Acidemic- Film

Crazy Cool Vs. Warm and Sane - Rating the Icons

2008-08-07T21:04:00.012-05:00

If one looks at the stars of Hollywood--themselves, our perception of them, their personae--with the right kind of eyes, you can see in their sparkling allure a subtle but distinct difference - there are really two kind of actors, people, souls, beings - the free and the follower, the rebel and the slave, the alive and the sleeping, the young and the reckless, its all split along a narrow axis that I've suddenly been able to point to in my cosmic DNA astronomical map of cinema.

One side is cool, mysterious even to themselves, perhaps violent at times but awake, always awake to the cosmic horror. Abdre Bazin described Bogart as possessing "existential maturity which gradually transforms life into a stubborn irony at the expense of death." (1) This irony and maturity needn't run in every "cool" gened actor - they are just two tricks of survival and endurance for those of us who have at some early or fundamental level--rejected society. These artists are liberals when the society around them becomes rabid conservatives (as in the the 1950s) but then when the west is won and hippies embrace in the streets, they ride out into the sunset alone like John Wayne in the SEARCHERS. They are the "introverted" artists of Jung, the people for whom death is always on the radar screen.

On the other side are the warm, socially engaged types for whom cultural norms and parent-instilled beliefs are taken almost subliminally as their own. It's hard to say exactly what it is... maybe they've never done acid? aren't alcoholics? haven't killed anyone in a war hand to hand? There's something that keeps them in check, keeps them rooted and sane - dependable and sometimes dull. They frequently win Oscars. They are active in the community, relentless self promoters, phony preachers, the more they "try" to be cool and dangerous, the more sane and normal they seem, though sometimes this can be endearing (Peter Fonda) it is often as not, rather silly (Ben Stiller).

I've always been very prejudiced to the crazies, so excuse me if I sound prejudiced, in fact, both are essential to the evolution of humanity as a whole. Some of the warm types have managed to become cool through life experience - I would say Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Heath Ledger and Naomi Watts all fit into that "trans" category. And cool types can become warm through mainstream acceptance, Oscars, spiritual awakening, etc. it's much sadder in this direction, as the actor often seems to have fallen into a pool of narcisstic neediness, like Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Robin Williams and Kevin Spacey.

THE CRAZY COOL TYPES--born, bred and bonded-- would include: Asia Argento, Christopher Walken, Jon Voight, Gary Oldman, Bruce Lee, Heath Ledger, Fred Williamson, Lee Marvin, Bogart, Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Chloe Sevigny, Vin Diesel, Cary Grant, Kim Novak, Jack Nicholson, Mia Farrow, Jason Robards, Isabelle Adjani, James Woods, Dennis Hopper, Johnny Depp, Samuel Jackson, Mae
West, W.C. Fields, Peter O'Toole, Barbara Stanwyck, William Powell, John Garfield, Willem DaFoe, Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci, Lindsay Lohan, Bela Lugosi, Orson Welles, Lawrence Tierney, Richard Widmark, Ginger Rogers, Tuesday Weld, John Barrymore, John Wayne, Kate Winslet, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lorre, John Belushi, Ice Cube, Rhada Mitchell, Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Kristen Dunst, Faye Dunaway, Peter Sellers, John Cassavetes, Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hannah, Daniel Day Lewis, Lee J. Cobb, Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Deborah Kerr, Brad and Angelina Jolie, George C. Scott, Gina Gershon, James Dean, Robert Downey Jr., Martin Sheen, Micahel Blodgett, Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Russell Crowe, Timothy Carey, Robert Ryan, Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power, Al Pacino, Gloria Grahame, Vincent Price

THE WARM and "SANE" TYpes: Tom Hanks, Jimmy Stewart, Doris Day, Ben Affleck, Gary Cooper, Woody Allen, Every kid on the WB network, every actor in every show designed by J.J. Abrams, Tom Cruise, Victor Mature, Franchot Tone, The Three Stooges, Meryl Streep, Jackie Chan, Keith Carradine, Lawrence Olivier, Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Ethel Merman, Hugh Grant, Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, John Travolta, John Malkovich, Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Leo DiCaprio, Jim Carrey, Sean Connery, Nathan Fillion, Steve Carell, Van Johnson, Fred MacMurray, Kevin Costner, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Janet Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Whoopi Goldberg, Warren Beatty, Van Heflin, Ellen Burstyn, Jodie Foster, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Helen Hunt, Jennifer Anniston, Kurt Russell, Jonathan Lithgow, Goldie Hawn, James Mason, Fred Astaire, Jessica Tandy, Joel McRae, Dick Powell, Ali McGraw, Ryan O'Neal, Ruby Keeler, Roger Moore, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sharon Stone, Annette Bening, Charlie Sheen, Diane Keaton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eli Wallach, Jack Lemmon, and Richard Dreyfuss, Elijah Cook Jr., Martin Balsam, Madonna, Vincent Cassell, Richard Gere

The IN-BETWEENS: Jane Fonda, George Clooney, Lily Tomlin, Jeremy Irons, James Spader, Jake and Maggie Gylenhaal, Christian Bale, Denzel Washington, Mel Gibson, Renee Russo, Max Von Sydow, Dustin Hoffman, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Greta Garbo, Joan Blondell, Clark Gable, Christian Slater, Elliot Gould and William Shatner!

While the warm are concerned with "doing things well" the cool are concerned with analyzing and stretching just what "things" and "well" can mean - the termite vs. white elephant argument of auld. Of course there's plenty of room for crossover beyond these lists... but there they are... the stunning truth revealed. Are you now ready to cast aside the falseness and staleness of warmed over blanditude yourself, and stop being a Steve Carell or Ruby Keeler, to become your own raging Angelina Jolie Warren Oates-style mother fucker? To paraphrase Willard to his rats: "TEAR IT UP!"

Burn the money!

2008-08-05T10:15:00.011-05:00

The most poignant moment in the new DARK KNIGHT movie is when the Joker (the late, great Heath Ledger) sets fire to a giant mountain of money. The metatextual similarity with this scene and the film's vast budget and huge profit - all for what amounts to a big loud explosion of nothing - is eerily prescient. For DARK KNIGHT is really a big loud leftist version of DIRTY HARRY, with our sympathies reversed. We can imagine Batman rushing in to save that burning money, cradling it to his arms and screaming to the sky, "Damn you, fire! Damn yooooou! This money had just one more day 'til retirement," while we look on in horror, not over the money, but because we find that the only "true" soul in this dark mess worth identifying with is the bad guy. As someone who always rooted for the bad guys as a child watching SPEED RACER, and was always sad when they lost, all I can say is: "It's about time!"

In the sleepy adolescent dream world of cinematic Gotham, only the Joker is awake. He's the only one with Zen stillness and joi de vivre, the only "sane" one in a world gone mad. No matter how loudly and harshly he's screamed at (Batman growls and shouts until he's hoarse), Joker never loses his mellow gold cool; he's already at peace with himself, with his mania. He's in the flow like one of those old drunken masters in the Shaw Brothers films, or like Colonels Kilgore and Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW.

Everyone else in the KNIGHT is, for lack of a better word, becalmed. They can't stop fretting about their possessions (and this includes wives and children), locked in identification with forms, what the Buddhists call "samsara." The Joker stands alone, a Tyler Durden in a world of pre-explosion Ed Nortons; he's Che Guevara divided by Hannibal Lechter in a sea of Batistas and Dr. Chiltons. What did Tyler say in FIGHT CLUB? "It's only after we've lost everything that we can do anything." What was it Kilgore said in APOCALYPSE NOW? "That smell, that napalm smell, smelled like... victory."

