31 days of nite

real talk

2009-06-13T01:37:00.000-04:00

I miss my brother a lot. also i am drunk

your mouth my mouth our mouth

2009-06-12T00:42:00.003-04:00

Tonight I sat in a chair and listened listened listened while people talked talked talked for three hours and there was nothing else for it so i listened while they talked some more. I imagined their words streaming out of their mouths in a stream and the words converged, merged, fed like rivers into the ocean and i was struck dumbfounded. Therapy is not a science so that means its an art, but there is no way to portray it in a visual sense so it'll never hang in a gallery. Perhaps one day when I'm famous (joke) I'll get a group of patients together and have an installation at a museum where we'll hold therapy in a public place and not a white-walled office (our frame, or canvas, or whatever) and people can sip martinis and smoke cloves and pay us lots and lots of money, but for now, it's confined to clinics. I listened and listened and listened and wished with all my heart that i could somehow see the soundwaves coming from their mouths, or that humans could hear in color, or something, ANYTHING to let me know that what i am creating will last.

Now I'm in my room smoking in the dark and watching the smoke congregate in the corners of my high ceilings and the smoke is pouring out of my mouth and it's no different than their words except it hangs around a little while longer. does this make sense to anyone but me.

grossly underqualified

2009-06-09T21:50:00.003-04:00

One of the hardest aspects of counseling is that you can't just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind when a person tells you something. Last night in group, a consumer shared a traumatic experience from his/her childhood. I, being a clinician, asked the consumer if the consumer had ever been in intensive therapy, to properly process the emotions and issues attached to this trauma. Consumer states that consumer has been in therapy, once, and the therapist said, "Oh, you'll get over all this stuff in time" and just generally treated the situations (which is to say, the devastating events that effect the consumer's life in every way imaginable) as a stage, something that someone gets through. Well, yes, OK, that's true; most of the trauma from a person's life can be dealt with. But it can take years for a person to get there, and that one time in a therapist's office was enough for this particular consumer to make the decision to never go back.

A peer from the group responded to what I said, and stated, "Fuck the therapy, fuck the counseling, fuck 12 Stepping. You can do that for years, and what'll you get out of it? Nothing. You need to learn to forgive, and only church is going to give you that".

Now, my initial reaction was to tell the consumers that this is bullshit, and that any clergy member who was presented with the types of issues that this person is going through would direct the person to a therapist, because any clergy member knows that some things need to be handled in a clinical setting. My initial reaction was also to tell this person that religions are all phony and were created from hatred and continue to perpetuate generation after generation of hatred, all in the name of love. And also to tell them that god is a lie and that nothing they're really going through is happening anyway. And that I think drugs are OK in the context of controlled intake and that legalizing all narcotics, every single one, would solve a lot of this country's financial, social, racial, and legal problems.

But I can't say that. I can't say that because we're not friends and we are not having a conversation, and I think that's what most people don't realize about therapy. It's a relationship unlike any you'll experience elsewhere in life. Even if I were to share all of my problems with a priest, I wouldn't trust him to not tell anyone else the second we get out of the confessional booth. A therapist, on the other hand, has actual, physical accrediting and legal bodies to answer to, and that should be enough to ensure confidentiality and trust. But this consumer had a shitty experience with a shitty therapist, and that colored every experience and opinion of therapy that the consumer will hold, and then someone else goes and tells them that counseling won't work and only church will save you and the idea is reinforced in the person's mind.

The incident left kind of a bad taste in my mouth, but I couldn't relate that to the group. I just had to internalize it and process it myself, and I realized that I was doing a lot of inserting my own opinion into the mix, my personal opinions on religion and therapy, and that's not allowed. I don't give advice, I don't state my opinion, except when asked to, and I am not your friend. And I'm way too self-aware to know that every person's subjective experience determines how they interpret the world, and so for me therapy works and church doesn't and for other people the exact opposite is true and we're both OK. But it's hard not to say what I'm thinking, and even harder not to say what I'm feeling. And that's the reality of this work. Maybe the consumer could talk to a priest about what happened and that'd make it all better. I don't know.

Here's what I do know:

1. The consumer saw a shitty therapist who gave pat answers to a serious incident that had long-lasting repercussions in my consumer's life. The consumer saw this shitty therapist because the consumer has shitty health insurance provided by the state that only allows people to see shitty therapists in shitty, over-crowded, over-worked offices in the shittiest parts of the city. Clinicians get their licenses and flee from these shitty offices to open private practices in nicer parts of the city, and they accept only private insurances and they counsel housewives about boredom and stress and prescribe tons of medications and MAKE A KILLING. Here's the promise that I made myself while driving home last night, thinking about all of this: when I get my MSW and my license and I set up my private practice, I will continue to take low income consumers and provide them with quality counseling on a sliding scale basis, and I will market my practice to people who believe in the therapeutic process as much as I do, and if i don't make ends meet, oh well, at least I tried. There is no reason for every single person who wants therapy to not be provided with the highest quality experience possible, regardless of income (which naturally goes hand in hand with race). The most highly-trained, best-equipped counselors should not head for the suburbs, they should continue to help the people who truly need it and want it.

2. The counseling relationship ultimately leads to a power differential. I am not allowed to speak my mind or state my opinion. I am also the focal point of the group, the person that consumers turn to when conversation sputters out and the big, scary Silence sets in. I'm expected to always have an answer, or advice, and the truth is, I don't have any answers, and like I said before, I don't give advice. Perhaps evolutionary therapy has a place for totally honest communication between therapist and consumer? Perhaps there is a place for opinion from the therapist, and also the recognition that the therapist is just a person, not some authority figure granted with powers that you don't have.

3. I am a lucky person to be doing the job I'm doing, getting the experience that I am, and I'm also grossly under-qualified. Shhh!

camera

2009-06-09T12:09:00.005-04:00

(Last week I made a promise to myself to start working on my screenplays every weekday. That lasted three days. Now I'm expanding my definition of workweek writing to include this blog, because I think it is important to write each day and to begin to think of writing as a "job" of sorts, even if I'm not getting paid for it yet. the effort to write each day is what's important and i don't think it matters so much whether the writing is on here or towards my screenplay or some other project entirely. So this is all part of an effort to just write as much as I possibly can, like I used to.)

This weekend I stood on a short stone pier at the beach where I spent most of my summers growing up. I didn't go too far out at first, because I am a neurotic person. The thought of stepping too far out on the pier scared me, brought about thoughts of mortality and anxiety and the things that I usually think about, but which seem intensified when facing raging oceans and breaking waves and unforgiving rocks. There was a small tower at the end of the pier, sending out a loud, beeping signal every couple of minutes. I stared at the tower and thought about walking up to it but decided against it. Because I'm neurotic. You know this.

I thought about the poems that I'd read on the beach and considered why it is that I am so afraid. Fear seems to run my life, not to mention in my family; fear of people and places and the unknown and death and everything else. There were quiet Asian families fishing off the side of the pier, and I thought about when I was younger, standing in this exact spot late at night with my father, and we were fishing then, too. I caught an eel, but in my 5 or 6 year old world, eels didn't exist. I'd never heard of them. So my initial reaction was to shout, "It's a sea monster!" My dad evaluated the creature and informed me that it wasn't a sea monster, just an eel. I felt silly asking what an eel is, and I'm sure he felt sillier when he just mumbled a response. "Oh, it's a fish, or...something?"

