Vodka-Yogurt

Horror and the Human Will.

2008-11-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

Changeling is the most horrifying movie I've seen that doesn't fall under the horror genre. The movie illustrates how miserable life becomes when people in powerful positions collude to maintain that power. In this film the police, the office of the mayor, and the head of the state psychiatric ward all work towards convincing the refreshingly de-glamorized Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins that her missing son has been returned to her. When she points out that the boy is not her son, they use all their collective social powers to silence her. It being the 1920s, this is not a hard task to accomplish. As I was watching the film I remember thinking that it's funny how bureaucracy is often at its most efficient when it is used for evil purposes; there's nothing quite like the knowledge that you're destroying and oppressing the lives of thousands to work the doldrums out of all that paper pushing.

The film is beautiful in that aesthetic way that pre-depression United States period pieces always seem to effortless achieve. I felt some of the scenes were trying a little too hard to emphasize this, particularly at the end of the film where a hat is tipped and a crane shot climbs up to the rooftops showing the bustle of the city road. These little period tropes were distracting particularly when they were meant as winks to the audience. Although an invisible style would have been a mistake, the fact that this is a true story required the exercise of a little more restraint than the film delivers. Small slips aside, the film nevertheless seems yet another fine chapter in the history of Eastwood's masterful direction.

After the film's conclusion, Joanna pointed out to me that she'd read a review where the critic complained the film "rewarded the audience for being right." Indeed, there is no moral ambiguity in the film. Victims and villains are defined in such a way that has prompted some vibrantly negative soundbytes. Here are just a few:

"The result is a film that plays like a creaking melodrama, with good guys and bad guys and precious little in between." --Chris Kaltenbach "Baltimore Sun"

"Eastwood and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski play things right down the middle, letting the story unfold in such an obvious, straightforward manner that you think they must have a curve ball up their sleeves. Sadly, they don't." --Adam Graham "Detroit News"

"The nice people? Gosh, they're swell. The bad people? Splash water on them and they'll melt. Changeling is a true story full of cartoons. There is not a single character in this movie that couldn't be made into an origami swan." --Steve Burgess "The Tyee"

This seems like a critique of the real life events more than it is a critique of the film though. Insofar as I can tell, the true events are largely manipulated in terms of their chronology to ratchet up tension, but not necessarily to amplify moral outrage. It must be understood that a victim, being removed of all his or her power, becomes perfectly moral because they have been robbed of agency. I think this is what critics are responding to, and in so doing are mistaking characters for cartoons. Representations of pure evil and complete victimization seem to be out of style, unless you are making a holocaust film. In the same way that we are allowed to experience despair and the extent of human cruelty in those holocaust films, I don't see why we can't have a similarly emotive experience in watching Changeling. This film is mimetic, not didactic. If anything is being taught, it's history through an artistic lens, not how to behave morally or recognize good or evil.

Million Dollar Baby was another Eastwood film that had this same arc, but had the benefit of "asking" the audience if euthanasia is permissible. I put "asking" in quotes because I don't believe the film intended to ask that question, so much as make a statement that it was, which then brought about a discussion of the ethics behind that message. Subtract that issue from Million Dollar Baby, and what's left is a straightforward inspirational story about the power and potential of the human will. I suppose what I liked about Changeling was the mapping of the human will through bonds between persons and in community. There's the mayor pressuring the Chief to improve the image of the police, who pressures the Captain into making this missing child case go away, and the Captain then puts the wheels in motion to the entire phony reunion. The police put pressure on administration at the Psychiatric Ward to inter without due process all the women that cause them trouble. Even the psychopathic murderer in the film forces his cousin, a young boy, to assist him in kidnapping and brutally murdering children. And Ms. Collins has the Reverend acting as her voice, and the Reverend convinced a famous lawyer to serve as her attorney and advocate for institutional change. On one level I see it as a story about political change, concerning the rights of women and the eradication of political corruption. The latter of which (and probably even the former), I suppose is apropos to our current political climate of change, as evidenced by the success of the Obama campaign. But the idea that politics exists on both abstract and personal levels isn't really something you can explain except through examples or hypothetical situations, and Changeling fills that order.

If a criticism of this movie can be made, it may involve the element of horror I mentioned earlier in the review. This movie is rife with the terror of inevitable torture and death. During a scene where the murderer, Gordon Northcott, has grabbed a boy out of the chicken coup he is using as a prison, the children hook their tiny fingers on the chicken wire, scream, cry, and look with horror as one of them is dismembered with an axe. Then there's the horrors that await the women of the Psychiatric Ward. The violence on the screen isn't nearly as impacting as those moments where you know something horrible is about to happen, and no one will stop it, yet countless people are observing it. This theme gets a little labored and at one point gave me flashbacks of Mel Gibson's Passion. However, this kind of scene if turned on its back during a public execution, the condemned man begs for his life, and howls incoherently as he is dragged up the steps of the platform where he will be hung until dead. Plenty of people watch as he is killed as well, and are similarly unmoved by his pleas. Perhaps this scene will serve as the counterpart for the Million Dollar Baby pet issue, asking if capital punishment is morally permissible? Though I don't feel this film asks that question, either.

Militant Agnosticism: Another Entry in Guerilla Filmmaking.

2008-10-29T08:38:00.000-07:00

It's easy to mistake Bill Maher for an atheist. After all, he's elitist, he's liberal, he's irreverent and funny--all the spoils of a mind having been liberated and turned against the fantasy of God. But Maher isn't an atheist; he's a strange breed of agnostic. When it comes to the subject of the Uncaused Cause, he readily accepts what he doesn't know, and finds belief or disbelief in the existence of a god fundamentally misguided. This is a distinction worth making when watching the film, as I think a lot of atheists will think he's making their argument for them, when in reality he's trying to undermine the whole debate by scrutinizing the side with the loudest certitude. Bill Maher asserts nothing in the film, saying that all he is selling is doubt, and he does an impressive job of making anyone who isn't buying look, indeed, ridiculous.

Maher has been accused of being unfair to the people he interviews. He does use editing techniques and snide subtitles, but they don't seem dishonest or attempt to distort his opponents' position like Michael Moore's tricks routinely do. He does force religious people into an uncomfortable corner by forcing them to explain and defend the most fantastical aspects of their belief--namely the literal interpretations of stories that run counter to the laws of physics and logical consistency. Having been raised a Christian, I remember wondering as a child why it was God didn't seem to perform big miracles anymore. Sublunary life, it seemed to me had become rather boring after Jesus made his stage exit, and I arrived too late to catch that last really big show. I remember thinking how much easier it'd be to believe if I could have witnessed a resurrection or two. As an adult, I realize that this is the same sort of early critical thinking that allowed me to come to the conclusion that Santa, The Easter Bunny, and the Boogie Man did not exist in real life. It's interesting and somewhat painful to observe the cognitive dissonance that must be employed for people to believe in the stories of Noah, Lot, and Jonah as historically accurate in their adult years. It's even stranger when they're confronted about what these stories mean as morality tales. Is it morally right to offer your virgin daughters to the town's rapists in order to protect the angels you were entertaining that evening from such a fate? Why is it God can be jealous and wrathful but jealousy and wrath are bad for human beings? These questions aren't really answered, and I don't believe the people the filmmakers asked these questions of will want to investigate them. The question I was asking myself as I watched Maher's ambushes: "are these people frightened of these questions or are they too intellectually lazy to be bothered by them? Will any of these confrontations linger in their minds?" I'm not sure they will, or if they do, they will linger in a lockbox full of questions labeled "poisonous doubt" that every Sunday another padlock is added to.

I wish Religulous was Part One of a two part film. I feel it accomplishes what it sets out to do--that is, make religious people look deeply confused, deluded, and frequently outright insane--but I feel the means it accomplishes its goal are mistakenly focused on fear. I felt like I was watching the mirror's image of what religious people tell me: "if you don't believe in God you're going to Hell!" Maher offers the alternative: if you don't stop being religious, our race will perish. I remember thinking at the melodramatic conclusion of the film that it feels like, as an atheist, I gave up one source of religious existential dread for another.

The real problem with religion is its influence over public policy. Maher, and I for that matter, believe we simply can't have people who are operating under delusions that distort their perception of reality deciding what is right for the rest of us. It's not their belief in a God that bothers us per se, it's the consequences of the belief that do. I don't want someone writing legislation who believes birth control is evil because fertilized eggs should have the same rights as individuals under the constitution, that the world is as young as the human race, that the evidence for evolution is inconclusive, and that one day the dead shall walk among the living so long as the nation of Israel endures. In this way, I feel like the end of the film does have a legitimate cause for giving us the warning it does.