Batman's also too bound up in possessions and saving lives and the letter of the law to move into the cosmic flow. The Wayne billions are slyly depicted as liabilities as far as Wayne's personal growth. Hee takes whole ballet companies out on boat trips on the nights they have shows to perform (a serious violation of any performer's ethics!) and then jets off on a plane in the middle of the ocean and strands them, bored and confused, with only Alfred to amuse them. It's the sort of "punishment" that might happen to Norma Shearer in an old "faux-risque" MGM drama, while Wayne's the sort of lonely Forbes magazine guy that New Deal artists like Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz were lampooning back in KANE, showing them off for the un-zen samsara-chasing hungry ghosts they were.

Even in the age of the gold-wearin' pimp styles of MTV, how can we root for such a dour bling-o-holic as Bruce Wayne-cum-Batman? We're supposed to salivate Pavolov-style over his helicopters, his yachts, his babes, his high tech bat toys, but rather than a proletariat fantasy of accumulation, Wayne lives with the dread and guilt of the rich and powerful, their need to pacify the proletariat. Thus, they use the very flimsy rationalization that their high tech doodads are to protect and serve as well as show off. One thinks of maniacs like Imelda Marcos, who claimed the impoverished Filipino people were all enjoying her life by proxy, thereby justifying her titanic shoe collection, or of course, the U.S. military employed as corporate goons in Iraq. At least Tony Stark invents his own shit, and he does it to clean up his own mess... and he fuckin' drinks like a real man... and he don't mind killin'. James Bond is also cool because he didn't pay for all that cool stuff he's got, the British did, so what do we care?

Anyway, with global warming what it is, shouldn't Batman be riding a solar powered bat bicycle? I mean, if he really cared about the welfare of his air breathing Gothamites. Wouldn't his billions be better served buying and securing vast tracts of rain forest? Instead he spends his billions on weapons to enforce the status quo. In short, the billions are employed in the protection of the billions, and nothing more. The Joker wants to teach the world to sing (or scream), but Batman just wants the world to stay quiet. Just like dear old Charlie Kane, he only lets the people rock the boat if it's not his boat, but eventually it's all his boat, and so he outlaws rockin', for the good of the people.

Chris Nolan seems to underline the hyper commodity fetishism of Wayne's world, offering a sly socialist critique even as he fulfills his conspicuous consumption fantasy obligations to the producers and advertisers (Alfred is always interested in knowing what of Wayne's many cars will be taken out for drives. "the lamborghini, sir?" he says, voice quivering). Things get worse when the letter-of-the-law debating starts choking up the narrative like exhaust fumes. As Nolan illuminates the tricky balance between good and evil, rich and poor, left vs. right, he seems split on the viability of arbitrary lines in the sand, such as when Wayne's weapon designer, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), takes a sudden high moral ground over the use of some spy software. Batman meanwhile risks the lives of countless civilians during his reckless chases after Joker and his mob, blowing up buildings and crashing through cars - but he'll swerve out of the way to not run down Joker, because that would be wrong. What? Dude, you easily killed thirty people in that chase, so get over it. To get back to APOCALYPSE NOW, you need Martin Sheen to talk to you about handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. Talk about two-faced!

All this just makes Joker's homicidal glee look more and more admirable and honest, but even he is stuck with a lot of SOPHIE'S CHOICE'S REVENGE style booby traps to spring. Does a franchise as proven as the caped crusader really need to borrow so heavily from the SAW films? But no matter, Ledger's Joker is so comfortable in his tailored purple tweeds, so free of any moral quagmire, that you can't help rooting for him and all his Colonel Kurtz-like "slug crawling a straight razor"-style clarity. What Wayne needs to do is get some blood on his hands, get his slug ass up on that straight razor. Maybe he should go kill his next steak instead of just ordering from a safe internet menu. Maybe we need to put Bush and Cheney in a room with some detainees; make them pull the trigger in person for a change.

Adding to the meta-text, before the previews was a public service announcement warning kids against smoking marijuana. It was the one where this kid is wearing about 50 t-shirts with silkscreen slogans like "Burnt out" which he gradually peels off as he gets more and more "clean" off the weed... until he's free! FREE!

The idea that altering your consciousness, expanding your perceptions and horizons through direct experience of a thing (rather than the parentally approved contempt prior to investigation!) is bad (mmm-kay), while the ad that comes right after this anti-marijuana sermon involved the bland antics of a bunch of high school kids dancing to a cover of "Don't you forget about me - Hey Hey Hey" in the school library (ala the BREAKFAST CLUB) whilst bedecked in the fall line up from JC PENNY. Thus the more "indirect experience" of a thing is superior to the thing itself - you condemn the drug culture until its sanitized and put in a museum and can be enjoyed retro-actively through pastiche tribute. Hey hey hey, and you walk on byyyy na na na na na!

This is how the Batman justifies his petty morality too... and how the church operated in the Middle Ages, where anyone who sought direct spiritual contact instead of going through the church was burnt at the stake. In Gotham City, all enjoyment has to be done through Bruce Wayne, otherwise he'll give you such a CGI-enhanced beating! It's for your own good, but he'd never kill you, or anyone else, because that would be wrong.

Dude, if you're gonna do a public service for anything threatening these kids... how about getting your head out of the sand and doing more promos for childhood obesity? Then again, those are really just more Indy 500 speeding tickets, as you can see below:
Uh huh.... if this is the "Sane" America we're defending, I'm voting JOKER!

Jodorowsky on Spielberg: "If I can kill Spielberg, I will kill Spielberg."

2008-08-03T13:53:00.003-05:00

Whoa! All this and more can be found over at Bright Lights' Interview with Alejandro Jorodowsky. Damien Love finds the silver haired devil freely (and with delightfully skewed English) venting some spleen on the "ill" violence of Spielberg and how DUNE saved his life:

I think David Lynch is a fantastic moviemaker. I was so ill when he made Dune. But when I went to the theatre to see it — always I tell this with great happiness, because I was so jealous — I was dying. I was grey. But then when I went to the theatre and saw the picture, I was so happy, because the picture was so bad! And then I could live again! Because if David Lynch had been able to make Dune as David Lynch, I think I would have died. But when he made a bad Dune, he saved my life. And I love David Lynch, because he saved my life. Also, I love Cronenberg, because he is an auteur, he has his obsession. I like him. He is honest. There are a lot of moviemakers I like, and there are others I hate. But what I hate the most is Spielberg. And second Walt Disney.

Didn't you used to hate Walt Disney above all others?

Yes. But now it's Spielberg. I think Spielberg is the son from when Walt Disney fucked Minnie Mouse. And then there was Spielberg. But in terms of industrial pictures, there is a picture that I think is a masterwork, and that is Starship Troopers. That, for me, is the most beautiful cowboy picture I ever seen. It's fantastic.

Yeah! Woo Hoo! I am not 100% sure Spielberg deserves to be killed, but I will always tip my hat to a man who can blow the whistle on fascism cloaked as homey history one second then turn around and praise a straight up fascist call to arms like STARSHIP! I highly recommend reading the whole interview. Love asks great questions, including the one above... Citizenship equals responsibility!