The ocean holds untold stories, presents the vacationer with new worlds that exist just below the surface. I got over my fear of the ocean early on and have loved the water ever since. But I'm always aware that the ocean is a mystery, and not really meant to house human beings. It is this awareness that colors my every experience. I am aware that it is not just the ocean that isn't meant to be home to humans, but this planet as a whole. We are aliens, or perhaps just vacationers enjoying a place that isn't ours, can't be ours. This planet belongs to the universe, and the universe belongs to no one, least of all us. The universe doesn't even belong to itself, because the very idea of "belonging" is a man-made construct. Property and ownership doesn't exist in nature. We divide up land and we also divide up stimuli received in our brain and label it to make sense of it. And you can take this line of thought further and further until you realize that our every perception is the result of some degree of measurement and interpretation. We are not really existing, just perceiving, and when the brain dies, show's over, folks, drive safe.

I stood at the end of that pier and I smoked a cigarette and I got my camera and just filmed things naturally occurring; a couple of boats drifting through the frame, waves breaking, the tower sounding its signal every minute or so. I went all the way to the end of the pier, fear be damned, and it was wet and slippery but I didn't fall in. I walked back from the pier and found my friend and my love but I was distant the rest of the weekend, as I tend to be, just stuck in my own head and not even sure of what's going on. I remembered when I first got my camera, I googled directions on how to clean the lens because I wasn't sure. A photographer had an online guide to cleaning lenses and stated that oftentimes amateur photographers will not shoot near water or sand or any other potentially camera-harming environments due to not wanting to damage their equipment. The author of the page stated that this results in a lot of great shots never being taken. The author encouraged the amateur photographer to seek out these locales and to take pictures, and if your equipment gets wet, fuck it, buy another. You'll always have the photos that you took, and they could live on beyond the camera, beyond the photographer, beyond the entire history of the universe. I imagine emailing myself a copy of the footage that I shot and that email leaving beamed to a satellite high above the earth, and then being shot back to earth, and there's a digital footprint left there. The digitized information exists between the earth and the satellite and it could exist forever, waiting to be picked up by a receiver anywhere in any point in time. This is comforting to me. And it occurs to me that this is what filmmaking can provide. It can encourage me to step out to the end of the pier, you're not going to fall in if you're careful and surefooted. The camera goes to places that I wouldn't otherwise consider going, but then when I do, it's not as bad as I thought it may be. And you receive beautiful images and they're captured forever and this is what it's all about.

Flirtations with Racism

2009-06-08T22:44:00.006-04:00

1. Today I was giving this dude I work with (similar to me; white, glasses, facial hair, likes punk rock and metal) a ride and when we got into my car i was shocked to see that the music playing was Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us back. I had an instant moment where i freaked out and was like, did I do too much self-disclosure to a co-worker. does he think that i am secretly a black militant, or perhaps a Muslim? I hesitated to turn the music off instantly, and that would be the source of my next freak out. It didn't matter what I was playing; like I said, he was similar to me, culturally and also in terms of pop cultural frames of reference, so that meant he was down with the PE(" now every single bitch wanna see me"). But then I worried that my initial urge to turn the music off revealed the truly racist person that I am. Sure, my brain said inside my head, you'll listen to hip-hop in my car when you're alone, but bring another white person into the mix and you switch to bland jangly indie pop. And then I worried that my initial impulse to switch the music stemmed from my unconsciously thinking that because he is white, he must hate rap, thus making me and him both racist. this is the way my mind works. In the end, I played the first five tracks and switched it. That seemed safe. So am i racist or what?

2. I'm in the car with a black consumer at work, and i am just randomly flipping through radio stations. I land on a lil wayne track that i like but don't know the words to, so i can't like rap along or anything, so my participation seems perhaps like a stupid white liberal nod to solidarity (again, not saying there is any reason to interpret these events as I have; this is my purely subjective experience, and probably no one thinks I'm racist, and probably I'm not (though actually writing this sentence made me think that, yes, i am racist), so feel free to read this shit for entertainment purposes. I am just a neurotic, self-doubting, everything-else-doubting bro, yknow) and then I go to change the station, hesitate, and then fuck! actually do change it, and then I of course instantly worry that my changing the station revealed my true racist self, earlier when you were both singing along to the song, he was loving you, and then you changed the fucking station. Might as well join the KKK, you fucking RACIST. That's what i heard in my mind. And this is what I am stressing out about, all the time; nothing. And my work has taught me that ultimately most people spend a vast amount of their time freaking out about nothing, and I'm no different, so stop fucking freaking out about nonsense. But once I acknowledge that I'm freaking out about, and then I start to worry that I freak out over nothing, and then before I know it I am freaking out about how I am freaking out about nothing (and even this simple acknowledgment of my freaking out is proof that I know its senseless, but i'm still doing it in the moment). And this is what I love about humans, ultimately: our ability to contradict ourselves. Not every species of animal can do that. our ability to hold two positions in direct opposition to each other, and to argue them both, is an extension of our basic ability to feel conflicting emotions about ourselves, and the world around us. You might not know it but this is a pretty FUCKING AWESOME aspect of humanity and I urge you to start doubting everything, including my telling you how FUCKING AWESOME skepticism is. I am determined to just dive into the gray areas and doubt everything and then start to believe it all and believe none of it all in reaction to the believing and it's beautiful. So what i hope to catalogue here in a series of vignettes about my anxieties about my own racist tendencies. I'll start by stating that I do not believe I am a racist, at all, because I understand race in terms of biological and cultural roots and think that we the only differences that exist between us are purely man-made constructs, and a basic misunderstanding of evolution and biology in general. But maybe I'll feel differently about all this by the time I'm done. (I will never be done)

2009-06-04T23:43:00.002-04:00

DR. REPP (v.o.): All culture and art and godheads and societies are attempts to make something permanent out of life, which is just an accident and an illusion, anyway. We strive, and we worry about it, and we want something, oh lord, something, please, solid in our lives. And then we die and all of time exists in a split second and we never even accept or learn to enjoy how short everything is. How this all could’ve just as easily not happened. We take existence for granted and talk of destiny and fate but the truth? This all could’ve just as easily not happened. And it probably didn’t anyway.

to be mailed with the hair from my mustache that sticks up

2009-03-24T01:16:00.000-04:00

Orlando looked nine feet tall from my place behind the desk. I had been working the job for almost a year but I wasn’t really ready for this. My supervisor is in the room with us, trying to talk to him. His words are tangential, disjointed. In the business we would say that he is “responding to internal stimuli”. He tells us that there is a man in the streets who wants to murder him and he’ll have to do something about it. My supervisor asks why and Orlando tells him it’s because of a girl. “Have you been with this girl?” my supervisor asks. “I smashed it once,” he responds, and my supervisor (brunette, young, from the suburbs) just nods her head and I try to stifle a laugh. A psychiatrist comes into the room and that’s when Orlando leaves. Earlier, when it was just he and I, he stared at me and told me about Iraq. “When I close my eyes all I see are the letters K-I-L-L”. The cops pick him up a few days later and he’s in the hospital.

evolutionary therapy: I

2009-02-17T23:37:00.004-05:00

"Animals in order to survive have had to be protected by fear-responses, in relation not only to other animals but to nature itself. They had to see the real relationship of their limited powers to the dangerous world in which they were immersed. Reality and fear go together naturally. As the human infant is in an even more exposed and helpless situation, it is foolish to think the fear response would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value."
--Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Yes, they did indeed pass on to their offspring a realism (that is, the fear response, which I'm gonna call the death urge because this is supposed to be a horror movie blog, after all), and since the men who developed this sense of anxiety about the world would have lived longer than those without it, he would have produced more and more offspring. The death urge would have been naturally selected for and passed on to future generations via genetic information.

Becker concludes thusly: "The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none." I said something very similiar to a very pretty young girl while we sat on the floor on Valentine's Day, but in Becker's quote, I believe that I have found the crux of the idea that I have felt germinating inside me for the past couple of years. I have wanted to be a therapist, but it is becoming increasingly harder for me to reconcile the reality of how most of the people in the mental health field think. They are not scientifically inclined, and it has hurt the development of empirical data to back up most of the claims that the field makes about how it rehabilitates people. There is always a push to legitimize the social sciences, but mental health has been lagging, lagging due to generations of scholars perpetuating Freudian non-sense, hypnotherapy, Christian-based counseling, and the like.

