

Also for your consideration:
-Hollowing out your eye sockets with your own fingers so that this image can never again cross your field of vision.
-Purchasing Shrek DVD and home shrink-wrapping equipment, defecating in Shrek case, resealing Shrek package, returning to store.
-Hijacking an M1A2 Abrams tank, decimating DreamWorks Animation studios (1000 Flower Street, Glendale, CA 91201). Those choosing this "consideration," please be sure not to miss their backup facilities in Redwood City (1800 Seaport Boulevard, Redwood City, CA 94063). You may need separate tanks for this task, so be sure to recruit a friend.

TINY TOO Art Show Announcement / Wallet-Size Kaiju

2010-12-09T04:48:00.000-08:00

The TINY TOO SHOW exhibition at Gallery Meltdown showcases eensey-scale work (three inches or smaller) from some thirty-plus artists. Yours truly will also be in the show, and as per usual, the peripheral reason to mention this here is that my pieces are movie-culture-related. As the show is a one-night-only, cash-and-carry affair, the bulk of the art is available for perusal and purchase in the preview catalogue <— linked right here. Among these little gems is something for every budget, and as they take up less wall space than a commemorative $2 bill, make excellent holiday gifts. Direct purchase inquiries to Gallery Meltdown staff, at the links above/below, in person or by phone.

The TINY TOO SHOW goes up on December 11, 2010 from 6 P.M. to 9 P.M., in the gallery space of Meltdown Comics, 7522 W. Sunset Blvd., 90046. Those peculiar persons for whom Wednesday is not synonymous with "New Comics Day" often ask "Where on Sunset is that? I've never seen that," and the answer is "West Hollywood, somewhere between the In-N-Out and that Griddle Cafe place that cooks Oreos into pancakes."

So below are photographs of my tiny paintings, which depict beloved monstrous creatures from Japanese tokusatsu media. That is, they're all guys in rubber kaiju suits. Each of these oh-so-ironically mini-kaiju are acrylic on 2"x2" MDF. As disclaimer, in person these are considerably more lustrous, not so washed out, and appear less "blotchy" and more "pointillist," as digital scanner or camera simply cannot convey the miniature-ness on hand. Anyway, do consider that you're seeing these rascals at nearly twice their actual size, which completely undoes any in-person effects, but is fun anyway. Away, then!

Anguirus — 1968
Front of the pack, but the most modern design of the bunch, Godzilla's first giant monster foe appears in approximation of his Destroy All Monsters! design. Anguirus' 1968 incarnation was selected over his First Appearance look in Godzilla Raids Again (née Gigantis, the Fire Monster, 1955) because 1) I love Destroy All Monsters!, 2) the film is in color, which avoids having to paint in monochrome or inventing a color scheme for the beast (the original suit is rumored to have been painted in hues of red and blue!), and 3) later appearances do not try to mask that the design forces the suit performer to crawl around on hands and knees. There is, in my opinion, something charming and a little magical about bent-knee kaiju, a necessary acquiescence to the anatomical reality of the actor, a silent signifier of the Real World that could break the illusion but that is, instead, gradually absorbed as a genre convention. Blessed are the knee-crawlers.

Kanegon — 1966
The most esoteric of this cluster is Kanegon, who appeared in the Ultra Q episode "Kanegon's Cocoon". Despite having featured in one TV show more than forty years ago, the coin-purse-headed, non-giant kaiju is a readily recognizable icon in his homeland, and is steadily reproduced in vinyl and resin of all size and color. The excellent Ultra Q has sadly never been exported to America, but is available on nice, ultra-pricey Japanese DVD from the usual sources for such things. Naturally it's never been dubbed or subtitled, but you don't entirely need a translation, particularly for this kid-logic fable about the dangers of money lust. Briefly, greedy boy Kaneo finds a pod full of coins, is sucked inside, and wakes up as a Kanegon, which must eat cold hard cash to survive. With some familial resemblance to "The Metamorphosis" and Carl Barks comics, the episode finally goes full-on weirdo in the dénouement, where Kanegon somehow blasts off into space, Kaneo parachutes back to earth, and finds that his parents have turned to Kanegons, too. Anyway, the episode contains several indelible images, including the desperate creature crouched curbside before a dropped safe box and shoveling coins into his maw, as well as one of the more hair-raising stunts I've ever seen, when the suited Kanegon actor falls from a moving bulldozer and into the path of the blade. But vague morals about greed and alien ass-rockets aside, I suspect the episode endures because of a single lyrical shot of the lonesome Kanegon sitting on a quarry hillside at sunset, gazing into the distance.

As re: the painting, I cop to having backed off on the backlighting and dusky shadows of this scene, in exchange for a clearer look at this classic monster suit. Relatively trustworthy color documentation exists, but I chose to depict the scene in Ultra Q-accurate black and white.

Mothra — 1964
Mothra comes at the suggestion of the lady of the house. Good thinking, since girls like Mothra, and a request I'm glad to fulfill because she lets me keep dozens of vinyl monsters in the living room. Besides a hindwing reduction and proboscis redesign after her 1961 debut, I don't believe that Shōwa Mothra underwent drastic changes in look. Like everyone else, I try to keep up on these things, but claim no expertise.

The scene in the little picture above comes from her '64 appearance in Mothra vs. Godzilla (Godzilla vs. the Thing, for the elderly), as the aging Mothra takes refuge in her sacred cave on Infant Island and rests up for one final, self-sacrificing battle. Mothra has, the Infant Islanders say, chosen to defend Japan against Godzilla, though her life cycle is ending and human greed has endangered her massive, beached egg. There is a quiet majesty to this scene that seems intrinsically Japanese — being, as it is, about natural cycles and personal sacrifice for the good of society. Overhead light streams into the dark cave and rims the beast's gently flapping wings, a melancholy wash of mono no aware clarity and beauty all the more unexpected for being in a tale of giant monsters amok.

This is among the most moving and delicate scenes in a Godzilla picture — if not top of the list — and one of the many elements that recommends Mothra vs. Godzilla as a particularly fine installment.

I've cheated the angle of Mothra's wings, and fudged the interior of the cave, for more dramatic (and square) staging. Do forgive me. And finally, inevitably...

Godzilla — 1964
Speaking of Mothra vs. Godzilla and its excellent qualities, the street-level story is funny and compelling. Theme park developers claim ownership of Mothra's egg, the working class fishermen who discovered it demand compensation, career politicians try to put positive spin on disasters, and newspapermen have honest-to-God ideological discussions about the degree to which journalists should shape public opinion. That's just a random sample of this idea-rich masterpiece, and Mothra vs. Godzilla is exactly the counterattack to keep in your arsenal when some chucklehead tells you that a Giant Fighting Creatures movie mustn't/needn't/can't/shouldn't aspire to be anything but stupid, loud, cinematically incompetent, etc. You will need this weaponry in the near future, likely in battle with the Transformers franchise.

Back to the point, MvG also sports one of the very best Godzilla suits, affectionately shorthanded by enthusiasts as Mosugoji, and pretty much the hands-down fan favorite Shōwa suit. Personally, I can't help but feel the most affection for the Soshingeki-Goji of Destroy All Monsters! through Godzilla vs. Gigan/ on Monster Island, and there's something abominably creepy about the King Kong vs. Godzilla suit, but in the end, I cave to popular opinion on this one.

As for the King of Monsters half of the equation, Godzilla is depicted as an irredeemable asshole in the film, is given one of the all-time, any-movie greatest entrance scenes, a delightfully ignoble comeuppance at the end, and...

In the above scene, Godzilla slips and smashes into Nagoya Castle, then takes out his rage on the landmark: the coolest Godzilla design lays into one of the Tsuburaya Dept.'s most spectacular miniatures. Ironically/hilariously, restoration of the historic building had just been completed five years prior. So, obviously, that's a good, excruciatingly laborious thing to commemorate in a two inch painting. I can only add that I was a little bummed that to fit both the beautiful creature and castle the scale is such that one can't quite make out the golden dolphins atop the building.

* * * * *Finally, for those who read this far and actually, y'know, live in Los Angeles... In grand Bandai collecting tradition, there will be one additional Show Exclusive painting. That is, not available via Internet or phone order, and not available after the show, but available only on December 11 at Gallery Meltdown!

P.S., the painting will be of Guiron from Gamera vs. Guiron. Because his head is a knife.

Fox and Sam at the End of the Road: THE X-FILES and "Closure"

2010-11-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

It is something of a joke, irony or, perhaps, stunt, to call an X-Files episode "Closure". Firstly, it shares the title with an episode of Millennium, part of a series of crossover and bounce-back between titles of the semi-shared Ten Thirteen Productions universe. Secondly, obviously The X-Files doesn't do closure. Certainly not in the narrative or business senses of the word, where the plot is an endless hanging garden of dangling story threads. The program's picture-making form is driven by denying visual closure. Beasts and bodies are concealed in partial shadow, angels and aliens blaze with intolerable light, and the signature images are two flashlight beams searching about in darkness and a cigarette cherry flaring in the murk. Nor does the show traffic in the sort of psychological "closure" (foothold in our pop psych lexicon gained during X-Files broadcast years) that the episode purports to deliver.

At its foundations The X-Files lacks epistemic closure, every moment is forever open-ceilinged, shifting and frustrated. Paradoxically, it is a closed loop and always was, relates back, receives information, and speaks meaning only to itself. But if you want my opinion, The Truth is both: The X-Files is deeply, deeply anxious, and obscurationist at heart.

Now then, the matter at hand is the ultimate fate of one Samantha Mulder, disappeared from her family home at age 8 in 1973, and the resultant impact on the mental state of her brother, Fox. Because The X-Files is an elegantly constructed machine, one thing leading to another and all, the curious circumstances of the abduction witnessed by the elder Mulder sibling provide meaty story materials and internal character psychology, both. Plainly, when we meet Agent Fox Mulder in 1993, he has come to believe Samantha to have been swiped by marauding aliens. The knight's quest to locate the absent sister fuels much X-Files narrative, and as it is, in short order, folded into the larger series-long mechanics of the Syndicate conspiracy and the antics of various space peoples, a story element of central, driving concern. What Happened to Samantha? is not just juicy Mulder backstory, but frontstory. Forward-story.

Even when not directly inquiring into Samantha's whereabouts, whether tackling concerns larger (global Martian invasion) or unrelated (vampires, mutants, chupacabras), she looms large in Mulder's headspace. Sam is riding on Fox's shoulder and just over the horizon as he chases every Jersey Devil down every blind alley. The memory of witnessing the abduction and the pain of loss catalyze a perfect chain-reaction leading to the Mulder we know: a propensity to regard the paranormal with credulity, a paranoiac bent, empathy for victims, a martyr complex, and so on. Perfect, that is, but for the absent center. Mulder's psychology and belief systems whirl around a cavernous gap and he might collapse in on himself at any moment. He is a man built on shaky premises. Two vital supports that (usually) prevent implosion, though they tend to contradict one another: Scully's devotion to keeping him in check, and repeated evidence that tells Mulder he is right. The kind of closed-loop logic that runs Mulder — no one believes me-> I will make them believe by solving X-Files-> no one believes me because I investigate X-Files — runs all the way down on the basement level of the character and the series. This simple hook with convoluted barbs is summed up by that despairing/hopeful kōan: "I Want to Believe."

So then, the true tale of Samantha's fate and the passion of Fox Mulder: these are the entwined snakes to which episode 11 of season 7, "Closure", intends to bring closure. At the end we will hear an explanation, and Mulder will mutter, "I'm fine... I'm free." But maybe the explanation is not an explanation, and maybe Mulder is neither fine nor free, and just maybe there will be no closure. Then again...

Mulder looks up...
I Saw the Sein

Besides a loathing of plot summaries, a guided walkthrough of the episode is perhaps not the cleanest path through these muddy waters. On first pass, "Closure" seems meandering, its conclusions confusing and confused, to say nothing of dissatisfying and, well, inconclusive. These things may be true, as there seems to be something wrong at every turn, but on the other hand something is wrong at every turn. After much gallivanting around Sacramento suburbs, a women's prison, an abandoned military base, and a fictionalized version of the Skyforest, CA Santa's Village park, a solution to the Samantha Problem. "Closure" says: Samantha T./A. Mulder was stolen from her home, then raised along with Jeffrey Spender at April Air Force Base by the Cigarette Smoking Man. She was likely brainwashed and made subject to medical testing until she escaped and was brought to an emergency room. Before Cigarette Smoking Man could retrieve her from the hospital, Samantha was (fortitude, people...) rescued by benevolent spirits made of starlight, known as Walk-Ins. The means by which the Walk-Ins save the souls of innocents about to suffer brutal, unjust deaths, is to (150 episodes and a feature film leading to this moment) kill them and make their bodies disappear without a trace.

To this information any reaction is acceptable, but popular candidates include "lame," "that sucks," and "holy shit." Sure, sure and sure, but only in flatly stated summary, because "mercy killed by star-souls" is less than half the story; it answers the What and When but not the Why and How. One troubling thing about "Closure" is that it sees the agents chasing down a lot of information that they have already discovered, as if reiterating the plot thus far for newcomers. So Scully reviews videos of Mulder's regression hypnosis from 1989, Mulder finds evidence that Samantha had been relocated to the Spender household, and the possibility is floated that the girl was victim of an entirely unrelated serial killer. None of this is news to the characters, none of it is entirely new plot material, but it forces all involved to sift through most of the open-ended possibilities yet again. Mulder pays multiple visits to the same abandoned house on April Air Force Base with reshuffled agendas, hours of videotape are pored over, mountains of hospital paperwork shoveled through, moldering secret diaries scrutinized, obscure witnesses tracked down and dozens of graves laid open. The treadmill churns, and, feet pounding the same few inches over and over, Mulder never lets up.

The X-Files has an ambivalent, relativistic relationship with the concept of truth. To say that "The Truth is Out There" implies a lot of things, including that one is therefore not in possession of that truth, that if it is perpetually "out there," that one cannot know it fully, but perhaps, too, that there is such a thing and a search may not be in vain. For central example, the truth of immediate concern and contention in any given episode tends to be whether or not some kind of supernatural jive is going down. There generally is, of course, paranormal activity afoot, and the audience is nearly always given some kind of "objective" — that is, not filtered through a character's subjective point of view — evidence of such. As such, it might seem that Mulder is nearly always right, while Scully is beating her head against a wall of irrelevant skepticism. It may further seem that The X-Files plays fast and loose — or "cheats," if you prefer — with this phenomenon, implying that there may be some other interpretation, forgetting what it has shown us, or, specifically, regularly allowing Scully to witness the paranormal but not to overhaul her worldview accordingly. A common complaint, that, but it comes a) from viewers outside the narrative, and b) as occasional gripes by Mulder.

The issue laid out before the characters — and the audience — is less about whether the world is swarming with ghosts and UFOs than it is about what one does with the information before one's eyes. When faced with evidence of Possessed Serial Killer #258, or even supernatural phenomenon that might comfortably fit into her belief system, as when visited by a cherub in "All Souls", Scully neither shuts her eyes and forgets it away, nor jumps to conclusions. She tries to assimilate that data with extant scientific knowledge, and when unable to do so, will admit she does not know what to make of the event. Mulder occasionally doesn't know either, but more often, faced with the same evidence, simply confirms a conclusion that he has already reached. Mulder and Scully are not symbolic stand-ins for larger concepts — e.g. Scully is not Science or Skepticism or Rationality — but characters with varied, contradictory and complex attitudes and qualities. The series' core subjects are the nature of truth and power, faith, religion, of science, belief, spirituality, the shaky narratives of history, nation and identity, so on, so forth — life and death stuff, as it were. The X-Files does not preach or lecture on these matters. It investigates.

"Closure" is the second half of a two-parter, following "Sein und Zeit", which is named, in the German, for Heidegger's Being and Time. The titles give a clue on how to read the episodes, "closure" in its multiple senses stands in contradiction to — but gaining reinforcement in its ironic inverse — reference to Heidegger's study of hermeneutical phenomenology. Now, pardon my butchering of an unsummarizable difficult work, but the relevant concepts in Heidegger would seem to be that a being's inquiry into the nature of being is perilous, cyclical and likely unending. A self-conscious being, by asking such questions, is in nature the thing about which it is inquiring. Absent external frame of reference, interfacing only with beings in the same situation, and wrestling with language that has a different being from that which it describes, a being can only gain understanding through systematic interpretation. The being is defined by past experiences, and while aimed at the future, that future, too, is shaped and framed by the perceiving being in terms of past experience.

This is more than enough to chew on as regards Fox and Samantha Mulder. Having already explored the ways in which Samantha's abduction in the past determines Mulder's present, is sure to define his future path, in its way is rather synonymous with his person, the remaining key concept seems to be the cyclical, incremental progress of understanding. The two-ep arc is about nothing if not dogged reexamination of evidence, paths in circles, arcs retraced until one being reaches some knowledge of himself, and therefore another being, and therefore Being. Halfway through "Closure", after weeping over a reading of his sister's newly discovered secret diary (it ends inconclusively), Mulder stands in a late night diner's parking lot. He sees...

... The void, penetrated by glittering pinpricks of light, which leads to this speechifying:

MULDER: You know, I never stop to think that the light is billions of years old by the time we see it. From the beginning of time, right past us, into the future. Nothing is ancient in the universe. But maybe they are souls, Scully. Traveling through time as starlight, looking for homes.

History, then, coalescing in a brief Now that is soon to be past, a history that was once future, a future always in the present. Time spacialized, existence as never ending search. A universe both lonely and sparkling in harmony, a dark space and a light on an unfulfillable quest. This from cold facts made into the sort of New Agey sentiment that stokes Mulder's fire and brings him a peculiar comfort.

"Don't look for it, Taylor!"

Earlier in "Closure", a portent. A certain ape gives advice to a certain spaceman in Planet of the Apes, playing on a motel television, "don't look for it, Taylor! You may not like what you find." Its function, 1) as a hint: this is about time, about looping back to where you began, about the grieving process, and 2) as a warning: perhaps not to Mulder, but to the dedicated, difficult-to-please audience. We are going out on that beach, an answer will be found, and, well, no guarantees after that.

To spend any time in the presence of diehard fantasy audiences — "fans" if you prefer, "geeks" if you absolutely must — is to find that they tend to possess memories for minutia like steel traps, a literalist streak and a contradictory apologist streak. Since we may not like what we find and The X-Files seems to know this, we ought to figure out why we may not like it. So, starting at the end and meandering around again, the Samantha File closes with the Walk-Ins. The Walk-Ins are problematic because they have never been referenced before, will never be heard from again. Their participation in the Samantha mystery has not previously been seeded and they yield to no rules of the fictive universe, and scoot in at an oblique angle to the established narrative facts; that is, amidst the warring government conspiracy, alien factions, serial killers and Feds, angelic star-ghosts can kind of do anything they want.

Perhaps, if these irritants can be weighted, the Walk-Ins' greatest offense is to introduce supernatural element to the central Mytharc storyline. Though The X-Files participates in and/or grabs elements and inspiration from dozens (hundreds?) of speculative fiction subgenres, the Mytharc has always been strictly science-fiction espionage thriller. A fine line, perhaps, but one consistently drawn: no magic in the Mytharc.

Finally, we may reject the Walk-Ins because they are brazenly sentimental in concept and execution. Color desaturated, double-exposed, and bathed in a shimmery glow, moving in uber-serious slow-mo, the little star-ghost-angels frolic as Moby's choir-and-strings piece "My Weakness" plays, and inspire much earnest Mulder monologuing. In their presence, a lot of discussion of the inherent innocence of children, the sort of Problem of Evil discussions that assume the presence of a watchful God and end up framing the spirits as holy agents. The specific language in the voice over is pure Mulder in sentiment, but uncharacteristic in that it speaks at length about "God," and along with the "My Weakness" sequence is highly problematic as it implies that it is a lovely thing that the purity of murdered children has been preserved in amber for eternity. The Walk-Ins, then, seem something of a cop-out, and a sappy cop-out at that.

The potential complaints about the Walk-Ins are, however, the very reasons they possess a bit of an edge and nuance that makes them harder to dismiss. "Believe to Understand" — "Crede, ut intelligas," as Scully could likely explain — urges the title card over that gloomy mountainscape where the banner usually reads "The Truth is Out There." There is that Augustinian inscription on how to read "Closure", and as it unfolds, Mulder is repeatedly warned off his search by the three people with whom his life is most closely intertwined. Scully, his mother, and Cigarette Smoking Man in a private Dr. Zaius chorus tell Mulder not to continue pushing for answers. But why?

The Infinite Samantha

Mulder has, as those paying attention know, been reunited with his sister several times, or, more accurately, been confronted with her physical presence in increasingly disconcerting form. Each iteration of Samantha branches out into new possibilities at least as much as it sheds light on the situation. This begins in "Colony" (season 2, episode 16) where Samantha returns to the family, only to multiply exponentially in the episode's continuation, "End Game", where she is revealed as one of several clones, and an alien hybrid. This effectively solidifies the link, in literal terms, between Samantha and alien activity, and in a more nagging, unscratchable way indicates to Mulder that if he solves one, can solve the other; naturally, having gotten this close, the slate is wiped: though no real "Samantha" is found or erased, the clones are all destroyed, yet Samantha-possibilities have proliferated before Mulder's eyes.

Next contact is made in "Paper Clip" (3.2), when the agents uncover a subterranean cache of abductee information, including Samantha's file (once marked for Fox) replete with "recent tissue sample." So there but for the grace of a 3M stick-on label goes Fox Mulder, reinforcing his survivor's guilt, doubt about his parents, and the caprices of circumstance: it could have been, almost was, eventually will be him. He has located a scrap of Samantha's body in her tissue sample, the smallest confirmation that she is alive, or was recently. Closer by inches.

The season 4 premiere, "Herrenvolk" (4.1) leads to an apiary tended by an army of eight-year-old Samanthas. But clearly they are clones — drones, even, barely able to communicate — stalled at the age of abduction. A reminder, here, that for those who swiped the girl, she was a tool with a function, and that for Mulder, the lost sister is irretrievable; he is chasing the idea of Samantha, and even if she is recovered, she will not be in the same condition as when she last played Stratego.