However, the human brain does have a penchant for belief in the infinite and the sacred. And human life is peppered with experiences so transcendent that they defy our ability to verbalize and epistemically qualify them. During one moment in the film Maher is getting stoned in Amsterdam and asks whether his friend suspects as he does that the kind of intense spiritual moments he experiences while taking mushrooms or LSD are of the same chemical nature that religious people experience. Immediately after asking this question Maher sees that his friend's hair has caught on fire from the candle behind him, and springs into action to put his friend's hair out. While I laughed with the rest of the audience, I was also moved by this moment. Essentially, that moment is the thesis of the movie. And that thesis is that we should focus on what is real, rationally contextualize our experiences which feel larger than the reality we inhabit, and focus on problems which are immediate--like keeping your friends from being immolated.

It would have been nice to see a longer investigation of how the brain works when it comes to religious inclination. It also would have been nice to hear more about what Maher thinks about the concept of the sacred, especially considering his role as a comedian. These ideas were subjugated to pushing the message that religion is dangerous and intellectually unhinges people. Somehow, culturally, that is the harder message for the film to convey, and its richest source of comedy, so I can't completely fault the movie for dwelling on it. Nevertheless, I can't help but wish a movie would come along and explain how people fall into this trap of needing a fantasy to inform their moral sense and fulfill their need to be made of immortal substance, destined to outlast the universe clutching the hoary beard of a mythic creator. And perhaps that movie would contextualize human existence in an alternative metaphor, both fulfilling and true.

Ubuntu: Installation and First Impressions.

2008-10-28T18:30:00.000-07:00

Having several laptops already, I'd been ignoring my desktop ever since I'd first installed Windows on it. I just didn't see the point. Desktops don't seem to have much purpose to me unless you're playing resource intensive games on them or video rendering, and presently I lack the motivation to upgrade my video card. I suppose sitting at a desk can help you concentrate more than lying back in a recliner with your laptop balanced on your thighs, a crumpled bag of Doritos teetering on your chest, a beer nestled between your hip and the armrest, and a TV blaring in the background, but these luxuries are hard to give up despite their impact on productivity. Besides that, I think with the right perspective you might say that by drinking, eating, watching TV, and working on the computer, that I've actually increased my productivity.

But I digress. Obviously, the desktop computer needed some kind of makeover to get me back in that office chair. Without any files needing to be backed up on it, and being bored with the computer as it was, I figured it was the perfect candidate for becoming a Linux box.

I downloaded and burned the image. I decided against dual booting, and went forward with letting Ubuntu wipe and reformat the entire drive in ext3 file system. I ran into my first problem when some of the files on my install CD appeared to be corrupted. I'd originally burned the disc in a PC environment on my Macbook Pro, but the second time I used my PC laptop and it burned clean. I've heard of other people having similar burn errors, which seem to be corrected by using nicer image burning software and burning at a slower speed. The installation was pretty painless after that point.

First impressions of Ubuntu were pretty positive. The GUI has an aesthetic quality that I think matches anything PCs and Macs have to offer. It comes preloaded with a lot of neat software, which I'll talk more about later, but for now, suffice to say that it blows my own expectations of what free software is capable of out of the water. I'm beginning to understand why so many people defend Ubuntu on a political level, as it seems to be the finest example I can think of in terms of an evolving product and craft in the creative commons. A lot of hard work went into this software for its own sake, which is pretty inspiring.

Step one for me was getting the basic computer functionality I'm used to up to speed with what my Mac and PCs can do. I hold nothing but contempt for Internet Explorer, so seeing that Firefox came preloaded on Ubuntu was nice. However, you still have to install java if you want to view all of your favorite sites. Software installation is radically different on Linux, and there are a few ways you can do it. My preferred way is through the Synaptic Package Manager, as I'm not familiar enough with terminal commands yet to make that my go-to method. Plus, I'm lazy. Synaptic Package Manager is essentially your go-to program for downloading and installing software. It regularly downloads lists of available software and updates from online distributors. You do a search for the software you want, you find it, you select it and the other required and recommended packages for install, and you're good to go.

Like most things with Ubuntu, though, you need to change some Synaptic Package Manager settings depending on what software you want access to. (Early lesson in Linux: software rarely ever arrives with default settings that you won't feel the need to tweak.) There are four different qualifications of software using Ubuntu and repositories for each. The different categories of software have to do with the way in which the product is licensed and supported. These categories are: Main, Restricted, Universe, and Multiverse. Main software is Canonical supported software (should you wish to pay for technical support from Canonical, this is the software that they can help you use). Restricted software is software that is supported, but does not have a free license. Universe is community supported software (not supported by Canonical, but generally well supported by user communities). Multiverse is software that isn't free and is also unsupported. There are repositories for each category of software, and these repositories need to be added as software distributors on your Synaptic Package Manager. To add repositories, open up Synaptic Package Manager> Settings> Repositories, and check all the boxes except source code. You'll notice a tab next to the Ubuntu Software tab labeled "Third-Party Software," this is used when the software you wish to download is not available in any distribution lists and requires you to manually add the URL of the distributor. I have had to use this feature already, and will cover it later.

Once you've got all your distributors set up, do searches or just browse through what it has to offer by category. For myself, I needed java installed and its corresponding plugin for Firefox. I did a search for Java and quite a few results came up, but what I wanted was sun-java5-jre and sun-java5-plugin, and whatever dependent and recommended packages were linked to them. In downloading Sun's Java, you are tacitly acknowledging and accepting Sun's EULA. For those of us who accept EULA's every day when using PCs or Macs, this isn't particularly out of the ordinary, but Linux users generally like things to be free, open, and modifiable, and for those modifications to be available to the community. They're a fanatic, feral group of intensely creative egalitarians, anarchists, and communists. Sun Microsystems recently turned red and became sympathetic to their outcry, releasing most of the Java core code. Unfortunately, some pieces of Sun's code are still licensed to other companies who weren't particularly keen on releasing it to Open Source License. So, an open source counterpart exists, package openjdk-6-jre, which is based on the cutely named Iced Tea Project, that works to fill in the gaps the still privately licensed Java code has left. I have heard that there still might be problems with IcedTea, though these problems are becoming less and less significant as time goes by and the community continues to rebuild Sun's "missing" code. I have not tested this package out, but think I might next week and see what happens.

So far, I've been experiencing some bugs with Firefox, which are extraordinarily hard to identify and troubleshoot. I have no idea if it involves a website I frequent, or a plugin that one of the websites I always have tabbed utilizes. Whatever the case, Firefox occasionally, quietly crashes on me as if I'd hit the exit key sequence. I am determined to figure this out, but I'm having a hard time learning where to begin, as no error messages alert me to even the most vague starting point. I'm sure there is a way to monitor the program and log these errors, but I don't currently know it, as I am still clawing my way out of an ignorance darkest. The positive side to this is that I've not yet lost work thanks to one of these crashes, mostly because gmail, blogger, and most of the other websites I travel save as I go along in any given composition. With Firefox remembering all my previously opened tabs, it is but a minor inconvenience.

Insofar as general system stability is concerned, Linux is a pretty sturdy OS. It is not crash proof, however. I've had a couple of system crashes, and a few hiccups that didn't end in complete system lockup but did seem to quit everything I was doing and knock me back to the login screen, though not all the way back to POST. I'm not sure what to call this latter kind of crash, as I'm not familiar with an equivalent in Mac or PC environments. All in all, my level of frustration is pretty mild, but it may just be that it is tempered by my treating this as an interesting learning experience.

Though the paragraph of information I have about Synaptic Package Manager may make it seem like installing software is a pain, it's actually a pretty handy, one-stop source for software acquisition and installation. It can be tricky once you've installed a program, trying locate it in your menu folders. As such, it's always a good idea to look up as much information about the software you're about to install as you can, which is a good rule of thumb with any piece of software in any operating system.

Bush beats Lame Duck Challenge. We get cool, free software to show for our empty retirement funds.

2008-10-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

I've been having a really lousy day at work, what with the ceaseless calls from people who misdirect all their hatred of technology at me. It can be surprisingly exhausting working tech support. You're there to provide solutions, but many people see you as the embodiment of the Impenetrable Mystery of the Malfunctioning Box, and find it difficult to resist lashing out. I am apparently also there to hear complaints about software bugs and issues that really should be best communicated to, you know, their developers, but because I am the nearest representative of the nebulous realm of technology I end up receiving the anal fissures that belong to Steve Ballmer. After hearing and emotionally metabolizing their venomous complaints, these users then want me to fix their problem and be gone, for the sooner they dismiss me the sooner they can start feeling secure in their relationship with their PC.