But here, it seems, lies the roots of the idea that I am calling evolutionary therapy. This could become my life's work, I think, and it's based upon a simple premise. All mental disorders (calling them mental illnesses is a misnomer) are rooted in the fear of death, a very real, biological sense of mortality which is unique to humans. The death urge has helped humans to increase their numbers and ensure the ongoing survival of the species, but it has also rooted in us an innate, genetic anxiety. Therapy can help to alleviate this anxiety, but first it must take aim at the ways that humans have naturally selected for the death urge, and the ways that we can healthily deal with it. This involves educating people on biology and the evolutionary roots, of their fears, depressions, anxieties, and psychotic behaviors which have been misunderstood and allowed to take control over their lives. Humans need science and evolutionary theory in order to ensure the continuation of the species. I do not know if this is a new theory, but there has never been a scholarly article written which utilizes the term 'evolutionary therapy'. This may not be new, and it may not even be novel, but it is a beginning of my academic pursuits and, I hope, will offer an alternative to the soft, touchy-feeliness which therapy is often associated. Like the films that I will make because they are the types of movies that I want to see, I am going to develop a new model of social work practice, because I cannot exist and work with the existing one.

uh

2009-02-16T23:57:00.003-05:00

I just found a file on my computer, a text file that I created on 3/2/2008. I do not recall creating this file. I don't remember writing anything. When I opened it, it was a Word Works document consisting of a single sentence, four words:

MARS IS EARTH'S NIGHTMARE

THE GHOST OF THE COMPUTER

2009-02-16T23:16:00.003-05:00

I have reached a point in my purging where I know that it is entirely possible to adopt a perspective merely because it is interesting to do so. There is no way to quantify belief. One can say that he believes in god, and we have not yet developed a physical way of observing that one actually does believe in god, in a material way. We have neurological scanning technology that can visualize the chemical processes at work, but all they tell us is that the individual is experiencing the act of belief. I want my brain to be a clearinghouse for ideas, a sacred ground where all ideas and perspectives are considered equally. My eventual neurological scans will reveal religious beliefs, I suppose. It is quite rational to believe in god despite a lack of physical evidence to support the case. Belief is a conscious choice, a selection of an emotional process over a rational one, and it is arrived at via reason. I will explore all avenues of human thought and expression and life, adopting any belief system as I see fit, believing none, believing all.

Once mankind has accepted that the thing we have chosen to call the soul is really nothing more than our personalities or our collected intelligences, then human thought and discourse can get truly interesting. If we are willing to stake a belief in a human soul, then, why are we not willing to take the same leap to inquire as to the nature of the machine’s soul? It's just as immaterial as the human soul and the odds are about the same of proving its existence. What does an appliance feel? Does a computer have dreams? (See Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs wherein the protagonist tries to create a subconscious for his computer by creating a random folder and interesting random text files of information. What else is the human subconscious but all the information we filter through our brains, all of the clutter that we don’t know what to do with? A computer’s subconscious is more relevant than any theory of a human subconscious, anyway, because we can at least point to an actual folder that is the machine’s subconscious.)

Further food for thought: computer software is dependent upon line after line of binary code, endless sequences of data which inform the technology’s function and usage. It can only do what it is programmed to do. Well. Sounds similar to human coding, DNA, genetics, right? What if human begins are nothing more than the genetic equivalent of a player piano, acting out some predestined, scripted existence? Perhaps our entire lives are already written out in a long strand of genetic coding? More to the point, if humans are willing to believe that we have a soul despite the absence of any tangible evidence to justify our having this belief, then we should be just as ready to believe that our computers have souls, too, and perhaps our houses are haunted by the ghosts of our discarded toys, washing machines, microwaves, and television sets. This will be a key to the initial work that I will produce over the next couple of years, where one realizes that belief in nothing is ultimately belief in everything, since saying that we are all wrong and all explanations for the existence of life are meaningless and lacking is also saying that all explanations are valid and you can freely pick and choose from any existing belief systems, and even create new ones. Nothing is everything and we’re all right because we’re all wrong.

When you open yourself up to the possibility of the ghost of the computer, then you open yourself up to the possibility that artificial intelligence is just as valid as human intelligence. Digital is just as valid as analog, a point that digital filmmaking, which will be the medium through which I express myself until I can afford others, must ultimately make due to the fact that it will be created through digital (that is, pixilated) processes. What we must point out is that digital information is nothing more than a tangible expression of the stuff of the universe; cells and colored light. What we perceive in a film is no less relevant than the stimuli that we perceive in our everyday lives. This is the path to truth, the only way the human line of thought can continue. This leads us to the acceptance that science and religion are really the same things, just ways of explaining the universe, and ultimately are all part of the all-encompassing continuum of human expression and feeling and evolved behaviors. Science is the rational side of life, the order-seeking side, the 1s and 0s binary code of life, while religion points to the supernatural, the part of the human mind that wants to tear structure and logic asunder. Once we see that science/religion, digital/analog are really the exact same thing, we free ourselves to the possibility of anything, literally everything being possible. The ghost of the computer becomes real. So too does the soul of the appliance.

2008-09-21T16:33:00.004-04:00

I stood beneath a tree today with my brother and we talked about how small the tree used to be when we were younger. We looked at its branches and how long they stretched now, and stared at the roots in awe. They too reached out from the base of the tree, like a child becoming an adolescent becoming an adult, moving out into the world, finding out what how it processes and perceives the world. And then I thought about chopping the tree down, and how I could never do that, and how even if I were to take an axe to the thing, maybe the stump that was left in the ground as a reminder of the tree's brilliance would go on existing for thousands of years. The basic matter of the tree would remain in existence into infinity, and so maybe the tree itself would, too. And this lead to me considering the minute, sub-atomic ways in which we are only now learning that the human species receives and processes information, and that in turn forced me to consider that maybe, perhaps, in some way, after the human brain ceases functioning and we die, maybe we still continue taking in stimuli and processing it. It is an extremely biased, anti-intellectual stance to say that the human brain can detect and process every bit of information we receive from every dimension of reality. Maybe the remotest parts of our being, the very smallest pieces of genetic material we consist of, goes on into eternity. Maybe we all get to live forever in ways we never even came close to dreaming were possible and our every anxiety about death and destruction is wholly unfounded. Maybe (probably) we are all wrong about reality and the truth is something that we could never even hope to conceive of (yet). Regardless, it occurs to me that the only way to obtain this knowledge is through science. Religion is static, the most conservative, concrete way of thinking possible, and it is nearing irrelevance. To me, anyway.

Zzzzimilies

2008-09-17T16:54:00.004-04:00

The eternal debate rages on; do people prefer to sleep "like a baby" or "like a rock"? (If you're one of those "sleep of the dead" people you can fuck right off, weirdo.) People have been arguing about this for years, but it's time to settle the score. Travis Martin is setting the deal straight once and for all!

First off, I'm not all that familiar with what babies sleep like (I only sleep next to, like, two babies per year), so it's a little hard to be impartial. But my impression is that babies sleep the sleep of the deranged, waking up every hour, crying, screaming, evacuating their bowels and bladders without a care in the world. In other words, if you sleep like a baby, you sleep like a retard, jack, and I don't want that simile in our lexicon any longer. Who would want to sleep like a baby? Only a sick culture, one that reveres the rights of children above those of adults, one that places a premium on stupid, fleeting youth, could invent such an inane expression. Slept like a baby. As if!