Apparently tangential, but straight in line with these replicating hypothetical Samanthas, is the season 4 episode "Paper Hearts" (4.8). The story explores the possibility that Samantha was a victim of child-killer John Lee Roche, and not taken by aliens, not with the involvement of the Syndicate, not with the forced hand of his father. The "Paper Hearts" concept will be floated again in "Closure". Both rounds, it turns up zilch. Roche even gives a full confession, which stands as the only complete, first-hand account of Samantha's fate... except that it is bunk. The source that appears to be yielding the most information is giving up the least. Again, odd (or discontinuitous) for Mulder to even consider this version of events after gathering (well, witnessing) so much counter-evidence. But he is open to possibility, willing to explore, and interested in dicey information, but not beholden to it, if it does not gel to his standards.

Finally, in the amazingly-titled "Redux/Redux II" (season 5, episodes 1/2), one more grown-up Samantha visits her brother. This time she is proffered as bait to lure Mulder from government work to shadow-government work, and believes the Cigarette Smoking Man is her father. With that, the final living Samantha disappears from the narrative. Fan speculation tends to agree that this was yet another clone, but all that is certain is that Samantha appears, spends an evening at home, Mulder does not take the Smoking Man's bait, and she is whisked away once more. Possibly the closest she's ever been, maybe he's almost got her back, and could be nothing happened at all.

As hinted, the crux of frustration and the masterstroke is that the "Sein und Zeit"/"Closure" diptych does not rewrite, overwrite or reconfigure exactly what happened to Samantha. The Truth of this matter, in hard, cold factual terms, is unaltered, and has been fairly firmly in place in most relevant details since, say, the fifth season. Mulder has known this for years, or more importantly, it is the version he believes, and the one we, the audience, also see with the most clarity.

Samantha was removed from Martha's Vineyard, as collateral in the Syndicate's dealing with aliens. On her return, she was placed in the home of the Cigarette Smoking Man, experimented on, and cloned several times over. This stands, Walk-Ins or no Walk-Ins. To these events, and while stressing the long-term project of the Infinite Samantha, all "Closure" adds to the known facts is: "She died."

The Smoke-Wreathed Heart

To Mulder's Zaiuses (Zaii?), then. All those concerned for Mulder's well-being take a turn instructing him not to pursue the Samantha matter during the "Closure" arc. Scully, most of all, has to deal intimately with her exhausted and tortured partner, and is attuned as to when to indulge, assist or put her foot down. She and AD Skinner have added motivation to keep Mulder in check, as he is chasing down Samantha via/at the expense of properly solving the child abduction case that spurred the latest tail-chase in the first place. They are right to worry, as by the end, the case is never properly solved.

More mysterious than the cares of Mulder's colleagues is the Cigarette Smoking Man's visit to Scully with a request: "I want you to stop looking." She will deliver a message, which Mulder dismisses with an accurate "Oh well, he's a liar." Sure is, and keep that in mind, but remember that when so inclined, the Smoking Man tells the truth like few others — a particularly cutting version of the truth because he understands relativism, that subjectivity, and agenda apply to all beings, himself included, and is up front about it. For that, Smoking Man scenes are always dense, and this one's a brief doozy. What the Smoking Man says is: "No one's going to find her... Because I believe she's dead. No reason to believe otherwise." Knowing the ending, and knowing that this is about "belief," note that CSM does not say that Samantha is dead or that he knows she is dead. While wrapped up in the suspense of first viewing, these comments are ripe with insinuation, and continue to spawn possibilities as the plot unfolds. Could be he killed her. Could be he had her killed. Could be he knows that she died due to "testing" — by the Syndicate or by aliens. Could be he suspects that, like his ex-wife, Cassandra Spender, the girl was abducted/returned/reabducted. Could be that he knows only what he saw, which is that Samantha disappeared from a locked hospital room just before he arrived. And now he has come to believe she is dead.

But this belief is not what CSM asks Scully to tell Mulder. When she criticizes his having withheld, er, whatever it is he knows for all this time, the Smoking Man explains, as he has before, as he will again: "Out of kindness, Agent Scully. Allow him his ignorance. It's what gives him hope."

Scully thinks about it. Scully doesn't seem to agree. Scully tells Mulder what Cigarette Smoking Man said. He is a liar, after all. "Mulder, why would he lie now?," Scully counters, and CSM had argued the same; that in previous years he was motivated to lead Mulder on to protect the Syndicate's secret work which was effectively destroyed during the season 6 "Two Fathers"/"One Son" arc. Why lie now? Well folks, somebody is lying:

"End Game" — BOUNTY HUNTER: She's alive. Can you die now?

"The Blessing Way" — (somewhere on the astral plane or something)
MULDER: My sister? Is she here?
BILL MULDER: No

"Two Fathers" — SCULLY: Agent Mulder told me he believed he saw his sister. Last year.
CASSANDRA SPENDER: That wasn't her, Agent Mulder.
MULDER: Then where is she?
CASSANDRA SPENDER: Out there, with them. The aliens.

So from abductees to apparitions to aliens, the weirdoes of the universe seem to believe Samantha Mulder lives and breathes.

Speaking of misleading information, Mulder's mother, Teena, in typically enigmatic form, shows up a handful of times during this chapter. She has always been more withholding than even Cigarette Smoking Man, and her tendency to occlude information hangs like a pall over the episode. She first appears while Mulder is away in California on a case. Alone at home, Teena burns a photo of Fox and Samantha, leaves a voice mail for her son, asking that he call back so she may discuss things "that I've left unsaid for reasons I hope one day you'll understand," and commits suicide by gas inhalation.

A hint, here, that Teena Mulder knows something... about something. Scully will discover that Teena was dying from "Paget's carcinoma," which, interestingly may be something of a misnomer, or a confusion of several possibilities. Mulder insists that his mother's undelivered message was about his sister, and that she was silenced by the Syndicate. And indeed, both agents have lost family to these particular murderers, and Teena had withheld crucial information before. Without getting too ahead of the game, let us say that Mrs. Mulder's message is never revealed, and Scully would seem to be correct. But why, then, does she burn the photo of her children?

Certainly she has left things unsaid, and if Mulder tends to categorize the Smoking Man as "a liar," Teena has a pattern of lying as well. The backstory unspoken in the "Closure" arc is that, at minimum, Teena was aware that Samantha's abduction was directly related to Bill Mulder's secret government work: in "Paper Clip", she revealed that Bill had asked her to choose which of the children would be taken, and she was unable to do so. As per "Talitha Cumi", she knew that an alien neck-stabbing weapon (a "plam," to those in the in-joke know) was secreted in a lamp in the family home. As she was stroke-striken at the time, and her son, bizarrely, never questioned her on the topic afterwards, none can say if she knew what the space-icepick was, or its purpose. The list of Things Teena Didn't Tell Fox goes on and on, but the extent to which she understood Syndicate/Colonist business is an unknown variable.

An appearance by Mom's ghost in Mulder's motel room gains no ground either. Mulder is unable to hear or see the apparition, but she appears to police psychic Harold Piller, and meanwhile her son gets a clue via automatic writing: "APRIL BASE." Given these events, all we arrive at are — surprise! — uncertainties and possibilities. The Scully Version is: "Mulder, she was trying to tell you to stop. To stop looking for your sister. She was just trying to take away your pain." Unspoken by both agents is the real possibility that Teena harbored a lifetime of regrets regarding her role in the fates of both her children — Fox's parentage, Samantha's abduction —, hence the burning of the family photo. What Mulder will ultimately conclude is that "I've been looking for my sister in the wrong place. That's what my mother was trying to tell me." This interpretation, predictably, has multiple potential meanings. Possibly Ghost Mom is pointing Mulder to April Base, communicating through the automatically-written note in ALL CAPS, as she once wrote PALM. Indeed, at the abandoned home where Samantha's hands are imprinted in the cement, and her voice is inscribed in a diary hidden in a cupboard, Mulder locates a necessary lead — specifically, that she ran away on the date the diary ended.

Another Truth is that Mulder doesn't find Samantha at April Air Force Base any more than he found her in the "Paper Clip" file. He already knows, or knows the possibility that she was raised in the Spender household. She told him this in "Redux", and if she was a clone or a hybrid or a not-Samantha of some kind, the handprints in the cement could still belong to that same clone. At the top of "Closure", Mulder combs through videotapes found at the Santa's North Pole Village theme park, where a serial killer Santa had buried the bodies of twenty-four children over forty years. Samantha is not depicted on the tapes, not found in the ground. Mulder confesses to Scully that "You don't know how badly I wanted her to be in one of those graves," as it would at least end the search. But Samantha couldn't be there. It would not make sense. Besides flying in the face of the Syndicate plot that the agents have agonizingly pieced together for seven years, Mulder would have some memory of a family trip to California. Should Mulder have found a cold body at North Pole Village, it would not be wrapped with a bow.

There are two poetical-cum-literal dimensions to the message from Mulder's mother that will unlock the business of "Closure". There are geographical coordinates provided, but as they lead only to information that is inconclusive unto itself (handprints, partial diaries, shaggy dog hospital reports), what the note really points to is a series of absences. A body, dead/alive or cloned would not be enough and Mulder has literally searched from the South Pole to North Pole Village, from exhumed graves to the astral plane, and Samantha is not Out There. He is looking in the wrong place.

Secondly, Teena's message is passed to Mulder through automatic writing. That is to say, of course, that it comes from himself.

Sky-Walker, Star-Killer

In real world New Age contexts, Walk-Ins are beings from elsewhere who have taken up in human hosts, replacing the previous consciousness. "Closure" calls its spirits "Walk-Ins," though this application of the term is unique to these episodes. A walking encyclopedia of the paranormal, Mulder would know what a traditional "Walk-In" is, and demonstrated such in the convoluted episode "Red Museum" (2.10). The creative staff is therefore making a choice to associate the "Closure" beings with run-of-the-mill Walk-Ins. So what is going on here?

The behavior and motives of the Walk-Ins are complicated and ultimately inexplicable. The cold open of "Sein Und Zeit" establishes the base pattern and "rules," such as they are, and kindly kook psychic Harold Piller names and explains near the beginning of "Closure"; this is the major loop of phenomenon and interpretation in the investigation of the actual X-File motivating the episodes. To the file cabinet, then.

Six-year-old-ish Amber Lynn LaPierre disappears from her bedroom in Sacramento while her parents are in the house. The name and circumstances echo aspects of the 1996 murder of JonBenét Ramsey, a crime already difficult to comprehend that in the ensuing decade increasingly resembled these no-answers riddles. Mulder horns in on the LaPierre investigation for its superficial links to Samantha's abduction, but besides a child missing with no trace, the incidents bear an important non-resemblance: no bright lights, no levitating girl, no family link to a government cover-up of an interplanetary invasion plot. Scully addresses the transparent psychology at work, and tells Mulder that if sympathy for missing children has drawn him to the LaPierres, he is also stretching to connect the apparently unrelated cases.

Amber Lynn's disappearance is accompanied by three unusual events. While tucking her in, Mr. LaPierre has a vision of his daughter as a corpse. Immediately before the girl goes missing, Mrs. LaPierre pens a ransom note addressed to herself and her husband, and making reference to Santa. Some time later, Mrs. LaPierre witnesses an apparition of Amber Lynn attempting to speak to her.

Recalling a similar confounding note in an apparently solved X-File, Mulder visits the jail cell of confessed murderess Kathy Lee Tencate. She does not quite say the words, but allows Mulder to conclude that given the confusing, inconclusive evidence (more automatic writing, another vision, another spirit visit), Tencate has made a false confession in hopes of appeasing the parole board. After some soul-searching and another visit from her ghost son, Tencate suggests to Mulder that Teena Mulder's message was that she, too, had seen the Walk-Ins.

Here, "Closure" enters that undefined space where metaphor and story events merge, swap out, and wear masks. It is remotely possible that Teena had visions of a dead Samantha, but when? Before Samantha disappeared from home? Years later, before she disappeared from the hospital? In the closing scenes, a retired emergency room nurse who was on duty the night Samantha was taken by Walk-Ins claims that she had the visions. A pile-up, again. The would-be Tencate and LaPierre murderer is given an inconsistent name by the episode closed captioning — "Ed Scruloff" in "Sein und Zeit" and "Ed Truelove" in "Closure" — which is indicative of this open-ended is/is-not pattern. While Scruloff/Truelove nabs victims from all over the country, their bodies are all buried at North Pole Village. The only two of his victims that are named are children he did not manage to kill at all, but likely intended to kill. Whether he ever left a ransom note (or why) is not established, nor is it clear if/how/why the Walk-Ins are leaving such notes. Just as Scully and Skinner indicate, Mulder gets so far off-track with the case's Samantha associations that he fails to notice that none of the evidence is adding up.

The role of psychic Harold Piller, who guides Mulder through "Closure" is partially expository, laying out the few rules of the Walk-Ins that he understands: the awful visions given to the parents are of the fates their children were about to suffer, and, the masterstroke, that "they will come to you if you're ready to see." But he is not there to circumvent the questions begged by the Walk-Ins, either as metaphor or physical event. When standing amidst the North Pole Village graves, Piller asks a question that plunges straight to the heart of the murk: "My God, why? Why must some suffer and not others?"

There is a lot of suffering to go around. As it happens, Scully discovers that Harold has previously been institutionalized, diagnosed as schizophrenic, and is under current investigation regarding his own missing son. These things are, of course, not damning, but they complicate things, they throw doubt, they open possibilities.

Though his own boy disappeared under identical circumstances, Harold does not see his double-exposure spirit, the final confirmation of Walk-In involvement and a tranquil death. But it is Harold's son that guides Mulder to Samantha's diary and escorts him to meet her spirit in the clearing at the end of a dark road. Mulder sees the boy only because he's "ready to see," which means as much and as little as that he Wants to Believe. Piller believes in the Walk-Ins in general, but cannot accept that his son is dead, will not listen to Mulder's advice that "we both have to let go." In his final scene, Harold runs off into the darkness on an endless snipe hunt. The road he takes is the one Mulder has been traveling since 1973.

The memory of Samantha leads Mulder to Amber Lynn leads to the Tencate case leads to the twenty-four children behind the Village lead to Harold's son leads back to Samantha. A series of infinitely nested X-Files, all bearing Fox's name, pasted over with Samantha's. Mulder is the Walk-In, here, the little girl is lost, but she lives on through her brother.

While Mulder is off chasing starlight still looking in the Wrong Place, Scully reviews arcane evidence from what will prove to be the Right Place. She watches videotape of Mulder's hypnotic regression sessions from 1989, where he first remembered the events of November 27, 1973. This is, in effect, where we came in. The memories unearthed in these sessions were the first intimate information that Mulder shared with Scully. It is the formation Fox Mulder, Investigator of the Paranormal. At the closing of the loop, the last evidence meets the very first evidence. The FBI psychologist reviewing the tape with Scully evaluates "this is just garden-variety compensatory abduction fantasy." This was always a possibility. The reason for a reminder at this point is to parallel the solution with the inception. In a rather audacious scene of the season 7 finale, "Requiem", an FBI accountant will ask: whether the Bureau believes it or not, if the whereabouts of Samantha are resolved, and the Syndicate is dismantled, what, exactly, is left to investigate?

The Walk-Ins may rescue some from painful injustices, but leave plenty of pain in their wake. The LaPierres will likely be convicted, Kathy Lee Tencate remains imprisoned, Harold Piller grieves forever, and billions of souls will not be rescued from earthly death. Why must some suffer and not others? In the final moments of "Closure", Mulder gazes at the stars once more. Faced with that field of graves, the lost child's empty bedroom, the sky of Infinite Samanthas, Mulder does what we all must do, and reconciles a mountain of ambiguity with an explanation that makes sense to him. His heart comes to rest on the stars, and not the blackness around them. He is finally looking in the right place.

Art Show Announcement: Who Wants a... HIGH FIVE!!

2010-11-12T17:33:00.000-08:00

Hello, I have been getting ready for this art exhibition for the last couple of months, and now it is done getting ready. The HIGH FIVE!! show features work by Renée French, Kozyndan, Alice Pine, and also me, Chris Stangl.

HIGH FIVE!! opens on Saturday, November 13, 2010 at Gallery Meltdown, the finest (only) gallery located in the back of L.A.'s finest (not only, but finest) comics retailer, Meltdown Comics, 7522 Sunset Blvd. As seen above, the opening reception begins at 6 P.M., and the show is up for perusal at your leisure through November 27. If you are interested, but unable to attend on account of being "busy," "lame," or "on a different continent," digital catalogues are available via computerized electronic-mail (contact gallery director at: hopeyglass (at) earthlink.net).

I am exhibiting four brand new prints in a series of portraits of important film directors. These relief block prints are all hand-printed by the artist, in small, limited editions; they will be available for purchase via the gallery, starting November 13. Here is a better look at the famous director of The Manxman, Sir Alfred J. Hitchcock (two-color reduction print, edition of 15).

Backwards, Forwards, Now to Then: Happy Birthday, Winona!

2010-10-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

A birthday well-wish on this ought-to-be-a-national-holiday, to Ms. Winona Ryder. Her twenty-four years of on-screen work, beginning in 1986, have all been interesting (and yes, a subject of this journal's unbending fascination), and in her thirty-ninth year on Earth, she enters a particularly promising phase in career terms, participating in Black Swan for Darren Aronofsky (ergh/yay) and a Frankenweenie remake (wha?/yay) for Tim Burton. Ryder's natural place in the cinemasphere is in contentious, off-beam projects by filmmakers strong of vision and colorful of personality. Because it is nice for work one enjoys to be seen and discussed, let us hope these films catch on in ways that recent endeavors like A Scanner Darkly, The Ten, Sex and Death 101 and The Informers did not. But if not, no sweat, for Ryder's performances enrich those very entertaining curiosities, and relative stardom is not a measure of artistic success. At any rate, the actress appeared rested, healthy and glowing at recent premieres for Swan, and that is happy news enough.

The image above comes courtesy of 1999's Girl, Interrupted, of course, some three minutes into the picture as Susanna Kaysen (Ryder) undergoes psychiatric interview with Dr. Crumble (an unctuous Kurtwood Smith, doing a caring, patronizing variant on his timeless signature sentiment "Bitches, leave!") following an Incident involving a bottle of asprin and a bottle of vodka. Susanna is decked out in natty nautical stripes, a sort of cartoon convict uniform that echoes her looming imprisonment at Claymoore Hospital. Nerves bundled, she tries to maintain the keel of the conversation, but Ryder shakes her voice on selected notes and makes clear how hard it is to stay above water. She's playing it on Levels, attempting to plainly explain her mental experience while aware of how she's being interpreted and the consequences of each word, and thus takes it slow, pained and honest. She spends most of the scene looking through the doctor, probably appearing spaced out, but really spaced too far in.

Explain what happened? Moving into close up, Ryder doesn't exhale her smoke, but lets it puff out of her mouth and nose as she speaks, an uncontrollable cloud that pops out in embarrassed spurts that she cannot contain: "Explain to a doctor that the laws of physics can be suspended? That what goes up may not come down? Explain that time can move backwards and forwards and now to then and back again and you can't control it?"

And here a dog barks, further distracting Susanna, as the doctor asks "Why can't you control it?" Ryder winces hard trying to make sense of the question, determine if she's reading too much into it, and to be heard over an internal din that is bothering only her, asks a little too loud: "What?"

Dr. C: "Why can't you control time?"

And to that, a patented Winona Ryder look: aghast, disgusted, and terrified at once. How about it, lady, why can't you control time? — not a bad sentiment for birthday times, that. A beat, one blink, and she breaks the brief eye contact.

The scene also has probably the best possible answer to the age-old question "Are you stoned?" (that is: blank stare). As the only sort of birthday present I am qualified to offer, I celebrate this Winona Ryder screen moment, and add it to the collection of randomized masthead images at the top of this page. So to The Exploding Kinetoscope's favorite actress, happy birthday again, and hey, don't worry too much about that controlling time thing.

Hey Look, It's Ringo and Frankie!

2010-10-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

Under consideration, this universally beloved shot from Stagecoach, the one that moves from this:
... to this:

First things first and sliding immediately off topic, there are plenty of images capturing this moment all over the Internet and I might have swiped them for illustration. Unless making a point with incongruous stolen pictures, I try to create my own screencaps whenever possible, because, like Quaker Oatmeal and recycling beer bottles, it's the Right Thing to Do, and because there's a certain art to screencapping, one for which I sorta like to think I have a flair. David Bordwell would surely have a lecture for me about the inadequacies of the practice, but it's all I got. In this case, an even worse sin, I can't make frame enlargements and can't take frame grabs of Blu-ray discs. For all Blu-ray's myriad pleasures (including the fun of typing the gimmicky e-less "Blu"), the inability to screencap is an ever-increasing hindrance to the important work we do here. Sadly, the only other option is to, uh, take pictures of my TV screen, which is a hideous solution, and photography is an art for which I do not have a flair.

Anywhich, back to the shot in question. It is the first shot of John Wayne as the Ringo Kid, a gasping, audacious hero shot that stops the stagecoach in its tracks, dollying up on Ringo as he twirls his rifle, yells "HOLD IT!" and has a sudden, barely perceptible change of expression. Wayne has struck an elegant pose even though he's toting a rifle in one hand and a saddle in the other, the strain of this ridiculous feat betrayed not by his casual posture but the sweat streaks on his face that aren't apparent until the shot moves in. Basically it is an unforgettable, electric-buzzed moment and every element is perfect, even those that are not. Specifically, 1) the movement is just slightly faster than expected or is comfortable, and 2) this famously causes the shot to pop out of focus as it repositions into 3) the woah-just-slightly-too-close close up of Ringo. There is a vast amount Stuff Going On in this shot which does not last more than three seconds, from the aureola crowning Ringo to its importance in Wayne's career, but I don't think it is fully unpackable because part of its power is of disruption; the thrill is in the way it feels subtly off, arhythmic and just-out-of-control.

That said, it is cemented into the film and a piece of a scene, and some of this impact comes from 1) the whinnying horses immediately before the shot. The eye-catching movement in the preceding shot is the horses pulling back in reaction, effect being that the dolly-in is pushing off of the backward momentum of the horses.

2) a goofy two-shot reaction of Curley (George Bancroft) and Buck (Andy Devine), immediately after, where Devine chirps "Hey look, it's Ringo!" in that inimitable Andy Devine way. On the front end, the picture-story is that the stagecoach crosses a ford in the river and comes toward camera, the effect being that the coach is pulling up on Ringo and drives straight into a huge view of his face.

So it's all in reaction and juxtaposition, and I'm going to say that Andy Devine is quite responsible for making this one of cinema's greatest entrances.