With each call, slowly life force drains from me. My eyes lose their sparkle, become milky. For awhile I feared the cataracts would blind me completely.

But my day has brightened significantly, now that I've heard about CodeWeavers giving away their Windows-API enabler & WINE GUI, CrossOver, for free. BAM! If you've got Linux or MacOS and feel like running Windows programs and games in it, now you can, bubba.

What's even more amusing is why this is all happening. Snipped from Star Tribune:

In July, St. Paul software developer CodeWeavers came up with the gimmick to make its products available free for a day if any one of five positive (but seemingly unlikely at the time) things happened during Bush's last six months in office: gas drops to $2.79 a gallon, milk drops to $3.50 a gallon, U.S. jobs exceed 138 million, the Twin Cities median home price returns to $233,000 or Osama bin Laden is captured.

Bingo on No. 1.

When CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White saw that gas was $2.79 a gallon during a recent fill-up, "I screamed, 'Woohoo!' Then I yelled, 'Oh, crap!' as I realized every American can now have my software for free -- kind of upsets my fourth-quarter revenue projections," he said.

You can't write satire like this. The president just succeeded in beating a Lame Duck Challenge by letting the economy gutter. George Bush is finishing his presidency not as a lame duck, but as a monkey's paw.

Adam's Ubuntu Journal.

2008-10-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

Having two jobs and only one work-free day a week engenders a specific kind of insanity. It's quiet and sad. You end up like Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, outwardly succumbing to the crushing power of unavoidable social machinery, which lists its demands of you and offers no negotiations, only grim consequences. The trick is, when no one's looking at you and barking demands or mewling requests, you take advantage of that strange and beautiful moment of clarity in the midst of all that white noise and do, or better yet create something fun, interesting, meaningful. You must later cling to the tiny accomplishments which emerge from these rare moments and claim that they constitute who you really are. Using this irrational line of thinking is how a man maintains his sanity, or, at least, it's how this one does it. I've made a promise to myself to be vigilant in recognizing these moments, like an adolescent male at midnight waiting for the signal scrambler on Cinemax to slip a few distortion free seconds of bare boob--his penis already threaded through the fly of his jockeys, waiting.

(I'll be honest, I don't know how to make a transition from that creepy analogy, but I'm too attached to it to let it go.) Anyways, since I was very young I've always loved playing with computers. In college I built them, read about new hardware releases, helped troubleshoot my friends' computers, and soaked up knowledge from friends who worked in the field, but I never held a tech job personally. Now that has changed, and I've started to find my interest in computers during free time dwindle. It's akin to being around your significant other every hour of every day. Windows and MacOS are like two girlfriends who keep asking me what's new and what I'm thinking until I snap at them: "I DON'T KNOW, WHAT WAS MY ANSWER HALF A MINUTE AGO?!" Even the internet is seeming tired and spent. My cursors blink in the Google and Wikipedia search windows like loving but uncomprehending eyes. It's not their fault. Because I work with computers now, it's only natural that I associate Macs and PCs with the yoke of my oppressors. Something had to be done; I couldn't even bring myself to blog--opening that laptop again was just too depressing.

So, to rekindle my interest in computers, I've made the decision to do what any good couple must before getting outright therapy: try something new, which feels kinda weird at first, but you're assured by everyone who's been there that you'll grow to love it and want it on a regular basis. Ubuntu is my buttsex OS.

And good Lord is it ever uncomfortable at times! But it's always interesting, at least to me, because what would be a tiny issue of functionality with any Windows OS or MacOS based machine, becomes a long and often tedious search for an answer. However, it's not a search where you get just one answer, you get several of them, and you have to decide which one is right for you depending on what you want and what you may want in the future. Once you get that fix, that feature, or that special line of code, it seems a more complete solution than what you typically get from Mac or Microsoft products, and it comes with additional options and more flexibility than anything offered by another operating system.

It's a long and winding road to answers, though, and I'm starting from scratch. I have zero experience with Linux and I don't have anyone around me who is teaching me how to use it. I have only forums, guides, and the "man man" command. It's my own little side project, and you can read about it if you like. Maybe if you're thinking of trying out Linux yourself, you could use this as a tentative resource. Or maybe hearing about all the stupid shit I have to go through just to mount a harddrive will convince you not to go near it. Hopefully, though, this section of my blog will at least be amusing.

Note: No, I have not given up on movie reviews. It's just really rare when I have enough time to see a movie. When my bartending schedule slows down this winter, and I start getting Friday nights off more often, that should change.

Polanski vs Dorfman

2008-08-17T22:51:00.000-07:00

Death and the Maiden is one of those rare movies that makes itself interesting by defying meaning and shunning catharsis. On the script level, it seems an earnest and painfully transparent meditation on the senseless evil of torture. Meanwhile, Roman Polanski infuses the film with all the campy melodrama of a Hitchcock TV serial, and the filthy language of a David Mamet film without the hypnotic rhythm. The language is so raw and obscene, and the descriptions of sexual violence so graphic, that I felt I was being assaulted with them. The movie is an angry, lumbering piece of art, which provokes as many questions about the intentionality of the artists involved as it does about the reach of human morality.

From the very beginning Sigourney Weaver's Paulina has a dry, emotional otherworldliness. Whether she's pouring wine or having a cigarette on the porch, her movements always carry this purposeful intensity, despite the point of those activities being to lull someone into a state of absent complacence. Paulina has a wild strength and brokenness; she has the mien of a feral animal that has survived to old age in a forest dense with hunters. When Paulina confronts the man she believes tortured her years ago, she begins recalling the ways in which she was raped; the words have a violence that effects everyone in the room, like a shrapnel bomb. The intensity of these scenes doesn't feel solemn or completely sincere, though; they're like Kabuki theater--over the top, pornographic. That such profound victimization is being handled in such an insensitive, indulgent, and careening way fills each scene with a dull, sour perversity, which eerily complements all the clumsy and obvious moralizing Paulina's husband, Gerardo, engages in.

After seeing Paulina high-center a car on the edge of a bluff, then throw the back end of the car over the cliff with her bare hands, followed by a booming music cue and a gusty close-up of wide-eyed Weaver, I got the impression that Roman Polanski was undermining the gravity of his script. More scenes and music cues reaffirmed this, and I began to appreciate how the hamfisted way of manipulating audience tension was highlighting the clunky meditations on torture, human rights, and morality at work in the script. Roman Polanski goes out of his way to bury character revelations and de-politicize the material because, I believe, he rightly felt both were cheap. Instead of naming the country that the story takes place in, it is left--somewhere in South America after the fall of some dictatorship. His characters all have Spanish names, yet are clearly white and have no accents.

After Paulina ties up Dr. Miranda and tells him that he will either confess to torturing her or die, it becomes obvious what Paulina wants--what she thinks will make her feel whole again, anyway--is exactly what the doctor couldn't take from her. Paulina, during her captivity, never gave up any names of her fellow subversives. Her captors never "broke" her, or at least they didn't break the parts of her that they sought to. By forcing Dr. Miranda to admit to what he did, she definitively proves that she is more powerful than he. The tension in the movie is all based upon whether Dr. Miranda is, in fact, her torturer, and we anxiously await the big reveal when we find out if Paulina is crazy and torturing an innocent man, or if Dr. Miranda is the monster Paulina believes him to be.

The problem with the kind of catharsis that Paulina is after, however, is that it has little to do with her torturer. People who commit rapes and mutilations under the banner of the defense of a regime or warped political cause ultimately do it because they like it. Forcing a person with the threat of pain or death to confess to anything is, of course, pointless if they don't have anything to confess to, but that matters little to the person carrying out his business of inflicting pain. For the torturer, the end result is the same: either they break by telling the truth, break by making something up, or break by dying. The process of destroying a psyche or a body is the end for the torturer, and I suppose what kind of destruction, be it physical or mental, arouses the most satisfaction varies from torturer to torturer. But Paulina has a very specific need in the film, and that's at getting a genuine confession. Harming him has no lasting value. This need to take something back has nothing to do with morality; it's simply a person trying to reclaim her sense of power. It's hard saying if this remove from moral and political realms was intentional in the script, but it's obvious where Polanski's thoughts lie: some traumas are so severe that they dehumanizes people and push them beyond both those arenas.

