Lovefest '07: #9. This is Janet! She's a Phenomenon!

Jessica Harper in Shock Treatment (1981)
Janet Majors performs the song "Me of Me" on the DTV network "Breakfast Show", a self-promotion showstopper that in the context of Shock Treatment's perverse satire of media, American idolatry and wholesomeness itself, becomes the film's most chilling anthem of destruction and loss. Harper performs "Me of Me" at full tilt, vamping and purring the sultry verses, and bellowing and growling the rumbling chorus: "Me, me!/ Me, me me!/ Me me me!" She mugs and pouts into the camera, wiggles through a set consisting only of amorphous fog-machine smoke and Greek columns, then demolishes the in-film fourth wall, invading the seating area of the studio audience. The studio itself is the only real world that exists in Shock Treatment, and the DTV cameramen whirl about into that reality-warping space, pinned helplessly to Janet as she single-handedly expands the perimeters of The Breakfast Show to make more elbow room for her own star gone supernova. Janet runs through the set as she performs, becomes a nonspecific, all-encompassing Me, demolishing the set's only solid vector points of reality by knocking over the pillars, and finally wrenching the electric guitar from the hands of the house band. Her face fills the screen as she stares at herself multiplied visually on the studio monitors; Janet's image becomes the only image. As she takes over the diegetic guitar without missing a beat, she consumes/becomes the soundtrack's only sound.

In a film so concerned with image-making, such a display of magnetic performance, self-confidence, and shamelessness should look, sound, and feel like a triumph, a flowering for Janet, who begins the film in the DTV audience, identity half-defined by dismay toward her pathetic, awkward and confused husband Brad (Cliff De Young). But "Me of Me" rather than being the moment in which Janet Finds Herself, is the scene in which she loses her Self entirely.

The same character, previously played by Susan Sarandon, underwent a superficially similar transformation in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where Janet started in a pastel Sunday dress, ended in feather boa, corset and fishnets, lost her innocence three times over and consumed human flesh. But Janet's RHPS journey is one of liberation, moving from naivete, repression and simple doldrums to knowledge (erotic and otherwise), sensual awakening, and the excitement of personal agency. Rocky Horror, though, is about keeping an overdeveloped Super-Ego in check, Shock Treatment documents the perils of a rampaging Ego. In Shock Treatment, Janet doesn't discover empowerment, capability and confidence; she is used, conned and tricked until she's dissolved away in a Narcissus Pool of solipsism. DTV sponsor Farley Flavors has machinated to exploit Janet's natural girl-next-door charms for reasons of personal vendetta, and a profiteering agenda of selling his deeply unbalanced vision of mental health as a consumer product. For approximately 48 hours, Janet becomes ensconced in the endless maze of utterly content-free DTV programs, all of which star the same few performers, all referring back to the other programs, all openly advertising each other, sometimes showing episodes on TV sets within other shows. The DTV programming schedule melts into itself: one big show about absolutely nothing. So Janet is cajolled into promoting herself on talk shows, soaps starring her parents, and game shows, all apperances entirely to plug more apperances, on the promise that her meteoric rise to stardom will improve the mental health of the wayward Brad, who's been institutionalized in the DTV medical drama Dentonvale.

Janet plays along for Brad's sake, Jessica Harper knitting her inch-thick eyebrows with worry. Slowly — or is it quickly? — she's caught up in the idiocy and madness, stops puzzling over what she's supposed to do on TV, and believes the hype: I make fabulous TV because I'm inherently fabulous. "Me of Me" is the echo-chamber not just of celebrity culture and media autocannibalism, but the fatalist result of following "I think, therefore I am" to its logical conclusion. Janet will eventually escape redeemed, but in "Me of Me" Harper shows us a woman diving headfirst into a black hole. Janet is transformed, but transformed into what? Harper's small, round face is masked with bone-white pancake makeup, hair hidden under a flying saucer hat, widening her high forehead even more, and her dinner-plate-sized dark eyes become glistening black voids; Harper's strange, lovely face is transformed into a dolled-up death's head. She's got the strongest set of pipes ever to tackle Richard O'Brien's tunes, and though much of Shock Treatment's dialogue is, if not non sequitur, a sort of semi-sequitur, it's spooky as Harper sings with increasing throaty passion as the lyrics make less and less sense as anything but masturbatory nihilistic fantasy: "I'd never lie to me!/ I'd be willing to die for moi!/ I pray every day to me!" Janet's empathy for Brad is annihilated in "Me of Me", her motivation no longer to save her husband but sheer selfishness.

When Jessica Harper rocks "Me of Me" with total hell-bent abandon, it's a scene about Janet abandoning her true self. She's a phenomenon!

Lovefest '07: Countdown and #10

The Exploding Kinetoscope presents a Valentine's Day special! For the next ten days, I'll be counting down ten actresses I love in ten performance moments I love in ten films I love. For the most part, they don't have a terrible lot to do with romance itself or romantic movies, but be assured, there's a lotta love going on. They aren't going to all be the greatest or most iconic scenes, they aren't even all my #1 movie star crush objects. But you better believe I'm head over heels for these ladies. Heart-shaped boxes of chocolate all around.

10. In Marlene Dietrich's Mouth
Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress

Von Sternberg's bitter and baroque films make a hideous burlesque not just of humanity, but in The Scarlet Empress, of all human emotion, except, perhaps, Dietrich-worship. It's a hard obsession to argue with. Ostensibly, we're watching Dietrich document the evolution of naive Princess Sophia into cold, hard, magisterial Catherine the Great. It is certainly a wonder to watch Dietrich as the transformed Catherine, parading around like a liberated badass in a world of trolls and worms: when Catherine is revealed, she's the spectacle you bought the ticket to see. Captivating as she is as a reborn Bad Motherfucker, fitting hilariously into von Sternberg's gallery of grotesques is Dietrich's performance as Sophia-in-transition. She plays every scene literally wide-eyed, and in a breathless proto-Monroe idiot whisper. Dietrich doesn't drop her smoky eyelids until the woman is jaded and self-possessed. Most fascinating to me is this would-be seduction scene in the palace stables.

John Lodge as the concerned-but-horny Count Alexei is attempting to get into Catherine's pants for the 2000th time, but now she's willingly come to him, understanding his intentions; a sort-of-innocent, still undecided about taking the plunge into personal agency by way of debauchery. Lodge's frustrated and funny performance dominated their previous scenes, but this one's all in Dietrich's hands, and it's her best physical performance moment in the film. The playing is so weird and ridiculous we don't buy for a second that she's not the sensuous, frankly oversexed Deitrich of our dreams. Bugging out those mesmerist's eyes, she grabs an overhanging rope, awkwardly twisting her figure into unnatural poses, absentmindedly at first, until she falls backward into a haystack entirely on purpose. Avoiding eye contact with Alexei, she sticks a piece of straw between her impossible, swollen lips, for no discernable reason but an oral-fixation joke. When he plucks it from her mouth, she does it again. And again. And again! She just keeps putting staw in her mouth and looking in the opposite direction until Alexei and the audience are in a confused frenzy. It's one of the strangest, grossest, sexiest and most absurd seductions scenes in all of film. Yanking out the final golden blade, she gasps "if you come closer, I'll scream." It doesn't sound one bit like she means it. Subtext promptly becomes text, as Alexei growls "It'd be easier for you to scream without a straw in your mouth."

They kiss, sure, but was that ever the point? The unspeakably tasteless dirty-joke punchline is a beat later: a horse whinnies, Catherine panics and flees in a cloud of dust. Now that's a make-out scene.

My 10 Favorite Films of 2006... But NOT YOURS

The Rules of the Game

-Skip this introduction, if you have no problem with year-end film lists.

-We make lists because lists are fun. Even more fun, I've illustrated with The Hot Movie Babes of 2006!

-According to my "2006 Comprehensive Viewing Diary", I saw 129 films in 2006. Knowing I failed to record a few, that can probably be pumped up to 150. This is "pathetic" and I resolve to see more in 2007... however, I did manage to read more books in '06 than '05, or ever before, and frankly, I'm not willing to cut into that figure, no matter how much I like movies.