The Blurring of fact and fiction: True horror in the age of youtube

2008-07-31T12:58:00.008-05:00

What scared and fascinated me the most about the whole BLAIR WITCH phenomenon of 1999 was the way its phony authenticity worked to enhance the fear. As you may remember, the film's release in theaters was preceded by a website where the footage was alleged to have been found in a bag containing several tapes and cameras, all buried under a house in the middle of the Maryland woods.

Even "knowing" this was a publicity stunt didn't stop me--or millions like me apparently--from being scared for days by that movie. I was so scared I launched a phony online magazine "Frightened Male Monthly" around the concept.

What concept you ask? The idea of a willful return to pagan superstitious ignorance! Why? because its fun to be scared. BLAIR WITCH reminded me of how my childhood friends and I would scare each other half to death with made up stories of monsters in the woods or basements, and we loved it. BLAIR WITCH worked from the same principle: it's 100% more scary if you can pretend its true.

Youtube is now full of "authentic" footage of yeti, UFOs, aliens, bigfeet and sea monsters, the whole land, sea and sky of the "unexplained." If you can suspend your disbelief, lots of chills await, especially in these weird times, with NASA employees coming forth with tales of high weird strangeness.

For the discerning Acidemic reader, I've taken the time to pick a handful of my favorites, selected for their graininess and scare factor. Enjoy!:

Both these film show the gravitational propulsion system commonly associated with UFO technology, so I choose to believe they are real, though I don't necessarily think I am right in my choice. Again, I'm not saying any of this is right or wrong, in fact as I've written before, I think a good evolutionary goal is to move past dichotomy: aliens are real, but not in the clumsy vaguely scientific way we understand "real."

For a typical human to say "If aliens are real, why don't they show themselves?" is like a dog saying "If algebra is real, how come I can't smell it?" In fact, a dog's sense of smell is far more reliable than human sight, therefore, algebra cannot exist.

Read Patrick Harpur for a clearer definition of what I'm talking about. In the meantime, bring on the bigfoots!

I like this one a lot because of the high "fearful" pitch in the kids' voices; if they're sure it wasn't a bear, I'M SURE it wasn't a bear. Kids have a mainline into the dark collective psyche, right along with acid freaks, schizophrenics, yogis, mystics, aliens, yetis and... that's right, Jesus.

The Rote High School Persecution of Saint Ellen

2008-07-27T11:08:00.006-05:00

There's something definitely original about the scattershot editing collage techniques of THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (2007), getting a belated US DVD release after a year in Canada and the broken film festival scene. Director Bruce MacDonald delves unashamedly into the trick bags of JULIEN DONKEY BOY and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, with every little fragment unreservedly depicting sext teen mental illness, teen girl in danger angst, familial breakdown with a father always one step from physical abuse and all that other groovy stuff that's been done before a dozen times... but not this way!

The divine Ellen Page looks here like she's trying to be a mix of Bree from Klute and DeWayne from the documentary, STREETWISE. Mentally ill kids run through fields and we see a lot of Page wrapped in her shower curtain on the bus - talking to the camera in morose cutter girl poetry prose. The whole film has the feeling of a collage and poetry chapbook one's friend might make, the sort where their sick unconscious screams at your from behind the morose drawings and symbolism: "Get thee to a therapist." But one can't ever get these girls to listen to therapists, they're too downy and cuddled up in their madness. And the shrinks are all one-note passive aggressive imbeciles, as is the one here (a passive aggressive old transvestite).

The problem is TRACEY FRAGMENTS can't let go of the "abused child" cliche lexicon long enough to dwell on Tracey's perverse desire for her own illness. A much more brave and fearless breakdown can be seen in JOSHUA, where Vera Farmiga fondly paints red boots on herself with her own blood. You don't see that sick joy in Page's performance because she's too like a young Jane Fonda, too sincere to see the true glory and godliness that lies in insincerity, the layers revealed when you pull back from your own position. Fonda couldn't pull back, but it was okay because she blazed so insanely upon her own position that layers were revealed in the sheer wattage; she made humorlessness sexy in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY, and she made her KLUTE prostitute painfully open, like that friend who uses their brilliance in the service of self-limiting rationalization. Page hasn't quite made the grade; she basks in indie blankness and it works because her face is so flawless and empty.

But the editing is really the star and in its way this film is the anorexic poetess chapbook version of MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. The dialogue and monologues are terirble though - the dreams of academics slumming in the teenage squalor and wrong decisions they never had or made. Tracey's narration (her last name is Berkowitz, like the serial killer!) includes lines like: '"Tracey Berkowitz... Tracey Zero-itz... Tracey Forty Below-itz...", and then there's the cover version of Patti Smith's "Horses," wherein the singer imitates every inflection from Smith's recording to a montage of Tracey running and split screened in with real horses-- and a laughing black man in a bowler hat on the bus to signify alienation and urban hostility, Taxi Driver style.. and a cracked-out dude who hangs on her all skeevy-like named Lance from Toronto. And the colored girls sing "Doo de doo de doo..."

It's one of those films where the chips are stacked so much against the heroine that you suspect the contest is rigged. If we're supposed to see all this social persecution as Tracy's own twisted fantasy, then don't keep rubbing it in our faces like we're supposed to have these insane AND JUSTICE FOR ALL/CUCKOO'S NEST knee-jerks about the man keeping us down. It's unfair to ask for it both ways, and our director and writer and actress can't see the humor in the fantasizing about high school tauntings ("No tits" is the student's cry, which doesn't seem quite realistic). We see her led by a creepy crackhead who promises to find her brother, and when he gets in a barfight instead of fleeing while she has the chance she waves her agape mouth and horrified eyes around like she's waiting for the director's signal and the director's gone to the bathroom. There's some nice shots of a crane machine in the bar though, for all the crane machine fans out there!

You can tell this is directed by the Canuck who did HIGHWAY 61, because it's got the same outdated dress sense (Her heart's desire dresses like he's Desperately Seeking Susan) and aimless mood-building. There's a zero point progression of story here, which is the sort of thing that happens when a director spends the first thirty minutes working to rivet your attention, then runs out of idea and hopes you'll just coast along revisiting the same footage from different perspectives.

I usually try not to write long negative diatribes here, but Page deserves better than all the idie wankery she's been enduring since HARD CANDY, films made by geeky priviledged film people who have no experience of the tawdry lives they long to depict. Just as JUNO-scribe Seniorita Diablo Cody slums her way through a year as a stripper and expects the world to applaud her bravery, the hyper-stylization at play here masks a very tragic inability to connect with the material. We only get cliches of stupid parents, abusive sleazeballs, gibbering black folks, none of the forthy depth yo see today from maestros who've actually clocked time with the skate set: Spike Jonz, Guz Van Sandt and Larry Clark, to name a few. We see Tracey being persecuted in high school and it feels as if MacDonald has seen too many high school persecution films - Tracey passes through the gauntlet of tampon-hurling cheerleaders that's been persecuting heroines of teen movies right up from CARRIE through Ringwald and Ryder and Lohan.