The film's title is from the string quartet by Schubert. Paulina's torturer would play it during their sessions, and she forever associated it with feelings of violation and powerlessness. She plays it while she interrogates and beats Dr. Miranda, in an attempt to write a new meaning onto the music for the both of them. The movie is bookended with a string quartet performing it, and when the credits rolled I felt the music had absolutely no meaning or relation to the two characters. It seemed to exist outside the bounds of the narrative once again, just like their country and the fallen regime.

More Batman spoils.

2008-08-07T08:51:00.000-07:00

Before I talk more about The Dark Knight, here are some things to look forward to at Vodka-Yogurt: I'm going to start reviewing graphic novels and series, there will be more on liquor and mixology, and of course more film reviews. This is more an excuse for me to not to have excuses to neglect writing, because I always have an opinion about one of these three topics at any given moment. I may take to reviewing books later, but right now I'm reading too much nonfiction about cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and sex with robots. These books are all connected to some larger ideas I've been mulling over which I'd have to dedicate a separate blog to. So, until I start reading fiction again, these three categories will have to do.

I realized as I was writing my last review that some folks might interpret the plot points I give away as "spoilers." I don't believe I gave away anything more than what imdb does in its cast list, and, moreover, anything that anyone shouldn't already know who has the most passing familiarity with Batman character storylines--which you all should. (Nevertheless, I do hate giving away any plot points in my reviews, and I promise to do better. I'm in the process of resurrecting my style and form.) In this post, though, I will be discussing a part of the film that you'll not want spoiled for you. So if you haven't seen it yet, keep the rest of this post hidden. As for the rest of you...

Did you all feel a little uncomfortable with the way things played out on those two ferries? I felt I was being emotionally manipulated by the mini redemption story going on in the ferry full of prisoners, but, overshadowing that, I had this creeping sensation that Nolan was doing something a little more nuanced than suggesting human beings (gasp! even the criminals) are fundamentally good to each other when rubber hits the road. Ultimately, Batman and Joker's rooftop interpretations of what went on in those boats were from their own morally extreme and unsophisticated frameworks, and were completely unrepresentative of what actually went on in the ferries. However, the decisions made by the people on the boats were representative of the larger purpose that necessitates the presence of Batman and Joker in Gotham.

What stuck in my craw was the decision making that went on in the civilian ferry. While a criminal made an active decision not to blow up the civilian ferry, such a decision wasn't made on the other boat. There was no moment where the man with the trigger on the civilian ferry thought: "no, this isn't right." That man wanted to blow up the other ferry, but--just like the guard on the prison ferry who handed it to an inmate with the understanding that the criminal would blow up the civilian ferry--he couldn't do it himself out of cowardice. How is this a redemption story? If you were looking through the glass of consequentialist ethics, you might then say something like "perhaps cowardice can be virtuous in some circumstances," which hardly seems right.

I asked Joanna if she viewed that scene as an affirming or empowering moment for the species. She argued that the behavior of the man who couldn't summon the strength to pull the dread trigger, but truly wished he could, was actually more transgressive than a man who would push the button without hesitation. I can't really get on board with calling the man "more evil" than someone who would; I think they're the moral equivalent. When it comes to judging what lies inside a person, it matters little if he or she is capable of acting on it. What differs in my view of the man who can act on his dark nature and the man who cannot, is that the latter is more wretched. And don't be fooled, there was only one man on either boat that had the courage to act at all; everyone else on that prison boat was represented as wanting someone else to blow the civilian ferry up too.

The power that Batman is trying to exert over Gotham is Hobbesian. Batman wants you to permanently live in fear, just the fear of doing anything illegal. In this way, Batman does achieve a victory over Joker when neither ferry blows up the other, but it's a consequential victory that harbors no great redemption for the human soul. This is why Gotham will always need him: Nolan's Batman does not serve as anything but an enforcer and protector, and at whatever cost to his reputation. He, therefore, inspires nothing but megalomania in a select few, and fear bourne passivity in the remainder.

I suppose what left me feeling irritated by the boat scene was that Batman misrepresented his victory, which I suppose isn't his fault, nor should it be held against the movie. The Joker's miscalculation wasn't that the people of Gotham were deep down in it for themselves and their own survival. They were and are. It was that they still suspected the rule of law and punishment had some lingering power, probably the equivalent to Joker's terrorism. I suppose they all represented Harvey Dent only without a moral compass, merely a respect and fear of the ruling power. And, since blowing up a boatload of convicts with guards in it would likely come with no small amount of backlash, they froze and waited for things to play out amongst the power players.

Ghosts of Gotham.

2008-07-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

My heart skipped a beat when I heard that Christopher Nolan gave Heath Ledger a copy of Alan Moore's The Killing Joke as a point of reference for the direction he wanted to take the Joker. Alan Moore's representations of madness are the most haunting, accessible, and seductive within the genre of comic writing and literature in general, and I will take my copy of From Hell and beat anyone to death who disagrees.

What I like about Alan Moore's grasp of insanity as a phenomenon is that it seems to consist of two parts. The first, naturally, being obsession--over a person, an object, an idea, or maybe a partial or complete collection of all the above. The second part is a little more subtle, yet represents a significant shift in how one perceives and interfaces with reality. The most rational of human beings are not slaves to ideologies, concepts, or symbols; rational men and women use these intellectual materials as a means of navigation through the social and physical spaces they manifest. Irrational people become slaves to ideologies; they do not navigate through symbols, but slavishly follow the cues of a canonized few and sacrifice much of their agency. They suspend their personhood and become mutations of the symbols they worship. What makes the interplay between The Joker and Batman so powerful, is that they are both, by this definition, completely mad. Ultimately, Batman should always be thought of as the one inmate Arkham allows outside of its walls, simply because he keeps herding all the other criminally insane back to it.

The Dark Knight, contrary to what everyone may be telling you, is not without it's flaws. However, it's flaws are insignificant when taking into account the bravura performance by Heath Ledger as The Joker, the justice the script does to the comic medium as complex morality tale, and the fact that Katie Holmes wasn't in it.

I really enjoyed Christian Bale's performance as Batman in Batman Begins; however--and I can't be sure if his performance seems less than stellar in this film simply by contrast of Ledger's--his Batman in The Dark Knight seems labored. It's the voice. Actors who portray Batman have to utilize two voices: Bruce Wayne's and Batman's. One is light, congenial, vaguely unctuous, while the other is deep, dry, and angry. Kevin Conroy's voice acting work in Batman: The Animated Series is the high water mark for this kind of performance; his Bruce Wayne was warmer and his Batman had less gravel in the larynx. Batman does speak more in The Dark Knight, so it may be that his usual laconic nature disguises how much Bale sounds like a breathy, male phone sex operator who has an ice pick stuck in his trachea.

My second qualm is with the Harvey Dent character, which seemed hastily constructed and his narrative arc verging on tacked on. While I understand Nolan's desire to express the creation of Dent's alter-ego as a fusion of Batman and Joker's identities, I didn't feel Two-Face was emblematic of much internal conflict. Once Harvey is disfigured, he simply becomes an agent of rage funneled through chance. Some amount of duplicity seemed sacrificed, and I simply didn't see the tortured Two-Face psychology that I was familiar with. I wish the transformation of Harvey Dent into Two-Face would have been included, but his criminal activities only alluded to. This would have still communicated The Joker's masterwork, and it would have given Nolan more time to flesh out his character. I'm also a little disappointed that the Rachel Dawson character created some competition and tension between Batman and Dent. Originally, Jim Gordon and Batman loved Harvey Dent dearly, and his fall from grace was an event that caused them both much personal pain and deepened Batman's already immeasurable sense of guilt. I felt this could have added more depth to Batman's struggle with the meaning of his identity and obsession, not to mention highlight all of the Joker's own observations about their relationship.

Regardless, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, and the script that wisely denies him an origin story, is a dream. From the buzz I'd heard of Ledger's performance, I was prepared for a dark and sadistic take on the character at the sacrifice of Joker's comic nature. I just wasn't sure how a performance that was "truly terrifying" could be simultaneously funny. Watching the film in the theaters, I realized that all the laughs were uncomfortable for the audience but they were there, and slowly coaxed out of them. My theory is this, the more comfortable you are with dark themes and disturbing realities, the funnier Ledger's performance will be. Also, the more likely it will be that you'll end up like me, laughing hysterically before everyone else in the audience is, but serving an important role by informing the rest of them that it's OK to chuckle. The Joker is the ultimate embodiment of the Horace Walpole quote "life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."