-If the movie was released in 2005, but there was no way to see it in the U.S. until 2006, it is a 2006 release for this list. While it may not be "fair" to include 2005 festival-and-foreign openers like Manderlay, The Proposition or Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, I feel it's a greater disservice to never give them an opportunity for listhood.

-If I see a commonality between the films below, it is that they are not making many year-end round-ups, and that on their release, I was generally frustrated or confused about how they were being discussed or ignored. I tend to be drawn to genre films because they engage, trouble and move us in a more seductive manner than Important Message Movies. Below are: a biopic that leaps the pitfalls of the genre by being about something larger than the subject herself. Two crime thrillers crafted by master hands but in which no one cared to look for what they might be "about". A comic book adaptation with more to say about fascism, imagination and the revolutionary spirit than Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men combined. A political documentary so grand it should make Michael Moore buy a gun and shoot himself in the head for crimes against humanity, but which isn't even eligible for Academy Awards. Gory Korean weirdness, smudgy digital mindscapes, and cartoon headtrips whose strange forms distracted writers from engaging their beauty. One hilarious, obnoxious foreigner goofing on Americans, making the nation pout in response... but not the one you think. A goony summer kiddie blockbuster so universally despised, no critic could be bothered to explain its success, unless to say it must be that audiences are stupid. Er... right.

I didn't gerrymander my list to favor underdogs, it just came out that way.

If you find these films unworthy, dare I suggest you did not think about them hard enough? I suppose I do.

-The disclaimer is unnecessary for Exploding Kinetoscope, because I'm happy to title it a "favorites" list. Those questioning the validity of "Ten Best" or the vague "Top Ten" lists might find peace by replacing a critic's "Best" with "Favorite".

If critics aren't qualified to make lists unless they've seen every film that year, then neither are they qualified to write about film unless they've seen every film in history. Neither are you qualified to have a best friend until you have tried out every person who ever lived. You do not have a favorite food, a favorite sweater, or favorite Beatles song. Are favorites inherently interesting? Must we undergo this semantic torture and soul-searching for a game that, for a rare occasion, allows critics to write only about films they enjoyed?

Look, I'll read your list, if you read mine. It's fun, and maybe we can convince each other to watch ten movies through each others' eyes. As Mr. Presley said, the Halls of Darkness have Doors That Open. Peek ye, through mine door!:

10. Wacky Races: Manderlay

Manderlay takes on the specific problem of America's foundation in slavery and the ultimate failure of the marginal improvements in race relations in the aftermath of abolition. Those are things Lars Von Trier thinks the nation does not like to talk about honestly, and bleak conclusions we rarely reach. An unfair generalization, perhaps, but this is hardly about being "fair". Manderlay is the more difficult film than Dogville. It's the meaner, funnier satire, too.

As Mr. Morrissey said, "I have spent my whole life in ruin, because of people who are nice." And so Manderlay and Dogville's terrible truths are ideas no one wants to hear, not ever. Are there possible problems with, gulp, democracy? No, no please, it cannot be that the very notion of kindness, charity and goodwill can be problematized in practice. As relevant and necessary as it will always be to take stock of race relations, Manderlay is, beneath that, a satire not of American racism, but a cultural tendency to simplify unfathomably complex issues. Beneath that, a parodic look at how and why social progressives do their good works in general. Manderlay is, beneath that, a puckish pantomime of human nature, as we struggle with moral dilemmas we've brought on ourselves, strive to do good for all the wrong reasons, and hurt each other in the name of salvation. Nice try, human beings!

Oh, and for my money, David Thomson can keep his Nicole Kidman fetish. I'm happy to develop one revolving around Bryce Dallas Howard. Reasons We Go to the Movies #1: To look at pretty girls.

9. I Outta V Ain't Bad: V for Vendetta


The only Alan Moore adaptation of which the Old Magician should be proud is the one that made him recoil the hardest? Ah well, a crazy genius is still crazy. The Wachowski Bros. and James McTeague may or may not realize how their minor story tinkering rejiggers the politics of Moore's novel to become an unambiguous call to active revolution, rather than a meditation on the process by which the power of the political symbol to makes its meaning manifest. The comic remains superior (superior to anything on this list?), but I'm unconvinced a madder Hollywood big-budgey could've been made from the material. McTeague makes a smashing debut... and no one would have made this movie but the Wachowskis.

8. Fertile Crescent City: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts


This movie is not about hot babes.
Here comes the story of the hurricane. The media whipped itself into a frenzy with tales of organized terror-squads of rapists and hospital snipers, implying without saying that perhaps the flooding of New Orleans was a modern cleansing of Sodom and Gomorrah. The implication is that no matter how much suffering CNN was happy to show you, not to go down to Louisiana and try to help. So never again should you let anyone tell you Spike Lee is irresponsible, too angry, or an upstart.

When the Levees Broke does its most important work as Lee documents and explains in level-headed terms exactly How It Went Down. Did you know how a levee works in engineering terms? The various construction options and cost of upkeep? The issues involved in building port cities? Exactly where to point the finger for what happened in the New Orleans flood and why? You will learn these things.

Spike Lee's Requiem, though structured as a Jazz Funeral, does not quite propose that we have entirely lost one of the greatest American cities. It proposes that something died inside the national character that summer, not because of a natural disaster, but the unnatural actions of a government toward its people. Because of laziness, ignorance, greed and lies, and oops! Those are all human failings. If you hadn't reason enough before, the Hurricane Katrina debacle should tell you: someone seriously does not care about your safety and well being. Not my president!

Levees is also about celebrating and remembering to value our national treasures of art and culture. There are sequences that Reel Film called "completely unrelated and downright pointless tangents (i.e. the history of jazz within the city)." It's a dead-wrong evaluation. In such a vast document, other critics have been most moved with political outrage; some needed Levees to truly understand the unfathomable damage to lives of survivors. The human loss would be atrocious in any situation; that it took place in a city whose primary contributions are to arts and culture make it easier to ignore for some, and harder to bear for others. Levees documents the most important Mardi Gras of all time. It's not a party: The Carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin explains, is a playing field for working out all issues, socioeconomic, political, communal, of death and renewal. And New Orleans certainly has a lot they deserve to work out.

7. Believeth All Things: A Scanner Darkly


Like a beam of pink light from Philip K. Dick's brain, comes Scanner, adapted by the most sympathetic sloppy philosopher on the contemporary movie scene. Linklatter is a Problem Author, a man whose body of work is half films I Do Not Get. I don't get why he wants to make School of Rock when he has Slacker and Waking Life rattling around his brain. Guru or crackpot, it is not mine to say, but Scanner Darkly's full-service breakfast-in-bed of hashish brownies and bong water provides more food for thought than any previous PKD adaptation. No other filmmaker has been philosophically nimbleminded enough to tackle the material. Ridley Scott, Spielberg, Verhoeven never stood a chance.

The rotoscoped animation augments the performances of those gorgeous icebergs Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, but obscures frenetic freaks Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey, Jr. It does afford an imaginary look at Ryder's breasts (truly, the movies are the stuff of which dreams are made!), but as any fan who's seen Autumn in New York can tell you, they don't look like that. Ryder's is the performance for which I couldn't wait, this year. As in her best work, Ryder constructs a character out of emotional building blocks that rub disconcertingly against her real life. Sympathetic and nervous, we watch her Donna attempt to drown her fears and personal disappointments in a pond of Slack, only to fall in, sink over her head, and nearly lose herself in nervous breakdown. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to watch, as Donna melts down while trying to force her coke-rushing brain to slow down so she can explain the intertwining reasons she's doing so many drugs, can't get closer to her boyfriend, and completely needs him. So uncomfortable that a fainthearted actor wouldn't have taken us there, let alone herself.