Maureen Medved wrote the script based on her novel; it's certainly not her fault the film is as messed up as it is, but like JUNO, it leaves a weird taste of some screenwriter slumming-mendicant society newsletter. Medved's an academic (assistant professor at British Columbia University, with a long string of plays and publications) which in and of itself speaks to a lack of familiarity with the nitty gritty of street life. But I'm not trying to bash her, just the ever dwindling indie spirit of originality and actual immersion in the worlds you long to depict as opposed to immersion in films about the life you long to depict, and MacDonald, whom I'm still mad at for all the phony quirkiness and self-awarded hipster cred in HIGHWAY 61. MacDonald longs to make a film about a confused girl, but fears getting too close to one (lest he be seen a pedophile, perhaps?) So she's naked but behind a shower curtain, yet mentally as sealed up as if loaded to the gills on xanax...and alone, almost all the time alone - that easiest of ways to film an actress. The whole film seems to have been shot in a week, then edited for three years, ala something by George Lucas. What's up with these crazy-deficient Canadians?

Karina Longworth writes a good bit about the release/distribution problems hitting the FRAGMENTS here.

On the plus side, FRAGMENTS offers a good score from the Broken Social Scene, and Tracey reads Ed the Happy Clown comics!

For a real, genuinely bizarre film about a fucked up chick in Canada, can I steer you towards the under appreciated and flat-out weird tale of incest and topless boxing PUNCH? (that link is to a review I wrote in 2004).

Read another of my diatribes about Page, this one on HARD CANDY, here.

More Tentacles from the 5th Dimensional Rift

2008-07-24T11:04:00.015-05:00

Last night I finally saw THE MIST (2007), which is based on an old Stephen King novella I read in high school. I can't remember if the biblical elements are all in the King version, but one thing I do remember, for what it's worth, is that there was a hell of a lot more drinking! The lead character in the book drinks beer nonstop all through the story. What the hell happened? The only beer drinkers in the movie are condemned as "not taking the issue seriously." Jesus Christ, people!

I don't want to spoil things, but the presence of tentacles and the concept of the military opening a hole into another dimension, and having tentacles and mantis-like monsters escape to destroy civilization has become so common - from Lovecraft, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Futurama (see below), to The Mist, and god knows how many Amazing short stories... not to mention the reports from those brave space cowboys who voyage into third eye realms with the aid of shamanic ritual, DMT, psilocybin, Salvia Divinorum, etc. And then there's "Revelations" in what you earthlings call the bible, and the eerie resemblance of "the Spaghetti Monster" to the transdimensional space octopus the Hebrews called "Yaweh." Call me paranoid, but it all fits together like a giant mantis claw pointed at the calendar to 12/21/2012, or what James Cameron would call "Judgment Day."

As I've said in the past, my own mystic visions have corroborated these fictional testimonies, and the recurring presence of a) dimensional rifts as signals of the apocalypse and c) tentacles and mantis-like beings issuing forth and devouring human souls and feeding of psychic energy (most commonly pain) in both fiction, visions/hallucinations, biblical prophecy, comedy, and paranoid crackpot UFO witness sightings/testimony, all seem to indicate the same horrible truth; a truth perhaps too horrible to look at straight on, (which also corroborates my vision of this devouring god as a sort of rotating space Medusa. To look at it head on is to die or turn to stone, so we can only glimpse it through the warped funhouse mirror of fiction, dream and astral projection).

Why am I risking condemnation, judgment, and perhaps mantisassination by telling you this? Because knowledge is power and actually every time I visit the space octopus/Medusa, She always first wants to know if I've preached Her word... i.e. to bring forth the glory that is the return of Medusa/space octopus onto the world! For the embrace of the space octopus is what shall save us from being devoured (as I said below, your soul has to be nice and light).

Other interesting paranoid parallels: the resemblance of the many-armed Hindu deities to the "vision" of flowing tentacles, and our own ability to feel and manipulate auric tentacles.

My Nostradamus-esque prophecy is that we will be seeing more and more images and renderings of trans-dimensional rifts, human-devouring mantis-beings, and tentacled heads rotating through space as we approach the fated date of 2012, all this as cosmic preparation for our collective journey into the fifth dimension, past the illusion of time and space. Are you ready to open your third eye and start waving hello to your new overlords with your newfound auric tentacles? You've got four years to start, my tasty human friends! And check out this crazy T-shirt!

The many tentacles of Love

2008-07-22T13:28:00.006-05:00

Every once in awhile a film comes along that justifies all your own crackpot visions. For me, such a film is Futurama: THE BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS. The titular beast is voiced by David Cross and rather than a menace is actually a loving God-like diety from another dimension who takes advantage of a cosmic rift in the universe to lock his loving tentacles into the backs of the necks of all human beings, lifting us up to ecstatic union with an all-powerful benevolent other.

Just cosmic bufoonery? Well yes, except this is the exact vision that more than one of us shamanistic cosmonauts have had in our astral voyages, especially as we countdown to the end of the Mayan calendar, 2012. What the bible foretells as a hole in the earth from which the creatures of the dead shall walk, including giant mantis like beings with whips of fire, some of us have witnessed past the cosmic veil as also an opportunity, for those of us with light enough density to cross over into the arms (tentacles) of our benign ruler, the one beyond good and evil, who oversees even the lizard reptillian aliens that devour the souls of the self-centered (or dense).

These multi-tentacled intra-dimensional beasties have been described and discussed since the dawn of time, witnessed only with the third eye, usually by visionary crackpots and writers like H.P. Lovecraft. The mythological creature Medusa is also one such being (my own vision of this was a giant medusa head rotating through space, on which all humanity lives, as microbes, soon washed by cosmic noxema from mighty mistress Medusa's olive green complexion.)

Sounds like a lot of cosmic bufoonery, doesn't it? And that's exactly why BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS is such a hilarious and essential film. All these harsh cosmic lessons are perhaps too much to endure without a great sprinkling of levity. Now I've never seen Futurama--except for the original episode which I didn't like exactly, being a dyed in the wool Simpson fan, but in this humble blogger's opinion, BACKS is actually better than the Simpson movie, that is as far as laugh a minute genius is concerned, so at least add it to your netflix list and when you get to the part with the fabled octopus, remember, this sucker is real, and when judgement day comes, the real litmus test to whether you get eaten by the mantis beings or allowed to pass into the next dimension is going to be based on your soul density-- the more selfless and outgoing and loving you are, the less dense you get, (i.e. the extension of self reduces density), while the more selfish and self-centered you are, the more dense (your self contracts inwards, small and hardened). This has nothing to do with dogmatic interpretations of Christianity, but it does have to do with being nice and not judging others, even the stupid and ugly who deserve it. This amusing and soon to be important little nugget of information, incidentally, is something the powers that be don't want you to know, which is why they've trained you since birth to react to blogs such as this with ridicule. Stay dense! Imagine Captain Crunch at the helm of his ship, urging all the little peanut nuggets under his command to stay sugary and crisp, rather than getting themselves salty and stale and unappetizing to their giant devouring Other who even now shakes the box and sends them squirming and screaming into the milky bowl of intergalactic breakfast! I stand before you, risking your condemnation, urging you to go stale and salty, and thus be passed over during the cosmic snacktime that looms large in a scant few years.

P.S. If you are interested in learning more about where I pick up such nonsense, may I recommend Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Flight of Quetzlcoatl, and/or High Strangeness by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, or you could just find a way to go deep into the 5th dimension and learn for yourself. Seeing through the third eye is believing! Just don't believe too much, for dogma hardens fast as cement once exposed to certainty's withering sunshine.