Speaking of which, we all have our favorites, and my shortlist would include Peter Cushing in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed!, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest — elaborate setpieces climaxing with thrilling reveals and introductions that we won't go into right now, but top Orson Welles in The Third Man — keep some popular favorites (Karloff in Frankenstein) and dump others (Darth Vader in that movie about Darth Vader). This scene in Stagecoach, however, always puts me in mind of another great movie entrance, Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (yes, yes, he is visible as another character earlier in the film).

The reason the entrances of the cowboy and the transvestite alien reverberate off one another — though come to think of it both are fugitives from justice, questing for freedom and non-judgmental of the sexuality of others — is simply a jarring push in from this:

... to this:

But of course, while prepping these screencaps, it became clear that the moments are very different. The effect as a memorable, keyed-up introduction to a character is similar but John Ford does it with effortless 3-second economy, while RHPS director Jim Sharman is simply up to something else. Ringo appears during a lull when we aren't really expecting it, while Frank-N-Furter's entrance is a mini-climax to which a whole sequence is building. The first close up of Frank is, indeed, a privileged shot, but it is punctuation on a scene.

Frank's entrance in Picture Show has been moved from its place in the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show. In plot terms, this merely swaps the positions of the numbers "Sweet Transvestite" (first in original stage productions) and "The Time Warp" (first in the film). The reasons, one supposes, are that "Time Warp" is the sort of "hit single" of the musical, a live showstopper to which the play builds up, in a loose-knit plot that is an excuse for the songs. The film is more dramatically developed, and thanks to lessons learned from the stage show, has a better grip on pace and payoff. Once Tim Curry appears, the beast is basically loosed and one wants to get on up to the lab and see what's on the slab, rather than dally downstairs for, as Brad Majors puts it, "more folk dancing."

The scene bridging the two numbers then is not just an introduction. By repositioning "Time Warp", there is a gap left where there used to be an exchange concerning the whereabouts of delivery boy Eddie. In place of this missing exposition, the film adds: nothing. That is, the film's transition adds no additional narrative information, but creates a musical bridge, uniting a pair of songs. Frank descends to the first floor in an elevator behind Brad and Janet, and this little scene is scored with sound effects (and percussion) that build off the discordant piano banging at the end of "Time Warp" and ramp up to the fanfare at the top of "Sweet Transvestite". The instruments in play are a base tone laid down by the lowering elevator, a chorus of the chortling Transylvanians, the rhythm section stomp of Frank's platform heel, and the mounting chant of Brad and Janet's dialogue in metered back-and-forth ("I'm COLD, I'm WET and I'm just plain SCARED!"). This audio piece terminates with Janet screaming as the zoom into Frank's close up comes to rest.

The above awkward screencap of Brad and Janet in front of the elevator comes straight off the top of the shot in question, after Janet has already noticed the figure in the cage. The sort of platonic ideal of the composition is in a pair of earlier shots, like so:

Besides the aural component, the gag being staged in this scene is that the square couple is backing out of the ballroom, away from the Transylvanian weirdoes but into Frank in the foyer. So there are cutaways for reactions (Transylvanians rising from the floor as they see the elevator descending, Transylvanians assembling around red carpet, Janet goggling at Frank's back) and clarifying information (two close ups of the stomping shoe), all building anticipation for the reveal of Frank.

The screenplay's newly invented bit of business is well-motivated, with Brad dismissing Janet's rising hysteria by condescending and trying to minimize her concerns (Frank will later diagnose Brad: "Such a perfect specimen of manhood. So dominant."), and the rousing of the "Time Warp" spent Transylvanians providing reason for the couple to keep their eyes on the ballroom. Immediately after the money shot, before the gate slides open and "Sweet Transvestite" proper begins, Curry's close up is disrupted by a reaction shot of Janet, who becomes over-stimulated and, in running gag, faints. This puts a button on the scene, separates the elevator shoe-stomp as its own mini-song (audience participators traditionally stomp and clap along), and Janet's response cues the audience on how to react to Frank-N-Furter — that is, somewhere between Beatlemania-style abandon and what-the-fuck gaping. In short, Susan Sarandon provides the Andy Devine effect here.

Scare-stounding DVD Covers!

2010-10-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

Gee, it's been awhile since... YOU SAW SOME ASTOUNDING DVD COVERS.
No, really guys, I'm, like, working on stuff!
In the meantime, kick back with a bowl of Brach's Autumn Mix and look at these Astounding Ones of October. Or should I say... SKELETON-TOBER?!

Astounding DVD Covers! #4: March of the Pumpkins! All-Horror Astounders!

You know what the best part of the Ghost Host cover is. I know what it is. We don't need to say it out loud.

Okay, Ringmaster. You win. You are the creepingest person on a DVD cover. Also, I feel compelled to notify authorities of your DVD.

Freleng Studies — The Deadly Numbers of SATAN'S WAITIN'

2010-09-30T02:55:00.000-07:00

"Satan's Waitin'" (1954) is a cartoon about death and is structured a bit like a classic Ten Little, Er, Indians style pick 'em off, of, if you prefer, a Bay of Blood style slasher picture. The twist is that we're watching the same victim bite it in colorful ways over and over, as Sylvester runs through his proverbial nine lives in seven minutes. The slasher in this case is the Devil in the form of a crimson bulldog, which is a metaphor for Sylvester's worst, obsessive, Tweety-hunting impulses, natch.

So here we have a couple of Freleng's own fixations on display, i.e. the neuroses and psychological torture of Sylvester (Tweety is barely in the cartoon except to motive the story and provide an ass joke when his tail feathers are yanked) and a certain philosophical morbidity that crept into his '50s shorts that is perhaps noirish or Hitchcockian or about the comic possibilities of Order and Chaos pressing and pulling at the weak soul of the cartoon animal Everyman. Whatever the conclusion I note a vague sense of postwar malaise in Freleng's work of this era, if not one totally distinct from other brands of malaise. This isn't a truism across the board, but when the quality is there, it is there in force, and not to be found with his peers. There is a terrible geometric order to "Satan's Waitin", to graphical wit, the pussycat and the canary on precarious chase across a sky carved by intersecting phone lines:

The most restrained, buttoned-down of Warner's major cartoon directors, Freleng's world is not populated with the flailing, screaming humanity of Bob Clampett's, his characters do not explore the complex, broad swath of human personality as Chuck Jones', his stories do not balloon out to the extreme proportions of Tex Avery's. And etc., not to tromp over a well-worn favorite stomping field of animation pundits; point is, speaking of formal issues of character animation, Freleng's cartoons don't squash as much, don't stretch as much, they don't antic as big, don't do takes that distort anatomical forms into graphical abstractions. Now all of this is of variable Trueness, depending on the staff for a particular short and who was actually animating a particular sequence, but certainly Freleng did not ask his animators to hit bigger, crazier poses, infuse acting with more personality and presence, or pick up the pace for the joy of speed. And on one hand, that is not as funny, and perhaps Freleng is puzzlingly lacking that cartoonist's gene that loves a funny drawing. On a different, more contemplative hand, stillness, stiffness, intellectual detachment and a cool demeanor can, indeed, provide a much different sort of comedy, on the Charles Schulz, Chris Ware sort of end of the comic spectrum.

Why was Freleng obsessed with Sylvester? It's not Tweety that the director is interested in — he defanged Clampett's sadistic-widdle-kid character and in design, function and performance drained the bird of a distinct personality rooted in human traits. Certainly every other director artist drew a funnier Sylvester, where Freleng pulled back on the character's previous stupidity and thuggishness. In place of the older Sylveter, here is one sweat-drenched and helpless in the face of his own compulsion.

Anyway, "Satan's Waitin'" is a study of graphic contrasts, spatial orientation, shapes and visual rhymes, and above, the hunter and prey locked in cycle scramble up a fire escape. The only reason to head to the rooftops in a cartoon like this is because someone is going down, and as it happens, Sylvester's journey up the fire escape ends in a pit of flame.

The abyss awaits! Hover. Hold. Beat. One of you is getting out of this alive.

So there's a cause/effect elegance to the cartoon's up/down see-sawing, doubled here as Sylvester's tail is his last erect extremity, then the tail flops down, then his soul springs up out of his butt in its place. A pair of brick and sidewalk square grids reinforce the visual order, but chaotic cracks in the cement emerge from under the cat's corpse, hinting at something else.

There is no tally provided of Sylvester's sins. He has simply Been a Bad Pussycat, and must take the red escalator every time, no matter, as we will eventually see, how he tries or what he does. The vagaries of moral rectitude flit around the fringes of "Satan's Waitin'", and the cat's only crime seems to be the attempted fulfillment of his natural predatory instinct, not that acting on instinct ever got anyone on the golden escalator. Though plenty of cartoons want to get in gags with wings and halos, I would naturally assume that all Looney Tunes characters are going to Hell.

Background painting people, do glance at the complimentary red and green buildings splitting the space between escalators.

Yawning chasm, fanged rock formations, spiraling conveyer belt to damnation.

Judgement!

The story here is that Sylvester's numbered lives must tarry in Hell's waiting room until all nine of their fellows have arrived. The structure is a countdown as the cat loses lives during the course of one long chase scene, with pit stops for exposition.

Life #2 arrives after a tangle with a steamroller. Again, scrambling life-drives are pinned and pressed into two dimensions and squeezed straight through the ceiling of Hell.

"Scare Your Girl," indeed. There are a handful of fine signage gags in this cartoon, another Freleng trademark, if not an exclusive one. Dig also this abandoned urban space, in the middle of an unpopulated city stands an empty carnival about to become a literal carnival of souls, lending an amplified quietude and desolation. There are production, budgetary and technical reasons for the minimal cast and lack of extras in animation, of course, and changing tastes in art and design have a lot to do with the modernist look of '50s and '60s WB cartoons. On the latter front, however, Freleng and Jones were usually ahead of the curve.

More nice muted primaries here; look how this says "carnival" and is all red, green and yellow but isn't just an out-of-tube eyeball cacophony. There's also a clue in the middle to a motif of Sylvester's being plagued by demons, and a big yellow paw that will pay off in a few scenes.

Nice dynamic staging. Noir-y, Third Many shadows that also popped up on Sylvester's first descent to Hell. There is a lot of movement along the z-axis in this cartoon.

Satan is everywhere.

Point demonstrated, I hope, about Freleng's comic reaction takes. Even the moment where Sylvester is so terrified that he dies is not much bigger than this.

Sylvester loses lives four through seven in rapid order on this shooting range. Though it is not different from any other cartoon shooting range, because of its place in this farce of certain destruction, this one seems a particularly apt, fatalistic metaphor: lined up, on track, ready to be blown apart. Also, more signage, more vague, useless moral instruction: "Shoot straight." Yes, good luck with that.

So, the way Freleng stages the gag here is to cut back to Satan's waiting room, as we hear gunfire, victory bells, and bang bang bang bang, dead cats are deposited in a row. There was probably a moment early in the film when we expected nine cat mangling vignettes. Confounding expectation, Freleng burns off four of Sylvester's lives in seconds.

Here begins the speediest sequence in the cartoon, and speaking of movement from back to fore, this roller coaster train slowly climbs the distant hill before rocketing downward — which is rather how we began this story. Then it charges at the viewer's damn face, which is a good deal more alarming than Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, and then zooms over the screen. What's happening here, and in another directly-overhead shot of the train charging down a drop that I haven't pictured, is a) complicated staging with difficult angles, beautifully animated with mathematical precision...

b) more open space netted by intersecting lines, c) the visual rhyme and gag setup that is the reason the escalator to Hell was designed as a long, red, twisty track.

Point A above kind of makes up for the subdued character animation and mild gags. No doubt any other unit was up to the task of pulling off the scene, and if, say, it had been a Clampett, the scene would likely have the visceral impact of riding a roller coaster. Jones would have blessed it with his — how do put it? — peculiarly sardonic sense of physics, and both others would have done it all faster. But faster, gutsier and (ahem, funnier) bloodier is not the point, the point is the go-nowhere trip along a one-way track.

Relish the spare, allegorical quality of this particular pose, and the clever, don't-blink touch of marking the car #9. Because it's the little things.

I note for anyone without art inclinations that drawing this angle totally sucks.

This is the important part of this shot. Were this a Jones Roadrunner cartoon, the timing, the drawing, the sound effect would make the moment of impact the joke, maybe with a microbeat of I-fucked-up Coyote recognition before the carnage. Here it is the belated behavioral instruction that is impossible to follow, and doom rushing at one's head.

Payoff. Probably the funniest cut in the cartoon is between the coaster massacre and the above match, Life #8 blank-eyed, silent, no reason to fight this anymore.

Meanwhile, topside, Sylv takes the "Time Enough at Last" approach and seals himself up in a bank vault. Not trusting his unrestrainable urges, and trying to minimize the universe's chaotic x-factor input, he goes on defense. We'll note yet again that this designy vault is all grids, quads and circles, and fair enough, Everything is Shapes, but '50s design only emphasizes this fact (and my roundabout point is that the cartoon is kind of in dialog with that idea).

Naturally, Satan being Everywhere, two bungling robbers try to dynamite open the vault and kill everyone in the process. And on that front:

-The last manifestation of "Satan's Waitin'"'s thematic/visual theme of agents of explosive chaos and confining order sort of luring then breeching one another. Also crime does not pay, but neither does not doing crimes.
-A mild send-up of atomic age bomb shelter mentality.
-Another cut-to-result staging of a violence gag. Freleng doesn't show the explosive, the explosion or the corpses, just:

Everything goes to Hell anyway.

Weekly Deprogramming Schedule — #3

2010-09-22T00:26:00.000-07:00

Masters of Horror: John McNaughton — "Haeckel's Tale" (2006, John McNaughton)

Originally earmarked for direction by Roger Corman, passed at some point to George Romero, the MoH first season finale ended up in the hands of John McNaughton. While I greatly enjoy the maniacal Wild Things, no disrespect intended, but McNaughton is not Corman or Romero. When "Haeckel's Tale" was broadcast it had been twenty years since McNaughton directed his only nominal horror film, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. This is my sneaky way of suggesting that some of the "Masters" of Horror are not masters, or maybe not even specialists in horror, which may account for the general lack of mastery on display. This is my kind way of saying that this promising premise resulted in a generally junky program.

Point in case, "Haeckel's Tale" is based on Clive Barker material, which ought to prime an audience for hideous transgressive visions, bizarre plot inventions or at least some weird gross-out shit. What transpires is an absurdly padded out buildup to a laugh-riot punchline that maybe is/probably isn't supposed to be funny, which is that a 19th century country lady has a sex orgy with zombies. Everything is wrong here: go-nowhere reference to historical figure Ernst Haeckel, telegraphed twists, pointless sidetracks exploring God's Domain vs. science vs. Frankensteins vs. necromancy, circular conversations repeated over and over, and poor Jon Polito wearing a long gray wig. The self-negating frame story, for instance, sees an old lady telling a cautionary tale about why not to raise the dead, when the twist reveals that she gets it on with revenants all the time. In one of those special moments where nails are struck squarely on the head, a zombie dog pops out of a trunk and wriggles around in sub-par special effect fashion but our skeptical protagonist scoffs "it's some kind of crude puppetry!"

On a more important note, "Haeckel's Tale" was scored by avant-garde music heroes The Residents, whose work was then rejected and replaced. This previously unreleased material is currently available for a pittance at the group's newly mounted download store. As the Rez say, Buy or Die!

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Masters of Horror: Tobe Hooper — "The Damned Thing" (2006, Tobe Hooper)

What this amiable mess seems to have borrowed from Ambrose Bierce is a title and the image of a man killed by an invisible creature. Basically the deal here is that an unseen horror of some kind stalks Cloverdale, Texas, but is mainly after poor Sheriff Reddle, whose family was wiped out in an attack 25 years prior. "The Damned Thing" tries out and swipes a dozen different ideas, and may be amusing or effective in the moment but the whole thing just doesn't track. It's got a small community devolving into a mob of crazies (like The Crazies, sure, or "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"), a small town in denial until its sins come to roost in supernatural form (like Stephen King in It, 'Salem's Lot, Cujo, etc.-forever mode), nuclear family meltdown as psycho dads hunt the wife and kids (an extended Shining swipe), a horror passed through generations of the same family (like, er, Jaws the Revenge, maybe), and a sub-Smog Monster not-quite-environmental-parable about tampering with the mysteries of nature (SPOILER it's a giant oil monster that wants to eat the Reddle family because they built an oil rig). Sometimes the monster is invisible, sometimes not, sometimes its presence drives people to aggressive violence, sometimes not, and the story sorta makes sense but really does not.

As an addition to the Hooper legacy "The Damned Thing" is obviously minor work, less ambitious but less botched than "Dance of the Dead", and not as much fun as The Mangler. The episode's most effective sequence in terms of plain, wincing horror and oh-goddamn! surprise is of a man attacking himself in the face with a claw hammer. Clearly this Tobe Hooper has a talent for horror about the misuse of hand-held woodworking tools, and that skill ought to be channelled into something of more consequence than "The Damned Thing".

* * * * *
The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987, Rod Amateau)

Every time one sits through this treasure trove of appalling images, something new will bother the edges of the mind and haunt the viewer well into slumber. Perhaps it will be gutter punk fashionista Tangerine spreading her pantyhose'd crotch in order to entice 14-year-old Dodger into allowing her to exploit his home-sewn garments (don't worry, she's fifteen, herself... or maybe do worry). Perhaps it will be the never-again-referenced title sequence that may or may not imply the Garbage Pail Kids are extraterrestrial beings. If you haven't seen The GPK Movie — or, rather, Experienced it —, it is the dingiest-looking, most unpleasant children's movie ever made and is about how the a bunch of toddling dwarfs in walleyed rubber baby masks puke, snot, fart and piss all over and help a little boy try to score with a gang leader's girlfriend by using their magical sewing skills.

Like I said, something new every time. This go-round it was a little girl sneering "Go suck a rope!" at the men from the State Home for the Ugly who have caught her in a butterfly net. The image of the pummeled Dodger doused with raw sewage by bullies is enhanced when one remembers he is covered with open wounds. A newly discovered puzzling detail: a painting from fellow fucked-up family classic Troll (1986) is prominently featured on the stairs to the antique shop basement where the GPKs are held captive. The overlapping staff between productions does not seem to include the art directors or property masters, but the films do share the same special effects crew and Charles Band's favorite thespian, Mr. Phil Fondacaro. Perhaps the Troll painting resides in the Fondacaro archives, or maybe like the Garbage Pail Kids driving off into the night on ATVs, some mysteries are like the wind.

Credit also to the lady of the house for noticing that among the cluttered set dressing a nude Cabbage Patch doll hanging by its neck in a rusty bird cage.

* * * * *
The Informers (2009, Gregor Jordan)

The Informers is set:
a) in Los Angeles, 1983.
b) in a world of people who can afford to sit around watching MTV on Eames furniture in their underwear, with some sidetracks to a fanciful vision of how not-rich people live (selling abducted children to rich people).
c) deep inside Bret Easton Ellis' stalled-out brain.
d) who cares? It's over. It doesn't matter. Like... it doesn't matter.

The fourth screen adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis is apparently the writer's least favorite — he's even gotten soft on Less Than Zero — because it "doesn't work," as he told Movieline and more helpfully lodged the complaint that "it’s not supposed to be played like an Australian soap opera" and that his own vision for the project was funnier. Not being versed in Australian soap opera, I can only say that the tone is perfectly appropriate for an Ellis adaptation, that being suitably zoned out portraits of wastoids punctuated by hysterical potboiler speeches, fights and meltdowns, and shrill moralizing throughout. To be fair, Ellis can sometimes be actually funny — my favorite moments are Patrick Bateman hallucinating a television interview with a Cheerio in American Psycho, and a possessed Furby emerging from a dog's butt in the bonkers Lunar Park. He usually settles for Warholian jokes funnier to talk about than to experience, such as endless lists of characters' designer consumables, celebrity names, sex acts and drugs.

All four Ellis adaptations offer valid, committed takes on the material, all emphasize and capture different aspects, but all are sincerely Ellis-ian. The Informers specifically nails Ellis' cold, sheeny prose, affectless characters, leaden, portentous symbolism in every prop, backdrop and air-sucking line of choked dialogue. Gregor Jordan's film is mostly shot in that too-bright gray of overcast L.A. and his chilly liquid camera moves like it's been resting in an ice bath. Lots of shots of people staring off and thinking/not thinking.

The Informers retains the book's interconnected short story structure but cuts between story threads, in the tapestry narrative tradition of Nashville and Short Cuts, rather than the anthology tradition of Fantasia or Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. Also unlike any of those movies, the hoard of characters are all creepy disaffected idiots and nothing particularly happens in any of their stories. For example the rock singer for the titular band, The Informers, sits around a hotel, ingests substances, cuts his hand, sexes underage groupies, doesn't sign a movie deal, makes a phone call and finally punches a groupie. While magnolia is built of a dozen small stories packed with incident, intricate overlap and convergence, and Crash (2004) has a certain thematic unity and its interwoven sprawl is part of its purpose, The Informers is glued together with persistent drone, its characters largely linked because everyone is passing around the HIV virus, and its theme that everyone is an amoral shitbag trapped in stasis. I'm gonna go ahead and say I think it is surprising and questionable that a gay man who lived through the era would write a satire about the early '80s in which one of the blackly comic jokes is that the whole cast is spreading AIDS to each other, then complain that he wanted the movie to be more "light-hearted." Or it would be surprising if the same guy hadn't written a book with a severed head on a boner, then complained that critics missed the satire.

The magnetic cast gives all kinds of alienated, glassy-eyed and ridiculous, and there are some killer scenes built around very fun performances. Mickey Rourke abducts a child in broad daylight by scooping the boy up and chucking him in a van, and it looks like documentary footage of what Mickey Rourke happened to be doing on his way to set. Billy Bob Thornton as a sociopathic movie studio head corners his mistress, Winona Ryder, in the Spago ladies room. She keeps trying to break up with him and he just smiles calmly and doesn't listen, and she bugs her eyes out, sputters and just can't fuckin' believe his gall. Another diverting Ryder scene sees the nicotine-fitting news anchor harassed by a sniggering rock band during lunch at Canter's deli; it's a sharp and specific confrontation as privileged L.A. square culture and snotty hipsterdom look each other up and down. Stealing the whole mess is Chris Isaak, looking very much like Kurt Russell and playing a terminally dorky dad trying to bond with his bratty, resentful son on a Hawaiian vacation. Again, nothing really happens in any of these stories and that's sort of the point, so in a way these amusing performances are working against the spirit of the material.