I wouldn't take this so personally if there wasn't a perfect expression floating around; sleep "like a rock". What a lovely turn of a phrase! What a sort of Zen like image to ponder and use in our conversation. Sleeping like a baby is a regression, devolution, a return to the cradle. When one sleeps like a rock, however, one alters their genetic make up entirely and becomes like a rock, unthinking, uncaring, immobile. Peace. Americans don't want to think about negation, deconstruction, about the quiet and solace that comes from nothingness, losing yourself in the abyss. We would be happier if we learned to accept the void. Give up control. Stand in awe before the all-consuming mouth of pure light and color and experience. Allow it to engulf you. Analysis is for the deathbed and the fearful. Step into the wilderness of the soul and be made into something new. This is what I'm doing, and it's the only thing I've tried that brings me any semblance of peace. I want to bathe in white noise. I want to be cleansed by the static. I want to become the void.

I will become the void.

it lives!

2008-09-11T16:54:00.004-04:00

October is just around the corner, and you know what that means. 31 nights of horror films, for the third year running. Last year's writings are somewhere on a message board I never read anymore, but all of the stuff I wrote from 2006 is still archived here (and MANIAC is, i think, the best piece of film analysis I've written. Which is not to say it's any good, or original, or whatever. Just, y'know, saying.)

This will continue to be pretty much just writing about horror and other types of cult cinema, but I'll most likely post some original fiction stuff that i've been kicking around. I am in the midst of finishing my first screenplay and I imagine bits and pieces of that will end up here at some point. But this is all probably bullshit and I'll just continue to write movie reviews for 3 months till I get sick of it. (Again.)

2006 ROUNDUP: INSIDE MAN (Lee)

2007-02-11T14:10:00.001-05:00

Anthony Lane wrote something about BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, the Woody Allen film from around a decade ago or so. He wrote about how Hollywood does not need great pictures, but rather good ones. The staples - the romantic comedies, the thrillers, the period dramas - these needed to be less formulaic, more interesting and unique, and the masterpieces could take a backseat for a little while. Another NYC auteur, this time Spike Lee, takes this notion and applies it towards the crime picture genre, with solid, if not spectacular, results.

It's easy to foget how good of an actor Denzel Washington is, mainly because I've seen so few Denzel Washington movies. TRAINING DAY was, I think, the last one that I watched, and I can't imagine what the one before that was. He is completely cool and collected in this as a hostage negotiator who slowly starts to realize that the bank robbery he's working isn't really a bank robbery at all. Clive Owen is Dalton Russel, the inside man, who knows a lot about the wartime dealings of the head of the board of director's at the bank. Jodie is just sort of there. The show belongs to Denzel, of course, but you probably already knew that. My favorite part was Clive Owen. He spends most of the film with his face covered, but there is a scene where he finds what he's looking for, the thing that'll make him rich and expose a wealthy man for the savage he is, and he pulls his mask off, staring longingly at the thing he's spent so long planning. Owen's face is so interesting, scruffy, deep lines running down his cheeks. Lee shoots it in close up, and it's beautiful.

Things start out with a relatively standing heist picture, people talking about "the perfect crime" and whatnot, but things soon start to unravel and it becomes about something else entirely. Lee can't resist throwing in some references to race relations in New York, and the first filmmaker to overtly reference 9/11 in a film also shows us Foster and Washington acting in front of a large "We Will Never Forget" banner. These touches never really come around to mean anything greater, though, just an everyday occurence in the melting pot.

I had to get on IMDb to check out Clive Owen's character's name, and of course ended up spending ten minutes or so reading the threads that are posted there. A mistake, as most trips to the IMDb usually end up being. While people debate whether or not Spike Lee is the worst director of all time and how this movie "sucks", they all seem to sort of miss the point. INSIDE MAN is a good movie; it never achieves greatness, but it never really tries to, either. It's obvious that Lee has fun with the material, and the cast is also laughably good. It's a solid little heist flick that has some interesting twists and turns. Note: this is coming from a person who typically hates any kind of movie that "twists and turns".

In a larger context, this is exactly what Hollywood needs. Take a look at the top seven films in America, in terms of moneymaking, and then look at their rottentomatoes scores:

01. NORBIT - 09%
02. HANNIBAL RISING - 17%
03. BECAUSE I SAID SO - 07&
04. THE MESSENGERS - 13%
05. NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM - 45%
06. EPIC MOVIE - 02%
07. SMOKIN' ACES - 27%

All studio pictures, all released nationwide in multiplexes from New York, across the flyover states, all the way to LA. If even half of these were as good as INSIDE MAN, then perhaps I'd watch more Hollywood pictures in theatres. Maybe a lot more people would, come to think of it. INSIDE MAN never attempts to tackle any big issues in any meaningful way. It knows its place, and it makes its claim as the little sudio picture that could. That Spike Lee is also releasing documentaries about Hurricane Katrina is important and admirable; he is able to make these documentaries because movies like INSIDE MAN are seen by the larger public. I think it's great that someone like Michael Heneke is allowed to try his hand at a Hollywood picture. The US remake of FUNNY GAMES will be almost certainly be inferior to the original, but the fact that it'll make Heneke some more money, and perhaps allow him to make movies for a little while longer, is worthy of note.

Perhaps what we need are great filmmakers making good pictures, at least for a little while. Just a thought. INSIDE MAN won't make my top 10, but it never set out to do so, either. This is, in its own way, worthy of note.

2005 ROUND UP: COCAINE COWBOYS (Corben)

2007-02-03T17:49:00.000-05:00

Yet another larger-than-life documentary, COCAINE COWBOYS attempts to capture the glitzy, gawdy world of 1980s Miami, complete with a soundtrack provided by Jan Hammer. From the opening credits, what we are seeing is stylized and cool and funny and so very over the top. That it never becomes self-parody is to its own credit. What could have become an exercise in camp or irony instead ends up being a love letter to the times and places.

Perhaps it may strike some people as odd that drugs could be presented in a loving light. While the documentary definitely exposes some of the uglier elements of the drug world (the insane bloodbaths that result from the trade), it also takes care to point out that men like Mick Munday and John Roberts, key figures in the Miami scene, were businessmen, who believed in the philosophy of supply-and-demand. They are providing a service to the people of Miami. The further irony of this situation is that the money they make they pour back into the Miami community, fostering development and commerce where there was once seemingly only blight and ruin. Roberts claims he spent $50 million in Miami restaurants, car dealerships, nightclubs, bars, tailors, and the like. COCAINE COWBOYS never explicitly points the finger at the entire city of Miami as an accomplice, but it does take care to note that there were virtually no cops there until things turned violent.

And, yes, they turn violent. The second half of COCAINE COWBOYS is not until the second half of SCARFACE, as we see the result of such an incredible amount of money being made in such a fast time, and in an unchecked industry. A central figure at this time is Griselda Blanco, who is simply too horrific to be made up. She is linked with the Colombian cartels (as Roberts and Munday and most of the people in the film are) and is said to be involved with some 200 murders. The people interviewed take care to note that Blanco was "the godmother" and she did not fuck around. She had people killed for looking at her wrong. In the film's darkest moments, we hear from her ace, Rivi, that she ordered him to kill a man who had disrespected her son. Rivi and a driver roll up on the guy, shooting into his car, but missing the target. They later learn that there was a 2 year old in the car and that they managed to shoot him. Rivi is terrified, but Blanco loves this, and soon is offering larger rewards for her men to kill the children of people who owe her money. She is, apparently, evil incarnate.

COCAINE COWBOYS, with its neon opening credits and cheesy score, could easily have veered off into parody, but it manages to play everything straight. Through a mix of old news clips, interviews, and re-enactments, we see how things played out through the media and the eyes of the people who lived and trafficked there. Perhaps the greatest strength is the directors allowing the players to tell their own story without injecting themselves into the mix. I guess I'm just sick of the modern documentary style of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock (which was really influenced by the self-involved, docudrama "science fiction" films of my favorite director, Werner Herzog) and find it refreshing when someone, like Billy Corben, has enough faith in the source material and people involved to tell the story. COCAINE COWBOYS may make a top 20 of 2006, not top 10, but it's infinitely entertaining and engaging and an interesting slice of life in a certain place at a certain time.