The Fireworks and the Crummily Cautious

2008-07-16T18:27:00.008-05:00

I've been too hot and blocked to write from the acidemic heart lately, but wanted to check in. Reading one of my old influences, Pauline Kael, I came upon this brilliant description of De Niro as Johnny Boy, the reckless gambling addict in MEAN STREETS, which I would like to share:

His madness isn't explained (fortunately, since explaining madness is the most limiting and generally least convincing thing a movie can do). When you're growing up, if you know someone crazy daring and half-admirable (and most of us do), you don't wonder how the beautiful nut got that way; he seems to spring up full-blown and whirling, and you watch the fireworks and feel crummily cautious in your sanity."

Now, I never really felt that way about Johnny Boy in MEAN STREETS. I guess it's the German in me that hates to see someone be financially irresponsible (scenes seem to drag as he hems and haws about paying his debts). BUT I do feel that way about Angelina Jolie in GIRL, INTERRUPTED! I just re-watched that movie the other night and fell in love with Jolie's crazy girl Lisa all over again. And yes, Pauline, I must be still growing up because I know people like her, and I LOVE them, their insanity, their craziness, their wild sickness. It thrills me. That's why it's so painful to watch Ryder's character, who has clearly fallen in love with Lisa, enact this faux rebelliousness after they are seprated, lipping off to stoic nurse Whoopi Goldberg, singing racist camptown songs, etc.

I recognize my own ersatz "crazy daring" in Ryder, her inability either as a character or an actress to access the depths of sociopathic delirium plumbed so effortlessly by Jolie; the "imitation sincerest form of flattery but you can never pull it off because its not spontaneous enough" sort of faux daring that has led some critics to question the validity of Ryder's mannered performance. But is Ryder just not up to the challenge of the role, or is she a brilliant actress who conveys the confused narcissism and mood swinging self-indulgence of her character so well we forget they are not the same person?

Either way, it's Jolie who brings the alcohol to the party, so to speak. It's a shame she's so tied up in her starving millions that she can't afford to get down and dirty with a James Mangold type any more. But irregardless, her prime lunacy endures forever in GIRL INTERRUPTED, which I suggest you see again if you only saw it once. I know people who watch this movie over and over and over (the crazy ones). I love them. I love Pauline Kael. I love you, dear reader. So why can't I get the bugs to stop crawling around in my skin long enough to get back into writing my book?

If the Quirks offend thee...

2008-07-06T20:31:00.014-05:00

Put the blame on Mame, or Frank Capra, but I think we're at a saturation point with "quirky" indie family comedies. Hopefully this weekend's release of the tepidly reviewed "never should have escaped the Sundance" LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE-cum-DAN IN REAL LIFE style quirky family comedy "about heart, about growing up, and growing old..." Alan Alda-Matthew Broderick senile old bonding movie, DIMINISHED CAPACITY will mark the water line by which cliches meant to pacify the whole extended family, which have come pouring out of Sundance and IFC like an old lady's tears, will now be done with. Presuming the poor film makes no money.

I don't know, there's a comedy in there somewhere, maybe in a really early draft of Sherwood Kiraly's adaptation of his own novel. I mean, the pitch is great: a senile old man with a zest for zaniness heads to Chicago with assorted family members and a priceless old baseball card he wants to sell. The card is a great mcguffin, as Broderick has to continually void all the bad deals the demented old man gets hoodwinked into (like swapping it for Broderick's editor's promise to print the old man's fish poetry). Along the misadventure-strewn way just about everything original must have been sifted from this idea and discarded... instead, the cookie cutter mold is enforced right down to the hometown girl who Broderick left behind (Virginia Madsen, quietly searching for someone to play off of). She now has a kid (but is divorced) and the kid is a little league space cadet and it all comes down to him catching the card as it almost falls into a janitor's pail of water... you get the idea. Luckily I was seeing this at the Sunshine in downtown NYC and so wasn't the only one groaning as quirk after tired quirk was upturned and exposed like so many bugs under rocks all scored to mopey tunes off Sufjan Stevens' ILLINOIS album.

One stand-out is Dylan Baker as a card trader at the convention. Playing a very serious Cubs fan, Baker has a field day, lending a world-weary dignity to a guy who lives and dies by the repeated failures of his beloved ball team. Wisely realizing Baker is really on the ball, first-time director Terry Kinney lets all his scenes play longer than they need to, and for the time he's on screen, it's as if the clouds of stale cliche part and something real and tender and human comes out. Uou can see the assemblage of quirky actors--Broderick, Alda, Madsen--watching him from the other side of the collector's card table in awe, wishing he'd come in earlier and set the mood. Before him, it's almost like a trading card session between two Sundance workshop veterans: "I'll trade you a quirky gag involving fish writing poetry for your learning to shake off your doubts and achieve greatness with your life, I'll even throw in a white trash relation struggling with the first step of AA."

Of course the baseball card changes hands more time than an intercostal clavicle or secret roll of microfilm... as does Alan Alda's southern fried accent. Alda's eccentric Uncle Rollie apparently orders his quirks from an old Sears catalog: he baits typewriter keys so fish can type poetry for him; he dries his socks on an indoor gas grill, and so forth. Ruth Gordon is probably rolling atop Harold in her grave. Alda is still way too witty and physically loose and agile to be convincing as a coot. Broderick on the other hand, looks genuinely confused and disoriented, no big deal in a film like this though, wherein the actors all stand around looking like they can't find their chalk marks.

I can see now another way that cinema helps us prepare for life beyond death, and that's through the realization of the ease with which we identify with characters; even the space cadets of DIMINISHED CAPACITY. As long as it's not completely terrible, we can fall into any movie like a dream, emerging only when the credits roll or the phone rings or when we need to go to the bathroom or get more ice. Similarly, the spirit upon leaving the body becomes amorphous intelligence seeping into the interlocking gazes surrounding it, merging with the all-seeing I.

Who is to say, after all, that when a really good actor dies on screen, that we do not also die, or that this character is really reliving his life through us, through our eyes, the way we might look in awe at photos of ourselves as babies, the way a chimp or Hamlet studies the human skull? It's astounding, the basis of consciousness, the mirror regarding itself into infinity. That's why a much better movie was the one I revisited after trudging home from Sunshine Cinema: ALIEN: RESURRECTION.

The astounding mirror character I am talking about here is the reincarnated/cloned Ripley character played by Sigourney Weaver. Is she the "same" Ripley who died at the end of ALIEN 3? Did consciousness transfer via the cloning process of mad scientist Brad Dourif? The transmutation of self, of sentience, of soul, is what is the issue here. Is the soul as we perceive it really ego, and is ego really just an obsession with one particular locus of identification, with the body you inhabit at this point in time? Is ego then not a kind of imprisonment, being trapped outside the free floating locus of identification? The way Sigourney Weaver grasps these paradoxes is nothing short of poetry; her Ripley is egoless and animal-like, sublimely sexy like a very cool person taking ecstasy for the first time. I didn't like ALIEN: RESURRECTION the first time I saw it, but it's better with repeat viewings. There's a steady stream of redeemable moments all the way through, original little touches, like robot Winona Ryder jacking into the computer mainframe by sticking a tube in her vein like shooting heroin; French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet clearly takes the time to make each outlaw character memorable and not just a few cliche'd quirks stapled onto an actor, the way they are in CAPACITY.