Reeves' monologue, in which he explores his filthy house like an anthropologist of the Self, investigating himself in both senses of the word, is my favorite male performance of the year. In his stoned terror, Reeves' Bob Arctor wonders if he has inadvertently undone the Gordian knot of his existence, been doomed, having unravelled his own spiritual DNA. "What does a scanner see?," he asks. "Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk." Arctor gropes for the reasons we turn to the fantastic for stories to explain the mysteries of existence. The Biblical reference is important, for what is the Holy Bible but a fantasy novel investigation of the soul? The power of fantastic fiction is in metaphor so incisive as to cut through the muddle of perception, and scan for the truth. It is a moment of clarity.

6. All That Killin and Fuckin, and No Sons: The Departed


At this point in the list, and until we reach #1, the ranking means little to me. The Departed... man, I'm pretty rave-prone, you know? But in The Departed, Martin Scorsese builds within his exciting little cops-and-robbers story, a complex web of visual motifs to match William Monahan's meticulous infernal machine of a screenplay. Doubled and reversed characters abound: at the story's core, DiCaprio's Bill Costigan a good man duty-bound to act like a criminal, and Damon's Colin Sullivan a bad man honor-sworn to act like a do-gooder. They vye to please two stand-in fathers, one dark (Nicholson's nutzo crime boss Frank Costigan), one light (Sheen's Capt. Queenan). The men chase each other without realizing it, through endless corridors of ironic payoffs, mirrored situations, loaded dialogue. "I'm a detective, I'll find you!" Colin flirts with a woman, a pickup line from a man who can't find himself. "One does tend to follow the other," goes a line late in the picture I wouldn't spoil for you, but it's in reference to anything but the cat-and-rat games Bill and Colin are playing. Visual riffs on Psycho, Vertigo, The Wild Bunch, The Third Man and Kill, Baby... Kill play witty cinephile sports, even as they expand the real issues of identity and personal responsibility addressed by the cracking crime story.

Even The Departed's admirers seemed to agree it is not obviously "about" something, unlike the self-announcing weight of Raging Bull or Last Temptation of Christ. I smell a rat. The Departed is about personal identity in crisis. It examines how the ambiguities implicit in acting or performance may corrode self-reliance, loyalty and family responsibility. The Departed sees the exhausting, chaotic blur as we are forced to shift between domestic, public, private, and work identities. In short, it's a story about the fractious stress of getting ahead in America: don't stop till you're numb.

5. Into the White: Sympathy for Lady Vengeance


This movie is totally about hot babes.
Like his spiritual brother-in-arms Quentin Tarantino, Park Chan-Wook makes sick joke exploitation movies staged as handsome arthouse films, and bursting with delirious style. As with Tarantino, beyond the virtuoso picture-making, star-turn performances and youthful energies, it is difficult to get anyone to talk seriously about the story, the thematic elegance and the content beneath the exciting form. Lady Vengeance completes Park's loose trilogy, with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, but who in the press asked what that might mean? Hint: it's not just about revenge. If that's as far as you can get, you're shortchanging yourself as much as you are Park Chan-Wook.

It seems to me that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance gradually exposed its characters to a world of moral relativity, and the difficulty of evaluating your motivation and responsibilities in light of knowing everyone is in the same predicament. Sympathy, after all, can be a real bitch.

Oldboy expands the idea, leaving characters and audience reeling at the prospect of surviving in a chaotic universe. Is it a shaggy dog story, a man being punished for a crime he had no idea he committed? No, it is about the impossibility of trying to chart and control every unforeseen consequence of every action. Oldboy expands Mr. Vengeance's existential dilemma: what if you do not ultimately even answer to yourself? It seems to suggest we take those moments of happiness as they come, before the awful reality of their context is revealed.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance has the trilogy's most hopeful ending, though our protagonist, Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), goes through no less agonizing a journey. She suffers similar psychic trauma to Ryu in Mr. Vengeance, learning that your Right may conflict with someone else's. She is battered around by the absurdist universe that tortures Oh Dae-Su in Oldboy. She nearly slits her throat on the blade of her own poor choices: having sympathy for the vengeful may not be the same as approval, assistance, or enabling them.

In a trilogy so black and comfortless, how can Geum-ja find any salvation without Park copping-out? It's a salvation hard-won, but Geum-ja finds it. Revel in your ability to create opportunities for redemption. Be grateful for the instances when you greet a second chance having learned a lesson. Bury your face in them and dig in.

4. Queen of the Universe: The Notorious Bettie Page


Gretchen Mol gives the performance of a lifetime, and easily of the year, but how the film was ignored and overlooked as a major artistic statement is one of the great mysteries of 2006.

How does one make a sympathetic, honest biopic about a subject who seems in some ways to have later turned her back on her celebrated work? Is this possible, without pulling punches? Or without seeming to end in defeat? Is it unfair to a good Christian woman to claim her life as a third wave feminist sex-positive parable, when she never claimed to be fighting the good fight in the first place? Since Bettie Page, after her career as nudie pin-up, bondage model, grindhouse-movie dancer, and Miss January 1955, was born again into the Spirit, is there a way to make Bettie's story end in triumph not just for the enduring icon, but for the woman? Can we reconcile the destinies of Bettie Page, Pin-Up Queen and Bettie Mae Page from Nashville, TN? How does one responsibly depict Page's modeling work for the reasons it is beloved, without casting it in different ideological light than the participants ever considered? Is there a way to depict the dismay of government and religious forces about pornography without smugly portraying them as repressed killjoys? Is there continuity between pin-up photography and pornography? What about bondage and fetish photography and pornography? For whom, and how can these things be liberating? The model? The audience? The ironic or nostalgic audience?

Mary Harron's Bettie-pic decides that rather than avoid these questions, they are the primary issue at hand. With more grace than Citizen Kane itself, The Notorious Bettie Page charts those conflicts at the heart of our lives, and decides it is how we conduct ourselves amid a sea of inevitable contradictions and ambiguity that defines us. The biography is sketched in bold, decisive strokes, and then the characters are left to interpret the meaning of their own lives. What do we regret, and of what are we proud? Who tells us what our sins are? Who wields judgement and defines our moral codes? Most importantly, Harron and Guinevere Turner's challenging screenplay asks: of all the patriarchy's methods of controlling female sexuality and yoking feminine power, which manifestations hurt the most?

There aren't easy answers, but neither does Notorious turn Page's story into a grim moral quandary, when we are probably here as fans who want to understand how a woman in ball-gag and ropes could look so sunny, make it all so fun. It is not a harrowing film, even though every man in Page's normal life is out to control, dominate and do violence to her free will and self-confident, natural sexuality. It's ultimately funny and warm because everyone wants to exploit Bettie Page... except the exploitation filmmakers, and fetish and nudie magazine photographers: they are artists, and they love, understand, and empower her, in their own naive way. Is that unfair? It seems pretty clever, perceptive and accurate to me, and so Notorious Bettie Page lets Bettie Page reclaim her own myth, and in return gives us back a strong, smart, talented, funny woman at the core of a great American icon.

Mott Hupfel's cinematography is so gorgeous that any chrome postcard and mid-century girlie mag collector will weep. Achieving what The Aviator could not, Hupfel recreates the photographic style of not just the year in which a scene took place, but of whatever photographer was shooting her at the time. It is no gimmick, and no approximation. Anyone intimately familiar with Bunny Yeager's saturated pastels, Irving Klaw's grainy dance loop films, and the cute griminess of Varietease should be in awe of Hupfel's ability to not only imitate but integrate and expand these styles, and make them play, butt heads and help the director make story and emotional points. And I mean it: at first glimpse of Bettie splashing in the searing-blue Florida waves, I cried. It means people can still be photographing films that look like Bunny's pictures, and the choice is being consciously made to create ugly films.

3. Avast Me Hearties!: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest


I was talking with my friend Arlen today about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and how if you caught an episode by accident, it probably seemed ridiculous, silly, perhaps bad. It is none of those things, as anyone fully invested in that subversive fantasy and rich character drama knows. You gotta be a fan, though, or you're never gonna know the joys of being a fan.