Batman, being the other side of that coin, feels too much and has to force order upon the world. This is what makes him a different sort of hero: his ideals are informed not through high ethics, but through an emotional pain-based need to institute martial law and fascist order. Briefly, he thought Gotham's rule of law had finally returned, and that he wouldn't be needed anymore, and could go back to a normal life. Or, at least, the ghost of Bruce Wayne thought that. The reality, which both Rachel Dawson and The Joker know and articulate, is that Batman is more "real" than Bruce Wayne. The latter occupies an atrophied and distorted portion of his psyche, which is more facade than man. All of Bruce Wayne's public image is catered to concealing his secret identity; Wayne doesn't exist anymore except as a drunk, a womanizer, and thoughtless entrepeneur recklessly living off the largess of his father's fortune and the genius of his corporate cohort. The only time he is genuinely interfacing with reality is while he is under cape and cowl. This, I suppose, is the real tragedy of Batman and all his villains. Once Gotham's lawless, brutal nature is revealed to a person and what they love most is taken from them, they essentially die. But they come back like poltergeists, to teach warped lessons to the still living, succeeding only in propagating their kind. I've always wondered if this was why Gotham has been represented as having a visual style close to 1930s, yet having a technologically modern-to-futuristic underlying quality. Half the city seems populated by ghosts and criminals of an older era, while the rest seems populated by your average fellow from Manhattan. The whole city is trapped in alter-egos, past lives, and reckless technological progress.

An open letter to Rolling Stone.

2008-07-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

Dear Rolling Stone,

I understand that magazines are not traditionally judged in their totality by any one columnist, and I also understand anyone who would judge an entire magazine by such a standard should be viewed as a crank, a crackpot. It is my hope that my cognizance of this will to some extent give credence to my position that Peter Travers is an abomination in print and is destroying the integrity of your periodical.

His writing is so bad. He uses writing devices that only appeal to writers who stopped reading after high school. Why does he continuously ask me questions and then answer them for me? An example from his review of The Dark Knight:

The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan's absolute stunner of a follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins, is a potent provocation decked out as a comic-book movie. Feverish action? Check. Dazzling spectacle? Check. Devilish fun? Check. But Nolan is just warming up. There's something raw and elemental at work in this artfully imagined universe. Striking out from his Batman origin story, Nolan cuts through to a deeper dimension. Huh? Wha? How can a conflicted guy in a bat suit and a villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile speak to the essentials of the human condition? Just hang on for a shock to the system. The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil — expected to do battle — decide instead to get it on and dance.

I appreciate his energy and excitement, and agree that it is often lacking in many of the reviewers at the New Yorker and The NY Times. But seriously, can't you sic an editor on him that'll swat his muzzle with a rolled up back issue and say: "No!" a couple times in a loud and authoritative voice? That's absolutely inexcusable writing that wouldn't even make it past the editor of a high school newspaper. There is no fucking way you read that just now and didn't cringe.

This isn't isolated! He does this constantly. Here's an excerpt from his review of WALL-E:

First reaction: WALL-E, directed with a poet's eye by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) from a whipsmart and shrewdly accessible script he wrote with Jim Reardon, is some kind of miracle, Talk about daring. It's Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot mixed with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terry Gilliam's Brazil, topped with the cherry of George Lucas' Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's E.T. , and wrapped up in a G-rated whipped- cream package. What could have been a mess of influences is instead unique and unforgettable. Tons of movies promise something for everyone WALL-E actually makes good on that promise. It's a landmark in modern moviemaking that lifts you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance. Want proof that animation can be an art form? It's all there in the groundbreaking WALL-E.

I'm not even going to touch upon the fact that you're letting him end sentences with commas now. Just look at that mess of italics, and all for the sake of reminding us that he's seen Brazil. By the way, someone needs to let Travers in on the difference between influence and homage; getting that straight might clean up his writing or at least make his juvenile penchant for list making meaningful. Here's a question I would like Travers to answer for a change: why does his writing always have to sound like a local radio host trying to pitch me a new diet soda or brand of condom?

My favorite is when he tries to affect the demeanor of an elitist: "Misguided souls will tell you that No Country for Old Men is out for blood, focused on vengeance and unconcerned with the larger world outside a standard-issue suspense plot. Those people, of course, are deaf, dumb and blind to anything that isn't spelled out between commercials on dying TV networks."

I love how emboldened he gets when he insults a crowd that only faintly exists in the real world. But wait, you'll love this, from the same paragraph: "It's also as entertaining as hell, which tends to rile up elitists. What do the criminal acts of losers in a flyover state have to do with the life of the mind? Plenty, as it turns out."

You know, I really do understand your inclination to tell me to "just not read it." I completely agree that when I read these entire articles I am responding to a dark and morbid part of my psychology; it's the same part that also encourages me to check if there's blood and flesh smeared on the road after a car accident. However, you have to understand that on Rotten Tomatoes I frequently have to look at the selected blurb from his article in order to find blurbs from the reviewers whose opinions I do ascribe value. But, God help me, I see Travers there and he's usually asking me questions I know that idiot has already answered, and it makes me mad. It makes me mad that I have to be exposed to that. It makes me mad that his influence has sway on the Cream of the Crop tomatometer. It makes me mad that underneath his name I see your magazine as the source of its print and power.

I am not alone in my confused loathe. Many people laugh and scorn him. Friends of mine have thought about printing out a few of his random reviews and playing a drinking game to it, though I have discouraged this because that would actually lend his writing some kind of function. Besides, better drinking games can be played, and no amount of alcohol stops me from snarling at his writing. If anything, Travers would make me a mean drunk.

I understand he's probably an institution at your magazine by now. He's probably really nice and brings donuts and coffee in the morning, asks you how the kids are doing and even seems to care. So fine, don't fire him, just please EDIT HIM. Let him know when "readers" (heavens no, not you, you love his writing--pat his shoulder) might find his sentences awkward, cloying, unctuous. Perhaps he could limit his rhetorical questions to maybe one every two reviews--or maybe you could just edit them out without telling him and send him a special copy so he'll never know. The point is, you guys have options and there's no reason why his column has to be an albatross around Rolling Stone's neck.

--Adam

Overcoming programming.

2008-07-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

The positive reception to WALL-E wasn't much a surprise to me; however, after seeing it myself, I was surprised at the discussion surrounding the movie, which has seemed incomplete, reductionist. To walk away from WALL-E and feel that it is a film with only a didactic goal to warn us of unfettered consumerism, while playfully integrating the visual sentiment and style of a Chaplain or Buster Keaton film, is a bit like saying Apocalypse Now is just a film that says the Vietnam War was bad through adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel. It's obvious and facile analysis, but you can't really argue with its validity. I also can't understand why critics are feeling the need to defend and apologize for the film's premise. Global warming has finally become "legitimized" (because we evidently trust our politicians' consensus more than our scientific community's) as a bipartisan issue, so let's all stop referring to movies that use it as a simple plot device as "preachy."

That said, critics are right about how beautiful the film really is. The first half hour is spent almost completely without language, and we don't miss it. Watching WALL-E clean up, organize, and occasionally pocket bits of an entire civilization's garbage, it only seems right that he should be a spirit without the clutter of verbiage. When the robot EVE arrives to search for plant life, it is both charming and sweet to watch them relate with only their names to exchange; it's nice to see the romance of gestures again on screen. When done superbly few things are quite as affecting, and WALL-E is a deeply felt movie.

The film eventually does evolve into a human narrative about returning to earth and returning to a laboring species. Human beings have all left earth on the space version of a luxury cruise liner, you see. All their needs are met by robots, which allows them to spend their time traveling around the ship on hovercrafts that look not unlike Hoverounds, and they interact with each other using projected computer screens. From what I could intuit, it was as if the product shelves and Slurpee machines of a 7-11, the time consuming annals of myspace and wikipedia, and the passive source of commercial video entertainment that is the television, were all combined and distilled into the convenience of a moving chair. A lot of people are complaining that the film's view of human beings devolving into a fat, anti-social, permanently sedentary, and mindlessly trend following species is too bleak and unfair. Naturally, I think it is spot on, and could almost hear a few people in the audience muse: "Why didn't I think of that!" after beholding the majesty of the hoveround 2.0.