Another way to picture it as three different levels of identification- which bring us from movie watching to being, to "watching" our own being:

First level is identifying with a character in a story; second is "becoming" other people in dreams, wherein we can still shift the locus of our ego identification; third is one amorphous intelligence that moves from individual to individual voice and mind, staging its own elaborate rituals for self discovery; to see someone or something is to become that thing. Ultimately isn't it all just DNA talking to itself? The paint paints itself through the painter, and it sees itself through those who see it, and endless cycle of creation and destruction, the brush, the brain, the subject all along one hideous serpentine chain leading straight up/down into the void, perception and perceived merely two nodes on the same instrument. How's that for motherfuckin' quirky, Uncle Rollie? While the tired and overly cautious filmmakers carefully weed out the genuine eccentricity from their film, real life goes on all around, more baffling and phenomenal than even the looniest Frenchman's conception of science fiction.

"WHY DON'T YOU CALL YOUR INSECTS?" Thoughts at a July 5th DVD horror marathon.

2008-07-06T02:41:00.006-05:00

Jennifer Connelly is aces in her first starring role, for Dario Argento, in the recently re-released on DVD 1985 horror flick, PHENOMENA. The better title would have been "Lady of the Flies," which is what the sinister school mistress calls young Connelly once her telekenetic bond with insects becomes public knowledge. I just saw this film for the first time, and am I glad I waited. The colors on the new disc are superb. Care and attention has obviously been paid and if you can move into the frame of mind of being at a near-deserted drive in in the middle of nowhere you will dig the spook show surrealism and great wind noises. It takes all the hot topics of the early 1980s/late 1970s and mashes em up real nice into a melange of tasty b-movie stew: chimps avenging their slain masters (with a razor found in the park trash can), THE SWARM-style bug attacks, CARRIE-esque telekenetic revenge against bratty schoolmates (replete with wind blowing the hair back ala FIRESTARTER), deformed Jason-like freaks, flaming lakes, beheadings, maggots, POV killers shots with a knife on a pole ala PEEPING TOM, etc., all scenically filmed around the base of the Alps in what wheelchair bound Donald Pleasance dryly refers to as "the Transylvania of Switzerland."

People have written bad things about Connelly's acting in this film, her blank expressions when she should be scared. There she goes, walking around in killer's houses, with an expression as if she's asleep. Well that's the point! She's a sleepwalker! It's in the plot; go with it. PHENOMENA works best, as its fans note, as a fairy tale, with Connelly's power to attract bugs perhaps the key to her fearlessness. She's like a superhero, hence the killer's question, "why don't you call your insects?" when she's about to be decapitated.

Next: INSIDE, a 2007 French horror film from "Dimension EXTREME," which is a disturbing concept- a corporate branding that promises unflinching gore and cruely. What's next? Severed head corporate logos? I for one couldn't be happier, or more worried about the fate of makind.

The Netflix liner notes say that in INSIDE, Beatrice Dalle "relentlessly pursues the pregnant Sarah, determined to perform a grisly brand of C-section." I think the "grisly brand" is key here, as it implies there is a non-grisly brand. The patronizing ROSEMARY'S BABY-style treatment expectant mother Alysson Paradis receives from her mom, the hospital, and her distracted married man boss sets the ambiguity and ambivalence meter to high right from the start. There's a refreshing lack of "sanctity of motherhood" posing, which has become so ingrained in the contemporary American cinema. With this disillusioning, we are made to realize that all c-sections are grisly, and that birth is a cruel and nasty business, which no amount of drugs, sanitary surfaces and hospital hooplah can deny. INSIDE gets to the meat of the matter, with humor and a fine sense of real time pacing.

TEETH on the other hand was such a drag I could barely get past the FBI warning. It's supposed to be about, you know, a vagina dentata in action, but insead it's all sage and squeamish, like that abysmal cheat of a film HARD CANDY from where after a tediously lengthy preparation, Ellen Page only pretends to castrate the pedophile she's picked up off the internet, or SEX AND DEATH 101, where the serial "killer" played by Winona Ryder in SEX AND DEATH 101 doesn't really kill the swinger slobs she dates, but merely puts them in comas until she finds true love. Here in TEETH apparently, you can sew that shit back on--Bobbit-style--and rather than a steely avenger of rape victims, the protagonist merely stumbles along preaching abstinence and any genuine penis-crunching comes only after tedious stretches of nervous filler; Jess Weixler tries to protect the schlongs of America--like the nervous Serbian Simone Simon from CAT PEOPLE--and what's the fun in that? It boggles the mind that we can cut off just about everything in this world, but not a dude's schlong and especially not his balls. (God bless Robert Rodriguez for having bagfulls of them in PLANET TERROR). And you people call yourselves feminists! Harrumph!

Another thing which trying to watch TEETH after INSIDE and PHENOMENA made me realize is the importance of a good synthesizer soundtrack. Movies really are both picture and sound, and even if you're not paying attention to the plot, every event is explained full bore by the heavy metal and blazing guitar rock pulsing through Argento's canon (the score for TEETH by contrast is all exotic digeridoo cliches). Argento's friend George Romero digs a good synth score too, though, which is why to step in and rescue the evening from my bad taste of TEETH, I chose to dig up... DAY OF THE DEAD.

I hadn't seen this one since 1985, at the multiplex! God Damn. Punk-a-Billy Funkhauser and I drove all the way to some cineplex in goddamned Fort Lee, NJ to see it. I loved it of course, but didn't remember it as a classic; over the years it kind of got shuttled to the curb as too talky... the "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" of the series, if you will. But time has been kind to this film, as have popular tastes regarding cannibalism (now we don't even flinch) and the post-modern theorists like Steven Shaviro point out the neat "masochistic spectator positions" that accompany the zombie subgenre.

Now, there IS a lot of talk in the first half of DAY OF THE DEAD. And the one-note military hardheads seem to spend more time on their hair and cackling than is good for them, but there's no stimping on the gore fx, and the pace is full bore. Down in a n old military base/fall out shelter, a team of scientists deal with the issues of the day while the hopped up military guys protecting them get more and more squirrely. "Frankenstein" is the head scientist who has slowly whittled life down to a medulla oblangata ex machina... the concept of "is you is or is you aint a sentient being" is explored in myriad subtle ways; The people getting pulled apart get to contemplate this as they watch their limbs and entrails get spread out in all directions, like the rolling out of a tent.

One film that looked truly disturbing in the previews on the Anchor Bay PHENOMENA DVD was something called THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (2007) which sports a deceptively sun-dapped shot-on-digital video in real people's suburban houses look, which then gets all the more disturbing as the ingeniously edited trailer slowly moves from STAND BY ME-type nostalgia-ism to sexualized violence as kids start hurting each other and instead of condemning, mom condones, and shows the boys how to do it right (to the girls). I'm so disturbed just by the trailer that I don't think I'll ever watch a trailer again! Men may be brutes, kids may be demonic but God DAmN! cold-hearted moms is the scariest creatures of all.

Yes ASIA!

2008-06-26T22:57:00.014-05:00

It's true; the whole Acidemic thing got started because of Asia Argento. It was 2003 or so. We were in love with her from SCARLET DIVA onwards. Her sheer reckless bravery was the inspiration behind Acidemic. We wanted to make something worthy of her. She was set to do our cover story/interview and even sent us cool self-portrait photos. Then, we lost communication. It was around the time her HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS premiered at Cannes and got trashed by the critics (a lot of whom have since come around and praised it). We figured she just had to hole up somewhere and cut loose the inessential strings until the heat died down. Hell, we did that all the time ourselves.

And so, we decided print was too expensive and to go with the web after all. Anyway, what could we say in an interview? Asia already opened her guts and soul to us, and even more, in her work. She later read and said she liked my article analyzing SCARLET DIVA. I'm still atwitter and aflutter!