From the unlikeliest source comes a new form of pop entertainment. Disney, beginning probably with the 2002 video game Kingdom Hearts is the first major American media conglomerate to begin crafting entertainment that seems designed around the desires, needs and dreams of fan culture. This is a big deal. The Japanese pop culture industry has for years reaped the benefits of catering to otaku and the broader audience alike. Kingdom Hearts crossed-over anime and Final Fantasy style RPGs with the texts beloved to the similarly obsessive Disney-head crowd. Smart marketing move, but that's not all: smart, generous storytelling, willing to open its fictive world. Here's an area where cinema writers, who typically love analyzing closed, unmalleable texts fear to tread. Pirates 2 is for Henry Jenkins.

The story is built out of the elements that satisfy and inspire fan-fiction writers. Careful, obsessive attention to the arcs and quirks of every periphery character, piling on the backstory and complicated relationships, until the puffy summer blockbuster assumes Wagnarian proportion. Every character combination would be a potentially interesting pairing for slashfic. Holes in character histories and the timeline are left open for imagining more adventures. New fantasy elements and characters are introduced with such color and variety, they expand the Pirate-verse in every direction. Any Pirates fan gets a three hour cruise on the funniest, sexiest, most breathless, dreamiest galleon on the water. The rest of you may be lost at sea.

Pirates keeps both hands free to spin gold out of solid fanservice. The Disneyland fetishist is moistening up as soon as the scene moves to the deep bayou where the ride opens... but when we get cameos by the "famous" fireflies, believe me: Annual Passholders everywhere spontaneously generated E-Tickets in our pants. Captain Jack Sparrow is granted the biggest, baddest entrance since Frank-N-Furter; every Janet Weiss in the audience faints. The revelation of a magical, literal Moral Compass immediately spawns 1000 pages of naive erotica about what happens if any of the cast points it at anyone else. Phallic sword jokes, Elizabeth in drag, everyone in bondage and homoerotic whipping scenes means something for everyone! The cosmology explodes into a specialized Land of the Dead (World's End), demons and monsters, mythological curses and Vodun priestesses. A gambling scene explains a game you can play at home. Don't get the ladies started on the empowering role models to be found in Keira Knightley's liberated lady Elizabeth Swann or Naomie Harris' scary sexed-up Tia Dalma. Boys get to appreciate the sacrifices of their martyred fathers like Will Turner, girls get both hands-on high-sea adventure, and pretty dresses, and Monster Kids all want a pet Kracken. The cosplay opportunities provided by Tia Dalma, Davey Jones, and Cannibal King Jack Sparrow are boggling.

The effort to drive fans out of their skulls with ecstasy runs so deep it's downright frightening. When Elizabeth tricks the crew of a ship on which she's stowed away into believing a ghost is onboard, the tale concocted by the superstitious sailors is a rejected storyline for The Haunted Mansion, proposed in 1957. Now, tell me that isn't crafted with care.

2. Boy, You Sure Are Good At Telling a Funny Story!: The Black Dahlia


Yeah, right, lady!
Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) sits nude in bed, but for a fedora perched at a silly angle on his head, a cigarette in his mouth and a femme fatale (Hilary Swank) sprawled on his chest. The movie detective is stripped down to his most basic, iconic props (er, heh heh, where's your gun, buddy?). So is that what makes film noir? Shadows, macs, gangsters and cool jazz? That God of Delirium, Brian De Palma, knows it is not the fashionable trappings that compose the core of a genre. It is the filmmaking language that creates their narrative conventions and, here, the worldview. If De Palma knows anything, it's the biology of thrillers, crime pictures, detective stories. Film noir is ruled by a black whirlpool, ready to suck down anyone, anytime. Once it's got you, you do not escape. That's the heart of noir. At the mutilated center of The Black Dahlia's whirlpool is the enigma of Elizabeth Short.

The film is based on a novel by celebrated douchebag James Ellroy (don't get me started, folks, there's not enough mill for that much grist!). The story fabricates wholesale nearly every fact concerning Short's life and the investigation of her 1947 murder. It should drive the true crime buff in me up the wall, and it seems to have aggravated Ellroy fans (I imagine them in a constant state of aggravation anyway), but as in all of De Palma, the real subject is the Movies.

As Bucky investigates the Short murder, all he uncovers is the bottomless, swirling despair of noir's amoral, consuming void. There are not goodies and baddies, no Light Woman and Dark. From the corridors of power to the average upstanding cop to the disenfranchised would-be starlet, everyone is corrupt, lying, weak and guilty. Los Angeles itself is rotten in its very foundation. In one of the film's most giddy, ominous moments, a literal earthquake sends sick vibrations through Bucky's world: the planet itself is unstable, untrustworthy. He eventually meets himself at the bottom, as the murder worms into his psyche, the suspects bump against his own social circles, and the motive is located in his own domestic space.

James Ellroy likes to believe this is a model of how the world works, and all a man can cling to is the screwed-up integrity of his conflicted, repressed macho heart. Brian De Palma does not cotton to that nonsense, and makes the existential brutality of The Black Dahlia the engine which powers the closed-circuit loop of film noir itself. De Palma's masterstroke has always been the understanding that the language of movie thrillers translates into gibberish in the real world, and yet they excite and move us anyway. From Blackmail to Saw, the thriller does not "make sense", almost above and beyond any other genre, yet we happily meet it halfway and play by its rules. Film noir often wears the mask of detective fiction, the illusion of Holmesian deduction is eventually stripped away to reveal the black math beneath the logic. We accept that the bona fide classic The Big Sleep ultimately does not make sense, so The Black Dahlia subverts the language of the genre by stretching our capacity for lunatic un-reason to the limit.

Because Dahlia is not about the real moral dilemmas of mankind, but how we interface with a genre, Bucky's quest is specifically about how he may navigate the precarious grounds of film noir. There can be no purpose of constructing a personal code of ethics when the game rules are designed to ensnare everyone. De Palma proposes a delightful answer to this bleak problem. Bucky finds a strategy for survival by recognizing his own capacity for perversity, the amorphic capabilities of his own body amid nothing but body-related anxiety, the creative skill of free-association: Bucky learns the value of play, within the genre's nasty web.

Symbolically emasculated in the first scene, when his teeth are smashed out of his face by his own partner (Aaron Eckhart) in a fundraiser boxing match, Bucky eventually traces a network of similar mouth injury imagery to avenge Short's murder. In Swank's slumming bisexual aristocrat Madeleine Linscott, who's made herself over in Short's image, Bucky's first indulging in bad-news Vertigo necrophilia. But he also picks up from Madeleine the ability to recognize the eroticism in his own homosocial relationships, the pervasiveness of costume and playacting, and the polymorphous perversity at work in every human. And so on. Bucky's happy ending finds him in the arms of Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson, acting like she doesn't know how to smoke) icy ex-prostitute accomplice to several crimes, with knife-scars that mirror the inscription of male power upon the body of Liz Short. My hunch is the guy doesn't find solace there because she's the least-corrupt of the cast, but the symbol with the most ties to every issue that's consumed him: she's Elizabeth Short, she's Madeline Linscott, she's Lee Blanchard, she's George Tilden. With his new skills, he sees in this nihilistic universe that Kay is imbued with meaning. The white light into which Bucky steps in the ending is the enveloping glow of a film projector.

De Palma casts himself as an unseen director in a fictional screen test for Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner). He emotionally brutalizes the woman for no particular reason except that it is what directors of thrillers do, for their own diverse reasons. De Palma does not make hollow genre deconstructions; he obviously works out problems of power and control, gender issues, of symbol and language, of space and physics... it just all seems so mad, and unreal because he focuses on how they operate in the movies. The locus of putrid inspiration behind the Dahlia murder turns out to be a movie (The Man Who Laughs, no less). However, it's in that cruel screen test that Short can tell her story, that she is preserved in one piece. In a meaningful way, the movies also save her life, and Bucky's. The nexus of all fascination, beauty and power in The Black Dahlia is not poor Elizabeth Short's tormented body but the obsessive dream of cinema.