2006 ROUNDUP: SHERRYBABY (Collyer)

2007-01-31T12:13:00.000-05:00

The night before last I watched APOCALYPSE NOW, and last night I watched SHERRYBABY. They're very different films in many regards, but they also share a couple of things in common. For one thing, they both feature Sam Bottoms. For another, they both, at first glance, seem to be about Important Things, but, by the time we reach the end, turn out to be about people instead. And most glaringly, both films give us people pushed to their absolute limits, and lets us watch as their ends showly fray and they cope the only way they know how.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is Sherry, just out of prison, three years clean from heroin, and left to reside in a women's halfway home. Given the set up, one might initially think of this as a Lifetime movie, but it quickly becomes clear that what you're going to be viewing is a totally different breed of animal. SHERRYBABY is not truly about drug addiction or the things that lead people to seek comfort therein. It is rather about Sherry herself and how her addiction affects her. It is very much a character study, and a wholly unsettling one at that. It becomes clear early on that Sherry is not seeking redemption and that it is not going to be coming to her. She never seems to give up expecting it, however, which is perhaps the film's saddest quality. Sherry expects her five year old daughter to love and admire her, despite the fact that she has been incarcerated for half of her life. She expects to get a job working with children, despite the fact that she is a convicted felon. (She does manage to get a gig working at a daycare center for urban youth, but only after blowing the intake director. The theme of the use of sex to achieve her own ends flows throughout all of the film, and presents us with questions about who is using who.) She expects to remain clean and for her PO to cut her breaks. But as the PO himself says, Sherry does not want to put in the work.

SHERRYBABY is a heartbreaking, emotionally devastating film that never gives us a glimmer of hope, never gives us any reason to believe that things are going to get better. It is not a picture about beginnings and ends, but rather the dull monotony and bleak self-analysis that makes up the majority of our days. There's a lot more to consider here, including whether or not Sherry is sympathetic (I think she is) and what tone the film wants to close on (I want to think it's hopefuly, but I know better). But like Sherry and the film about her, this review is going to remain incomplete, unfinished, because beauty exists in the imperfect, if you're willing to look for it. SHERRYBABY is not for everyone, but it is a film that everyone should see.

EVIL COMEDY IN THE NEW YORKER.

2007-01-30T12:35:00.000-05:00

So, Tad Friend from The New Yorker has put together a piece on Sarah Silverman's new sitcom (which I await breathlessly, lustfully), which he has taken to calling "mean comedy". Ah, Tad? This particular brand of comedy, which Sarah is definitely a purveyor of, goes further than being "mean" and enters the realm of pure EVIL. It is not about just simply lacking sentimentality, but also about debasing the very structure that our country was founded upon. I am a New Yorker fan (Anthony Lane is my favorite film critic), but Friend's claims that Silverman's show is "much the meanest sitcom in years" totally ducks STRANGERS WITH COMEDY and IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA, my two old standbys. And actually, add WONDRER SHOWZEN to that list. While not technically a sitcom, it has to be considered among the single most subversive, vile, completely ruthless TV shows ever filmed. That it is a spoof on children's educational shows only adds to the fun. But I'll have a longer writeup on WONDER SHOWZEN sometime in the coming future. As to Sarah's show, well, it's getting Brian Posehn and Jay Johnston on TV regularly, so it's got that going for it. It is, of course, also Sarah Silverman's, who I am starting to think might be wearing a little thin, but is still bitterly funny in smaller doses. Just the same, I am looking forward to watching the show. More evil comedy can never be a bad thing.

2006 ROUND UP: JESUS CAMP (Ewing & Grady)

2007-01-24T15:43:00.000-05:00

Man. This is seriously one of my favorite documentaries I've ever seen, especially in this post-Moore age of picking a point and hammering it home, again and again and again, never giving the audience a chance to make up their own minds. JESUS CAMP stands in direct opposition to the mold that people like Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore have created, as it is a shining example of simply giving people enough rope to hang themselves. Co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady do a beautiful job of allowing scenes to play out naturally. The result is much more damning than anything Moore could concoct with ironic music and hand-wringing liberalism.

JESUS CAMP is a terrifying glimpse into the world of midwestern Christian fundamentalism. The main players are Becky Fisher, the creator of the so-called "Jesus Camp", and Levi, an unfortunate looking boy of ten or so who is intensely devoted to Jesus. I had obviously heard a lot about this film, as it garnered a fair amount of press for a release of such small proportions. It is also a quiet little picture, featuring none of the doom-saying or name-calling that has lead to several blockbuster docs in the past couple of years. JESUS CAMP emerges as a staggering, sedated little picture that aims to the heavens - and hits its mark.

Fisher is downright evil, of this I have little doubt. Word is she approved of the documentary, which goes a long way towards revealing several things. First, it shows that the filmmakers were fair and impartial in their portrayal of her. Secondly, it demonstrates the degree to which she believes. This belief, far from the comforting sense of knowing that some claim, is actually a certain kind of blindness, a belief which shields against logical discourse and scientific fact.

The people who populate the film are smug, sure of themselves, and unwilling to even leave any sort of dissenting voice into their lives. The children are all home-schooled, and the parents are all more than willing to show them videos which mock science and evolution. Every summer, they send the kids off to Bible camp, where they sing, read scripture, and are brought to tears on a regular basis by mean-spirited adults who want to tell them they are flawed, they are evil, they are sinners, and they are fallen. This doesn't resemble my childhood memories of lounging by the Atlantic Ocean or going camping with friends. I myself was raised in a Christian household, which also acknowledged that a world existed outside of my church and our religion. When young Levi says that interacting with non-Christians makes him uncomfortable, you get the sense that he has not had this same chance to experience the larger world, a world which the children in the film tell us is corrupt, morally bankrupt, and sinful. Again, these are children. The words they use can come from no other source except for their parent's own mouths.

The parents, for their part, deny "forcing" religion on their children, but it's hard to imagine a ten year old saying that she needs to be aware of when "I'm dancing for the Lord and when I'm dancing for the flesh". Perhaps the film's greatest lesson is the way in which we guide our children to be who we want them to be, irregardless of the fact that they are small and easily-manipulated. A key scene sees Fisher ask "Who here thinks God can do anything?" We see a mother pull up her daughter's arm, and then her son's arm, when neither of them were raising their hands. The mother physically forces the children to profess their faith. It is telling and it is chilling.

Perhaps JESUS CAMP's greatest strength is the way in which it debunks the argument that the Moral Majority, or the Christian Right, or Christian Fundamentalists, or whatever, are simply religious people and are in no way politically-motivated. After a week filled with seven year olds speaking in tongues, of being told that if Harry Potter were a real person, he would be in hell, of not being allowed to tell ghost stories because they don't glorify the Lord (of being told, in short, that children are naturally bad and in need of the strictest of supervision in order to become good, Christian people), Fisher and her co-horts bring out a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush and the children pray for him, wildly, frantically, with fervor. They also weap openly and loudly against abortion and pray for a more Christian government. Fisher, at the film's end, has a talk with Air America commentator Mike Papantonio, and makes the claim that there is nothing political about the camp, that they are simple people who want to share their faith quietly. The gloating image of the publicly disgraced Ted Haggard, who at the time of filming obviously believes himself to be nearing the White House at some point in the future, is haunting and hilarious, a grim reminder of the fact that these people have much darker intentions than they let on. They want to control this country (they pledge allegiance to "the Christian flag", after all). Fisher ultimately denounces democracy itself, stating that it is doomed to fail because it demands freedom for all.