If you have read the novel, be warned that all the vampire parts have been removed which makes the film less silly and entertaining. If you have not read the novel, unlike the movie, it has vampires in it, which makes the book stupider but less vague about why kidnapping victims are being sold to Hollywood creepos. Jury is out on whether it is weirder to adapt a vampire book and cut out the vampires, or that vampires could be inserted or removed from a story with no appreciable damage.

* * * * *
Project Runway — "A Rough Day on the Runway" (Season 8, Episode 8; Lifetime)

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was many things, but "fashion risk taker" is not one of them. A style icon, sure, but in my humble, wearing Dior is not risky. And that's fine, because fashion inspirations from Audrey Hepburn to Tim Gunn may be timeless and memorable without any particular edge. But contestants, advisors and judges alike seem confused by exactly what Jackie's style consisted of, what it meant, and the idea of this week's nebulously-worded challenge. See, T-Gunn stands in front of a big collage of Jackie snapshots and tells the kids that he is "honored" to be in the presence of... 40 year old photographs? Yes. Then explains that Jackie is to be their muse for this challenge.

There are lots of ways to interpret this, but I would have/did assume it meant something like "draw inspiration from and update a classic Jackie look of your choice." The designers largely seem to think this means "what would Jackie wear in 2010?" But, er, no, because she'd be 81, people. She would have Casanova make her clothes. The real point of all this is that they want the designers to make American sportswear with some kind — any kind — of '60s inspiration. To reinforce this, January Jones of the Adventures of the Mad Men teleprogramme is in attendance as a charisma-free Stylish Actress guest judge. See, slight retro-styling and mid-century references are the rage right now due partly to that very AMC show, which is why there are posters about it in Banana Republic windows as we speak. ANYWAY, nobody picks up the hints except Mondo and Michael Drummond. In the end one is de vinna uf dis challench and one is gone, daddy, gone.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that Mondo Guerra knows his 20th Century fashion miscellanea rather well, as when asked why he is wearing eyeliner, suspenders with tiny shorts and knee socks he says his look was "inspired by The Cotton Club." Which, 1) holy shit, dude, and 2) oh, right on. Point is, young master World War's major reference points already seem to be '80s Trapper Keeper covers and '60s sportswear fashion, and he knows how Jackie Kennedy dressed. When the judges coo that he was somehow able maintain his own design identity in the winning ensemble, well, uh, no doy. He'd seen Jackie wear bold colored suits and houndstooth (presidential campaign, check the books!), and seen her casual and in striped tees post-Camelot, split the difference and tossed on Jackie O sunglasses like a goddamn maraschino cherry.

Every other designer just didn't listen or didn't get it or sucks, maybe? No hats, no bold, bright colors, no A-frame dresses, no long gloves, no immaculate styling. And maybe fine, there's not time to make a Kennedy-style suit, but there's time to properly sew an Onassis-style yachting outfit.

Gretchen is not called out on obsessively making the same camel colored Jedi robes that sank her team in the group challenge, but there are more important matters to attend to. Namely, Andy South not only doesn't listen to the "Jackie Kennedy Onassis" part but ignores the "sportswear" tip and disregards "properly tailoring any and every piece." Popular sport-making aside, these are not proper harem pants, but... eh, close enough that with the sorry little vest, Mr. South's model appeared to be costumed as Toad from Super Mario Bros. The judges laugh openly at this clothing which has been custom made for colorful derisive metaphor, but the most tragical, sad thing is that Andy was essentially dressing his model like himself.

Now, whatever else one wants to say about Michael Drummond's lazy-ass bag top and skirt consisting of nothing but pleats, it ought to be pointed out that he made a perfect little wool jacket that was the very picture of vintage Jackie Kennedy. He is made to be Out, possibly because of all the deep V neck T-shirt wearers, his are the deepest and, therefore, grossest. Goodbye, Mike D. You are still my second favorite Beastie Boy!

What Plan Will You Follow Now, Cyclops?

2010-09-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Goal: Locate a suitable planet for colonization, colonize it, enjoy life in the new colony, and so on.

The Plan: 1. Have a bitchin' flying saucer that also goes underwater.

2. Use it to visit hundreds of worlds apparently at random, until stumbling upon Earth. Observe, evaluate for habitability and resistance capabilities of native population, etc.

3. Periodically recharge magnetic power at the North Pole, because the saucer runs on magnet power.

Supplementary Tasks: Kidnap Earth people as specimens to take back to home planet. Their body structures will be studied for potentially useful adaptations to immediately copy via genetic engineering, like evolutionary CliffsNotes.

Contingency Plan: Blow up any and every submarine that tries to get near the North Pole. If anyone manages to invade the ship, melt them with rays. Failing rays, chop them in half with automatic doors. [NOTE FOR FUTURE EXPEDITIONS: Do not allow an Earth man with a flare gun anywhere near the saucer captain's massive, undefended gelatinous eyeball. Though it can regenerate, this hurts like a bastard.]

Is the Plan Sound?: Not too shabby, but not particularly colorful. A big speech about how specimens are being collected seems at direct odds with the primary observed behavior of destroying everything in the saucer's path.

Weekly Deprogramming Schedule — #2

2010-09-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

Issues I Have with Netflix Streaming — have reached a point where I can't waste any more time with it until the 'flix gets its shit together. Netflix Streaming and I are at an impasse. Total time wasted this week trying to get Masters of Horror — "Haeckel's Tale" to load was in excess of an hour, and it never worked without the sound being 20 seconds out of synch. Add to that the degraded picture quality of most of the SD streams, the inexplicable pan and scan versions of titles readily available in widescreen, mid-stream pauses for exciting buffering action, and sorry Netflix Streamo, you seem cool but I think we need to take a break for awhile.

Masters of Horror: Takashi Miike — "Imprint" (2006, Takashi Miike)
Having seen all of season one but "Haeckel's Tale" (SEE ABOVE!!), I can safely call Masters of Horror a missed opportunity, a botched job, or a project that just got Mick Garris'ed. See, Mick Garris is a well-meaning fellow with much enthusiasm, and a prosaic filmmaker with no taste whatsoever. Perhaps capsule reviews would be in order, but it boils down to Joe Dante knocking it out of the park in terms of memorable telehorror — "Homecoming" may eventually be mentioned in the same breath as "The Eye of the Beholder" and "Architects of Fear" — and Argento doing a sassy and rude E.C. snapper, Carpenter and Stuart Gordon trying hard on work that is interesting but incomplete. This was never a contest, but it's tough to resist: Takashi Miike emerges from season one looking like the only true Master of Horror on the god-damned devil-blasted planet, and Showtime never even aired his episode.

It looks like Miike was able to pull in some extra funding, or perhaps he's just accustomed to shooting DTV features, because "Imprint" is more cinematic in production value, scale and technique than its MoH brothers. Basically, Miike's is the only episode that is a little movie. So in this round, an American wanderer in 19th century Japan searches for his lost love Komomo, and tracks her to an island brothel, where a disfigured and slightly mad prostitute tells him he's arrived just too late to prevent the death of the One That Got Away. The rather scatterbrained auteur has a lot to work with here — a lying unreliable narrator, doomed love, prolonged, inventive torture sequences, SFX monsters, violation of half a dozen basic human taboos — and infuses it with a visual poetry and patience that is a lot more despairing and nihilistic than the Hot Topic punk posturing of Tobe Hooper's "Dance of the Dead" or chortling splatter-and-chatter philosophising of Larry Cohen's "Pick Me Up". "Imprint" is more unified in theme, narrative, and technique than many of Miike's feature films. Beginning with a midnight ferry to the island "not in the human world," a mythic unreality pervades. Miike works both ends of the spectrum, from languid picturesque landscapes of rural Japan that delve the unfathomably ancient, to audacious modern touches like anime-inflected color-coded blue and red hair. "Imprint" opens in waters infested with the bobbing corpse of a pregnant woman, and over and over key images are of dead children swept off in streams. Like any good, sweaty and primal folk tale, this one is writ in body fluids, hellfire, the unfair rules of the fairy folk, and the across-the-board corruption of the soul. It is set not in the human world, perhaps, but perilously deep in the infected human heart.

As the child-molesting priest tells the demon child straight out of water ghost kaidan, as they gaze upon an elaborate red and gold scroll of Naraka, the Buddhist hell: "Pretty scary, huh?"

* * * * *
Machete (2010, Robert Rodriguez) — This is likely the best movie that will be made by expanding a parody movie trailer into an actual feature. Here's the problem. A (if not "the") propelling joke of the Grindhouse trailers is that exploitation trailers show all the best/most expensive effects, explosions, and money shots, but these rad moments often seem like they aren't from the same movie. And somehow Rodriguez figured out a small-scale actioner that yes, involves all those fun trailer moments and sorta makes sense, plus a few bad taste gore and phone-in-vagina gags that would've caused the trailer to go Red Band. So mission accomplished? Or original idea violated? Call it an enjoyable wash. All in all Machete has a cooler, more authentically paced slow burn, while Planet Terror is sillier, more frantic, funnier and crazier. Which of these Grindhouse babies is better depends on your sugar intake that day. Danny Trejo is everyone's favorite person, we all like looking at him chopping people and growling and street fighting while eating a taco. Plus I'm a sucker for this mode of messy, hot-blooded exploitation fueled by angry-but-joking leftist politics.

That last is an element of classic era John Carpenter to which Rodriguez gave a gentle elbow in the ribs in Planet Terror, but here warps into a sort of Tex-Mex Billy Jack variant, including many wonderful confused messages and crossed signals. What I mean is that this is a sick joke party held on the hard-to-pinpoint border between celebration of Latino culture and stereotype, and gets its kicks from seeing various kinds of racists and buttholes get decapitated, gutted, electrocuted and so forth. Because while the Machete movie is not a political tract, and we're not gonna get into immigration reform debates over a movie about a hit man with a machete, if you live in a place enriched by a large population of Mexican people, you probably care about some of them and can't stomach the racist undertones — let alone overtones — of most public discourse regarding the U.S.'s southern border. It is totally immature and extremely cathartic to see a cast of badass Latino actors murder Texas vigilantes.

Back to that first point, about expanding fake trailers. I hate criticizing Rodriguez for committing to these kinds of loony of-course-that-won't-work ideas and seeing them through to the end. In idle thoughts, one might wish that somebody would make a movie out of the sort of free-associative nonsense logic of the improvised stories told by children (The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl), or do panel-for-panel comics recreations, trying to mimic even the art style (Sin City), or see if a theater-worthy product can be scraped together on $7000 (well, you know), or use actually use home computers to test the supposed anyone-can-play promise of DIY digital effects filmmaking (Spy Kids and everything after). Lots of people think of these things but nobody actually bothers to go out and do it. Very, very rarely are the results satisfactory, but I can't help but be glad someone gave it a shot. So making a for-reals movie out of a spoofy trailer turns out to be more or less possible and a good time that slightly decreases the impact of the original, but makes Danny Trejo a heroic lead. Pretty good trade off, and points for even trying.

* * * * *
Cars (2006, John Lasseter, Joe Ranft) — Probably the last candidate I needed to screen for my Favorites of '06, and... Oh look, they made the best Pixar movie that isn't a Toy Story and then hid it under gross-looking anthropomorphic cars. I can't even say how long it took me to get past the squishy, smirky cars themselves, but it was something like four years, ten minutes and a lot of beer. There is still much repellant 'tude in the animation acting here — many cocked eyebrows, half-lidded eyes and smiling out of the corners of mouths — but not as much as other companies dish out. And the godawful designs of the little cars make them even less naturally expressive than most CG cartoons. But here's a thing. I don't want to dwell for eternity on what I think is very, stupidly wrong about how everyone in the entire business of making computer cartoons is using their technology. That is John Kricfalusi's job, and he does it better than anyone.

So Why I Heart Cars — It's one thing to make a children's movie that jerks tears out of adults by touching universal human experiences like having toys you liked and grew out of (Toy Movie 1 2 3 4 5, the death of loved ones (Balloon Movie), fear of losing a child (Finding the Fish), the horror of environmental destruction (Finding WALL-E), etc. That "thing" is called a "sucker punch." It is another, wholly more difficult and surprising thing to make a family picture that is an expensive, detailed mash note to Route 66 culture that also acknowledges the time and place are, if not dead and gone, leaving and dying. Completely romantic and nostalgic in the best possible ways, if you've ever driven Route 66 motivated by romance and nostalgia, Cars ought to stick in your throat like bugs in the grill of a Chevy Impala.

Also, thanks Cars, for reviving cartoon ethnic humor of the good-natured and happy variety (i.e. jokes about what kinds of cars people drive). And this is my only entertainment encounter with Larry the Cable Guy, and based on this, he is hilarious.

* * * * *
Project Runway — "What's Mine is Yours" (Season 8, Episode 7; Lifetime)

I'll just say it: unless they are particularly smart and funny, "stylish actresses" make terrible guest judges. So Selma Blair (Episode 1) gets a pass, while it is (unfair? frustrating?) scary that someone should be eliminated at the hand of Kristen Bell (Episode This One). The Stylish Actress hasn't necessarily got any fashion sense beyond what her stylist advises. On the other hand, Producer Input generally saves the day. That is why we have Producer Input.

Fear not, anyway, for we're in the portion of the contest that is about stripping the one-joke characters, the flagrantly maladroit weirdoes, and the sort of sweet designers who will fall out in favor of those blackhearted villains who fuel Workroom Drama. Also maddening are those challenges where the judging criteria are, er, vague at best. Such as here! So the designers go on a cruise around New York Harbor, where they stuff as much free food in their pockets as possible, and Michael Kors gives them sunglasses, which is pretty cool if you really like Ray-Bans. Also he tells them to design resort wear, which can mean anything, swimwear to evening gown, so long as it doesn't involve winter coats.

Such broad latitude would make things too easy, so Mr. Gunn bombs the Workroom with the Velvet Sack of Doom and Casanova gives good Frankenbite about being terrified of a cloth pouch. The twister is that pairs will be selected to execute one another's designs, a challenge designed to exploit the universal disgust at Michael Costello's supposedly shoddy sewing skills. Highlights include extended appearances by Swatch the dog at Mood, Valerie being harshly criticized for using cadet blue fabric even though it's the same color as Heidi's wadded-up-looking skirt at the top of the episode, and a possible reality show world record for use of the aggravating idiom about busses and those thrown under them.

We all learn something about teamwork, I guess, as Duckie-from-Pretty-in-Pink-I-mean-Mondo learns that Michael C. is an okay dude and yes, can sew, if you are patient with him and then they are friends, yay. Meanwhile Ivy browbeats Michael Drummond to the point that he can't get her garment done, then she boasts about how she confirms stereotypes about angry Korean women. ANYWAY! Mondo designs a striped bikini and windbreaker that could be sold at Target or boutiques alike, right this second (if, uh, it were summer), but is not necessarily High Fashion. Ivy is the clear worst, designing two billowy white bags with holes cut in them, but gets to stay because she is unbelievably mean. Andy South is the clear best with a polished swimsuit and flowy wrap thinger, but April wins because... she is easy to root for? Some kind of goth baby doll underwear thing that I'm not sure where you are supposed to wear at the resort? Creative use of excess asymmetrical straps? The balls to say that her inspiration was if you woke up on a tropical island that was also an insane asylum?

Casanova gets Out on account of designing old lady clothes, even though in my understanding, that is who goes to resorts. He leaves gracefully (miming suicide), and with the memorable farewell "Sad? Zero. Disappointed? One quart."

No killer moments from the Gretch, but she retains Best Dressed designer honors for various Annie Hall and candle store employee outfits.

What Plan Will You Follow Now, Davanna?

2010-09-09T01:34:00.000-07:00

The Goal: Locate a viable source of blood for the dying race of Davannans, whose bodies are ravaged by radiation bombardment from ongoing nuclear war.

The Plan: Several phases outlined in detail, but it boils down to:
1. Dispatch a representative from Davanna to Earth. Disguise him as a rich weirdo called Paul Johnson, and cover his milky white eyes with sunglasses 24/7. Employ juvenile delinquent manservant for menial tasks like operation of Earth vehicles and guarding the corpse-burning oven.

2. Force Earth doctors to provide blood transfusions without explaining why. Employ live-in nurse for daily home transfusions.

2a. If Earthling blood proves a compatible replacement, enslave the planet and steal all the human blood. Skip to #3.

2b. If Mr. Johnson dies, destroy the planet.

3. When the blood is used up, destroy the planet.

Supplementary Tasks: Procure extra blood samples from winos and vacuum cleaner salesman Dick Miller by means of a blood-sucking briefcase. Probably these are for study, but store them in the fridge. Also, accidentally smush a hapless Asian-American fellow to death in the interstellar matter transporter while attempting to mail him home as a "sub-human specimen."

Contingency Plan: Mind-control, telepathic linking ability and eye-contact-activated ocular death ray should cover most emergency situations. Should worst come to worst, dispatch flying bat-octopus-umbrella minion that can eat peoples' heads. [NOTE: When not in use, Vampire Umbrella Bat should be wadded up to look like a celery and stored in cellophane.]

Is the Plan Sound?: The blood procuring scam is okay for a last ditch effort. "Species facing extinction" angle adds sympathy, but that is mooted by overt racism and intent to destroy the planet without motivation.

This is the way the world ends.

Weekly Deprogramming Schedule — #1

2010-09-05T03:02:00.000-07:00

If you, Esteemed Reader, hadn't noticed, or were too polite to say anything, ExKin does not update with any regularity, speed or quality assurance. Marty McKee recently put a finer point on it, and simply said I need to update more. Between ten-hour work days, perfectionism, laziness, and general bad attitude, I am unable to post even short ends on the schedules of your more popular, successful, attractive blogs. Something like a long, researchy essay takes weeks to compose. So in a scheme to allow me to post at least once a week, the Weekly Deprogramming Schedule will collect brief notes on what I've been watching, listening to, playing with, clicking on, and eating every week, and will appear sometime during the weekend until I inevitably begin not doing that. Like so:

* * * * *
Psycho II (1983, Richard Franklin) Franklin's improbably entertaining sequel has no earthly reason to exist, so sets about playing merry parlor games with memories of Psycho. What we really have here is an A Class meta-thriller, a second chapter that bobs and weaves around the first. Notorious sequences from Psycho that the world has memorized shot for shot are spliced and diced into different contexts. The player-viewer most conversant in Psycho wins. So if you get a kick out of female lead Meg Tilly successfully completing her shower and finding the bathroom peephole, that's one point. Five points if you catch the duplicated shots of Norman standing in Arbogast's shoes as he enters his private trap homestead for the first time in two decades, another five as he pops into Mother's room and finds it fully furnished with the same montage witnessed by Vera Miles in 1960, plus one ominous, out of place slip of paper. Ten points for the player who remembers the big diner up the road, just outside of Fairvale, but a full 50 if you remember that it's ten miles away and unlikely that Norman could walk home before the gathering storm clouds break.

Psycho II can't possibly be as funny or perverse as its parent, but is adequately twisty where it cannot be as twisted. It goes without saying that Franklin's no Hitchcock (fine), and he's no Brian De Palma for that matter, but gets a lot of mileage out of assemblage. The few wholly original murder setpieces lack a certain luster, but there's at least one applause-worthy sequence that builds suspense out of a kitchen knife, a head of lettuce, a deep fryer and a restaurant order ticket carousel.

* * * * *
Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock) - Top ten territory, obviously. I wanted to spot check some details from Psycho II, and sure enough, Psycho never specifies when Norman killed his mother and her lover. I find it unlikely that a 12-year-old stole a corpse before the funeral ("A weighted coffin was buried," effuses hilarious Simon Oakland in that scene that only I love). The other motivation was to revisit the initial non-anamorphic Universal DVD (I never upgraded) before the touted 50th anniversary Blu-ray comes to the States. And hot creepers, it is just not lovely to watch this in a tiny window on a big TV, so October 19 can't arrive fast enough.

* * * * *
Project Runway — "You Can Totally Wear That Again" (Season 8, Episode 6; Lifetime)

The greatest competition reality show in the world continues to justify its extended running time, even amidst grumbling that the talent pool dried up around, oh, say season 1. To that, phooey. This is about watching artists at work, critics criticizing, and the process and sweat behind glamour's gauzy veil. Episode 5 was an impossible act to follow, with its impeccable story of hubris-drunk failure and underdog triumph, unselfconscious meltdown from willowy villainess Gretchen Jones and a holy-shit-did-that-just-happen scolding from the unflappable Mr. Gunn.

Anyway, this week: Puerto-Rican-Teddy-bear-Ron-Pearlman comic relief Casanova is barely in effect but truncates his trademark "exzacktly!" to "exzackt, exzact!" Deeply unpleasant and deeply orange Michael Kors continues to not change his clothes, and thinks he's being witty and snide but grossly misuses the word "goiter." Meanwhile, the designers try to repurpose grody bridesmaid's dresses. So basically a lot of silk is being hacked up and disguised.

Winner, as always, is selected for max drama from the small pool of contestants actually competing for Fashion Week (usually about six of them). Here it's Big Mike Costello, picked so that Ivy and the Gretch will make hilarious faces of disgust, and because his non-pro model happened to be a fox, and because the middle part of his dress was cool. Maybe he can't sew, but he can drape.

Who knows what poor manchild Mondo will have to do to win a challenge, but thankfully the judges find something appealing about his Pee-Wee's Playhouse vibe. This week he almost takes the win with a Star Fleet uniform in rockabilly color combo and nobody bats an eye. Peach wears a sweater with pictures of little sunglasses on it and gets eliminated for designing a multi-tiered halter top & tube skirt problem with a window valance around the middle. Both these designers' styles hinge on retro elements, but unfortunately for Peach, '70s kitchen decor is not currently In.

* * * * *
Masters of Horror: Larry Cohen — "Pick Me Up" (2006, Larry Cohen)

Consumer warning — Because Netflix is equally cool and lame, every Masters of Horror episode is currently available for instant streaming, but panned-n'-scanned. Why? Do not know. Because I am equally cool and lame, I'm watching Masters of Horror in order and am up to this one.