Despite the chattering humans' rediscovering the evolutionary purpose of their legs, the love story between WALL-E and EVE never advances beyond the articulation of three words, those words being each other's names and the word "directive." The directive being EVE's programming to fully deliver the message that Earth has once again become habitable to life. And this is wear David Denby, Roger Ebert, David Edelstein, and all the other film reviewers really seemed to miss what I saw as the baldfaced point of WALL-E. Human beings, from an evolutionary standpoint, really aren't all that special of a creature. Our purpose in life, within that paradigm, is like any other organism's: to maintain our bodies in such a way that we reproduce. So, you eat, drink, breathe, probably groom yourself according to the kind of person you're looking to mate with, and that's about it. From what I could see, people on the ship in WALL-E were somehow producing babies, although it was unclear if anyone on the ship was actually having sex (which I doubt for reasons beyond the fact that it is a children's film). My suspicion is that the robots probably had some kind of cloning device and artificial uterus. Point being, once the issue of mating is taken out of the equation, whether sex is left in or out of the picture is pretty irrelevant, since jealousy mostly tears at the fabric of society when people apply an expectation of monogamy. So, instead of being eating and humping machines, humans just became eating machines. Since there was no limit to how much they could eat, and probably no limit to what kind of flavor combinations they could be titillated with, they all became obese. These things happen.

I explain this process because I think people don't think about their drives to survive and reproduce as their brains' programming. People like to think they are beings of pure consciousness, following interests of their own creation. You're not. You're nature's fleshbot. However, there's no reason that your own personal fleshbot narrative can't be nuanced, fascinating, and transcendent. What made WALL-E and EVE accessible characters and more recognizably human than the blobs in Hoverounds, was that they'd moved past the basic instructions of their programming and had become moral agents. WALL-E ultimately grew to understand the purpose of his trash compacting and the larger culture of people that it signified, and in so doing he became creative and also learned what it is to be lonely. EVE grew to understand what her larger task of bringing a plant specimen to the ship meant to an entire species, and was thrown into situations where sacrifice and loyalty challenged it. Throughout the entire movie I felt, even during the most obvious plotting that I knew would be resolved, incredibly moved on a very childlike level to EVE and WALL-E's circumstantial plights. I haven't been so emotionally invested in two characters on the screen in years, and I'm convinced it was because I was vicariously experiencing what it is like to be a new person in the world, discovering emotional pains, yearnings, and ecstasies within a reality inhabited by other beings, themselves all bubbling with complex layers of cognition and desire.

So, I don't think WALL-E is merely a warning about global warming. And I don't think the ending is a clarion call to start "being green"--although I don't think that's a bad idea. Really, I think it's a film that explores personhood, and how directives, either implanted by evolutionary pressures or humans playing around with your command line, should be thought about and evolved from. I do believe that people can be happy being mindless consumers, so long as you define happiness as the rush you get with a purchase and the chemical peaks of eating sugars and chocolates--or doing drugs for that matter. But the more you follow that path, even if (and, really, especially if) it's a sustainable one, the fewer moral choices you have to make, and ultimately the less recognizably human you become. Evolutionary psychologists believe that our species evolved into our larger brains for the purposes of communicating with each other and establishing larger indices of fitness in mates--smart meant healthy, and healthy meant sexy. Humans being an intensely sexually motivated species, meant the pressure of this kind of sexual selection would result in a mind whose knowledge and power would soon extend beyond the jungle, past continents, beyond the scope of the time it existed in, beyond the world, and eventually far, far past the solar system. It would be a shame for that mind to return to sleep once it found a way to merely sustain and satisfy the desires of its body indefinitely. All that chatting the humans were doing into their computers aboard the Axiom--about the new color of clothes to wear and the new available beverages--were the sleep murmurs of an entire species, finally sated.

WALL-E Addendum: SPOILERS

I got into a discussion with Joanna after the movie about whether or not the ending to the film was appropriate. Namely, should WALL-E have mysteriously regained his sense of past, present, and future, along with his memories of EVE. It's a hard question to answer. I think, as a film for children, it was necessary to have WALL-E survive, otherwise the film would have been too grim. WALL-E is, after all, a child in respect to the universe, and killing him, especially in such a way that his form goes on still animated, would be cruel. Imagine watching Bambi, only shortly after seeing the Hunter kill Bambi's mother, Bambi himself dies of early onset Alzheimer's.

OK, that'd actually be pretty awesome. But I say this as an adult who loathes that movie, not as the kid who once cried while watching it.

Anyways, the question still bugged me: if the film weren't directed at children, and were solely made for me, a 27 year-old pretentious twat, would I hold the ending against the film? I wasn't sure, because I can't specifically tell what parts of WALL-E were replaced, and which parts remained. It looked like they replaced one of his main circuit boards, but I can't be sure if any memory storage device was completely discarded and replaced. For the sake of liking the movie, I'll just assume that WALL-E's partial amnesia was the result of having a few bad sectors in his harddrive, and some restore software later retrieved it, right at the crucial and emotionally rewarding moment when EVE was trying to hold his hand.

I guess, ultimately, it's just a question of: does the film allow me to suspend enough disbelief to assume WALL-E had a chance for survival. I think it walks a tightrope, but it accomplishes it. Which is good, because I think either ending, whether WALL-E's spirit dissolves into the ether, or survives to hold EVE's hand for the rest of eternity, is permissible by the narrative. Joanna asked me while I was thinking aloud about whether I thought WALL-E should have died: "Well, why should he? Will that teach us a lesson?" And she's exactly right, his being a martyr wouldn't give the story any greater significance. Maybe this is why I felt The Passion of the Christ was affecting but meaningless.

Belief and conviction.

2008-04-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

I cried a lot after watching Capturing the Friedmans, but if you were to ask me which character I felt the most pathos for, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I think I was moved by a sad, epistemic truth to being human: as reality travels along the path of time into the actualized and tactile, then through the portals of our senses, is absorbed into the electrical storms of our cognition, and finally stored in the catacombs of memory, some fidelity of record is naturally lost. This film is an example of the pitfalls of memory's reconstructive nature, particularly in how shame, trauma, fear, confusion, and social pressures write fictions into our personal narratives without our even being aware.

In most crime documentaries one has to determine which person is lying to the camera. In this film, characters are either unconsciously lying to themselves or have become so confused with their own recollections and their incompatibility with the memories of those around them, that multiple narratives reactively blossom and spur off. I think the only way this film could have been improved upon is if cognitive scientists were interviewed and had the opportunity to interview the participants of the documentary themselves. Perhaps then we might have had some greater understanding of which person's memory is distorted and how. Whatever the case, the truth behind what happened between Arnold and Jesse Friedman, and several anonymous children in their computer classes, will never be known.

Beginning around 1984 and lasting into the early 90's, child molestation in the news was all the rage. In particular, everyone began to suspect that their local day care centers were infested with balding, bespectacled pedophiles. Countless stories were emerging from all over the east coast, most notably New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Florida (where Janet Reno was busily planning a reelection around putting alleged pedophiles behind bars with coached kids' testimonies). But it was happening everywhere else in America too; kids were being rounded up, repetitively asked leading questions, and even hypnotized, all in the hopes that prosecutors could get convictions on these kids' horrific and bizarre testimonies alone. It often worked. It was a hard time for the day care industry, which was both in high demand given the rise in dual partner employed families, but under heavy and unfair scrutiny--papers needed selling, and district attorneys needed reelecting. Many people's lives were destroyed, many peoples careers were made, and only a few of them deserved it; so goes justice in America.

This was the hysterical cultural milieu wherein the Friedman's found themselves somewhere near the epicenter. Arnold Friedman's story is complicated, and the more you watch him in the film the more you realize he is lost in a fog of shame and confusion, the extent of which we're never fully aware. Arnold, in fact, admits to being a pedophile. He was initially busted during an investigation of a child porn ring; he was a collector, not a producer. Authorities searched his home and discovered a stack of illegal magazines. When the police additionally learned that he and his son taught computer classes for young children, suspicion arose as to whether or not he and his son had been abusing their students. The government immediately and aggressively began conducting interviews with the children. Only the suspicion founded upon his collecting child porn, combined with the frightened and wholly unreliable testimony of children, were the only pieces of evidence that any of this happened. Many of the children have later recanted their stories, at least one has not.

It seems like everyone in this film can at least tell the difference between half truths and lies, but cannot for the life of them identify one complete truth regarding what happened during those classes. Moreover, Arnold strangely admits that when he was 13 he had forced sex with his 8 year-old brother. Yet his brother has absolutely no recollection of this: "I don't remember anything! I have nothing up here [puts his hand on his head] that has me yelling, or screaming, or trying to get away, or being unhappy... maybe some day a door will open, but it better hurry up because I'm 65 now, and I could really care less." Arnold admits that earlier in his life he had "sexually arousing contact" with two boys "going short of sodomy." However, he maintains that this instance was the only time he ever gave into his urges, and happened prior to moving to Great Neck, New York, where he would later be accused of molestation. These prior fantasies and his instance of giving in to his desire disturbed him enough to go into therapy, where his therapist is said to have thought he had them well under control. Arnold forever maintained his innocence regarding the accusations of impropriety with his students.