If I can resort to mud-slinging that the film never demeans itself with, Becky Fisher is shown as a distinctly lonely, embittered person who spends all of her time around children, hugging and screaming at them. She lives alone, seems to have no husband or children of her own, and is almost certainly a closeted lesbian. I, personally, can't wait for her to be caught freebasing with Brazilian transvestites, or some such career-killing scandal. The only thing more rewarding than Haggard's fall from grace will be her's.

This is a staggering, heart-breaking work that stands as one of 2006's absolute, undisputed best pictures, a crushing depiction of childhood being taken from children and of the ways in which adults will warp the young to meet their own goals. Amazing movie.

2006 ROUNDUP: IDIOCRACY (Judge)

2007-01-23T19:45:00.000-05:00

I saw Mike Judge's first film, OFFICE SPACE, in theatres with two of my girlfriends. (That sounds awkward, doesn't it? They were girls who were my friends, not like I was fucking both of them. I wanted to fuck one of them. All through middle school, actually. And high school. Ah, young lust.) We couldn't get into RUSHMORE because it was rated R, but we got into OFFICE SPACE. I was sort of disappointed. A couple of years later, all my friends "discovered" it on DVD and soon they were saying, "Heeeey, Peter" and "I'm gonna show you my O face." I still never got the hype, but watching it again recently, it struck chords with me, office drone that I currently am, which were previously only hinted at.

IDIOCRACY is a bit of a letdown, as well, or at least it is upon first viewing. What is so maddening is that it has the feel of a film taken from its creator too quickly and left inthe care of a butcher. IDIOCRACY hints at brilliance, and even achieves it in the dialogue, but the editing and pacing is convoluted and pulls the rest of the work down. Nonetheless, it is an ambitious, viotrolic work, penned by Judge and Ethan Coen, set in the year 2505, when American society has reached previously-unheard-of levels of stupidity. Luke Wilson plays Joe, a private in the Army who is frozen (alongside a prostitute played by Maya Rudolph) as part of a cryogenics experiment. Joe is exceedingly average in every regard, making him the perfect person to test the technology out on. But he's forgotten about due to a series of misadventures, and instead of being frozen for one year, he's left on ice for 500.

2505 is populated by dunces, cretins, and trash, who speak a mix of redneck slang, ebonics, and varying grunts. IDIOCRACY gives us devolution, the process of man unmaking himself by his own stupidity and inability to adapt. The film makes the conceit that man rules the world simply because he is too dumb to know when he should not be breeding. Overpopulation and a general numbing of the masses, by way of TV, fast food, and the ineptitude of America's leaders, gives us the world that IDIOCRACY creates. There is a Violence Channel, which features a show called "Aw, My Balls". Someone named Dr. Lexus states, "your shit's all retarded, and you talk like a fag". Joe is eventually placed on trial for failing to pay a hospital bill and because he does not have a UCP tattoo which are mandatory for the 2505 citizens of the country. He is sentenced to jail, and easily escapes, because the guards are idiots. Later, he is found to be the smartest man alive, despite the fact that at the beginning of the film, in 2005, we are told he is of merely average intelligence.

How do we end up here? Water is replaced by sports drinks ("It's got Electrolytes!"), which are used to feed the nation's crops. A character exists named Judge Hank "the Hangman" BMW. Dialogue consists of nearly incoherent strings of expletives and neanderthal taunts. There are no museums, no books, and Starbuck's sells HJs. What is probably scariest of all is that IDIOCRACY's America does not seem all that different from our own, just greatly exaggerated and blown out of proportion. The number one movie in 2505 is called ASS, and it's exactly what you think it is. The number one movie this week in 2007 is STOMP THE YARD, a movie where the world's problems are seemingly solved with dancing. The pieces are all in place for America to turn into the idiocracy. You can see it in AMERICAN IDOL, in THE DA VINCI CODE, in George W. Bush.

A friend told a story about how after the World Trade Towers were knocked down, they found all of these rats that were eating asbestos, and everyone figured they would die. But somehow, the rats managed to adapt to the asbestos and process it as food. Now, this particular friend has a tendency to embellish (OK, to lie), but his point was clear: consider what we consume on a daily basis, and how this affects us. Consider how many people don't even think about this, and the idiocracy does not seem so absurd after all. It is, after all, simply taking a time machine to our current situation. It is America c. 2007 taken to its extreme end.

Despite its satirical elements, IDIOCRACY is ultimately a failure in the technical sense (aside from the performances, which require little of the actors, but are essentially serviceable). The entire thing feels ripped up and glued together, perhaps by a citizen of the idiocracy. It is clear why Fox did not want this to play in theatres. It, of course, hilariously spoofs Fox News, but it also has the damning feel of a rushjob. As to whether this is Judge's fault, the editor's fault, or Fox's fault, I cannot say, but the end result is that of a flawed masterpiece. Which, of course, makes it endlessly interesting and worthy of debate. But it doesn't make it one of the best of 2006. Sadly.

2006 ROUNDUP: LADY VENGEANCE (Chan-wook)

2007-01-22T21:59:00.000-05:00

"Living without hate for people is almost impossible. There is nothing wrong with fantasizing about revenge. You can have that feeling. You just shouldn't act on it."
--Park Chan-Wook

LADY VENGEANCE completes the loose "revenge trilogy" which Chan-wook began with SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE (2002) and OLDBOY (2003), but odds are, you already knew that. I have only seen OLDBOY, but I've been meaning to get into MR. VENGEANCE for a long while now. While LADY VENGEANCE never reaches the soaring heights that OLDBOY attains, it does come close in its own right.

The guiding theme of the film (and, really, the very best revenge pictures) is the ultimate futility of revenge as means to an end. In our lives, we will encounter pain that feels unbearable and final. Sometimes, that pain will be caused by other people. We may believe that we can alleviate our own suffering by passing some of it onto others, by making them share in our misery, but, in the end, it is a pointless quest. In the end, by letting our rage guide us, we become no better than the people we sought revenge against. That's also a central theme in LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and CARRIE, all classics of the revenge film sub-genre.

LADY VENGEANCE is the story of Geum-ja Lee, incarcerated for 13 years for a crime she did not commit (but did assist with). The events concerning her framing and capture are best left unknown to the potential viewer. (An aside: I typically don't give a fuck about revealing spoilers to people, but Chan-wook's films are ones that should be seen with as little knowledge of the films as possible. Thus, I make exception here.) LADY VENGEANCE unfolds in a non-linear fashion, unraveling slowly and revealing itself in subtle ways. While in jail, Geum-ja is granted the status of an angel, as she looks over the other, weaker female prisoners and takes them under her wing. She is well-liked by the guards and the Korean media. But quickly, we realize that her motives are not altruistic, and that she has a plan in mind for when she is released.

What sets LADY VENGEANCE apart (as well as MISS .45 and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and the KILL BILL pictures) is that the main character is a female, seeking revenge on a male character. It never really becomes a feminist parable, though, as Geum-ja is too singular, too focused on her particular goal, to make any sort of comment on gender. But the fact that she is a female cannot be avoided or ignored. Females are treated horribly by males in this film (but females also treat other females cruelly, as well), and, in the end, the males get their come-uppance. But, again, once revenge is had, what becomes of the seeker? When you define yourself according to one goal, namely the ending of another human's life, how do you define yourself once you actually achieve that goal? LADY VENGEACE offers no answers, no resolutions, just raises questions and gives us one great, bloody climax. This will probably make my Top 10 of 2006.