Two dueling cartoon psychopaths murder everyone from a bus that broke down on a rural mountain highway. The Michael Moriarty one is a trucker who smokes, eats junk food, pontificates on the nature of hunters and prey, and is called Wheeler. The other one is a hitchhiker who doesn't smoke, makes fun of Wheeler's philosophizing, and is called Walker. So you see, they're like opposing viewpoints, but not, because they're both just psycho killers. Then they get in a war over who gets to murder feisty survivor Fairuza Balk. There is some interesting hooey floating around about Those Who Walk and Those Who Ride, lots of throwaway dialogue about if we're Going in Circles or have a Destination, and some evocative natural fog and shower steam that visually implies a moist-aired netherworld. That gathering thematic dew seems to say that whatever our mode of transit, we all just wander this plane until we reach the same terminus, but rather than coalescing into a slasher-riddled I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, the whole thing is lost in a haze. Par for MoH course, which is to say not particularly masterful.

* * * * *
Ghostbusters (1984 NES game, Activision) — Four middling minigames are smashed together in one notoriously poor package, rushed into production and kinda-sorta walking through the plot of the movie. Ghostbusters is classically Nintendo Hard and every section has to be mastered trial and error style. The first half is (1) a crappy but easy driving game in which the biggest concern is conserving fuel. Successfully arrive at haunted buildings (well, haunted sidewalks) and you're treated to the (2) ghostbusting portion: a few seconds hoping Boo Berry marshmallows happen to randomly drift into your traps. The second half is the real beast, as the three white 'Busters (sorry Winston, but as Chi Chi told Consuela, "the black one? He didn't do nothing!") climb 23 flights of stairs. Every footstep is a tap of the A button. If you're not cheating with a turbo button, prepare for your impending carpal tunnel surgery. Finally, a just-okay top down shooter boss fight with Gozer. The prehistoric bitch and her terror dogs aren't such a chore — about on par with a tough Zelda boss — but the stress is in knowing that if you blow it, you are starting all over.

This is all capped by one of video game history's greatest shock endings. You can find the finale on YouTube, of course, but there's no comparison to putting in the hours required to master this demon, jamming the A button 3,000 times, and having the ending jam two middle fingers into your eye sockets. Conglaturations, indeed.

Are You a Righteous Man, Agent Mulder?

2010-09-02T02:56:00.000-07:00

In the lifelong project of staring too hard at arbitrary scenes from The X-Files, here's an installment of a thing. The episode "Signs and Wonders" (7ABX09) was likely built around a moment exploiting the universal observation that staple removers look like little snake heads. So mid-episode there is a creepy-comic match cut to that effect, later undone in the same scene as the office supply transforms into a dodgy CGI serpent. The topic de MOTW jour is the X-Files favorite of Weird Religious Cults, specifically Pentecostal snake handling. If you are of a mindset that finds it offensive to refer to such rituals as cult activity, I gently steer you away from "Signs and Wonders".

The snake handling element, of course, also provides the thrum of primal fear underlying all good X-Files, and not a few lesser X-Files. Namely it gives an excuse to have a bunch of snakes all over the damn place, including a showstopper in which a squirmy knot of rattlers issues forth from a pregnant girl's uterus. Enough people are reflexively afraid of snakes that they often top lists of common phobias, but I confess that I must belong to the target audience for Richard Avedon's Nastassja Kinski poster, because the Serpentes don't ick me out at all.

Right then, to the heart of the matter. The episode is a battle for souls between The Church of God with Signs and Wonders (the snake handlers), run by Rev. Enoch O'Connor, and the Blessing Community Church, tended by Rev. Samuel Mackey (denomination not specified, but non-snake-handling). A fine springboard for Topicals and Discussions, because, as always, when an X-File is opened on religion, trouble comes running. In what I note as a sequence of some Excellence in Network Snake-Thriller Television, the ideological and worship practices of the two churches are compared and contrasted as the clergymen each give their congregations a load of Revelation 3:16. "Signs and Wonders" is, indeed, a little more nuanced than snake handlers vs. no snakes.

We join O'Connor mid-preach, and yes, there are snakes, and yes, speaking in tongues, hollering and flailing. An elegant pan right, and a cut concealed by an out-of-focus bald head in the foreground aaaand... we join Mackey at in a Bible study discussion group. O'Connor's congregation is being preached at, whipped up to a fine froth, made "hot," in O'Connor's terms. Mackey sits in a chair, in a circle with his congregation, and works with them on a textual and historical analysis of the passage. Here's what these fellows have to tell you:

O'Connor: Revelations [sic] 3, the sixteenth verse. "Tis better to be hot or cold than lukewarm." God says if you're lukewarm, He will vomit you outta his mouth! Yes, did you hear what I said? God hates the lukewarm!

Mackey: "So, because you are lukewarm I am about to spit you out of my mouth." Now, that could sound pretty harsh, couldn't it? I mean, depending on how one reads it. But if we put this verse in a historical context I think we'll see [and here the dialogue fades to the sonic background] that John was specifically addressing the problems of the Church at Laodicea.

Mackey reads straight from his Bible, which sounds like a close-enough-for-FOX edit of NIV/NRSV language (he drops the appositive "neither hot nor cold"). O'Connor is holding an open book and points to the page, but is orating from memory and improvising. To be up-front about this, I know little about the scriptural interpretations and religious philosophy of real life snake handlers. My understanding is that these folks would probably be King James Version devotees, and there the key word in the passage is "spew" (well "spue"). Since I only keep an NRSV and KJV in the house, I'll trust to the reliable ol' Online Parallel Bible, which assures me that lots of weirdo translations have Christ threatening to vomit. I'm unable to locate any translation that formulates the passage in the quoted manner, as instruction rather than explanation. In an interesting detail, O'Connor's book is open to a page about a third of the way in. Revelation, being the twist ending, is usually at the back of the Good Book. Among the possibilities are that O'Connor is performing, and the book is a prop more than a prompt, or that he is using some volume of eschatological literature that happens to have Revelation in the first third. This esoterica is not the point of the sequence. The point is in the style of the lectures and the language, key words still being vomit vs. spit, hot vs. lukewarm. O'Connor is preaching judgment and wrath. Both men are engaged in the act of interpretation. Though the word sets fundamentalist teeth on edge, to engage any text is to interpret it. Everyone being good postmodernists around here, I trust the concept goes down easy. Mackey's interpretation begins from a place that acknowledges human reluctance and fear, tries to assuage doubt, and aid his congregation in accepting the message. To ease into the confrontational passage he begins outlining the "historical context" of the statement to the Laodiceans (which it is). O'Connor's interpretation is that the passage is a challenge to contemporary Christians of any era (which it also is) and a blow not to be softened. True to their own slightly revised takes on the verse, Mackey explains, O'Connor instructs.

All this sets an audience up to side with Mackey, who gives community to the lost, speaks and practices non-judgement, and to mistrust O'Connor, all pop-eyes and spittle (and snakes!). The stinger, of course, is that it turns out Rev. Mackey is the Devil.

After that revelation, the parallel church services are even more interesting. Consider Mr. Mulder's late-game description of the Devil as "some kindly man that tells you what you want to hear." One of the preachers in the town of Blessing is decidedly hot, spewing barf and brimstone, while the other is easing into a lukewarm bath. But uh-oh, is "Signs and Wonders" really taking a conservative Christian point of view?

Well, yes, no and maybe.

Figuring The X-Files's internal logic as regards theological matters is thorny, and evaluating the show's attitude toward the same is even harder. We've got several Troubles here. The X-Files sends the Agents chasing after weirdness of all conceivable stripe: folktales, urban legends, creature feature monsters, Fortean weather phenomena, and, yes, any number of world religious traditions, some extinct, many very much alive. Because it is a sf/horror/fantasy story, it tends to confirm the reality of every supernatural event, talent, entity, dimension. I regurgitate the premise of the program only to reinforce that within the rules of the 1013 'Verse, not only are there confirmed space aliens and leech-men, but a half-dozen warring species of space aliens, and a few breeds of leech-men. Various episodes confirm not only that X-Files World has a God, but several entire cultures' pantheons, and the Gods and adversaries of multiple, distinct Christian denominations. Point being, it is difficult to reconcile, say, "Kaddish" with "Revelations" with "Miracle Man", to pick three early explicitly Judeo-Christian deity themed episodes.

To which I say whew!, though I hardly wish to get into sorting out all that here. Possibilities for reconciliation of data:

(1) (boring!) The X-Files is a flawed text, built piecemeal episode by episode. I have mentioned this before, but the show has a respect for continuity only when it is necessary for the current story, and otherwise jettisons information as fast as it accumulates. By way of example, "Signs and Wonders" may be a Snake of the Week episode, but two episodes ago, in "Orison", Scully shot a man (possible demon and long-time Scully adversary Donnie Pfaster) to death, lied about the circumstances, and Mulder aided in covering up the transgression. At the time, this seems to shake Scully to her foundations. Next episode she's emotionally unscathed and investigating a wacky magician bank heist. Likewise, it means that no one ever sat down and charted the X-Files Index of Deities or discussed what episodes that confirm fringe Christian theology — snake handling, for example — "mean" vis-à-vis the Navajo spirituality or personifications of Death in other episodes. This does not have to undermine any critical analysis, but it might be kept in mind while forming a reading. Rather than work on supposition, we have to stick to what is on screen.

(2) The X-Files is radically pantheistic. Perhaps not as careful at that task as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Neil Gaiman or Marvel comics, though, so I prefer explanation...

(3) The X-Files is radically agnostic. Individual episode seem to verify many belief systems, but once the rhetorical force of a given story has passed, the possibility is left open for other interpretations. e.g.— Scully may encounter a "Seraph" (actually a Cherub) in "All Souls", but all we can certify later is that... something happened. Scully thought it was an angel, and the episode seems to confirm, but certainly Something Happened.

That example brings us around to the heart of the matter, the Agents. The X-Files does so love to allow characters to discuss and monologue at length on life's meatiest topics — Faith, Truth, Society, Purpose and Et Cetera. Always pitched in grandiose Carter-ese, such dialogues are generally inconclusive, full of circular arguments, bullheaded perspectives and vagueness. The writing staff has a knack for characters with strong points of view talking past one another. The gold standard for this type of thing is Cigarette Smoking Man's conversation with Jeremiah Smith in "Talitha Cumi", an interrogation of the alien resistance fighter that reverses onto the captor. Anyhow, the soul under judgement in "Signs and Wonders" is Fox Mulder's.

For all the weight put to bear on the faith of Dana Scully, we actually know very little about her specific beliefs. She is theoretically a frequently-lapsed Catholic, and while investigating O'Connor's church, claims not to understand such extremism. But her private faith is of a fair weather variety, easily shaken when anything traumatic happens, and usually renewed by witnessing miracles and divine intervention — the sort of thing in which O'Connor specializes. Scully's spiritual flapability is a major topic from "Beyond the Sea" in the first season through I Want to Believe. She ought to understand the power of O'Connor's brand of religion, but does not. Mulder, however, gets it, and explains: "Clear-cut right and wrong, black and white, no shades of gray. You know, in a society where hard and fast rules are harder and harder to come by, I think some people would appreciate that. [...][S]omebody offering you all the answers could be a very powerful thing." That looks a little condescending in print, but there is none in Duchovny's delivery (though when trying to demystify the snake handling aspect, Mulder compares it to belief in transubstantiation, clearly to get Scully's goat). Mulder has a strong background in psychology, after all. This argument is the dark flip side to that slogan associated with Mulder's fringe science mania: I Want to Believe, indeed.

However foggy Scully's spiritual beliefs, we have some basic information. She believes in a God fairly aligned with Catholic theology and doctrine. Compared to that, we've got nothing on Mr. Mulder. Mulder's attitude toward organized religion varies from derisive to respectful, depending on the issue, and his personal relationship with the gods is an X factor. Most of the time it seems that Mulder is a foil to Scully's faith, either stubbornly agnostic or a wavering atheist, and mistrusts organized religion. So, well... what's up with that? I mean, doesn't this guy believe in everything, including skunk apes and vampires?

On the writer's room level, at the foundation of these characters, down where drama is hammered together, the concept goes that Mulder is the Believer, Scully the Skeptic. After some shading, this plays out in practice as something closer to: Mulder is obsessed and operates on intuition, and Scully is cautious and tries to uphold the scientific ideal. Up at street level, where characters walk around and breathe, these two aren't simple opposites, but compliment one another — he keeps her open-minded, she keeps him honest —, and have much in common — depleted personal lives, and mutual respect and eventual love, for starters. That Scully is a scientist and a Catholic is not a contradiction, but the kind of interesting tension that makes real people tick. Mulder believes in virtually everything supernatural except God for similar reasons. His ambivalence toward monotheism is partly because it might limit the scope of his other beliefs and provide explanations he finds too pat, but more importantly he rejects organized religion because a major part of his self-identity narrative is a romantic vision of the outcast crusader. His social circle consists of Scully, the Lone Gunmen, and a porn collection. An outcast in the FBI community, he integrates his bad reputation into his persona and first introduces himself as "The FBI's Least Wanted." Even UFO nuts have clubs and conventions, and Mulder may be an important figure to MUFON members, but he doesn't socialize with them. A loner to a fault, Mulder is as determinedly nonconformist as a G-man who wears a suit and tie every day can be. Lone wolves don't attend church picnics, end of story.

The idea of snake handling in "Signs and Wonders" and real life is, roughly, to demonstrate that the handler does not fear the Devil, and that God won't allow the destruction of the righteous by a rattlesnake. This test is involuntarily put to Agents Mulder and Scully. Mulder's test is administered by Mackey, who asks the million dollar question "are you a righteous man, Agent Mulder?" When faced with a host of phantasmagorial snakes, Mulder ends up fang-bitten, swollen and hospitalized. Now, maybe Mulder fails to pass muster because his moral rectitude is frequently questionable. Maybe because as pertains to the episode he's spent this investigation being fooled by Satan's subtle tongue and persecuting the true warrior of God (to be fair, O'Connor does break some serious laws, such as shoving Scully's face into a box of snakes). Maybe because, by New Testament Rules of Righteousness, he hasn't accepted Jesus. Maybe the test means nothing, since Mackey is the Devil. Maybe there weren't even any snakes in the room. But all we can say for sure is that Something Happened.

Nobody ever mentions it, and it happens in a flash, but when O'Connor holds Scully's head against the reptile cage, the snake does not lunge.

Satoshi Kon's Eternal Dream Parade

2010-08-25T03:54:00.000-07:00

Satoshi Kon
1963 — 2010
When artists pass from this world, it speaks to the power of their work and demonstrates that they have infiltrated hearts and minds, if the audience hearing that sorrowful news reflexively filters it through the mental lens of that art. Which is to say:

This scene from Kon's OVA Perfect Blue (1998) was the first thought to flash through my head upon hearing of the August 24th death of the animator, director, and cartoonist. This is partly because of the literal content of the scene, in which tarnished pop star turned terrorized actress Mima has just discovered the demise of her entire aquarium of fish. But it is also because this has always struck me as a well-animated crying scene, and crying is notoriously difficult to animate. And all this because among Kon's four features as director, his first, Perfect Blue, remains my favorite. At first pass the unconventional psychothriller meditation on female identity and celebrity culture seemed joltingly Argento-esque, pro-critics tended to invoke Hitchcock and... don't forget we're talking about cartoons here. As soon as Millennium Actress (2001) appeared it was clear that what Perfect Blue is simply a Satoshi Kon film.

If there is one painful, unpronounceable word above, it is "four." Four features, one TV series, assorted animation tasks. Kon's death at 46 (nearly the same age as Whisper of the Heart director Yoshifumi Kondō) leaves us with a frustratingly small body of work. Frustrating not because it is inadequate, but because it is remarkable enough that one cannot help but want more. Every one of Kon's films is an increasingly ambitious technical and storytelling challenge. Satoshi Kon made films expansive of imagination and personal of preoccupation, pushed the boundaries of his medium and tried to break, dodge, and stand out from certain clichés, prejudices and lazy habits of the Japanese animation industry. It is that ambition to blow an audience's mind with sights they have not seen and will not forget that separates Kon's work, and, one hopes, will be the inspirational legacy of his films.

As I always feel lacking during such moments, I direct interested persons to this appreciation and 2003 interview by Brian Camp. The discussion mainly concerns Tokyo Godfathers, but manages to cover several key and under-examined aspects of Kon's films, such as the realer-than-truth documentary qualities possible in animation, and his dedication to visual depiction of Japanese characters that look Japanese.

Further reading at Midnight Eye, a pair of interviews regarding Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress and Paprika.

And so, still feeling lacking, I must allow the artist final say in these matters:

Never Knows Best

2010-08-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

The elusive slogan glows in the dark blue night of the first episode of FLCL.

What does it mean? Or what does it mean to Mamimi who has presumably scrawled "NEVER KNOWS BEST" along the length of her cigarette, and burns the message down as she takes it into her chest? Does Never Knows Best even mean anything, in a series where the title itself is invented nonsense and the cast openly questions its definition?

Never Knows Best isn't even a proper sentence, is it?

It is instead, beyond meaning, perfect as the crowning contribution to the perfect moment. That moment is about being a disaffected 17-year-old standing in the middle of a bridge in the middle of the night, stalled halfway between noplace and notgoinganywhere. She pines for her never-seen, long gone baseball-playing ex, tries to replace the absent boyfriend with his 12-year-old brother, stray cats and strange new robot gods, and in this moment is just utterly convinced that she is lost and broken. The tobacco embers connect with and forecast Mamimi's eventual pyromania, and eventually, eventually maybe (maybe) she'll get over all this and be okay.

But in this moment there is one perfect, cryptic, bleak-sounding, moody adolescent thing to write on a rumpled cigarette.

It burns all the way down,
fire to air to water,
and
never knows best.

Ah! Sweet mystery of life!

Weak End Box Orifice Report

2010-08-17T02:46:00.000-07:00

Hey, did you guys know that Netflix lets you stream most of Guy Maddin's movies over your WiiStation 3? Also that Criterion put out Blu-rays of Lola Montès and Black Narcissus that, if one is craving some manner of "eye candy" (yuck), are like melting a Kit-Kat on your sclera? We don't have to see the 3D cats or the non-spectacle of C. Nolan's tiny imagination or be sad that the 3D cats stole more money from children's parents than the much nicer movie about Ramona and Beezus, which if you do not trust my opinion about, here are the more trustworthy Dennis Cozzalio's comments on the same.

Anywhat, this weekend I was drinking some fine Cold Ones and glancing at the boffo boxface reports and saw that Internet people are still very concerned about what these mean for the jobs of people who they don't know. e.g.— I actually read this one fellow, who I am too civilized to link to, saying that these particular Scott the Pilgrim money figures "prove that geek culture is not mainstream culture." I didn't look at this movie yet, but isn't it like a bunch of Mario Bros. jokes, and the dude is playing a rock guitar on the poster? It's not like the movie's about a Texas Instruments graphing calculator that learns to read David Brin novels. Why does this Prove anything to anyone about anything? Also e.g.— that M.E. Winstead is a b.o. poison, first sinking Grindhouse, now Scottish Pilgrim! If it weren't for this crazy dame, people would flock to see tributes to the exploitation movies of the '70s and adaptations of Canadian romance comics! Now, I certainly made up the second e.g., but you know the sort of discussions of which I speak.

I'll tell you what the puzzling thing is: the crap performance of Step Up 3D. Because seeing awesome dancing on a big screen is something that everyone in the world who is not a creep likes to see. Maybe someone in marketing put a wrong demographic in their blanket release of a multiplier.

Basically what I'm saying is, people, all that matters is what makes you happy. And lists about money never make anyone happy.

Let Them Talk! Let Them Scream!: THE PRIME TIME

2010-08-07T03:46:00.000-07:00

Were one to construct a Sarris-on-42nd-Street style pantheon of exploitation filmmakers, it would be topped by those who created masterworks that live in museums and are protected by government agencies as national treasures, and laypeople who don't have the Sinister Cinema catalog delivered aren't aware that the movies ever played in proper fleapits and ozoners. So that's Romero, Hooper, Carpenter, Ulmer, Argento, Corman, Meyer. There would be a tier below that for geniusy craftsmen that play by the rules but slip in a lot of intentional art agenda, or deliver more goods than necessary, entertain above and beyond the call of duty, generally make something far more special than the poster art. That's your Fulci, Castle, Bartel, Sarno, Jack Hill, Larry Cohen, Rollin, Corbucci. These directors don't so much transcend the ghetto as create its definitive touchstones, exemplary examples. Then there might be Fascinating Weirdoes, and there most of us would list Milligan, Esper, Wishman, Findlays types. Can't live with 'em, can't believe what you're seeing. The bulk of the rest of the sea of candidates would be those with an identifiable style, thematic preoccupations, stable of collaborators — anything, really, that makes the filmmaker distinguishable from the house style of their producer, studio, or any anonymous journeyman or semi-competent. So: Adamson, Steckler, Mattei, Cimber, Castellari, Mikels, Bert I. Gordon, etc. forever.

Feel free to shuffle/add/remove names around until satisfied/bored/confused. This will surely become a popular party game on the order of bobbing for apples and Seven Minutes in Heaven, and lead to fistfights about what counts as an exploitation film, what nationalities should be included, and where to place Jess Franco. Now in such an imagined framework, certain of filmmakers, producers, and individual works are going to be singled out as Important Innovators. Beyond that acknowledgement the subject may or may not be examined or appreciated any further as film art. No guarantees. This happens in the above-ground world of major studio product as well, so for consideration: The Jazz Singer is something like a household name, and there is not a BFI Film Classics volume about The Jazz Singer.

Point being: Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Occasionally in this scum-gliz twilight realm, one bumps into a filmmaker who self identifies as an artist. They are rare among the carny types, jolly, cynical or both. By the accounts of their intrepid biographers, Andy Milligan and Edward Wood, Jr. are among that small number. Though they may have had few illusions about the nature and reputation of their work, these filmmakers at the bottom of the industry caste system, whatever else they may have been, understood that every picture-maker and story-teller is an artist.

Lewis has sometimes joked that his films are obviously well-made because the camera is always in focus.

Lewis' camera, of course, is not always in focus.

The hell?
Because Lewis and frequent producing partner David F. Friedman are world class showbiz raconteurs, and their landmark string of gore movies so pioneering, the films themselves are always overshadowed by their taboo-breaking legacy. The ten horror films account for less than one third of Lewis’ output (37 features), even when taking lost films into account (four known titles, supposedly upwards of dozens of shorts, loops and features). Among his horror pictures, approximately half of the very goriest titles dominate discussion of Lewis’ work. Which leaves us with an intriguing question: what is going on in the rest of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ movies?