Arnold's former wife was and remains completely undecided on her husband's guilt insofar as the case is concerned, but clearly condemned him in her heart for what he did admit to, and is deeply frightened by the nature of his sexuality. Her three sons, however, remain completely loyal to their father, and view her and a couple bad lawyers as the reason why their family was so deeply scandalized and fractured. One of the fascinating layers to this story is the surreality of these familial bonds between the sons and the father. After the admissions of indulging in child porn and at least one instance of molestation, they still stand by him, and insist he did nothing to deserve or cause their misery. No feelings of betrayal are ever uttered against him, only against their mother, who Arnold defends. Director Andrew Jarecki never seems to take a primary line of sympathy with any of the family members. The footage he edits together from their home movies is done in such a way that we feel caught in the maelstrom, taking no sides, just wishing everyone would calm down and talk about things rationally.

No person in this movie escaped the reach of my pity. The intensely erratic behavior, the conflicting stories, and general weirdness do somehow all add up into something recognizably human and emotionally sincere. But emotional sincerity doesn't always originate from a rational process anchored in reality. Right now people are walking the streets dealing with traumas that they are convinced they experienced, but never did. Others have minds that successfully purged traumatic events altogether. I have a friend who doesn't remember junior high. She says she has virtually no memory of that period in her life, save for the book learning. Theorizing on who in this movie is operating under what reconstructive tricks their minds are working on their memories, I think, misses the more alarming and subtle message of the movie. The overt message is that hard evidence is important in criminal trials, and video cameras are important in daycares and after school tutoring. The subtle message is that when evidence fails, when we are the sole record keepers of our histories, the most intense and life-changing events are often removed of their reality.

You get that on camera? Please tell me you got that on camera.

2008-02-21T21:30:00.000-08:00

The advertising to Cloverfield soured me deeply. First, I saw the partying montage. Movies that showcase people my age sipping drinks, charismatically sharing vapid observations, and hooting because they're still under thirty and can afford 12 dollar martinis fill me with dread and loathing. Having worked in an upscale downtown bar for just shy of two years now--and having been to my fair share of those kinds of parties on the other side of the bar--it's easy to recognize that these montages capture not a fraction of their energy. Directors stupidly film young hardbodies being rowdy and pounding drinks, set to a contemporary hip soundtrack, and then feel as if a demographic they don't understand, but desperately wish to fleece, is being reached. What they capture is more like a Bret Easton Ellis novel without the melancholy or the menace, leaving only that oily calorie-free feel we haven't been able to shake since the 80s.

Second, it just seemed like a derivative creature vehicle where you never really see the big bad monster, and are locked into seeing through the jerky lens of characters you ultimately feel ambivalent towards. I didn't want to see yet another movie where I was waiting to see obnoxious young flesh sacrificed for my morbid gratification. Blood for Baal should have some aesthetic underpinnings, yes?

Which is all to say, I put off seeing it until tonight, and came very close to waiting for the DVD release to catch it. I'm glad I didn't wait, as this movie was not made for the small screen and I fear it will not translate well to it. If you haven't seen it in theaters yet, go now. Cloverfield is a lean thriller at one hour and 24 minutes, and registers with a level of intensity uncommon to the PG-13 rating. It's thoughtful without trying to be, effortlessly injecting homage and satire without pretense or heavy handedness. It's a movie you can appreciate on virtually any level you so choose; its approach to horror, sentiment, statement, and overall technique are refreshing and solid.

I never got much attached to the characters as people, I suppose. Nevertheless, I felt a level of intrigue about their situation, which I suspect was the intent. When I think about Hud, Rob, Marlena, and Lily, I have the same feelings for them and their personalities as I have had for former pets. I noted their respective clumsiness or grace, temperament, loyalties, and a general sense of their ability to relate. You feel a sense of affection for the characters as you would a pet who may occasionally disappoint, confuse, and annoy you, but maintain a feeling throughout that they don't deserve to be eviscerated. It's a moral way to prop up a genre film that can't afford to be much concerned with exploration of character. The film is preceded by a Department of Defense record card, identifying what we are about to see as part of some government dossier. Though Blair Witch ultimately uses the same idea of the "found video record," the framing of the record in context largely dictates where the audience's interest lies. With Blair Witch we want to know what happened to the characters, with Cloverfield we want to know what happened to Manhattan.

Though the camerawork is all handheld digital and diegetically grounded, it doesn't frustrate as much as Blair Witch did. If anything, the surreality of scenes play out more meaningfully because of the technique. When Manhattan is first being terrorized people take to the streets trying to find out what all the explosions and power outages are about. As they stand around gaping, suddenly the head of the statue of liberty falls from the sky and bounces down the street, killing several people in its wake before it rolls to a stop in front of a crowd. Some people start to flee, but the majority of the crowd all take out their cellphones and start taking pictures and video of the extraordinary event. I really enjoyed this salient element of the movie: people being fatally drawn to document the horror that was playing out all around them--indeed, the movie as video document itself is presumably the most obsessively comprehensive civilian record. The video was intended as a record of a going away party, and not of the Cloverfield Monster, the significance of which is questioned by almost everyone in attendance of the party, but remains somehow understood as... well, what you do now that everyone owns video cameras. Cloverfield is the natural conclusion to a society that is now full of boring amateur documentarians who are beginning to experience their lives as if they're a reality TV show.

The act of photographing a thing also changes how one experiences it. I was reminded of what Tom Savini, the make-up artist for Romero's zombie movies, had said about his experiences in Vietnam photographing mutilated, dead and dying bodies: the vision of that body horror was filtered through the lens, turning it into an object seemingly outside of reality, rather than an environment he was walking through. Dissociation through the photography. I realized that during the film, I was vacillating between experiencing the feeling of being on that street downtown witnessing things firsthand, and witnessing it in that location but from behind the camera myself. It was something I'd never experienced before in the theater, which both surprised and elated me. It wasn't like any kind of Hitchcockian use of voyeurism which claustrophobically ensnares you in a moment of terror. The fright in Cloverfield is borne of awe which comes with the strange intellectual space to recursively analyze itself.

Finally, the filming of the Cloverfield Monster is fantastically manipulative. Each time we catch glimpses of the monster it seems different in some way. Early on it seems reptilian, then it appears more insect like, then it looks something more akin to a mutated golem, until by the end of the film we see him up close and learn how all these fragmented impressions add up into something more coherent. The technique combines the best of both worlds, in that the more you see of the monster the more questions you have about how it moves and behaves. Any child that sees this film will be sure to have a lot of nightmares featuring his or her own mind's eye version of the monster.

As I left the theater it felt as if I'd seen Godzilla, Aliens, and Open Water simultaneously. Although the film does tip its hat frequently to Blair Witch, it utilizes the same filming technique to achieve such different and vicariously diverse ends to hardly justify the comparison.

A brief history of pornography, and a review for John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus.

2008-02-03T09:25:00.000-08:00

I feel like in order to review Shortbus I should first comment on the history of pornography on film. For those of you who don't know, pornography in the motion picture has undergone some significant transformations (both politically and aesthetically) in presentation over the twentieth century, and, with the rise of "gonzo" and do-it-yourself pornography, it has been getting very weird in the twenty-first century.

Pornography on film began as a rare and underground phenomenon somewhere around the early 1900s, putting its appearance pretty close to the time the first motion picture camera was even invented. Sex films became more wide spread in the 1920s where they were being shown at brothels and other various clandestine clubs. For the most part, these films started out as diegetically bare, completely without plot or narrative form; people just did their thing in front of the cameraman. However in the minority though, pornography with narrative structure has existed since at least 1908 with "A L'Ecu d'Or ou la bonne auberge" whose plot features "a weary soldier who has a tryst with an inn's servant girl." (I'm always stunned at the human capacity to turn a tragic and horrible milieu into a sex fantasy.)

Production value remained rather low end for these motion pictures due to obscenity laws. Back before the United States wasn't sure if it wanted to be the porn capital of the world, it gingerly loosened its interpretation of obscenity laws in 1973 (Miller v. California) to the degree that the movies needed to have "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Determining this value proved difficult, and before we knew it Deep Throat was playing in scandalized theaters everywhere.