Now she's getting huge! She ROCKED Cannes this year with three or four films, including the upcoming Catherine Breillat film, THE LAST MISTRESS, her dad Dario's MOTHER OF TEARS, some new thing from Abel Ferrara, and BOARDING GATE by my new favorite du jour, Olivier Assyas (reviewed below).

Anyway, here are some of the photos she sent as options for the cover...self portraits and bad assedness! I have the cover somewhere around here... we used the top photo but only the left half so you only see the word "Die" --- Yes! Death and Sex are one in cinema and embodied perfectly in the mythical archetype of the blood goddess anima... an anima named Asia!

The Lists AFI Forgot: The Acidemic Top Ten

2008-06-26T11:16:00.009-05:00

What makes an acidemic film? Well, it's about FREEDOM! It's beyond duality, it means doing whatever you want - sticking it to the man if he gets in your way, but doing it with LOVE. What makes an artist free? Well it's about the doors of perception being wiped clean to see reality as it truly is, infinite (to paraphrase Aldous Huxley). That doesn't necc. mean it's a drug film, because there's plenty of drug films just as inhibited and hung up as straight films. No, it means the makers of the film either encourage or allow a perspective free of the usual dubious moral hand-wringing and punishments for transgression against the patriarchy. Seriously, how many films pretend to be badass, and then have it all be a dream, or the antihero decides to give themselves up, or the fallen women throws herself in front of a bullet so her true love can marry the boring socially acceptable gal? Or what about the lesbian couple who have to get shot at the end, or else Jessica Stein picks some beige normie instead of her hot girlfriend, or it's aaalll a dream?

Here's 10 movies that are truly free, truly alive, truly... acidemic! Take that, AFI with your moronic categories like Sports and courtroom. Here are some Acidemic Top Tens:

AMOK YOUTH

1. Over the Edge (pictured above)
2. Heavenly Creatures
3. Dazed & Confused
4. Kids (right)
5. Spider Baby
6. The Exorcist
7. The Butcher Boy
8. Thirteen
9. Bully
10. Rebel Without a Cause

THE OUTER LIMITS

1. The Holy Mountain
2. Performance
3. Head
4. Last Tango in Paris
5. Pierrot Le Fou
6. Psych-Out
7. Breakfast of Champions
8. Persona
9. La Dolce Vita
10. Fight Club

DRUNKS AND DRUGGIES

1. Night of the Iguana
2. The Lost Weekend
3. Scarlet Diva
4. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
5. Leaving Las Vegas
6. Twentieth Century
7. International House
8. The Thin Man
9. Long Day's Journey Into Night
10. Bad Lieutenant

I might be forgetting something, but that's a good mix of the canonized, the eclectic and the popular, ala the AFI lists. I also made some lists over on Bright Lights After Dark!

New! Stills from the upcoming experimental art film, "To Hell Rode a Hippy"

2008-06-23T14:16:00.013-05:00

Olivier Assayas - Super Genius

2008-06-20T13:58:00.009-05:00

Thank god that at least there are a few Frenchmen, like Olivier Assayas, who get that life is beautiful even when (or especially when) it's drenched in blood. Assayas makes movies that move and feel like ambient techno music - glacial emotions and settings, rapid tempo stream of conscious flow editing and magnificent paranoid foley work: as characters walk around hallways there's a constant flow of parties, cash registers, and other sounds from all around - in short, the real noises of this crazy world. In attempting a futurist neo-realism, he shows us just how bizarre our lives have become. He makes it seem ironic that science fiction movies are built on sets when the real world is right now far more complex and cyber-delic than anything one singular human mind could e'er imagine. Assayas provides a link wherein even corporate work and air travel becomes sexual and dangerous.

His latest, BOARDING GATE, returns to the world of corporate espionage in catsuits that won him mixed reviews with DEMONLOVER (2002). Superstar Asia Argento is great here playing a cross between her strung-out exhibitionist in SCARLET DIVA and the role which helped make her an international sex symbol, the influential-but-little-seen cult film NEW ROSE HOTEL. Based on a short story by William Gibson and directed by Abel Ferrara, HOTEL was set in a dystopian future where international corporations had replaced government and everything from banking to boarding room negotiations were done via cameraphones!

Science fiction what? Released in 1998, NEW ROSE HOTEL was futuristic for about three hours. It starred Christopher Walken and Willem DaFoe as two corporate spies-for-hire who recruit Asia's duplicitous and irresistible prostitute to seduce and betray a married Japanese researcher. They find Argento at a hip bar where the DJ is playing Cat Power in all murky cool Bozan Bajeli reds. Assayas clearly loves NEW ROSE HOTEL or parts of it. The son of Jacques Remy, Assayas has captured the child's eye view of jet set privilege, being shuffled through futuristic airport terminals and off to weird meetings and culture shock shopping malls without hardly knowing why or how soon you will get to rest and have a coke.

Critics say that for all his innovations, Assayas is derivative, but that's hardly relevant; if he riffs on other's work, it's cool because he steals only from the very best. Using the template of Godard's ALPHAVILLE (modern business architecture and practices as science fiction) and the sexy late night with unlimited mini-bar expense account decadence of Ferrara's HOTEL and joining them together at the USB port where Argento's own SCARLET DIVA wanders in exile.

One thing Assayas does better than all the rest is the sense of emotionless futurism that comes from being drugged out on international flights. There's a bravado stretch of time in GATE where nothing happens except pure poetry in cinema, an extended montage of Asia on an overnight flight to Hong Kong - the tacky but beautiful television shows hawking the city you are landing in, seeming strange and alien after a bad nights sleep with the sound off on your airplane headphones; the weird intimacy that develops between passengers sleeping next to each other; Asia climbing over sleeping Chinese people to get back to her seat; waking up cuddled against the old man next to her and not feeling good or bad about it, grabbing a bottle of water off the stewardess's tray at what seems like the dead of night, but then opening the window and being blinded by sunlight. If you have seen DEMONLOVER you remember the opening with the water on the plane and this leads to a sense of overall paranoia which Assayas clearly loves playing with, exploiting for our mutual benefit. Most of all he has an eye for Asia Argento, perhaps the perfect queen of the Assayas universe (which she helped birth, after all, via HOTEL). Maggie Cheung and Connie Nielsen could only do so much with their catsuits and slinky stares; Asia is this sort of person, this cat woman espionage agent: like Assayas she has a famous filmmaker dad (Dario) and a penchant for "stealing" shots at airports for maximum free sci fi affect. And just like her character in GATE, Argento lives the life of a jet setting debauched intellectual artist forever maneuvering her way through the tangled web of vice and male desire for her own exhibitionist fun and profit! It's who she is... in real life!

And what is real life? you tell me... exactly.

Queen of Dicks - CONCLUSION (part 4)

2008-06-12T18:26:00.003-05:00

This is everyone's favorite, when it gets all lesbian:

Great Dads of the 1970s #10: Josh Brolin as Dr. Block in PLANET TERROR

2008-06-11T16:12:00.001-05:00

I'll grant you that Brolin's character in this beautifully constructed gonzo gem from Robert Rodriguez (can I go out on a limb and say it's his best film since EL MARIACHI?) is in fact rather evil. Yes, he tries to kill his unfaithful wife even before he gets turned into a zombie, but damned if he ain't a good dad to his kid, Tony (played by Robert's son Rebel and named--presumably-- after Danny Torrance's finger in THE SHINING).