1. Finding Something Inside the Story: INLAND EMPIRE


Uh-oh, looks like somebody's movie is too hard for people. The opening fence, roses and sky in Blue Velvet symbolize America! Most of Mulholland Dr. is a crazy dream! And if your David Lynch appreciation cannot extend beyond this kind of literalist idiocy, you'll never mine the riches of INLAND EMPIRE. Ten years from now, I promise it's a masterpiece, and haven't (Eraserhead) we (Fire Walk With Me) been (Lost Highway) through ("Twin Peaks" finale) this ("Mulholland Dr." pilot) before? The general tone of frustration and disappointment among newsprint reviewers only begs the question "exactly who do you want David Lynch to be?"

Imagine, if you will, another world. A world in which David Lynch's hallmarks are not outrageous violence, uncomfortable sexuality and impenetrable weirdness, but the active exploration of the subconscious and our resistance to its fertile boundlessness; the location of evil and sorrow in the will to dominate; the abiding comfort and beauty in forms, colors, textures, sounds; a universe of hard lessons, but underlying connection, chaos bound and avowed to keep love, mystery and universal energies on course. That is the world of my David Lynch. You may need to watch with a third eye, but as Jeffrey Beaumont said, there are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience.

INLAND EMPIRE is one of Lynch's encouraging works, harrowing though it is, so ignore all reports that your spirit guide is going to ditch you on the astral plane. Laura Dern in a devastating, giving performance as Nikki Grace as Susan Blue, is our center, a heroine who learns to traverse boundaries, surfs the vast ocean of the non-rational and comes out on top and smiling. Pity those unwilling to even try.

Addendum : Number Eleven

I honestly feel sadness and dishonesty for not finding room for...

Borat - Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan - Joining the sacred Hardest I Ever Laughed ranks of South Park - Bigger, Longer, Uncut, Brain Candy, The Nutty Professor and Jingle Cats: Sing Meow of Christmas is Borat. That is pretty damn respectable company, Mr. Cohen. Neither as mean or political as anyone claimed, the central joke is less that Americans are ignoramuses than that everyone is funny when in uncomfortable social situations. Good enough for me.

Cute Multiplex Junk

Sometimes we have special "ways" of enjoying movies. These include: irony, derision, erotic spectacle, and rooting for outsiders.

Casino Royale - Between Daniel Craig and Eva Green, which of the leads do you most want to see in a bathing suit? You may change your mind by the end, because the only proper answer is: both! "Jeffrey Wright" is also an acceptable alternate.

Apocalypto - Weird. Dumb or possibly crazy, Mel Gibson gave me the a lot of gleeful enjoyment of a film in the opposite way the author intended.

Snakes on a Plane - Hey Rob Zombie, you know how you think you know about and love exploitation movies? The key element you have forgotten is known as "fun". Snakes was given an unfair handicap from "go", but made it over the finish line with more heart and determination than anyone could have expected.

I Don't Know What to Say

Is it possible I spent more time with my mouth hanging open in awe at Lady in the Water than any other film of 2006? Certainly it appalled me very much, but it gave me so much perverse pleasure, I find it so fascinating, that it deserves some recognition for sheer misguided, unworthy, confused, artistically-stunted splendor.

Combustable Moving-Picture Viewer Exists One Year!

"Tesla invented this cake... but I'm eating it!"
Today marks the one year anniversary of The Exploding Kinetoscope's first post. I can honestly say it has been variously fun, torturous, a waste of time, and enriching... in short, everything blogging is all about. Other film blogs may give you more daily content. I've generated only 56 posts in the entire year (a surprise even to me). I'm happy with much of that writing, though anyone reading the introductory post can sense it's not nearly as much writing as I anticipated. But I don't know who else is going to give you 10-page essays on one performance in Teen Wolf.


Minako and Usagi lay waste to the
ExKin official birthday cake.
Eat up, ladies!
I debuted ExKin the day after Christmas, but it's also the day before my birthday. There's nothing important about that, except I wanted to have three fun days in a row. Kinetoscope was always intended as a personal exercise in improving my film writing. And I wanted to sharpen my viewing habits. They go hand in hand. I like that: a passion for art consumption and an artistic skill set holding hands, on their way to the movies. And oh my God, you guys, do I love going to the movies. And almost as good, is getting espresso after, and talking about the movies. I obviously spend more time watching and writing about film than I fake-publish here. I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but dexterity of thought and speed are my focus for 2007; expect at least twice as much Kinetoscope next year. Faster, looser, but, well, more.

At times like this, it's natural to ask "why?" - why keep a public film diary? And why read someone else's? Well, I like blogs because they tend to be written by obsessives, those living the cinephile lifestyle in full, and those who write about film because they cannot help it, not because they're being paid to do so. The mission here is still a journey through all-things movies. It's a life of haunting the broken seats and smoky carpets of revival theaters... sleepwalking through the hidden aisles lined with dusty racks of over-sized VHS boxes... navigating the gleaming electronics store displays, head spinning from the new-plastic scent of freshly opened DVDs... What are we looking for? Where is Filmland?

It is the kinship between Famous Monsters and Cahiers. It is a tunnel between the drive-in concession stand and the arthouse projection booth. It's that weird spot where parallel streets Hollywood and Sunset meet:

When I moved to Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time making quiet pilgrimages to locations where Ed Wood, Jr. lived and worked. At the place where Hollywood and Sunset meet, is Wood's old office. And the Vista theater. And it's right by the Monogram studios. All in all, I'd say it's a holy place of movie history, though I doubt it's on many star maps, or gets many tourist visitors. If you've found it, you have deserved to find it. That's why I do it.

Self-Indulgence Bonus: My 5 Favorite Posts!
5. King Kong (2005) review, the first "real" post. Blogs are neat: write a review as distended, ridiculous, excessive as you like. No one can stop you.
4. Silly Red Eye review which caused much fury among young girls on Cillian Murphy crush-sites! No, seriously. I'm serious.
3. Some days it seems like I absolutely love every movie ever made.
2. Script changes to Kill Bill: how, why, and the net result. Stretching the limits of detail-enlargement like a missing scene from Blow-up!
1. Serious paper about narrative strategies in The Shining!

Notice: Black Maria Overhaul!

Boring tech note: On this fine Monday, ExKin is switching "Bloggo"-things over to a full BloggerBeta. As an artist, and typophile, I can't stand to write and present in the standard-issue Blogger template, so the parlour may look a little screwy today, as the furniture gets shifted around. Frankly, Blogger Beta's layout editor stinks for anyone who just wants to write their own HTML, but I had the foresight to create a couple dummy Beta blogs to play around with, so everything should be in order by the end of the day.

Then I'll tell you a secret about INLAND EMPIRE.

P.S. - The spellcheck's replacement suggestion for "typophile" is "pedophile". The end.

Update: Everything's now more or less in order, and a little prettier than before. The main reason to move to Beta is the new Labels function: check out the sidebar under Index and immediately find every post about Winona Ryder. I'll be adding labels to every previous post, over time. My limited CSS skills made the switchover take all day, which is ridiculous, and I would rather be working on new content. The beloved ExKin mascots of ugly '70s people shooting home movies will return, but wrangling code is not as much fun as writing about movies.

Movie Anxiety

Can today really be here? December 15, 2006 is the Los Angeles release date for David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, the Movie Day I've most anticipated all year. Strike that - this is the day I've waited for all year. And there have been a lot of big Movie Days this year. BUT!: Our greatest living film artist, my personal-all-time-favorite director, our Mr. Lynch actually favors us with a film relatively often, but it is always an event. A momentous event. There is only one chance to see a new Lynch film for the first time; that first viewing is rarely the most interesting or satisfying, but it is the most tingly, because it is the freshest, and only unprepared viewing. Like a first date, it is the excitement of full-immersion into a new world of possibility. With Lynch, I avoid spoilers like the black plague; as far as I'm concerned, Mr. Lynch will be having his way with my brain in a few hours, with no image, plot point, color or sound anticipated. So I'm pretty antsy. In lieu of a focused entry, which would be impossible, today I present a look at a feeling a few rare films have given me which is rarely talked about. I read about helpless hysterical laughter. And abject terror. Physical, gut-level sickness. Even obsessive, unrequited movie-star love. This is something... else?