The bulk of Lewis films are nudie cuties, a genre at which Friedman excelled. The balance of the filmography is filled out with hillbilly comedies, a biker movie, juvenile delinquent pictures, and oddball children's movies. All of these possess potential peculiar charms, but it is time to go hunting for the authorial stamp that marks them as H.G. Lewis films after the credits have vanished from the screen. Thankfully, all of Lewis' surviving work is available on home video, making it possible to evaluate his filmography beyond outstanding innovations in pulling out women's tongues.

Let’s take it from the top. Herschell Gordon Lewis' film career begins in 1959 with The Prime Time.

"Some kids grow up real slow. Me, I explode!"

Not content to hang around with her peers at Luigi's Italian Stereotype Restaurant, wild child Jean (Jo Ann LeCompte) screams at her mother, kisses Daddy goodbye and heads out into the day-for-night with clean-cut neighbor boy Tony (James Brooks). "Seventeen! I look at least twenty-two and I feel thirty!," kvetches the girl, burning with whattaya-got? rebellion (Friedman later quipped unkindly that "she was twenty-nine, and, on screen, looked forty-nine." To be fair, she's quite pretty and looks twenty-nine). The hot to trot gal is just toying with Tony's emotions for access to his wheels, and demands to borrow his convertible.

Meanwhile, Jean's nasty cop boyfriend Mack McKeen (Frank Roche) and his partner harass a pint-sized beatnik painter/ sex pervert known as "The Beard" (Ray Gronwold), who has been accused of molesting his underage models. Before leaving to make time with his own jailbait love interest, Mack extorts use of The Beard's studio as convenient location for his own romantic rendezvous. Alas, 'tis a date not to be kept. The Beard shows up to inform Jean that Mack has been called away on Police Business. Jean berates the hepcat's manhood, then commands that he paint her in the nude.

Poor Tony is bummed out about Jean's bad behavior, and mopes around Luigi's while his wacky pals spray bottles of Coke on each other. Even a late night underwear swimming party at the quarry can't cheer up Tony. His lovesick good girl friend Gloria tries to console him, but the situation worsens when Jean doesn't show up to return the car. Back at Chez Beard, the artist has gone berserk, tied up Jean, and painted her in a non-explicit pose unrelated to the way she's sitting. The wheels in motion, The Prime Time becomes a three-ring kidnapping drama as Tony and friends play teen detectives, Mack tries to throw the kids off the scent, and The Beard torments the captive Jean.

Two relationship triangles fuel the plot. The first is the questing knight/detective Tony torn between potential girlfriends, as light woman Gloria assists him in locating dark woman Jean. The second is free-spirit Jean turned object of desire and caught in the machinations of corrupt cop Mack and the crazed Beard. These figures of the Establishment and Counterculture respectively are both rotten abusers acting on self-interest, and it is great fun to watch the two creeps bicker.

The Prime of Jean: Sin, Suffer, Never Repent
Furious at the world, impatient at all times, and perpetually spitting venom, Jean is introduced posing in front of a mirror during the opening titles, and plays her first scene before another mirror. Jean is only interested in Jean, cannot see past herself, and sees others only in terms of what they can do for her or as objects of ridicule. Restless and dissatisfied, the self-absorbed girl desires constant movement and stimulation and nothing can scratch that unscratchable itch. Jean's quintessential scene may be as she waits for Mack at The Beard's studio, killing time by pacing incessantly, smoking and fuming. When she learns that her beau cannot keep the date, she is not upset because she cares about Mack, only indignant that she could be stood up, and in favor of the police chief no less! Doesn't the police force know who they're dealing with?

Sadly, the film's most compelling character is waylaid early in the story. Though we're stuck with the hopelessly square Tony for the second half, there are fun interludes with the sweaty Beard and his bitchy captive, and the trail to Jean is peppered with colorful exploitation elements. Tony's wiseass buddy Shorty beats up the owner of The Golden Goose bar where The Beard does live painting. A jumpin' rock combo plays "Teenage Tiger" (lyrics by Lewis, performed by "The Dodos"). A disreputable lady photographer tells an anecdote in flashback, in which Jean meets Mack during a dress-ripping, hair-pulling catfight. Finally, The Beard slips Jean a mickey and is about to stage her suicide and skip town, but blows himself up in a freak accident, slipping on a dropped match in his gas-filled apartment.

Beyond the rock n' roll, beatnik angle and semi-skinny dipping this is all fairly standard JD picture stuff (disregard any of several sources claiming it is any sort of nudie picture, cute or rough), but The Prime Time puts a plot development, trashy idea or weird, entertaining touch in every scene, and thus moves at a zippy pace. It may or may not be implied that The Beard sexually assaults Jean, and the film is a little more sexually charged than its contemporary cousins, but nowhere near as outrageous and seedy as Ed Wood, Jr.'s porn racket exposé The Sinister urge of the following year, or crazy as his girl gang saga, The Violent Years (1956). Whether their morals are faux or no, wherever the finger is ultimately pointed, JD pictures are about the dangers facing a generation desperate to grow up too fast, but woefully ill-equipped to deal with their wild-for-kicks impulses. Some sophisticated entries in the cycle make social tragedies of this theme, as in Rebel Without a Cause and The Blackboard Jungle (both 1955), some, like the above examples from Wood, just gawk in fascination. The Prime Time is of the Wayward Girl subgenus, that is, it particularly focuses on the perils of adolescent female sexuality. Prurient and moralizing as it is, the film does not quite depict outgoing female sexuality as a destructive sin in and of itself, does not name VD, unwanted pregnancy, ruined reputation as pitfalls, nor imply threat sexual activity is a gateway to drugs or violent crime. The danger in The Prime Time is that Jean's wonton behavior makes her bait for a society of wolves, and she is beset by controlling men who would possess and destroy her, and squares who would rescue, cleans and change her. Jean cannot win, for the world cannot abide her as she is, nor she abide the world, and her ending has the fated feel of Lulu and Jack the Ripper's date with destiny at the end of Pandora's Box. Though Friedman recalls the movie having an "up-beat ending," it does not.

Cop vs. Beatnik: The Eternal Struggle
Directorial duties on The Prime Time were handled by Gordon Weisenborn, though the Internet Movie Database and various print sources erroneously credit Lewis as directing "as Gordon Weisenborn" (Lewis himself makes no such claim). Lewis would adopt transparent pseudonyms on future productions and coincidentally has a "Gordon" in common with the director, so it is unsurprising that direction is frequently ascribed to Lewis. The principle account of the making of The Prime Time is in David Friedman's autobiography A Youth in Babylon, which contains at least a few minor gaffes, but certainly establishes that Weisenborn was a real person. Conceding that Weisenborn was "a competent craftsman and a nice enough guy," Friedman pokes fun at Weisenborn's artistic ambition — "he thought he was making a film of great social significance" —, and rhetorically ponders why Lewis recruited Weisenborn instead of directing the picture himself. Friedman does offer the lead that Weisenborn's resumé consisted of work created under the Film Board of Canada. The National Film Board of Canada website lists two Weisenborn shorts in its archive: "When Asia Speaks" (1944, 19 m.) and "Tomorrow's Citizens" (1947, 11 m.), the first of which may be ordered on DVD.

The Academic Film Archive of North America website indicates that in the early 1950s Weisenborn worked frequently with Academy Award nominee John Barnes on projects like "Safety on the Playground", a railroad safety documentary called "Impact" and story films to accompany Dick and Jane reading primers. According to his AFANC autobio, Barnes was from Chicago, though he spent periods living and working in London, Rome and elsewhere. As Lewis was based in Chicago and The Prime Time was eventually shot in the area, it seems likely that Weisenborn had relocated to Illinois sometime after the war. The most intriguing-sounding Weisenborn/Barnes collaboration, "People Along the Mississippi" (1952, 21:39 m), is an educational short made for Encyclopedia Britannica films, and is readily viewable at Archive.org. A sweet and historically interesting parable of racial integration in America, "Mississippi" is more poetic and stylish than the average '50s classroom film. Weisenborn is named as a Chicago filmmaker by the Chicago Film Archives, which houses ten of his prints and an interneg (titles not listed online).

It is likely that Lewis had a strong hand in creative decisions, and Friedman owns up to having shot some pickups of the quarry swimming scene, which are frankly the worst looking, sloppiest section of the film. Comparison between the filmmakers is inevitable, but both Weisenborn and Lewis have their strengths.

This is thorny territory normally bypassed in this journal. Lewis has given enough talks and interviews to establish his preferred position on the topic of his artistry. Plainly, he presents himself as a savvy businessman, sometimes as a jovial, witty huckster, and no more; the stance being that he provides product of ample running time and audiences are sufficiently entertained so as not to request refunds. Point certainly taken, and the rough edges and semi-competence are thus chalked up to indifference and irrelevance. But that lack of attention to technique accumulates into a recognizable, peculiar style, integral to Lewis' appeal, and that is the partial cause and purpose of this exercise.

The Girl, the Bottle, and the Phone
Based on The Prime Time and his available short subjects, Weisenborn has a better grasp of traditional cinematic basics than evinced by his producers in their own directorial work, or at least more interest in and dedication to classic form. He has a strong compositional sense, frames shots and moves the camera to accommodate movement with greater accuracy. The Prime Time is not exactly dripping with style, but Weisenborn sometimes stages action on multiple planes and foregrounds important props a few times. As Jean contemplates answering a ringing phone, it looms in the fore, as do a pair of carnival prize wicker monkeys in her bedroom as Tony reminisces about the missing girl. There is not enough available work to determine what constitutes the Weisenbornian touch, but the tone throughout has a intensity of conviction that Lewis' work does not. That may not be to The Prime Time's benefit as memorable entertainment, but it makes it less weird than many pictures on its family tree.

The Beard: Adam Sorg, Take One
Weisenborn may be a more technically competent director than Lewis — even after thirty feature films — but the fingerprints of the producers are all over The Prime Time anyway. Like John Carpenter, Clint Eastwood, and Charlie Chaplin, Lewis sometimes scores his own work, and here he provides lyrics for the two slightly alien musical numbers. The plot only produces a pair of corpses, but they are created by an elaborate, unusual accident and murder, then posed in interesting tableau. The Beard is the first in Lewis' lineage of obsessed, murderous artists, which will carry through Adam Sorg of Color Me Blood Red (1965) and climax with the unforgettable Montag the Magnificent, The Wizard of Gore (1970). Delinquent behavior, the rock n' roll scene, sexually active teen girls, and the men who would exploit them are topics that Lewis would revisit in various combinations in Scum of the Earth (1963), Sin, Suffer and Repent (1965), The Girl, the Body, and the Pill (1967), Blast-Off Girls (1967), She-Devils on Wheels (1968), Alley Tramp (1968), and Just for the Hell of It (1968).

With all its historic firsts, The Prime Time has another claim to fame as Karen Black's screen debut. Indeed, in the finished product, the future Trilogy of Terror star can be glimpsed dancing at Luigi's and posing for The Beard at The Golden Goose. Friedman relates an anecdote that midway through shooting Black signed a manager and the company was paid $2,500 to destroy the nude footage of her appearance in the swimming scene. A far-fetched tale, perhaps, but the point is clear: Lewis and Friedman found a way to make money off their picture before it was even completed.

Frozen Smoke

2010-08-03T03:28:00.000-07:00

Well lookit that, I've been tagged with the delightful Screencap Images Meme Thing by Things That Don't Suck. This being about images, I'll keep the notes brief.

The ever mutating, frequently ignored rules, for those what don't know:

1. Pick as many pictures as you want, but make them screencaps. These need to be moments that speak to you that perhaps haven't been represented as stills before.

This web-bogglin is dedicated to the practice of using screencaps, rather than posed publicity stills, as illustration, whenever discussing onscreen specifics like composition, set dressing, performance and et ceteras. I learned it from Bordwell and Thompson! [Housekeeping note to self: Seeing the finished product below reminds me that I ought to widen the post column to accomodate bigger images.]

2. Pick a theme, any theme.

Glenn Kenny's entry in this fad required players to guess the connecting theme between frames. As I am not so subtle and none too clever, the theme below is obvious at a glance. You may guess the films if you wish, titles at the bottom.

3. You MUST link to the original gallery at Checking On My Sausages and the gallery at The Dancing Image.

4. Tag five blogs.

Everyone reading this may consider themselves tagged... LAMF!
And now to the screencaps.

"A smoker's a smoker, when the chips are down..."

"... and your chips are down."

The films:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
Night on Earth (Jarmusch, 1991)
Deep Red (Argento, 1975)
Hellboy (Del Toro, 2004)
Cemetery Man (Soavi, 1994)
The Shanghai Gesture (Sternberg, 1941)
The Prime Time (Weisenborn, 1959)
The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999)
"No Smoking" (Kinney, 1951)
The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)
Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990)
The X-Files — Fight the Future (Bowman, 1998)
Twin Peaks — Fire Walk With Me (Lynch, 1992)

Nothing but Sugar and Water! Summer Fun with THE PARENT TRAP

2010-07-19T05:27:00.000-07:00

Every person you meet on the street and the corner sweet shop these days is chittering about how 2010 is The Worst Summer of Movies in History. In cities where they still have print newspapers, this Summer Movie draught grabs headlines over oil spills, economic depressions, cattle market prices, and fake news that is advertisements for new kinds of cell phones. The nation is in a depressive crisis about this threadbare summer movie slate.

This is basically the situation at multiplexes around the country.
Now, personally, I have found the summer a time of slim pickings since approximately the time when I stopped being the target demographic, which was like 20 years ago when I turned 12 years old. I have to assume they make pictures like Fantasia for Kids Who Don't Like Classical Music or Cartoon Mice but Love Nic Cage for 11-year-olds. But it is serious business too, because summer is supposed to be a time of "kicking it" and "breezing out" or whatever the little Sorcerer's Apprentices say these days. We're counting on our summer movies to help with this party that lasts from solstice to equinox. It would be like if the country's whole watermelon crop was attacked by weevils, or Congress outlawed charcoal briquettes. Thanks, Congress/weevils, the spirt of summer is ruined. Usually when people talk about summer movies, they mean movies that are released in the summer — as in our current dire situation with all the sequels and remakes and reimagineerings — and are of a particular expensive, special effecty, action-adventuring type. When we talk about the Great summer movies, that list always starts with Jaws, also responsible, via some sick logic I don't want to get into, for the existence of The A-Team It's a Movie Now and Eclipse Not the Gum or Antonioni but the Teenage Vampires. There are lots of reasons Jaws is great which we all know, such as not showing the shark too much and having a middle-aged New York theatre actor as an action star. But to me Jaws is an all-time great summer movie because it's about a dad, a nerd and a tough sailor all united in common purpose: to stop an asshole shark who wants to ruin summer for everyone! These are characters with a strong motivation and goal with universal appeal.

The point is really that the best kind of summer movie is one that is about summery good times. There are lots of quality (i.e.— idiotic and immoral) no-budget teen sex comedies that play to these themes, such as Pinball Summer (aka Pickup Summer), Surf II, and Computer Beach Party, and if you have a VHS machine and any sort of beer on hand, that is an automatic successful party. But for me no motion picture experience says Summer Fun like Walt Disney's own 1961 teen comedy, The Parent Trap. Not only is it partially a summer camp comedy like GORP and Friday the 13th Part 3D, but it squeezes in an adult romantic farce, a camping comedy, a girl power movie, and a (gentle) satire about the unconventional modern nuclear family. Plus it was originally debuted on June 21, meaning that back in the day, The Parent Trap actually kicked off summer by premiering on Solstice Day!

These girls are here to save summer!

The Parent Trap takes a small amount of critical flack regarding certain issues, and it is usually reasonable, fully earned flack. First, the film is inspired by, enacts and explores some common fantasies and understandable desires of children. One of those is the fantasy of discovering that you have a long-lost twin sibling; that somewhere there is a friend so perfect for you that they basically are you. I doubt many children with siblings around their own age or with actual twins have this daydream. This one is fairly healthy and interesting, and the way it plays out in The Parent Trap is that Sharon McKendrick of Boston (Hayley Mills with her regular English accent) goes to Camp Inch and runs smack into her twin sister, Susan Evers of California (Hayley Mills not particularly doing a different accent). Then they scheme to switch places to meet the respective single parents that they have never known, which is a variation on fantasies of swapping bodies (see under: Freaky Friday, you hamburger!), being a spy (see under: spy movies), sneaking around other peoples' houses (see under: Blue Velvet), and successfully lying to your parents. So those are fairly innocuous, like how Home Alone plays on common fantasies of being home alone, of your family not existing, and of driving a nail through Daniel Stern's foot. Or in E.T., the fantasy of having a little slimy man that sleeps in your closet. Innocent, healthy childhood dreams.

Where The Parent Trap gets dicey is in the Parent Trap itself, as Susan and Sharon plot to destroy their father's engagement to a gold-digging hussy, and force their alienated parents to fall in love. The second common complaint is that the trapped parents must be some kind of inhuman monsters to separate twin sisters and never inform them of the other's existence. And in the film they are sort of made to realize the errors of their ways, but we're always supposed to like them. In fact, the last act of the movie intertwines the teens' hijinks with the middle-aged adults' romantic comedy-drama. One of the girls announces that "we think what you and Daddy did to us children is lousy!," but no other character suggests that they are possibly the cruelest parents outside of Precious.

Now I find it automatically interesting that Disney made a wacky family comedy examining the changing social attitudes toward divorce. That it takes the form of this transparent, highly varnished wish-fulfillment for children of divorce that is just-so-wrong and just-so-right is the source of The Parent Trap's power and fascination. And I would love for a child psychologist and a historical sociologist to write a paper on these topics, but they are not the reasons The Parent Trap is a Great Summer Movie.

It is my recommendation that if you are hankering for some sunshiny June 21-style happiness, you can do no better than The Parent Trap. If you need more persuasion, or things to watch for next time you see it, here are ten reasons that I love The Parent Trap, from a potential list of hundreds!

1. The Parable Trap

A third major complaint is more generally applied to the Disney live-action comedies of the era, and is that the these pictures which are supposed to appeal to adults and children in equal measure simply make every character into an equally idiotic, soppy buffoon. Again, this is not totally off-base, if we are talking about The Ugly Dachshund or The Cat from Outer Space. Sometimes, as in the case of The Parent Trap, I do think it is part of the film's project. Writer-director David Swift makes the teen twins far and away the smartest, liveliest characters, with their wry, sly-dog henpecked grandfather the runner up. The remaining spectrum of humanity, everyone between the ages of 13 and 70-something, is some kind of goof, jerk, or weirdo. This is a light burlesque of the species, and part of the reason it works is that with every character a lovable eccentric or hissable villain, a roster of fine character actors find the specific, observed Type in the caricatures, rather than the Cliché.

Another reason for the cartoony characterization is that The Parent Trap is a sort of allegory of the eternal battle of sexes, family bonds and the human condition, and it finds us endearingly silly, romantic and bumbling. This may only occur to the obsessive student of The Parent Trap, but once the subtleties are noticed, hints start stacking up, and a creeping sense of the mythic pervades the film. The opening credits set the tone, in a stop-motion puppet playlet set to the Sherman Brothers' title song. Someone who is me needs to fully deconstruct this sequence, but in short it depicts archetypal Man and Woman figures who quarrel constantly and are tormented by the gods (i.e.— naked Cupids), who keep causing them to fall in love again. Rather key is that the vignettes summarize the theme of the parents' love story, but do not summarize the plot of the film precisely, and the stand-ins for Susan/Sharon are two non-twin teen girl puppets who are in turn associated with the putti figures: cosmic forces of eros and manipulators of fate! The very first image is of the proscenium arch of the world-stage, suddenly invaded by stylized cartoon lightening, Jupiter's thunderbolts of Destiny, Chance and Providence. The lovers first appear under a tree, as should all good Lovers of myth, their names carved upon the trunk (John and Marsha, in a Stan Freberg shout-out).

The film is further loaded with allusion to classical myth, funniest of which is when Sharon references Pelléas and Mélisande and Daphnis and Chloe to explain "how true love creates its beautiful agony!" Susan's dog is named Andromeda, an intriguing lead which points to more interesting parallels to the plot, not all of which I can quite make fit at this time.

Some of my favorite further clever symbolism is explored below.

2. House of Serendipity

The whole movie takes place over a few weeks, but it's the Camp Inch and family camping sections that make The Parent Trap rule the summertime. The camping scenes, set in the mountains near the Evers' Carmel ranch, are the last phase of the titular Trap, as the girls pool resources and use their outdoorsy know-how to "submarine" their dad's villainous fiancée. Besides the levity/screwed-up idea of breaking up a couple by causing bears to attack a sleeping woman, this section captures a nice semi-scrubbed version of that magical California State Park feeling. When I'm hanging out at the most scenic smoking area of California Adventure, I often fantasize that the whole of Grizzly Peak Recreation Area was built to recreate the camping scenes in The Parent Trap.

The highest concentration of Summer Magic (see, that's another Hayley Mills picture with less genuine Summer Magic than this one scene) is the pivotal First Act Climax. Susan and Sharon have been isolated together on account of fighting so much that they made a whole table of cakes fall down at a party. In the most hilarious and evocative shot in the movie, one of the cakes ends up stuck on the beak of a Thunderbird on totem pole. It is important symbolically, as a link in the film's chain of storm imagery. But it is also funny because it is a cake stuck on a totem pole.

Anyway... Inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan (seriously), the camp director forces the girls to live together 24/7 in a private cabin. It is a puzzling punishment for a couple reasons, but we're already faced with the long-lost identical twins, and about to accept that they successfully switch places and live as one another for several days. The movie knows this and without drawing attention or even saying it aloud once, places them in a cabin named "Serendipity."

The thunderstorm from the credits returns here, and the girls are forced to work together to batten down the hatches as the heavens howl through the open windows. It is here that the sisters finally unravel their backstory, blown together by the winds, stranded in the rain. First the wind dislodges Susan's Ricky Nelson pin-up, and the minidrama is book-ended as Sharon unveils a photograph of their mother. And when the weather calms, a cooling breeze blows through the camp, the enemies are reunited as sisters, and droplets fall from the eaves of their makeshift home like gentle tears of relief. Serendipity indeed.