First off, there's the fact that daddy and mommy are doctors, who wake up at night to go to work! Pardon me, but I think that's just about the coolest thing in the world. Maybe it's just that I'm so sick to death of those tiresome scenes of domestic tranquility around the breakfast table, dad with briefcase and mom in her apron, etc. that are supposed to spell out family dynamics in so many bad films. Here that breakfast family dynamic is inversed and made as sinister and exciting as getting ready for trick or treating.

Second, there's his line to his kid: "No dead bodies for daddy today," how cool is that? It lets the kid into dad's world, similar to the "give us a kiss" line in JAWS it delineates just exactly how the kid serves to help the father deal with his big adult issues, i.e. by acting as an conduit back to innocence. The son becomes the touchstone of decency which enables dad to wade into the blood, vice and depravity of 1970s monster hunting, eating, and becoming.

The cool daddyhood is also apparent in his relation with Tony even before the dead bodies line; it's just there in the way they relate to each other. Block treats Danny like an equal, like a young man deserving of respect and confidence but at the same time Block doesn't pass responsibility or betray any emotional dissonance or anxiety that might effect the kid, unlike the near-hysterical anesthesiologist mom (Marley Shelton) who is terrified Block will discover she's about to run off with her hot lesbian lover.

"Do we believe her?" he calmly asks Tony when mom lies about the text message she receives while preparing their nightly breakfast. ("Nope," Tony flatly answers).

Dakota shows all her anxiety and fear to Tony, while dad Brolin never would; he's even respectful of Tony's action figures and their desire to "eat brains."

How can a man make such a great dad in such a short scene? One word: BROLIN!

P.S.
Have you heard Brolin is going to play George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's new biopic? The mind boggles, the stomach contracts, and the gall rises.

Read a great interview with Brolin and Shelton on slashfilm here (where I stole the above image, thanks fellas!)

Zombie Glamour

2008-06-11T13:36:00.002-05:00

In channeling the cosmic zeitgeist into my paintings lately, they've all become zombie portraits (including the above, of Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong from SHANGHAI EXPRESS).

I've been working from film stills in an attempt to capture the idea of the "dissolving of memory" - how with movies you remember key scenes and then you see the movie years later and the scene turns out to be completely different! It's about seeing a young beautiful actress, then watching the making of documentary and seeing the withered stalk she's become... the hair and teeth gone, replaced by wig and dentures, the flesh decaying... the voice gone gravelly as she lurches forward to rend your living flesh and devour you screaming... until you too are aged and cannibalistic... meanwhile, the young image stays forever glowing on the silver screen....MOCKING YOU!

It's also about me being older and having written on film for long enough that I go back and reread some of my recollections on films I've seen and realize that even my memories of certain film scenes change over time... whoa!

Bing Crosby's "When the Organ Played 'Oh Promise Me'"

2008-06-10T14:05:00.004-05:00

First of all, there's the brilliant corniness of the song title. What the devil is this film about? Whatever the answer, it is PURE 30s ACIDEMIA! I especially dig the weird "womb-skull" hybrid at the end.

Thanks to C. Jerry Kutner over at Bright Lights After Dark for finding this on youtube. Read his thing on it here.

Semi-Great Dads of the 1970s #2: Kris Kristofferson in "SEMI-TOUGH"

2008-05-18T14:48:00.008-05:00

Dad in this case can loosely encompass older brother and Drunken Friend of Your Father (DFYF) figures... for Kris Kristofferson is not exactly in responsible father mode as Burt Reynold's football teammate, zen quarterback and DESIGN FOR LIVING-style menage-a-trois member in SEMI-TOUGH. But, he's still warm, tough and dependable.

I recently re-watched the film (after 20 years) and was shocked at how badly its blocked and paced. Sloppy stuff these redneckish Reynolds vehicles, the 1970s equivalent of our Adam Sandler/Judd Apatow "crank 'em while they're hot" sports/sex satires. The cool thing about SEMI-TOUGH is that it's made in the 1970s, so unlike the Apatow age of puritan inhibitions masked by potty talk bravado, people do actually have sex, lots of it, with no guilt or pregnancies. Hell we even see Reynolds resign himself to the "large fan," (Mary Jo Catlett?) still drinking around the hotel room late at night with her horribly curly short hair.

But Kristofferson shines amidst such sophomoric chaos, allowed to radiate all his Christlike calm and country rock mellow, a beacon of 1970s suave. He's been converted to a new age path shortly before the film begins; one of the largely forgotten fads of the 1970s-- est. As a result, everything he does is... "perfect."

Which brings me to the key scene that gets Kristofferson the Semi-Great Dad #2 nomination: The party scene where T.J. Lambert (Brian Dennehy), the misogynistic creep linebacker has gone nuts and is holding some bikini-clad chick from the party over the balcony, threatening to drop her on the concrete below. No one knows how to talk him down, but Kristofferson does; he calmly climbs up onto the roof and goes to stand next to Dennehy and just looks at him with love shining in his Kristoffersony blue eyes. "If you want to drop her, if that's right for you. Go ahead," he tells Dennehy. "Because you're perfect." Dennehy's oaf--so used to abuse and ugliness--is so moved and happy by realizing someone thinks he's perfect that he of course pulls the girl up and is all friendly and apologetic to her; perhaps his first step free of the trap of misogyny/self-hatred! All just because of Kristofferson's perfect faith. I can't imagine any actor of the era pulling this hat trick off as well as Kristofferson. In fact, I've talked more than one person off a ledge of one sort or another by basically just doing my impression of Kristofferson in this scene. He's just mellow and laconic enough to be able to say that sort of stuff without having to put hipster italics on it to keep from sounding corny or square.

But how can we condone a man who condones violence in others just because it's "their trip?" Well, see, a great dad has faith in his kid, and in his own ability to take care of his kid. He assumes the role of a benevolent authority figure, which is such a rarity these days we may even have forgotten what that means. It means "through me, thou art good." This is, ultimately, the true meaning of non-violent resistance, or "turning the other cheek." Even in the sense of actively engaging in combat this can still be practiced. One can bestow blessings on one's enemy even as one twists the knife into their heart (i.e. Adam Goldberg in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN).

The "loving" violence concept was huge in the 1970s, especially, as I've noted before, in Burt Reynolds movies like SEMI-TOUGH. This was the age of bloodless bar fights, where chairs break easy over heads, and people fly through storefront windows with the carefree abandon of a kid jumping into a summer lake. Everyone makes up outside in the parking lot, their macho fury soothed with some good old fisticuffs.

The 1970s dad was peaceful enough to understand the need for these sorts of outlets for his children and friends. In our more "enlightened" times no one is allowed to fight or have raunchy sex, not without consensual agreement in writing beforehand, and gloves.

So here's to Kristofferson, the mighty. Hell, he is such the man that he even manages to make his biker rapist character in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA sympathetic and cool. God DAMN. His is the mix of charisma and humility that tempers all judgment against him. Here's the kind of a man that you could get in a knock down fight with but then you'd go get a beer together afterwards and know he was your friend for life. Kristofferson, in short, is the ideal 1970s older brother, which is why he's only a "Semi-Great" 70s dad, but still...by any stretch of the cinematic imagination... he's perfect.

Queen of Dicks - Part Three

2008-05-15T22:48:00.003-05:00