Punch

When I saw Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love in 2002, it produced in me stress symptoms similar to a low-grade panic attack. From the clank/pump/wheeze of Jon Brion's woozy score, to the dialogue consisting entirely of unfinished sentences, to the haphazard arrangement of absurdist touches, indiscriminately harrowing or whimsical; the elements all butt against each other, do not fit, and made me feel like I was hyperventilating for 95 minutes. The scary, ecstatic feeling is comparable to the free-fall of a bungee jump or the prolonged head rush as a romance begins. This isn't to say I liked Punch-Drunk Love at first. As I stumbled out of the theater, I felt unhappy and wrung out, jittery and unable to speak coherently about the film. Total temporary disconnect, folks.

Paris

The first time I saw Jacques Rivette's Paris nous appartient [Paris Belongs to Us; 1960], was some European film class screening with a late start, and the meandering weirdo epic surely ended in the early hours of morning. I plopped down in a seat at that ill-attended, supposedly-mandatory screening, and as the stoned paranoia of bottomless political conspiracy unspooled, consuming every character, engulfing everything in their world, Something Bad happened. You can say this film is about a conspiracy gripping postwar Europe. A conspiracy so expansive and dispersedly structured that the more lit student Anne Goupil investigates her friend Juan's suicide, the further she gets from the heart of truth, until it includes everyone, everything, every building, every street, every object in every home. We often talk about being "absorbed" or "engrossed" by a film but Paris nous appartient leaks off the screen. It implicates your personal space. After Paris nous appartient has crawled over your body, you belong to Paris, and for days, weeks after, every time I see it, I cannot shake that feeling that I am part of this web, ever-expanding, ever more vague and confusing.

Yikes. I gotta split. More later.

Schoolboy Crush: SL&TIFR's Winter Exam, Extended Edition

The (sorta) quarterly film surveys-disguised-as-tests at Dennis Cozzalio's hard-working and thoughtful movie blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule are fast becoming a film Blogospherical tradition. The answers are compulsively readable, though like any Internet meme basically amount to a list of superlatives and complaints. Take/ read "PROFESSOR DAVE JENNINGS' MILTON-FREE, UNIVERSE-EXPANDING HOLIDAY MIDTERM" here! Below are expanded versions of my answers. Pfft. And they say people shouldn't take movie blogs seriously.

Screencap courtesy of Winona Online
1) What was the last movie you saw, either in a theater or on DVD, and why?

On DVD: Open Season (aka- The Recon Game; 1974), delightful kidnapping/rape/human-hunting/revenge junk with Peter Fonda and John Phillip Law. Why?: on a vigilante justice kick!

2) Name the cinematographer whose work you most look forward to seeing, and an example of one of his/her finest achievements.

Ubaldo Terzano and Bava's photography makes Blood and Black Lace my favorite looking motion picture of all time. The primary colors will sear your brain, and the pools of pastel will cool them off again. It's a perfect marriage of form and material, as the movie needs to look like a fashion magazine photo spread in the fashion show scenes and convincingly lurid for the murders.

Among the living and working: I kicked around picking Frederick Elmes and Tak Fujimoto. No way do I miss a chance to see those guys at work. BUT: right now, I'm all about Jeong-hun Jeong, Park Chan-Wook's cinematographer for Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Not always the most sumptuous, but his pictures look tired, sad, rained-upon, and beautiful.

For the olden-timey, it's gotta be Robert Burks' hallucinogenic work for Hitchcock. If you like that, check out Joe MacDonald's color pictures, especially the dress-shopping sequence in Bigger Than Life! Sorry folks, that was a crappy answer!

3) Joe Don Baker or Bo Svenson?

Baker in Charley Varrick sleeps in his clothes, sweats a lot, says stuff like "I didn't travel six-hundred miles for the amusement of morons. Izzat clear, ladies?," threatens guys with pliers and blowtorches, and his name is Molly. Now that's a heavy. And he played Winona Ryder's dad once. And yeah, he's the better B-Puss, too.

4) Name a moment from a movie that made you gasp (in horror, surprise, revelation...…)

Winona Ryder as Lelaina Pierce (yeah, right. She's playing Winona Ryder) lies on her bed in a T-shirt, cigarette smoldering in hand, staring at the ceiling like a dope, contemplating the messy, un-frothy, no-fun romantic triangle she's gotten herself into. You know, basically assuming the Crucifixion position for a generation: Jesus slept. It's the one moment in Reality Bites that transcends the Gen-X-ploitation... but that's not why I gasped. I'd already fallen hard, some 6 years earlier (Beetlejuice), but I just hadn't seen anyone photograph Ryder like that before. Gulp... Gasp!

5) Your favorite movie about the movies.

Ed Wood, 8 1/2 and David Holzman's Diary are my favorite films about the joy, agony and catharsis of being a film artist, but... as a meditation on the waking dream of cinema, it's Mulholland Dr. for me, all the twisty, dangerous way.

6) Your Favorite Fritz Lang movie.

I like it pulpy, I like it eerie, I like it wacked-out as possible, I like it Testament of Dr. Mabuse.

7) Describe the first time you ever recognized yourself in a movie.

Francesco Dellamorte -- who continually Gets The Girl and Loses The Girl, doesn't appreciate his friends enough, dresses in cool boots, black pants and white shirts -- feeling sorry for himself, gets drunk on red wine, stands in the autumn rain, talking to a statue of the Reaper. Dellamorte Dellamore. Badass, solipsist, or romantic? And I go "Are they making fun of me?"

8) Carole Bouquet or Angela Molina?

When it comes to Conchitas in your own life, you think the lusty Molinas will be harder to handle, but the Bouquets cause more trouble in the end. Therefore: Bouquet.

9) Name a movie that redeems the notion of nostalgia as something more than a bankable commodity.

Say wha'? I'm not being a wiseacre; I don't think I understand the question.

10) Favorite appearance by an athlete in an acting role.

Tor Johnson, Plan 9 From Outer Space: He's a big boy, Johnny!

11) Favorite Hal Ashby movie.

I like to watch Being There.

12) Name the first double feature you'’d program for opening night of your own revival theater.

Children of Paradise and Night of the Bloody Apes.

13) What's the name of your revival theater?

The Thanatos -- if it's an grand old movie palace. If it's a dump-hole with brick walls and folding chairs: The Exploding Kinetoscope Parlour.

14) Humphrey Bogart or Elliot Gould?

If this is a question of who is the better screen Marlowe, I refuse to dignify it with a response. That thing Elliot Gould is doing is not Philip Marlowe.

15) Favorite Robert Stevenson movie.

Yikes, don't ask me to pit Mary Poppins against That Darn Cat! Just don't... Poppins has more sheer, universal pop culture iconography, Walt's personal quality-control, and great songs, it's still funny and magical no matter what age you are... and Julie Andr--... Okay, That Darn Cat! I love TDC! so much it's repulsive. And there goes all my credibility. In all areas of life. Somebody take me inside and make me a big weird sandwich!

"D.C's wearing a wristwatch!"
16) Describe your favorite moment in a movie that is memorable because of its use of sound.

Daria Nicolodi as Gianna does an unexpected shimmy-shake as she haughtily leaves Marc Daly (David Hemmings)'s apartment in Deep Red She's trying to turn the head of the disinterested pianist, but also doing it to remind herself she's a desirable woman: a non-diegetic electric guitar plays a startling, cute and sassy boogie-down lick. I don't know if Marc can hear it, but we can, and that's what matters.

17) Pink Flamingos-- yes or no?

Yes, it is the funniest comedy in the history of motion pictures. Yes, if it were made today the entire cast and crew would be arrested for terrorism. Yes, the movie celebrates the spirit of America by tearing apart everything it stands for.

No, I'm not overstating the case for Pink Flamingos. Anyone who says otherwise will be executed for assholeism!

18) Your favorite movie soundtrack score.