3. The Running Time

The Parent Trap is more than two hours long, for absolutely no good reason. This allows for a leisurely, laid-back pace, ideal for capturing the lazy, abundant-free-time feel of summer. It's also in that special club of movies like They Drive by Night and From Dusk till Dawn, with second halves that feel like an entirely different story that grew naturally out of the first half. First half: discovering twinship / summer camp comedy. Second half: parent trapping / romantic farce.

4. The Mysterious Divorce Backstory

If the twins are 13 and Mitch last saw Sharon when she was one year old, the Everses were divorced in 1949. We can't be positive where the family used to live, but California was the first state with no-fault divorce laws, and those weren't in place until 1970. I cannot help but wonder what the grounds for divorce were, but usually imagine that Mitch had to press physical assault charges against Maggie at some point. The clue is that when she punches him, he hints that this is in no way the first time she has physically abused him.

5. Mitch's House

All scenes set in Mitch Evers' domicile are total House Porn, so it is a blessing that the unswapping of the kids has to take place at the dad's house in Monterey County, instead of a bunch of process shots of Boston. If I could live in any house from the movies, it would probably be this one, even though ranches are too far from coffee-shops and ill-reputed movie theaters. The other contenders are the TV journalist's house from Tenebrae and Diabolik's secret lair. But one of those had axe murders happen in it, which is kind of a bad vibe, and the other got wrecked by liquid gold spraying everywhere. So Rancho Evers it is! In a twist of fate that is not remarkable because the area is full of Spanish courtyard architecture, the house is not entirely unlike the 1920's Historical Landmark building where I actually live. If, you know, all the walls between apartments were ripped out, and someone who could afford more mid-century furniture lived there.

A lot of Disney theme park enthusiasts like to imagine that we have great ideas for fixing the parks, or could do a better job at bossing around the guys in Tigger costumes. But when I'm daydreaming up attractions I would like to see, my mind goes straight to "a walk-through recreation of the house from The Parent Trap." So I'm unfit to even work in the WDI cafeteria, right? Well, as Wikipedia would have it, Walt Disney Archives is perpetually bombarded by requests for blueprints to this house! I assume this is a lie, since anyone who could afford this house would not be the kind of weirdo who wants to build it.

These views are all one after another, as Sharon explores the house for the first time. Surely she knows Susan was telling the truth when she described life in California as "sort of... marvelous, actually!" One of the ways you can tell the step-grandmother-to-be is evil is when she sees this gorgeous house and says "Mitch, it needs a woman's touch!" Like hell, it does! A game you can play involving the set decoration is to count shots where there are vases and bottles behind peoples' shoulders.

6. Fashions

If you don't know what is so great about the "Let's Get Together" scene, then we don't like the same things or have a basic language in common for communication. But right now, check out these adorable fashions.

I don't know what is wrong with how adolescents dress these days, but it is probably caused by rays shooting out of their iPods or Nintendos. Just kidding, I like iPods and Nintendos. But teenager fashions are particularly sad and uncool right now, with too much emphasis on logos of different mall stores, and not enough of weirdness and creativity. Look at what Susan is wearing to look like a... rock star? Beatnik? Folk singer? It's simple and timeless, basically just jeans and a white collared shirt with a knit... sleeveless sweater? Giant vest? What is that, anyway? It is cool, unique, attractive and memorable, that's what it is. And Sharon is beyond classy in proper Wednesday Addams/ Judge Judy all-black and lace. This look is cuter, more striking, and more mysterious than the hoodies and tight pants that goth kids in my neighborhood wear, though I might be wrong about what the look is supposed to evoke. Anyhow, bless costume designer, Bill Thomas, who was probably swamped what with Babes in Toyland shooting at the same time.

7. Hecky's Pain

"Mitch, please. I may go out and kill myself. I don't know."

Two little girls have stripped the crusty ranch hand of dignity, and his employer laughs at his expense. In response, Hecky mumbles a suicide threat that does not sound particularly sarcastic or idle.

8. Mother Worship

All teasing about accents aside, Hayley Mills shines like she's powered by electrified copper wiring in every scene. She takes pains to differentiate her two characters, and in a neat touch gives Susan the nervoues/excited lip-licking tic from Pollyanna. She does some world-class comic takes, such as when she realizes she's the victim of the missing-skirt-chunk gag from Bringing Up Baby. If you want more, I previously wrote on some excellent scene work with Brian Keith, here.

But bar none, the most heart-drop-kicking scene in The Parent Trap is when Susan sees her mother in the flesh for the first time. She has entered the strange house preoccupied with memorizing the names of servants, layouts of rooms, and how to fake her way through music lessons. She's rapturously greeted her newfound grandfather, promptly going all Queen Christina and sniffing him to "make a memory." And suddenly Maureen O'Hara enters as Maggie McKendrick, looking about as jaw-dropping as a human being can look. And her daughter's jaw drops. Disney films of this era take a certain measure of criticism for pedestrian filmmaking under their professional gloss, but David Swift takes a page from Douglas Sirk here. Maggie appears at the top of a staircase, an beaming vision: a goddess. Susan has to mount the stairs to reach this idealized dream mother. Swift makes this entirely about Susan's reaction, staying in close, keeping only the girl in focus as she takes each stair. It starts with widened eyes and open mouth, and as she rises we can see her heart stopping and restarting, read her dawning awe and joy. It all plays out on Hayley Mills' face. It is a holy moment.

9. Dream of the Psychic Sisters

Stare at a movie long enough and its unsanded patches begin to pop out. There's inherently something slightly off about The Parent Trap, because as a tale of a chance encounter with an unknown twin, it is a story of meeting a doppelgänger. Traditionally, that means you're going to die.

There is also a strange little through-line about how the twins may have precognitive abilities. It may not ring a bell, because until the ending it only constitutes two passing remarks. First, immediately before Sharon reveals that she has figured out they are sisters, she says "Mother always says I'm psychic. You know, that I can sense things, when something odd is going to happen. I always get goosebumps." A mere scene later, while planning the big switcheroo, Susan becomes excited and says that she's getting similar goosebumps.

This Psychic Twins business may be a holdover from the source novel or prior screenplay drafts or half-forgotten story notes or something. But it comes back at the very end as a prominently placed segue into the final coda. Goes like this. So SPOILER TRAP alert. While the girls are in bed, the parents have a moving and pretty realistic reconciliation over homemade stew and booze. Cut to Susan/Sharon asleep, at this point in the story completely visually indistinguishable. Merged. And one wakes, probably Sharon, gasping that she had "the craziest dream... you and I were marching along real slow, sort of funny-like, in organdy dresses. And there was music coming from someplace..." And now we see a gathering in a scenic part of the ranch, the cast gathered before a priest. Sharon continues "and there were flowers and people." It is the second wedding of their parents... but have we time-cut to the actual ceremony, or are we seeing the dream? A premonition? A psychic warning? A Vision? The unreal feeling is enhanced by the series of rear projection shots (why? Couldn't the finale have been shot on location at Golden Oaks like the rest of the ranch scenes?), bride and groom both in white, and lack of dialogue. Only the love theme "For Now, For Always" comments, with lyrics of fate and eternity... Is this a wedding after all... or has everyone died? Only the doppelgängers in organdy can say, but they turn their wide blue eyes to one another and smile their silent, secret smile.

10. Butt Joke at The End

Airblower, Mindbender

2010-07-14T01:35:00.001-07:00

"Don't make me bend an air at you!"
Now here's the Thing, folks. M. Night Shyamalan will, I sincerely hope, continue to be allowed the money and resources to pursue his vision on the movie picture screen. As long as he is permitted to make his screwy, nonsensical, deadly-serious movies, I will continue paying admission and gawking. But in all likelihood, Shyamalan will never again be in a position to make a film as peculiarly insane as the gobbledygook fairy tale Lady in the Water. It just has to be accepted that the filmmaker cashed in his accumulated goodwill and free-pass creative control chips to create that naked, personal, pathological masterpiece of hubris. As demonstrated by his follow-up, the finger-wagging environmental thriller The Happening, in which people ran away from the invisible menace of the wind and not only wore symbolic mood rings but discussed how they "forgot what color love is", Shyamalan may make worse movies in his life, and they may be crazy, but they will be bad and crazy in a different way. He will not likely make a picture so narcissistic and bizarre as Lady in the Water that is also so expensive and has movie stars in it.

Now, The Last Airbender is plenty expensive, and aimed at "families," which means young teenagers who will talk on their phones (to say "I'm watching Airbender," which they are not), look at textual messages and then later drop their phones. I know this, because that is what was happening among the eight people in my theater who were not 1) me, 2) my ladyfriend or 3) this little round kid that was jacked up on Twizzlers and clapped his hands when he recognized characters/scenes/lines fromt he cartoon. Anyway! If The Happening was proud to be the First R-Rated Movie! from the modern master of suspensers, then Airbender is his first little kid movie, non-Shyamalan story, action-adventure picture, and first movie with lots of "bending."

Because Shyamalan's psychology is so interesting, we may wonder why he took this job? He had previously been unable to make the first Harry Potter film (due to scheduling conflicts with his tortured, weirdo un-superhero psychological drama, Unbreakable) and then apparently wanted/was not allowed to make the last two. Maybe he had a very specific yen to adapt a children's property about freak kids doing CGI magic spells, and Airbender scratched that itch? Maybe he thought this kind of thing is a surefire hit that would redeem him in the eyes of The Industry? If so, was this impulse born of logic, that he might better secure funds for his confused social parable thrillers? Or born of ego, a need to demonstrate that he can play on the summer tentpole action-adventure court? Whatever the case, it (sadly) seems like Shyamalan finally taking notes, since he did not cast himself in the film, despite a lot of Indian people playing the villainous Fire People Guys. There is even a messiah figure that he could have cast himself as, but probably even this crazy man knew he could not play a 10-year-old bald child.

Though Shyamalan wrote the screenplay it is not an original M.N.S. story, but an adaptation of a Nickelodeon cartoon which I understand was inspired by the continuity structure, visual style, and emotional/narrative complexity of anime. I'm assuming this means Avatar: The Last Airbender is like Robotech or Mysterious Cities of Gold or something, and not like Violence Jack, but who knows? The movie attempts to smush 20 episodes of the source show's plot into 90 minutes, and drops the "Avatar" part of the title for reasons that are a complete mystery. Shyamalan's only previous attempt at adaptation was the screenplay for Stuart Little, which basically tossed out E.B. White's book and retained the idea that the story is about a mouse. Airbender doesn't have a mouse, but it has a flying lemur and a flying white beaver with a buffalo face. They don't talk or really do anything in the movie, except the heroes fly around on the Luck Dragon Catbus thing a lot. Nobody explains why this animal can levitate.

There is either way too much story inherent in the source material or the writer didn't know what to cut or how to compress. The main technique of story compression is to have characters tell the story as fast as possible in lot of speeches. Everybody talks constantly and nothing happens. Like a dude will give a long, excited speech about how on their way to North Water City, the Airbender and his friends are going to fly around the world stopping in villages (sorry, not that Village!) and beat up the Fire People soldiers they find and start an uprising among the oppressed Water and Earth Guys (the Air ones are all genocided, hence the title The Last Airbending Person). And then there's a 5-second shot of the Airbender in one of those villages blasting a baddie with air. Cut to: they're in North Water City and this chick is like "We started a revolution!" When they did this, and how, and what that means, and how that is going, and if it was fun or interesting, we never, ever find out. Airbender treats all things like this, from being frozen in ice for 100-years (basically this has no effect on a person), finding out your people have been genocided (it makes you look spaced out for a minute), falling in love (this happens between two shots, with a voice-over from explaining that these people who just met fell in love right away), etc.

I'm not a person who believes Shyamalan has ever been a graceful storyteller, but at least his illogical scripts are usually driven by a lean narrative. Most of them are still very talky, but, ever the master of slight-of-hand, he builds in long visual suspense setpieces to make you forget how much garbage pours out of characters' mouths during the rest of the movie. Airbender is dense, rushed, and convoluted, and doesn't have suspenses, but it has special effects action scenes. The main fighting of the Airbender world is that Benders do martial arts moves but don't ever kick each other, just make attacks happen based on the four elements. Like you do a jump kick and it dumps water all over your opponent. The bad guys use fire, which should be the most threatening element, but nobody ever gets hurt by their firebending, or even burned or even caught on fire! It is like how the Ninja Turtles used to have swords that never cut anyone and nunchucks that never bashed in anybody's teeth. What is the fun of that? Perhaps this Bending business is in the tradition of the impressionistic Poké battles of Pokémon and the super-elaborate/outlandish attacks on Sailor Moon: lots of flailing and swirling and shouting about "energy" and no horrific physical carnage (but occasional horrific emotional carnage). For reasons obvious to most grown up people, this kind of abstraction makes more sense in cartoons.

Shyamalan has thoroughly studied how to construct the creeping-dread scene, as evidenced by his other movies which are made only of creeping-dread scenes. He's great at framing shots to impart a lot of information visually, his cutting is restrained and usually makes sense, even when his scripts make someone say the same thing out loud. But in Airbender his action sequences are pokey and rote. There are some creative fight gags and what looks like okay choreography, and the score thunders and trumpets to tell us it's getting exciting/inspiring/emotional, but it is not getting exciting, inspiring or emotional.

There is a lot of awesome stuff here for gawker types. Every performer is horrible in their own unique way in this movie... except the one nice/non-psychotic Fire People general, who is played by Shaun Toub. I liked Toub in Iron Man and he was too good for the foul things he was made to do in Crash (such as appear in Crash). In Airbender he is dignified, spiritual, and seems kind and patient and he makes those qualities seem pretty badass! Shaun Toub: Hot Young Star to Watch Out For!

All the other actors will make you squirm, but this one fellow, Jackson Rathbone (I'm told he was in Twilight, but since he wasn't one of those two monsters that Bella wants to screw, I don't remember him), is a special kind of bad where he clenches his jaw and bugs out his eyes and looks unconvincing even when he isn't doing anything. Andrew McCarthy used to do that, too. Noah Ringer, the main, previously unknown bald child, enthusiastically says many lines which make no sense, has no diction and slurs his words a lot. My ladyfriend said that this boy has particularly puffy beestung lips and that his topless tai chi scenes would appeal to pederasts, but I have no opinion about that.

Anyway, there are parts where Airbender makes jokes and no one will laugh, there are parts where you can't tell if a joke was just made, there are times where you can't tell if a plot development was supposed to be a surprise that was telegraphed too early or you were just supposed to know the information. It's all confusing and complicated except for the things which are repeated over and over. Like this evil general has a map that shows him where the Moon & Ocean Spirits (? don't ask!) are located, and he got this map by raiding the Great Library. He repeats this information no less than five times, often to people who already know. Also there's this Fire Prince who is exiled and has to capture the Last Airbender before he can return. This torments him, but you will be tormented as someone explains again in every one of his scenes.

The climax of this movie is the villain trying to work up the courage to stab a fish that he has captured in a sack. It is a magical fish, but it just looks like a normal fish but glowing a little. Then [SPOILER!! SPOOOOIILLERRRS!] he does stab it, but an Ice/Water Princess whose name I'm not sure we know is selfless enough to sacrifice her lifeforce by giving it to the fish. This is dramatic, because in her only prior scene she told a story about how the fish gave her some lifeforce when she was a stillborn baby, i.e. explains her function in the plot, then does nothing but fill that function.

So all in all, Airbender is a lot like Dragon Wars: D-War, and even has appearances by one of D-War's Imoogies and the Dawdlers, but without their rocket launchers. Sadly, it is not as consistently outrageous a geek show as D-War, but we are in the same sphere of entertainment.

The first scene of The Last Airbender is of these white Eskimo kids called I think Sokko and Katana walking on the frozen ocean. And Sokko sees something under the ice and starts smashing the ice open with his boomarang. And he busts the ice and then all the ice starts to crack and he looks shocked and yells that they better run, because the ice is cracking. But man, you did it to yourself! What did you think was going to happen? Why did you start cracking open the ice if you didn't want it to crack? Then the Last Airbender comes out, and M. Night Shyamalan just keeps banging at on the thin, thin ice under his feet, and I just can't look away.

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 6 — 2005

2010-06-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

Previous installments: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004...

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2005

10. Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (dir., scr. George Lucas)

A far-too-gushing write-up from 2005 can be found here, republished for the Star Wars Blogathon.

With an element of gross misstep and a boggling triumph in every scene, this age's designated popcult touchstone epic marches and meanders to its in/evitable conclusion, and Star Wars ends. The end is the beginning is the end, as unspooling contradictions writhe beneath the surface of George Lucas' primal and personal glossy space opera. A full-frontal merchandising assault is mounted on the same stage as a politicized Greek tragedy about how genocidal dictators are born. Bleeding-edge tech is harnessed to create photorealistic Amazing Stories covers. Every major beat of the story is etched in marble, but destiny's grim march is constantly interrupted by noodling asides. The unreined imaginations of a hundred creature, costume, environment and spaceship designers are funneled through a director with no filter for kitsch, cliché, or dorkiness, and a stadium full of lightsabers cannot slice through the resultant clutter. The downward-sloping arc of doomed protagonist Anakin Skywalker is designed to take him from slave boy to slave cyborg, and focused on the moment when he will murder his pregnant wife, but when that defining moment arrives the cause of death is something like lack of will to live. The biochemical mechanics of the Force are explained, but in such a way as to explain nothing. Moldering Yellow Peril caricature villains are merged with amphibians in papal hats and named after Republican politicians.

The nominally straightforward plot is confused, baffled, and rerouted through twisting blind-corner mountain roads. Nothing so agonizingly prevized on every level from galactic to midi-chlorial has ever been so sloppy and strange.

We have here a series of children's films with images of decapitated and dismembered fathers as a major visual motif. There is something going on in the Star Wars prequels at direct odds with certain conventional wisdom that they are vapid, soulless, lazy, cynical cash-grabs: Bad in some conventional, grinding, anonymous fashion. They are many things, but normal they are not. They are profoundly weird and more than a little bonkers.

This shadowed half is intended to balance the bright-hearted Episodes IV-VI. Within the six-movement film cycle, the Episode I-III trilogy climaxes and resolves with a fall from grace, leaves the universe charred and smoldering and thus primed for new hope. In an infamous, much scoffed-about preproduction documentary clip, Lucas tells his team that the films are "like poetry." A peculiarly formal poetry they are, carefully metered, rhymed and assonated, highly allusive and steeped in mystic esoterica. E.g., General Senator Binks may not be funny, but his real role in the mythos is of the Holy Fool, and his place in the poetics is to rhyme with the sidekick life-debt of Chewbacca. Where the story does not work, the schematic is rich. Trash, perhaps, but singular, epic trash.

Revenge of the Sith specifically finds its director in purposeful, less spastic form, confident in the forward thrust of the film and not just isolated sequences. A sleek black helmet is lowered over the burnt skull of a little boy who once insisted that he is a person and his name is Anakin, and the weight of six films bears down and presses the mask to his face.

9. Sin City (dir. Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, scr. Miller)

Set in a cherry-picked L.A.-New York-Vegas-Chicago-Detroit of the troubled imagination, Sin City is a film on a shopping spree to fill a cart with its favorite elements of noir, hard-boiled detective, cop thriller, and vigilante stories — essentially all of crime pulp — and is very probably bad for you. For cartoonist Frank Miller, the exciting parts of those genres are flappy trench coats, sensitive but impossibly tough guys, absurdly large guns, Madonna/whore complexes, serial killers with grotesque M.O.'s, tar-black irrationally placed shadows and glowing rim lighting, and a pervasive air of moral, mental and physical rot. Those looking for complex detective plots, sophisticated, dimensional femmes fatales and human-scale violence with realistic repercussions need not apply. Apart from the caricatured chiaroscuro, the reference point for Sin City is less Late Show Bogart movie than the sort of lurid crime magazines with a brand of hyperbolic violence Stephen King once charitably described as "gushy." Adapting Miller's comics for the screen, Robert Rodriguez takes the difficult road and assumes that while Frank Miller's psyche looks like a difficult place to live, it is a pretty hilarious, entertaining place to visit.

8. The Proposition (dir. John Hillcoat, scr. Nick Cave)

Hard, mean land, it seems, has made hard, mean men of its residents. Or perhaps they were drawn to this, their ideal landscape, as Hell was built for demons and the damned. If the classic genre theory reduction says that Westerns are About Civilization versus Wilderness, Law versus Freedom, Order versus Chaos, White Hat versus Black Hat, etc, to The Proposition this may as well be Mad Dog versus Mad Dog, or meaningless as Late Breakfast versus Brunch.

Bull-man Captain Stanley enlists captured outlaw Charlie Burns to put down his rampaging criminal brother, Arthur, somewhere in the hellscape of 1880's Australia. The collateral is to be younger Burns brother, Mikey, scheduled to walk or hang on Christmas Day, pending Charlie's success. As Charlie wanders, drinks, and laments, Stanley finds himself forced to protect Mikey from the wrath of the community. And everyone is compromised, every hand is bloodied, and man clings to the lie he needs to get through the long, boiling days.

Nick Cave's score is in wistful, hypnotic mode, and his screenplay is in brutal poetic mode that casts every human as killer, victim or ethereal outside observer. This is the shortlist of options as the characters trudge through the sun-pounded outback, looking for their place in the universe. Stanley aims to civilize the land, but in familiar, eternal, sickly comic Kubrickian tradition, has tragic ideas of what that means, how to do it, and insurmountable circumstances working against him. The cycle of history turns the wrong way. Stanley's brand of civilization cannot abide the criminals, cannot survive the rough justice the townspeople would like, and cannot truly coexist with the native population, and so the contradictions will be written in blood, gunpower and pain.

7. The Call of Cthulhu (dir. Andrew Leman, scr. Sean Branney)

The geeky, obsessed cabal of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society focus their efforts to create the Lovecraft adaptation of the highest fidelity to the source material in all of film history, and display sizeable cinematic prowess and good taste throughout. The simple and clever conceit that makes The Call of Cthulhu soar is to pastiche the fantasy film style of 1928, when the story was published, as if Lovecraft were being adapted in his own era.

Though some of the accuracy of the attempt at silent Expressionist style is dubious, on the whole it smoothes over the rough patches of semi-pro production. Arch performances, unrealistic sets and handmade special effects become strong artistic choices in a creaky / wildly stylized aesthetic, rather than flaws to conceal. Lovecraft's globe-jumping, disjointed, epistolary plot structure remains intact, and his antiquated, lugubrious purple prose is ingeniously transformed into irrationally-lit, oneiric images.