2006 ROUNDUP: UNITED 93 (Greengrass)

2007-01-19T16:33:00.000-05:00

I avoided this one for a long, long while. I recall the evening of 09/11/2001, lying in bed trying to process everything that happened that day. I recalled everyone saying, "It seemed like something out of a [Michael Bay] movie." This, of course, meant that the day's events would make perfect fodder for jingoistic CGIfests motivated purely by profit. I made my decision to never see a film about 9/11. And then I went and saw one five years later, and it was a lot better than I thought it would be.

I am in no way a patriot. I wouldn't serve this country in war and I actively dream about living in Europe or Canada. I cried while watching UNITED 93. Not just once, several times. It is a work of restrained beauty (yes, beauty) that takes a clinical look at the day's events. It is also, when necessary, extremely violent, as any story about 9/11 must ultimately be. The distanced approach to the material is juxtaposed with shocking acts of violence. Avoiding both cliche and explanation, Greengrass presents us with just the facts, as they happened, and because of this, he comes very fucking close to re-creating the utter confusion and senselessness of 09/11/2001. It is an extremely scary, extremely emotional place to be. It is a film that everyone should see, but that you're going to have to force yourself to watch. One of the absolute best films of 2006.

EVIL COMEDY - A PRIMER

2007-01-17T10:16:00.000-05:00

Around the time that BORAT came out, critic Victoria Alexander stated that, "Evil comedy, a new genre, has arrived". She's certainly right, in that BORAT qualifies as evil comedy, but what he fails to realize is that the genre, which is really more of a sub-genre, has existed for a little while now. I don't know exactly what the definitions for qualification are, or what fits into the category, but I've been considering these things for a couple of months now. I've also been thinking about what my favorite comedies of the 2000s are, and I'm realizing that more and more of them could be considered Evil Comedy.

STRANGERS WITH CANDY debuted in 1999 on Comedy Central, and I never really caught onto it. I think I was still a little too young. Besides that, still being in high school, maybe the material hit a little too close to home. After all, it's easier to laugh at the stringent caste system that is public education when you've got a bit of distance from it. Now, five years out of high school and with a more refined sense of taste (and a copy of the complete series on DVD), I realize that STRANGERS WITH CANDY is perhaps the meanest, most brutal, least sentimental comedy series ever aired.

Created by Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert, the show satirizes after school specials as it follows 46 year old high school freshment Jerry Blank, who identifies herself as a "boozer, user, and loser". She is hideously ugly and has a dark and troubled past. The average after school special would thus turn her into an inspirational story, someone who turns their life around and realizes the inherent beauty of the world. STRANGERS, though, gives us Jerri's insides, and they're even more bruised than her outsides. She is a cruel, self-centered racist who likes "both the pole and the hole" but also cracks homophobic jokes and cooks up drugs in her bedroom for the pretty blonde future soriority girls to OD on.

STRANGERS pulls no punches in brutalizing high school life, but it's often the adults who are the cruelest. Teachers and administrators seem to view students as nothing more than means to realizing their own abandoned dreams. STRANGERS shows us how people are so easily victimized, but also how people will allow themselves to be victimized in order to seek validation or self-assurance. People are co-opted, certainly, but they're also eager to be co-opted, just so that they feel like they belong to something or are a part of something. STRANGERS is just as unsympathetic towards the victims as it is towards the aggressors. It is sick and twisted and so blackly funny and just utterly ruthless and unsentimental.

Perhaps the only show currently to go as far down this road is FX's IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA. Maybe it helps that I've spent a great deal of time in the shithole city that the show is set in, but I realize what an absolutely miserable place Philly is, and how hilarious it is that people are so proud to be from there. The characters that populate SUNNY are the exact kind of people who would brag about the city they call home. The four main chracters are Charlie, Dennis, Dee, and Mac, who play four part-owners of an Irish bar. They are best friends, but they're also constantly exploiting and manipulating one another. Each episode sees some combination of the quartet divising ways of cheating the others out of money, prestige, humility, or some other equally valuable comedity. Along the way, they commit arson and welfare fraud, supply minors with alcohol, lie about having cancer, spew racism and homophobia at the drop of a hat, lie about being molested as children, ingest copious amounts of alcohol, anabolic steroids, and Elmer's glue, go America on everybody's asses, and run for public office. The list of people they offend is all-inclusive, but the show never seems purposefully edgy. It more has the feel of a bunch of guys goofing around, telling jokes in their shitty apartment, getting high. In other words, it's something more organic than calculated.

But that isn't what we're talking about here. SUNNY is evil comedy at its best, perhaps even funnier than STRANGERS. Each of the four characters is utterly self-obsessed and has no motivations outside of their own betterment. They are mean to their friends and they're all unlucky in love and life. Dee and Dennis obviously loathe their father, Frank (played by Danny DeVito), who only wants to get closer to them. Charlie and Mac are determined to get closer to Frank, who hates them, but also seems them as perhaps the children he always wanted. In other words, everyone is seeking validation and self-worth from everyone else. People are exploited endlessly and relationships mean absolutely nothing. The show's highlight is in "100 Dollar Baby" from season 2, when Mac and Dennis convince Charlie that he's a future underground fighting legend. The show has a training montage, set to "You're the Best Around" by Joe Espozito from that classic 80s story of underdog hope and heroes, THE KARATE KID soundtrack, but the training montage consists of Dennis and Mac drinking heavily and hitting Charlie with heavy blunt objects. Charlie, for his part, eats steroids, cries heavily, and has a nervous breakdown on screen. The imagery, juxtaposed with the schmaltzy song, illustrate the true, black heart of the show; a perversion of something pure and innocent (the 80s underdog story). Motherfucking EVIL.

Danny DeVito is also a producer of RENO 911!, the excellent Comedy Central series which has now reached four seasons. It was created by a lot of the people involved with THE STATE, chiefly among Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant. While RENO is certainly not SUNNY or STRANGERS in terms of the darkened tone, it perhaps surpasses the other two shows in terms of sheer volume of mean-spirited comedy. The difference is the way that the show is hued. RENO presents us jokes about (male and female) rape, incest, pedophilia, crystal meth, lost dreams, and crushed hopes, but it always does so with a smile on its face. The sherrifs from RENO remain optimistic even while they're sobbing. The show also has moments of hope and moments where we're supposed to sympathasize or identify with the characters. (A quick note: in no way am I saying that these facts are bad or that they hinder the show. I am merely suggesting that they ultimately keep it from the level of Evil that SUNNY and STRANGERS attain.)

Just the same, RENO just may be the funniest of all three of these shows. If I had to pick a favorite episode, it'd be "SARS Outbreak", where Brian Unger portrays Reading Ron, a fallen children's TV show host. He's airing on public television, and he takes a backseat to the stuffed talking animal who he co-stars with. He's also a former cocaine addict who lost his big house when the family took off. He has hopes of capturing some uplifting footage to show to the kids at home, but what he's given are the sheriffs talking about prostitutes (or "buckets") performing fellatio on Puerto Ricans, mothers dying while rollerblading and holding their babies, and, of course, rape. (Rape was at the forefront of LET'S GO TO PRISON also, which was co-written by Lennon and Garant.) The sheriffs want to give Ron some footage he can use, so they orchestrate a cat on a roof that they must save. Junior (Garant) climbs up on the roof and rescues the cat, while Reading Ron talks to the children on TV about cops and cats. And then the cat scratches Junior, and he drops it into a woodchipper, sending blood splattering on the side of the house. The sheriffs stand around, stunned, and Reading Ron has a nervous breakdown on camera. Hilarious, sick stuff.

Pretty much episode has things of this nature, but it's all balanced by the fact that the sheriffs all seem to like one another. This lends the show a warmer edge, but it also detracts from the ultimate EVIL of it all. CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, Larry David's amazing HBO series, is in a similiar vein. Larry is constantly being screamed and swore at by strangers and friends. He is complely self-involved and selfish. However, he also has a wife who stands by him despite it all, and his friends do things to help him out. Larry, also, is basically a good guy; he's just hopelessly self-centered and neurotic. This is in direct contrast with the characters who populate SUNNY and STRANGERS, who are self-centered, neurotic, and not at all good people. This ultimately sets it apart from CURB and RENO, both of which never seem to go as far as SUNNY and STRANGERS so gleefully do.