Ennio Morricone's crazysexycool Diabolik, but only if Christy belting out "Deep Down" counts as part of the score.

However: The moment the mournful, noble trumpet begins playing on "L'Arena" on Morricone's score for The Mercenary is the most powerful film music I've ever heard. It reduces me to tears by the end. When it was repurposed in Kill Bill Vol. 2, as soon as the music began, I knew what was coming. It set me of immediately.

19) Fay Wray or Naomi Watts?

Naomi Watts is the better actress. Fay Wray is the better Ann Darrow. I would like to have seen Ms. Wray play Jet Girl, however.

20) Is there a movie that would make you question the judgment and/or taste of a film critic, blogger or friend if you found out they were an advocate of it?

"Question," certainly, but not "discount out of hand." Opinions alone are worthless: their relative value is in the "why." So: Donnie Darko, the collected anything of Kevin Smith, Twin Town, Don Bluth movies, Hard Candy. But I'm always willing to listen.

21) Pick a new category for the Oscars and its first deserving winner.

Best Promotional Poster Art for a Motion Picture. The intention would simply be to improve the state of movie advertising by providing motivation for more handsome posters. This year's winner: The Black Dahlia.

22) Favorite Paul Verhoeven movie.

Robocop. R-C and Showgirls are the only Verhoeven In America movies in which his satire is pleasurable in a way that actually makes me laugh, and doesn't seem to shame the audience for enjoying genre stories.

23) What is it that you think movies do better than any other art form?

Better than any other artform, film preserves images of beautiful people in motion. Not to be coy: I am talking about Eros.

24) Peter Ustinov or Albert Finney?

For Hercules, and in all other things: dude, Blackbeard's Ghost. Ustinov to the end. What's wrong with you people!? I'm just sayin': Blackbeard's Ghost.

25) Favorite movie studio logo, as it appears before a theatrical feature.

a) Warner Brothers' three-fat, wormy white stripes W in a black oval against an angry red field before The Exorcist.
b) Universal's miniature aeroplane ride before the creepy-adorable miniatures of The Mummy's opening credits.
c) Alternate selection: The Vestron Video logo before anything and everything.

26) Name the single most important book about the movies for you personally.

Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman's Midnight Movies, 1983.

27) Name the movie that features the best twist ending. (Please note the use of any "spoilers" in your answer.)

Spoiler: Psycho (1960). End spoiler.

28) Favorite Francois Truffaut movie.

Jules and Jim, I guess. Runner up... Indifferent: The Movie!

29) Olivia Hussey or Claire Danes?

Olivia Hussey never gave a performance as good as Danes on "My So-Called Life". Claire Danes never made anything as fun as Black Christmas. Call that round a draw.

So as Juliets… Claire Danes didn't take her top off, seems to misunderstand what the word "wherefore" means, but gets to wear better costumes and is in the more compelling film. Olivia Hussey's fair busting at the seams of her costume, and gives the competent performance. Round 2: Draw.

As babes: judge if you must, I'm a Claire Danes man. Danes it is.

30) Your most memorable celebrity encounter.

I made a joke about "special sauce" while Morgan Spurlock (Super-Size Me) and I used adjacent urinals.

31) When did you first realize that films were directed?

I realized the production tasks of a director when I read a children's special-effects overview called Magic in the Movies. Either the book or my comprehension made it sound like a lot of boring organizational work, and not a creative job.

The real answer, the realization that a director can be the key author of a film, makes vital creative decisions and might have a body of work worth exploring because of that authorship, came after watching "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" episodes, asking my parents about the host, and then seeing Vertigo. Who turned a potentially hackneyed rooftop chase sequence into a mini psychodrama about perilous mortality, the queasy moral issues of self-preservation, and the sublime terror of psychological free-fall? The director did that. I realized films were directed, while hanging off a rooftop with Detective Scottie Ferguson. I was 10 years old, and so afraid I was almost sick, and I knew whose fault it was. Hitchcock did it to me.

The Devil Looks Over Your Shoulder: Film Criticism On the Run

"The critics who can’t break you / unwittingly, they make you." - Morrissey

Prologue - M. Night Shyamalan Goes Nutzo / Manny's Last Laugh

A martyr for the cause. Never forget.
In the most blood-pressure-popping, teeth-gnash-inspiring moment of M. Night Shyamalan's illiterate, arrogant summer flopparoo, Lady in the Water (2006), the director sics a mythological monster that he made up on a snooty straw-man film critic played by Bob Balaban. It is clearly intended as comeuppance for a minor villain. It is staged as if it were a Stand-Up-and-Cheer! moment for the audience. The narrative justification is that the film critic has given sad-sack everyman Mr. Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) bad information about how to identify mystical powers that lay dormant inside the residents of a Philadelphia apartment complex, and now the magical visiting Narf (Bryce Dallas Howard) is dying for The Critic's mistake.

Now, it would take a volume - and I hope such a book is written someday - to fully unpack the hubris on display in Lady in the Water. It borders on psychosis. In the scene under discussion, Lady fully leapfrogs over the border, jumpkicks the border, and shatters the border, and crosses into hateful insanity. The attack on the critic is a tactic (one among many in Lady in the Water) to make the film uncriticizablee. It is predicated on a lengthy list of false assumptions, accusations, and primary misapprehensions.


Most insecure man in the world?
Why does Shyamalan need to lash out at critics at all, let alone in such an infantile way? Isn't this a man Newsweek called "the next Spielberg" on the cover of the magazine? Does Shyamalan imagine that popular summer movie audiences have such venom for critics that they will enjoy seeing one shredded in his movie? We are told - nay ordered - in Lady in the Water to view the story as a Fairy Tale, and with the rules of Fairy Tale narrative in place... where does petty revenge on film critics fit into the Fairy Tale model? Within the story itself, the critic has only answered questions asked of him by the misguided hero, not imposed his opinions on others with malicious intent, arrogance, or presumed authority on his own part. The misstep Cleveland Heep makes is in misreading the information given to him by the critic: Heep asks what to characteristics to look for in an archetypical protective "Guild". The critic reluctantly answers, Heep accidentally misidentifies the mystic "Guild", and almost kills his savior-figure in the process. This is hardly the critic's fault, since in the end, his information was perfectly good, valid, and true. The critic could hardly be blamed, anyhow, since such an archetype, as presented and explained in Lady, does not really exist. As always, Shyamalan's movies end up saying the opposite of the idea he intends.

The film critic in Lady in the Water doesn't even offer film criticism, or evaluative opinions. The information he imparts is basic narrative theory, observation on story structure, and light analysis of mythological archetypes. Shyamalan has conflated a number of different film-writing jobs and purposes into "critics". Not that he understands film theory. Not that he has probably read academic criticism or any film theory.

For some reason, the critic is named "Harry Farber", presumably after Manny Farber.

If M. Night Shyamalan thinks Manny Farber is a suitable stand-in for Every Movie Critic, pardon my French, but he's a fucking idiot, who's never read Manny Farber. That, or the guy is seriously nuts.

I. Everybody's a Critic: Toward De-Mystifying Film Criticism

Movie reviewers, critics proper, film historians, academic critics, film theorists, DVD reviewers, diarists, columnists, biographers, interviewers, industry reporters, etc. ... and etc. ... The entire family of persons who write and/or talk publicly about film have only the obvious in common, but otherwise undertake entirely different tasks, with different concerns. A misconception among non-film-literati is, sadly, that they all do roughly the same thing: review movies and tell you if they're "good" or not. Nearly every film text available on Amazon.com has riotously funny amateur User Reviews, should one scroll into the abyss: see people complain that David Skal's sociocultural analysis and reception study of American horror film and fiction, The Monster Show is not a thorough historical "making of" reference, and doesn't cover European films... though neither is Skal's stated, explicit purpose. Witness the lament of the Pauline Kael one-star reviewer: "she doesn't like Star Wars! Mrs. Kael obviously was in the wrong line of work. If you can't sit back and let the child in you enjoy 2 hours of well-crafted imagination than you can't be a legitimate critic of mainstream movies, can you? Jaded pretentious bores like Kael should just review 'Art' films." "The author struggles to make some kind of point in this book, unfortunately, neither she nor the reader can figure out what it is," moans a reader of Martha Nochimson's blazing, pioneering feminist study of David Lynch, The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood. These books are respectively a jaunty cultural history, a collection of challenging film reviews pitched to a popular but intelligent audience, and a strange and wonderful scholarly analysis of a film author's oeuvre. Except for possibly Nochimson's Lynch study, none are pitched in language or founded in ideas that cannot be readily grasped by a high school graduate with no institutional film schooling. All have simply been encountered by befuddled readers who are in way over their heads. The confused, angry responses are roughly analogous to Shyamalan's critic-massacre in Lady in the Water.