The way the story is built is more about pace and increasing scale than plotting. Notes left by a deceased academic relate tales of increased activity among demonic cultists around the world, and eerie, otherworldly clues point toward the awakening of a transdimensional alien god. Cthulhu is too twisted and feverish to be flattened into three acts, disinterested in character drama, but is full of vivid imagery and snowballs to a thrilling, monstrous and cosmic climax on a sea voyage to an uncharted, newly risen island.

Part of Lovecraft's enduring power is in the dread sense that the stories themselves are unstuck in time and space. That there is something Wrong with them, or maybe with the writer. That maybe he is slightly mad, or a visionary, or both. That the stories are doing something to you. Though he casts a long shadow over all mediums of fantasy art, these are the Lovecraftian qualities never captured in screen adaptation. Simultaneously hokey and august, the feverish Call of Cthulhu strays closer to those mad mountains than any motion picture dream-quester before it.

6. Manderlay (dir., scr. Lars von Trier)

For the fancy-schmanciest art movie on this list, I’m going to drop the pretty talk for a minute. Lars von Trier makes fairly accessible art films, full of ideas, discussion points for later, and crazy formal experiments. They also have strong stories that are communicated in a relatively normal way and movie stars from all over the world. So von Trier is a good starting place for understanding how normal, unfancy, untrained never-took-a-film-class people can get a lot out of art cinema, and with a little work even find it fun and exciting.

I dunno if the gods love a good provocateur, but I know I do. It is good for audiences of the arts, casual and serious alike, to be challenged and affronted. People don’t like to be fucked with. That is understandable in real life, but art is a great place where we can be provoked and irritated without actually being personally injured. It’s okay to be bored during an Andy Warhol film, because he really is trying to bore you, get you to a place where you think about why you’re bored, what about the movie is boring you, and what it means to be bored. Maybe it even makes you mad. Maybe the guy is fucking with you. Did you really leave the house and pay money to watch a guy sleeping? You did, and Warhol is certainly fucking with you. Maybe that’s a scam and you could make a movie like that, too. You could, but you didn’t. But you win in the end because you just had a meaningful sit-down with some challenging art, and that experience went beyond “liking” or “not liking” a movie.

Lars von Trier is also certainly fucking with you. In his case, the stories are emotionally direct and brutal and he’s honestly working out issues that are personally troubling and painful to him. But they’re also a joke. Not a trick or a prank on you for having feelings about the put-upon protagonists that von Trier abuses. The joke is about how extraordinarily cruel the universe seems to be. The nature of drama is conflict, so melodrama piles on as much misery as possible, and it’s funny, interesting and beautiful that we still respond to this, even when as absurd and excessive as in a von Trier plot, even when as minimally presented as Dogville and its sequel, Manderlay. It seems impossible to forget the artifice when the sets are a giant black box with white lines on the floor and the buildings have no walls, but it is possible, too, because we kind of do forget. This isn’t necessarily a difficult, distancing way to tell a story that we have to work at to figure out or how to look past. It is potentially a stripped-down, simple way to tell a story without unnecessary stage dressing, like telling ghost stories around a campfire.

Anecdotal evidence says that some people (Wikipedia would put a tag here that says “[Who?]” and the answer is “some Americans I read on the Internet”) don’t like that von Trier frames Dogville and Manderlay as films about America. This is apparently because the writer-director isn’t American and has never been here. Now maybe some of Those People are spouting off, haven’t seen the movies, and just don’t like the idea of the rest of the world having opinions about America. That’s weird for a lot of reasons, but if I may characterize the nation (this is what blogs are for!), the country is pretty much a big showoff and wants the other countries to talk about it at parties, so here you go, this is what one troubled, weirdo filmmaker from Denmark thinks. I know you can handle that, America. But giving Those People the benefit of the doubt, it’s great that they take issue with von Trier’s Land of Opportunity movies. It means that they’re engaging with the films and interpreting them.

Interpretation is necessary, because von Trier doesn’t actually make definitive statements. He doesn’t put forth an articulated thesis that he perfectly illustrates, but worries through complicated problems at length, and doesn’t resolve them entirely or come to definitive conclusions. Dogville is about things like the pitfalls of charity, kindness, capitalism, the work ethic, and the unbridgeable gap between ideals and their application. Manderlay is about those things plus American race relations, slavery, power dynamics, the meaning of freedom, democracy, and historical trauma. When we talk about those things in Real Life, we usually take a position, have an opinion that we cling to, and shout a lot. Von Trier gives individual characters strong opinions, puts them in conflict, and usually has something awful happen to everyone. His own position is not necessarily in the mouth of anyone onscreen or even easy to suss out. When the stage is cleared at the end of Dogville, all that is left is a God’s eye view of the void and a furious, snapping dog. I’d guess that’s as close to a mission statement as von Trier gives.

In Dogville's case, maybe von Trier uses the town of Dogville to stand for America the Real Place, or to represent the national character, or as stand-in for any capitalist nation, or the entire sphere of human society, or all of those, but it’s also just the isolated, specific, imaginary mountain town of Dogville. Now, in Manderlay, our old pal Grace is leaving in the car with her gangster dad, and she transforms from Nicole Kidman into the more starry-eyed and sincere Bryce Dallas Howard, and happens upon an Alabama plantation where the resident slaves aren’t aware that they have been legally emancipated for seventy years. So, being Grace, with her superiority complex, good intentions and deep sense of social justice, she sets about forcing the slaves to be free. This being von Trier, that plan will go about as well as expected, which is to say not well at all.

If your Manderlay discussion club needs some prompting, bounce over to the Rotten Tomatoes patch and see how the Fresh (32% of Top Critics!) and Rotten alike mostly agree that this is some kind of indictment of some aspect of something. Some critics find a scathing statement on President Bush’s Iraq war in the way Grace pushes freedom upon the Manderlay slaves — using machine guns if necessary — but doesn’t have a solid plan in place for the clean-up phase. Some critics find a condemnation of well-meaning liberal tendency to rush in, meddle and foist assistance on others without understanding the situation or helping people to help themselves. Some critics say both those things without noting the confusion of targets. But wait, does von Trier even know the particulars of contemporary American conservatism and liberalism? This seems doubtful.... Iraq war, sure. But also Vietnam. Also every time anyone ever forced anyone to do anything for their own good. Manderlay is more like a frustrated, angry satire of no-win situations, especially those shitty circumstances you’ve inherited, must take action upon, want to set right, but there’s no clean, correct way to do it.

What belief systems do we get to impose on others? How does America move past its historical atrocities? Specifically, how do white people feel about and deal with the legacy of slavery? Broader: how does anyone in the world deal with these kinds of traumas? How do they haunt us, how do we remember them and move forward, and what do we do when confronted with their residue? Have we truly dismantled and discarded our racist stereotypes? Which ones are gone, which persist, which could reoccur? Why do we continue perceiving truth, allure or usefulness in stereotypes that we know are hateful and untrue? When do you help people who don’t want help? How hard should you try to help? When have you accidentally imprisoned someone with your ideology? How complicit are minorities and the oppressed in their own subjugation? Sorry, I got lingo-y there on you. Point being that some of these topics are painful to consider in private, infuriating to discuss in public, but all necessary to confront.

Now maybe Lars von Trier is fucking with you, and maybe that’s a good thing. What separates the great provocateur from the chortling wiseass? How do we tell a challenging, serious artist from a naughty attention-mongering huckster? Well, that's part of the fun, isn't it?

5. Serenity (dir., scr. Joss Whedon)

In which Joss Whedon does the impossible, or at least attempts it, and succeeds to an implausible degree, and completes the birthing of the rumpliest and philosophically humane science fiction for the screen in decades. The impossible task of Serenity is to act as second (er, third) pilot episode of Firefly, season finale (should the film have performed better), and probable series finale for a failed-culted-resurrected television show. It has to do this without the broad cultural awareness of Star Trek, which would otherwise be a logical comparison. It attempts to function as a self-contained feature film, a continuation, a conclusion, reiteration and encapsulation. As a film that, in all reality, exists thanks to the support of a network of vocal fans, it wisely attempts to satisfy those supporters and thus mustn't bore them with repetition but needs to introduce a nine-crew member ensemble cast and the precepts of its SF universe.

The central mystery tease of the series is played out, namely What is Up with Wise-in-Her-Madness Teen Waif Stowaway River Tam? This being Joss Whedon's playground, the answer is obviously that she got kung-fu powers after patriarchal powers tampered with her personality. The stories can't all meet their tidy, intended endings. That option was lost years ago. So some of the Serenity's crew of bandits and fugitives are get the short shrift, but the single most important story arcs out beautifully: fourteen episodes of Captain Mal Reynolds accepting the part of outcast, outlaw, lost cause, unloved cynic pays off as he resolves his bad faith, stands unshackled and free. Roaming the frontier space after fighting for the losing side of the Unification War and resigning himself to a life of scavenging, running and smuggling, what we have here is a man trapped — like Howard the Duck — in a world he never made, restless, frustrated, and chasing an undefined Something.

Whether he could use some faith, purpose or just some inner serenity, Mal certainly needs to free himself from bad faith. And he does, in shining Existentialist hero fashion, release himself from that moral death-grip, realizes his inherent, unstrippable freedom in the universe. The Alliance isn't Inherently Evil Empire Par Excellence, but ideologically stifling; as Mal is being smothered more than most, he's in the best position in the 'Verse to notice and do something about it. And that's how Serenity pays off the character arc properly.

Mal's circumstances "force" him into outlaw role, but he wills himself into semi-cooperative inertia through all of Firefly, and he tells himself: I'm a bad man, I'm on the run, I'm struggling to survive, human relationships are barely tenable, and I have no choice in the matter. It is not that he plays victim, but Mal sees his unsatisfactory life inhibited by circumstance, blind to the myriad courses available to him. He's not "free" because he doesn't acknowledge himself to be free. Were Firefly-Mal singing the theme song, the refrain "you can't take the sky from me" is wistful and ironic, but by the end of Serenity it is a true, defiant statement of purpose.

In less fancy terms, Mal needs to stop feeling sorry for himself, and gets inspired to action because he finds something to stick up for, namely the right to feel sorry for himself.

This is the extraordinary par for a Whedon-engineered course. All three of his lead TV protagonists have been plagued bad faith, constrained by roles and external belief systems. Buffy Summers doesn't need to just grow up and accept that she's the Slayer: she needs to locate a viable moral space in which to live, give herself permission to have problems, accept that she is grown up but not Solved, and that circumstance may suck, but you're never out of options (and ultimately says the hell with being The Chosen One). Angel doesn't need to Fight For Redemption! Not when there's (probably?) no God, everyone who matters to him has forgiven him, and he's going to "hell" anyway: he needs to reconfigure his sense of purpose, moral system and definition of "redemption," moment to moment, for all his un-life (and ultimately says the hell with any further reward).

And Mal, too, chooses what kind of man to be. He's not redeemed. But he's something like free.

4. A History of Violence (dir. David Cronenberg, scr. Josh Olson, from the comic by John Wagner and Vince Locke)

Here’s the problem for diner owner Tom Stall, who lives an idyllic, calm life in small-town Indiana: gangsters show up and say he’s mob deserter Joey Cusack and his nature is to murder people. Tom denies this for a good while, and Viggo Mortensen plays the affable straight arrow family man with all his bodily cells except a couple muscles somewhere in his jaw and some that calibrate pupil dilation. Something is wrong, or was wrong, or is about to be wrong.

What does it mean for a film to be truly Cronenbergian? It must take more than inventive grotesque biological mutations. That’s a signature plot trope, not a quality, not a style. A video-playing chest-vagina is an example, not a theme in full flower. Cronenberg infuses his unpredictable, uncompromising take on genre pictures with a profound human sadness, a wintery melancholy that pervades whether his bent lens is trained on the sex thriller, the tragic monster saga, the psychic assassin yarn, pervy transgressive horror, adaptation of modern lit classic, or crime drama. The inner turmoil of protagonists explodes all over their physical reality in spectacularly gooey, messy or at least violent and traumatic form, and the mysterious transmutations of perception and reality, identity and form get blurrier, blurrier, meltier, meltier. So tooth-shooting guns made out of gristly flesh are in short supply, and A History of Violence sounds like somebody's term paper subtitled "Evolutionary Stasis and Sociological Satire in the Films of Stanley Kubrick," but the picture is inescapably Cronenbergian.

They used to make terse, starkly poetic, dolorous and doomed crime pictures approximate six per week back in the 1940s (coincidentally circa when Cronenberg was born), when everyone had problems with their souls due to the trauma of the war. Nobody is exactly sure what David Croenberg's trauma is, if any, but it causes him to make purposeful, confident cinema that glides along scene to scene like a mean animal that knows where it's going.

3. King Kong (dir. Peter Jackson, scr. Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, story Merian C. Cooper, Edgar Wallace)
Also available here are lumpen extended thoughts about Kong '05, the first film written about at length on ExKin.

The rarest of unnecessary remakes is one that not only assumes thorough familiarity with the original, but wants its audience to hold that original forever in their hearts with religious awe. King Kong '33 is an Ur-film, a primal, godlike thing that lives in human consciousness like the Old West, the Christ story, and the Oedipal complex. Kong has no company but The Wizard of Oz up in that stratosphere. Chaplain does not live there, not Casablanca, nor Citizen Kane. Just Kong and Dorothy.

It is, then, not possible to really remake King Kong any more than one could rebuild the Great Sphinx of Giza or raise a baby to be Muhammad Ali. Peter Jackson would not replace, revise or improve upon King Kong '33 even if he could, so King Kong '05 is what exactly? A meditative deconstruction and expansion? An extended film appreciation essay? A public display of affection? Sure, sure, and sure, and Jackson's King Kong is a dream journal. The accumulated flotsam in one man's brain from a lifetime of dreaming about King Kong. The result is sentimental and strange, juvenile one moment and sophisticated the next, and all things considered (including peeks at ill-conceived, long-ago screenplay drafts), possibly the most naked and honest approach the filmmaker could have taken.

Every thought that Peter Jackson has had about King Kong and could possibly weave into his film is crammed into the loom, including those dangling in contradiction and unresolved (e.g.- it is an adventure at heart or maybe it is not an adventure). But key among those threads is a theme in Kong '05 wherein each man kills the thing he loves. Obsessive, bottomless passion proves throughout to crush the fragile dream. It comes to bear most spectacularly for Carl Denham and Kong himself, but behind the curtain we sense Peter Jackson pacing in worry, knowing that the act of creating this film is not so different from hauling the giant gorilla across the sea and placing it on stage in Radio City Music Hall. And will that crazy scheme work? Can Peter Jackson ever be done with King Kong? Can any of us? Will it kill the beast, or will the ape unleashed kill the showman? Don't worry, folks. Those chains are made of chrome steel.

2. Grizzly Man (dir. Werner Herzog)

It is Man versus Nature as environmentalist Timothy Treadwell attempts to live among Alaskan grizzlies. It is Man versus Society as the National Park Service tries to prevent Treadwell from breaking the law. It is Man versus Self as Treadwell struggles with the the personal issues that cause him to shun life among humans and delude himself about how beneficial his presence is for his beloved bears. It is Man versus Destiny as Treadwell is inevitably killed and eaten by a bear.

And Grizzly Man is ultimately Man versus Man, in an ideological war between the self-designated protector of the bears and filmmaker Werner Herzog, who assembles Treadwell's own documentary footage and freely editorializes. It is impossible not to do so, as the fascinating, outlandish star blathers and rages and shoves his hands into fresh bear dung, pesters and taunts massive animals while insisting to his camera that the creatures love him, and gathers approximately zero useful data about bears. Treadwell's footage is bracingly beautiful, and absurdly hilarious in its own disconcerting, tragic way. In one of the movie year's most indelible scenes, Treadwell has his hat stolen by a wild Fox, who he has named Ghost and tries to treat as a pet. Ghost the Fox scampers off to his den with the cap, and Treadwell wails about the theft, the violation of his trust by the naughty animal, and never gets his hat back. Whether one sympathizes with Treadwell or agrees with Herzog that nature is a brutal, inhospitable, impassive force, one has to admit in the face of the evidence that a fox will steal your hat and just not give a shit. Nature is like that.

1. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (dir. Park Chan-wook, scr. Park, Jeong Seo-kyeong)

Mashing up the chain-reaction kidnapping plot of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and the extensively-premeditated revenge tale of Oldboy, Lady Vengeance concerns the elaborate score settling between convicted child murderer Lee Geum-ja and the man who actually did the deed. And between Geum-ja and her daughter Jenny, long lost to adopted parents. And with the families of several other murder victims. And between Our Lady of Vengeance and God.

The emphasis is on themes of identity and art, prep work and improvisation, and the hair-fine lines between sacrifice and degradation, grace and wrath, atonement and —wait for it — vengeance. As she examines a specialty firearm crucial to her painstaking scheme, Geum-ja is warned that ornamented gun is entirely impractical. She does not care, and murmurs only that it is beautiful, and every piece of her scheme must be beautiful. The death angel's day job at a bakery sees her excel at the decoration of tasteful, fancy cakes. As her life has been wrecked, her world shattered, Geum-ja reinvents herself with a purpose, and that plan is an elegant confection. Revenge is all she has, so it must be beautiful.

Central to that plan is complete full-body transformation, several times over. Before imprisonment she was a schoolgirl in over her head. The publicity circus around the crime recasts her as an angel-faced monster, and here begins the long, treacherous snaking of The Plan. As far as news media and prison personnel can see, in the arms of the penal system, Geum-ja becomes a repentant saint-in-training; so the Kind-Hearted Geum-ja facilitates her own release. Meanwhile, she wins the gratitude of fellow inmates by donating organs and murdering bullies; so the sisterly bonds forged and debts are incurred that may be paid off outside prison walls. And once outside, Geum-ja's decorations shift once more. Like a superhero suiting up, she paints on red eyeshadow, dons the coolest high-collared leather coat available, and chops off her finger in penance. If it is not artful, it is not worth doing.

Byzantine and intricate as Geum-ja's plan is, the film’s chronology is rewired into flashbacks and temporal cutaways. Information appears when and if the audience needs it, and not before, surprise reveals of causes after effects, as if the plot has gotten ahead of itself or Geum-ja’s scheme has outwitted the storyteller. The heroine undergoes (undertakes?) such radical behavioral shifts, transforming herself as required to achieve her next goal, that like Kill Bill, Lady Vengeance becomes a revenge quest as journey of identity. Where The Bride is winnowed down and built back up, Geum-ja is in a constant state of becoming.

Park Chan-wook lands his camera on unexpected views, literalizes metaphors without warning, frames to communicate dramatic relationship as much as compositional aesthetic and hops between scenes with flashy transitional devices. So the beatific Geum-ja prays and is crowned with the glowing aureola of a religious icon, or we glide between rooms on intercom cables to reveal one scene listening in on another, or a subtitle is rattled onto the screen by an overhead shot of tabletop coitus. Each scene has a little formal surprise in store. In one remarkable sequence the captive villain about to feel the wrath of Lady Vengeance is forced to translate from Korean to English and back again as Geum-ja communicates with Jenny. Blocked as a line of linked subjects with the translator in the middle, a gun pointed at his brain, split screen effects and simple editing gradually blur the geographical staging. The translator is gradually forgotten, disappears from the screen, though his voice continues. Halfway through the conversation the mother will stand with her back to the child, but Park continues cutting their close ups as if they are facing each other. In these moments, as Geum-ja makes her confession (through the mouth of a man also being forced into confession by repeating her words), states aloud her intention to kill, articulates as best she can her understanding of sin and atonement, she uses the act of her revenge as a statement. She literally makes her victim speak for her.

So what we have here is an exploration of the value of ritual, the role of the symbolic act in the invention of identity. Upon her release from prison at the beginning of the film, Geum-ja rejects a symbolic brick of tofu presented by her Christian comrades. It isn't a coded object with a secret meaning to unlock: its meaning is explained, and explicit. Shucking off the Kind-Hearted persona, Geum-ja requires more than a costume swap, and with high heels, red eyeshadow and burning cigarette in hand seduces the teenage bakery assistant. She has to transgress the boundaries of the Kind-Hearted to transform herself. And so she progresses, marking each step of the way with ritual and symbol, imbuing her quest with meaning beyond personal revenge.

"Atonement" is at the center of Geum-ja's Great Work, but for the film it is more a question than a purpose. That violence begets violence is a given in Park's Vengeance Trilogy, and here the Lady aims to atone by killing her guiltier partner in crime. And this outlaw justice, as outlaw justice is sometimes wont to do, actually may "solve" something — namely uncovering and halting a serial killer — but that is not the same as atonement. The damage to Geum-ja's original victim and his family is already done, and for this she can apologize, revenge, repent, and even affect positive change, but cannot undo. The pattern of destruction has encompassed more murder victims, but none can be saved. There is, however, another child and another parent wounded but struggling for air: there is still a chance for Geum-ja and Jenny. If Lady Vengeance wants something like redemption, wants to atone, wants her world set right, she'll have to forge the tools herself.

Lady Vengeance may famously fade to black and white in its director’s preferred version, but there is no black, white, or grey in the world of the Vengeance Trilogy. There are actions and consequences, impossible choices, and a cast of characters backed up against the wall. Everyone here is a victim of circumstance. Blackness swirls around them, but before they are enveloped, they will try, as Lady Vengeance says, to “live white.” All we can do is try.

Food Party Rally

2010-06-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess Food Party should be everyone's new favorite show, and is probably the best thing on television right now.

Thu Tran, renown artist and maker of glass birthday cakes, hosts a cooking show from a cardboard kitchen, hangs out with a lot of puppets and guys in wigs, and gets very little cooking done. Any further explanation is futile, inadequate, inaccurate. The IFC website has some clips, and full episodes are available on YouTube. Tran is plainly some kind of Kovacsesque TV prodigy, and an artist to keep an eye on.

Food Party neatly fills the Dada comedy void left by the end of Tim and Eric, is more perverse than Yo Gabba Gabba, and though slightly less deranged or cruel than the perfect Oh, Mikey!, is a worthy cousin in that vein.

Further Viewing: For the insatiable adventurer into the outer reaches of freeform television genius, even if you've seen every Pink Lady & Jeff and jumped through hoops to get ahold of Turn-On, the all-time champ remains the All Time Greatest Show of All Time. Mr. Charles Robert Lee is the king of this mountain. And he'll send you to the lions.