I have the first season of WONDER SHOWZEN to watch in the coming weeks. From the two or three episodes I have seen, it is perhaps the evilest of Evil Comedy. I am utterly excited to finally see it.

2006 ROUNDUP: THE PROPOSITION (Hillcoat)

2007-01-16T09:06:00.000-05:00

THE PROPOSITION is a blood-soaked, gnarled, Australian take on the American Western written by the always-awesome Nick Cave and directed with style and grace by John Hillcoat. The action is visceral, the tone is analytical, and what emerges is a study of violence, guilt, and morality, and the ties that bind us together and, in the end, tear us apart. Cave takes the general themes of the Western (imperialism, the imminence of death, the search for redemption and definition) and applies them to the British settlement and "civilisation" of Australia. American Indians are swapped for Australian Aborigines and the Outback replaces the western US deserts.

This is a work of extraordinary restraint and outbursts of horrific violence. It is very much a meditation on violence and pain and sadness, but the contemplative mood is tempered by a sense of impending, looming doom. Guy Pearce portrays Charlie Burns, a member of an infamous family of Australian outlaws who slaughter a family and are targeted for termination by the incoming lawmen. Ray Winstone is Capt. Morris Stanley, charged with bringing peace to the savages and wild criminals who populate the Outback. Winstone is an absolute revelation; he's morally conflicted in that he realizes that Charlie and his fourteen year old, possibly-retarded brother, Mikey, are not the sources of evil in the family, and so when he captures them both, he gives Charlie a choice: kill his older brother, Arthur, and he and Mikey are free to go. If, however, he doesn't bring Arthur back by Christmas day, then Mikey's going to the gallows. Charlie sets out to find his brother and the remaining members of the "family", along the way encountering an awesome John Hurt as a bounty hunter and a group of Aborigines who put a spear through him.

Charlie's saved by his brother and the family, and so his moral quandry grows deeper. He knows in his heart that Mikey should not bear the brunt of the family's punishment. He also feels a deep loyalty to Arthu, all the while aware of the fact that he should be punished for his sins. Charlie, of course, is also dealing with his own guilt around the murder of the family (which included a pregnant woman). We watch Charlie weigh his options and choices and try to figure out which bond is strongest, which one he would least enjoy severing. It is a terrifying process, and the end result is a bloodbath of righteous vengence and gore. No one is saved in the end, and no one's hands are clean of blood.

Stunning visuals and audio (including music from Cave) that leads us down a nightmare path even as the film remains grounded firmly in reality. The cast, in particular Winstone, Danny Huston, Hurt, and Dave Wenham, is exceptional. This is without a doubt one of my favorites frmo 2006, maybe even top 5 on the year.

2006 ROUNDUP: RUNNING SCARED (Kramer)

2007-01-15T20:18:00.000-05:00

RUNNING SCARED is a film that I enjoyed a great deal and which I believe would not exist were it not for Quentin Tarantino. It inspired perhaps one the worst discussion threads I have ever read (and imagine that, it's from the IMDb) and it stars a horrible actor, Paul Walker. It has Chazz Palminteri playing essentially a version of every role he's ever played and it features little kid actors promimently. To call the plot inane and absurd is to make a gross understatement. It is also to ignore completely the purpose of the film and the charms that it does contain.

RUNNING SCARED is described by writer/director Wayne Kramer as a patchwork of childhood fairy tales and the crime pictures of the 1970s. It is also very clearly designed to stun, shock, and thrill the audience into a kind of resigned numbness. Anyone who has been tattooed knows what it's like to have a needle rubbed over your skin for several hours at a time. Over time, the pain becomes a dull, irritating throb that only really hurts when new portions of the skin are being tattoed. RUNNING SCARED is over-reaching and tries its best to take on a variety of social issues, including child abuse, prostitution, police corruption, backyard meth labs and child predators. It solves all of these issues with the barrel of a gun. It is very much a continuation of the right wing vigilante wetdreams of John Milius and Walter Hill. The fact that it was made (and widely released) in 2006 is amazing and daring.

Hyper stylized in the style of David Fincher, the film is audacious, sometimes ridiculous, often cartoony. Standing in contrast to this is grisly, realistic violence that sends plasma flying across the screen. Kramer seems to want to hint at some subtext about it being a dark children's fable, but it's bullshit. RUNNING SCARED has nothing to say politically or socially. Characters spew ethnic pride and racist and homophobic rhetoric, little kids shoot adults, and the body count rises and rises and rises. It is trash of the highest order, but it is pretty to look at and never takes itself seriously. Which is ultimately refreshing. Even Walker, as afore-mentioned, a terrible actor, plays his role well, simply because it demands no emoting, nothing real or authentic, simply rage and fear and the knowledge that if you ever stop moving, you're dead. RUNNING SCARED attacks social issues with a gun rather than meditation because it realizes that slowing down is not an option. It is a homage to methods that I find personally detestable, but I also understand that it exists as fantasy and must be accepted on its own terms. In its own way, it exhibits style to burn and a rugged sense of individuality. It is very nearly a comment on the action genre, but in the end, prefers to be about nothing. Perhaps I find this admirable; perhaps this is why I enjoyed the movie. Clearly not 2006 Top 10 material by any stretch of the imagination, but it is unique in its own way.

KARAOKE REPORT 001 - 01/12/07

2007-01-15T16:52:00.000-05:00

SONG #1 - "Let's Get it On" by Marvin Gaye: I had previously been informed by Nate that he was the new white soul singer at karaoke since I have not presented since October or so, and this just didn't sit well with me. I think that this proved I am still the king of Motown in this mostly-white, suburban town. Shows them! Pelvic thrust count: none, I think, amazingly.

SONG #2 - "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley: I was inspired to tackle this one for the first time over the summer, after an episode of IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA the night before featured it prominently (and hilariously). Brandie dared me to do it again. I think that I do it pretty well, except that I get into imitating Astley's voice (which I think I do pretty well), which is probably kind of irritating to those watching with fingers over their eyes. Pelvic thrust count: too many to fit on two hands.

SONG #3 - "It's Tricky" by Run DMC: This one I sang with Krista as a duet. It was the third or fourth time we've done it together and probably was the best of them all. It's hard to keep up with the rhymes but I know the song pretty much inside and out at this point, so it's getting easier. Did a bit of improv, breaking out a sort of call-and-response section with "WHAT!"s while Krista rapped. Pelvic thrust count: none.

SONG #4 - "She Don't Use Jelly" by the Flaming Lips: I have been meaning to do this one for a couple of months now, but every time I would put in a request, they would do last call before I would get called up to sing. This time it worked out, and I was in fact pretty good at it. Coyne's deadpan vocals are sort of hard to do but I think I was OK. There were howls from the crowd for this one. Pelvic thrust count: one or two, probably.

SONG #5 - "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails: Sung with Krista and Jody and one or two other people over the course of the song. I always feel ridiculous doing this one because it really just is the repetition of obscenity over and over and over, which I honestly never really noticed when listening to the song. Pelvic thrust count: more than pelvic thrusting, I at one point mounted by friend Billy's face and gyrated. I wasup to I think around ten shots of mezcal at this point, as well as a couple of gin and tonics and an entire shaker of dirty bong waters.

BONUS SONG #6 - "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen: This was done a capello after last call. It was started by my friend Brian after they refused to do another song. We got pretty much the entire bar to sing along. I did mouth guitar and the opera parts. You missed it, maaan.