Pity "Mrs. Kael", who was, of course, in the perfect line of work, wore maturity with pride, completely unconcerned about a "child living in her" (?!), didn't need legitimizing by anyone, and never particularly liked art films. Pity also, the poor readers who accidentally encounter a breed of film writing and simply cannot believe it exists.

Certain professional film writers, from Armond White to David Bordwell (maybe on the cranky-scale not so far apart, but certainly on the talent-o-meter), have been blogger-bashing in recent interviews, editorial pieces, some even in their regular-beat film writing. Some of them are plainly disgusted that non-pros think they can do the job, some seem to be fearing for their jobs, and some are just unimpressed with the level of writing to be found in Blogland. The net result is that they sound like Amazon reviewers who ordered the wrong book. (To be fair, Bordwell doesn't even mention film bloggers, just complains that "no one, as far as I know, is producing what I'd like to see," but is frustratingly vague about exactly what he wants to see. As a not-wise man once put it, then "neither [he] nor the reader can figure out what it is.")

I won't get very self-reflexive in this piece, but the by-design scattershot subject and tone of the Exploding Kinetoscope blog is both a constant source of frustration and a liberating blessing for me. I would try to focus more, but... well, it's my blog. The idea is to reflect what it's like to get coffee with me and talk about movies. So some days it's jokes, some days reviews, some days news, some days polished textual analysis that I have worked on for a month. Some days I go read a book by myself.

The history of reportage and writing about film began with movie-love stricken intellectuals trying to defend the medium as worthy of any mental effort at all. Writing about film in any capacity, at that point in history, included the value judgment that film is worth writing about.

The Ultimate Matrix Collection DVD includes two audio commentaries on each film. One track with Dr. Cornel West and controversial philosopher Ken Wilber, another with film critics Todd McCarthy, John Powers and critic/biographer/weirdo David Thomson. Indulge in all six commentaries to hear a hilarious cage-match of brainpower, in which three film critics are soundly, skull-crunchingly trounced. West and Wilber discuss history, consciousness, world religion, social politics, technology and art. The critics make snarky comments about how bored they are, and don't even demonstrate much fluency in film language or history. Frankly, they sound like they don't know very much about movies.

This is going someplace specific.

The Daily Reviewer Type (who births one-word poster blurbs), and the print columnist critic with a little more elbow room (who births full-sentence poster blurbs), whether shallow or insightful, taste the wrath of cinephiles and filmmakers because they too often seem to offer a consumer report approach to art. It can be wearying, and possibly unhealthy for the medium and for viewers. This danger lies in the presentation of the separateness of a critic's expertise, when it is better regarded as a mark along a continuum of how all audiences evaluate film.

That school of criticism remains interesting to people, because it is a slightly elevated version of how they experience and discuss movies, whether they realize it or not. "What did you see this weekend? Yeah? Oh, how was it? Cool, I'll check it out." With hope, the professional version is articulate, and the critic will have the virtue of seeing a more films than the average reader, and sooner. Everybody goes to movies. Everybody has opinions, and potentially has insights about the movies. The critic's opinion isn't unassailable; they're in print and being paid because they - again, with hope - are informed about film, and have the ability to organize their thoughts. Pro critics complaining about impudent bloggers don't understand the function of blogging, or even film review websites. They are, in effect, trying to tell the world not to talk about movies without permission. From the Blogosphere to Ain't It Cool News to 24 Lies a Second, internet film writing is about taking the unnecessary mystique out of talking constantly about film. It's an electronic coffeeshop table discussion. Some bloggers would undoubtedly take issue with this, since it willfully delegitimizes the medium. So be it. That there are dozens of fine bloggers who could do Armond White's job better is beside the point. When M. Night Shyamalan kills a man for having opinions about films, he's killing everyone in his audience.

If you're reading this, and more importantly, if you're not reading this: you are a practicing movie critic. Deal with it.

II. I'll Tell You What to Think: Toward Re-Mystifying Film Criticism


The argument above is admittedly facile and obvious: "everybody's a critic" interpreted as optimistic populism. Below is... something else. Everybody is a critic, but they are not all good critics. They are not all smart critics. Everybody is certainly not a writer. It is not the inherent fineness of thought that separates the film critic's work from the filmgoer's conversation. Their intersecting spheres remain separate because of the writer's applied skills, education, and dedication to the practice of thinking and talking about film in regular, thorough manner.

Most film-blogging necessarily falls into the non-scholarly categories of review, op-ed, news, and film appreciation, because the immediacy of the medium largely excludes extensive textual analysis, position papers, academic discussion. Those sort of pieces take a long time to write, and the reality of production makes them too precious to "waste" on blogs for most writers. So the majority of bloggery resembles the work of the published newspaper critic, but without credential, credibility or the benefit/constraints of an editor. Confession: I cheated. It's the process of "reviewing" that should be made less mysterious, and criticism should reclaim its potential power.

The great film critic exerts intellectual muscle-mass and illuminates the subject under scrutiny. Beyond that, pick your poison; the truly great critic diagrams his own boxing ring, and fights a fight you haven't seen before. That doesn't necessarily involve flashier writing, formal experimentation, more acerbic opinions, more discerning, or even more open-minded taste. But it can involve any of those things. The great ones may be sharp and insightful or receptive and interpretive, cold, warm, but they will be separate. The future of popular film criticism is going to look just like its past: a smattering of remarkable, defining work amid a gray wash of lightweights thinking they're doing the same job. Do not despair of this. Stand in the warm spots.

The deck is stacked against the film critics on the Ultimate Matrix Collection commentaries. Mr. McCarthy is not the film-writing equivalent of Dr. West. Academic writers could have been summoned for the task, but these review-critics are not involved in the same practice as scholars. They aren't smart enough to fulfill the requirements of Great Critics and illuminate the complex text in any way, which may be expected. They are, however, pathetically unable to support even their knee-jerk reactions as viewers. A willingness and ability to discuss the how-and-why of his opinions is what separates the competent critic from any other moviegoer. The Great Critic is allowed, and welcome to bury us under a mountain of opinion, because their opinions are better-expressed, supported, pleasurable and stimulating to experience, while the bad critic, the average critic and the man-on-the-street schmuck's opinions are not. The Great Critic makes the reader a better viewer and critic in the process.

That is, ultimately, all I've got. The quality that makes a critic is a willingness to fearlessly, openly criticize. Whether this is Andrew Sarris making mincemeat of auteur theory by ranking and canonizing directors like a kid organizing baseball cards, or popular Roger Ebert insisting unpopular Dark City is the best film of 1998, or Bazin sweating over the politics of editing dialectics, these forward-thinking opinions matter for their originality, the insistence, acumen and passion of expression.

All film writing, even the theoretical and historical, involves tastemaking in some capacity. The critic is a writer who should engage the task of opinion-cultivation full-on, with force and conviction. The critic must say the cruelest thing, the extreme thing, the strangest thing, must contribute that thought which only he is qualified, and able to give: opinion flanked by brain and gut. Everyone else is just a reviewer. May they all be eaten alive.

Andrew Horbal's Film Criticism Blog-a-Thon, gloriously vast in scope, lasts all weekend long at his entertaining No More Marriages! blog. His definitions are blurry (" I regard film criticism as simply the larger conversation about film"), but inclusive and positive. Check it totally out.