Still, pornographers' initial fear of that law engendered at least a partial attempt at artistic representation in those movies from the 1970s. In movies like Behind the Green Door one got the distinct impression that the filmmakers, more or less, were making an attempt at higher level entertainment, where people just happened to be ejaculating on each other. The passage of time has since eroded pornographers' artistic aim, and now this kind of antiquated thinking is regarded as a poor business model (unless you're making softcore films for Showtime or Cinemax). The focus now is on fetish niches that get increasingly more shocking and specific, until the viewer is having a vicarious experience that can't even be described in sexual terms anymore. By simply reflecting on my own online experiences, it would appear free speech has achieved quite an expansive victory in this arena of expression, and I'm fearful of what this new century has in store for us. (I'm starting to think a place for vomit buckets will be included in home office desks, kind of like cupholders in cars.) Gonzo pornography, which is what the kids are calling porn that breaks the fourth wall, along with homemade porn videos alike are wildly popular, and sites like xtube.com and pornotube.com have brought us back to the beginning of porn: people just doing their thing in front of the camera. The volume of people participating now is truly remarkable, with sites like xtube boasting 2.8 million "active members" and over four million total members. Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, has described DIY porn as "the new karaoke," and all signs point towards it getting more popular, not less.

Pornography, ultimately, can't be described in a legal context beyond the restriction of its sale to minors. What we can learn from how the porn industry has responded to its legal troubles between the 50s and 80s, and the apparent entropy the genre has undergone in terms of "artistic merit," is that things like narrative form and character development are largely regarded by audiences as noise and distraction. For John Cameron Mitchell, this is in keeping with what pornography is as defined by the dictionary: the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement. This seems to be why art house movies, if they use unsimulated sex, de-eroticize it, making the sex scenes either vaguely unsettling or outright uncomfortable. Mitchell feels this gives the viewer an opportunity to reflect in a clearheaded way on sex's role in and power over our lives. While that may not make for cinema that is a pleasure to watch, it's nonetheless compelling and decidedly not pornography.

And Shortbus is certainly compelling, but I'm not sure how clearheaded or even accessible Mitchell's look at sex is. Shortbus is a clarion call for another sexual revolution, though it hardly seems any more informed than the last. Every character is in some way despairing over a lack of love and sexual satisfaction, and each character seems convinced that the solution to one problem will precipitate the solution to the other. Mitchell says that sex in this movie is used as a metaphor to understanding the characters' woes: a suicidal young man can't manage to allow himself to love his boyfriend, and naturally his sexual hangup is a fear of penetration, meanwhile a couples counselor has never achieved an orgasm and has a fear of relinquishing control, etc. It's pretty straightforward, and for about an hour and a half you get to watch characters grope around in the social darkness towards various red herring adventures: opening their relationships to other sex partners, BDSM play, orgies, and one character even performs auto-fellatio.

It sounds outrageous in writing, but the movie's pervasive sadness quickly muffles the shock of the first collage of sexual vignettes at the start of the film. Shortbus is definitely a work directed at gay audiences and straight audiences who don't mind watching someone sing "The Star Spangled Banner" while simultaneously performing analingus. It's a niche crowd, to be sure, but there is something rewarding and wholly justified about the film for those that give it a try: if nothing else it captures the post 9/11 social atmosphere amongst liberal 20-to-30-something year-olds, where powerlessness is felt both politically and romantically. Disillusioned about marriage yet still yearning for one partner that will unconditionally understand them, they desperately march on because that's all you can do sometimes.

The characters in the film are difficult to relate to and often grating in that same way watching a friend of yours muddle through his or her relationship dramas becomes a repetitious chore. Whether this is a fault of the movie depends on what you're looking to get from it: verisimilitude or vicarious thrill. Whatever the case, the actors are certainly dedicated to their roles, and while they may not be likable characters they do come off real. Paul Dawson's sadness is probably the most accessible, as he pops SSRI pills and stares through himself in the mirror. There's a place you can reach when battling depression that is the inverse of a feeling of transcendence--it's not even rock bottom, it's just a sensation of one's own disappearance. Dawson captures this in every scene, including the ones where he is having sex.

Shortbus is a dreary little movie, funny enough not to be outright painful, and hopeful enough at its end to suggest that while some loving relationships might not endure, there's still more out there to be had if we just hang on long enough to let them actualize. And, if couplings have to end, maybe we can somehow make that part of them a little more graceful, dignified. On my second viewing, during the final scene of the film, I thought about how the ridiculous sides of sex and relationships mirror each other, and what a great job the movie did in representing that. The idea is best summarized by a single quote from the director: "How the hell do we find ourselves in those positions?"

Gordy Hoffman on filmmaking. Part two of my interview.

2007-02-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

In the second half of my interview with Gordy Hoffman (pictured beardless on the left there), he talks about his own experiences writing and directing movies, and the processes involved, from the initial inspiring moment for a story, to being on set during the film shoot. Gordy also shared with me his favorite movies from 2006.

You said in a previous interview that your inspiration for A Coat of Snow, at least initially, was when you saw a group of women excitedly jumping out of a limo. I was wondering--because I've worked in a bar downtown for awhile, so I've seen my share of bachelorette parties and the caterwaul surrounding them--what specifically about that image struck you with sudden interest?

Well, I really wanted to do some DIY Filmmaking. I wanted to grab a video camera and make a movie. I didn't want to be held back at all. I wanted to use my tools: write, cast, direct, ensemble, camera... make a movie. It was on my brain a lot, and it still is. I still look at things and think: "Oh that would be a good short. Oh that would be a good digital feature." It just struck me, the sound of these loud drunken girls, that kind of cackling, and then you turn around and there's this long white stretch limo that was kinda cheap looking. They were getting out and just going crazy. I remember they were making all that noise, getting out in front of a Burger King. It's kind of like that explosion of girls being allowed to just go crazy, and so part of that was probably them [using that energy] saying: "Yeah! Let's get some Burger King!" I thought, yeah, you could make a movie in the style of a home video out of a bachelorette party. You could cast a group of women and get a limousine, and that'd be all you'd need.

Was there any kind of moment like that that you experienced when you were coming up with ideas and ended up writing Love Liza. Was there a similar moment that arrested you?

It was the same kinda thing. I was at a gas station in my cab in Chicago and I saw somebody near a pump and I imagined--I don't even think he was huffing gas--but I drove away and I was thinking it would be interesting... I just pictured this guy in a suit, like a professional--a lawyer or a consultant--and all of a sudden he starts huffing gas and everyone around him is thinking "what?!" Just a normal guy who starts huffing gas. So the idea was "normal guy huffs gas," and Love Liza came out of that. It's funny, I was just in my car looking at something outside of it for the beginning of both movies. I've never made that connection before, but I guess that's really what happened.

I've heard a lot of writers interviewed who strictly write screenplays and don't direct and have disagreeing opinions on whether they want to be around during the filming of a movie. I remember David Milch saying it was a particularly disempowering experience to be on set and have other people interpreting his work. I know that you regret not being a greater part of the production of Love Liza, and I was wondering if you are interested in having your work interpreted by another director or if you're going to be both writer and director from now on?

I would love to have someone direct something I wrote. I don't feel compelled to direct everything I write. I can let go of some things, and some things are better suited for me to be the director of. I think you grow a lot. I didn't know how to collaborate very well, and I think there'd have been a different relationship [if I had to do it over again]. I'm a different person. It's been six years since we shot Love Liza, and ten years ago I was just starting to... I don't think we even met the director. But no, I don't think I refuse to come to the set. That was a mistake. I think I held my ground though, and Todd Louiso was really good to work with and is a really great director with a new movie coming out. A lot of the experiences that made Love Liza a success was that our relationship was a good one, and I can imagine a relationship in the future which is so good that I wouldn't need to be on the set. I could just say, great, go do it. But with Love Liza it was, for me, a mistake because it was the first thing I'd written and the first thing I was getting made. It's something I can't get back. But I think in the future I can see myself knowing and being comfortable letting people go off to film in New Hampshire while I stay here and do something else. Part of me thinks it's important for a first time writer to show up at the set, because it's important for everyone involved. I can't define their role, but I think writers should show up at the movie set. I think it's important but not required.

My blog is pretty much dedicated to movie reviews and film criticism. So, in that vein, now that 2006 is over with, what were the films you found most compelling and fresh?

I think United 93 was the best film of the year. Anyone who hasn't seen that yet, they should see it immediately. Anyone who is serious about writing or directing or who is concerned about American Cinema should see it. It wasn't nominated for an academy award, which is very odd. But Venus directed by Roger Michell was remarkably well written, composed, shot, edited, scored, and acted. Very well made movie all around. The Queen was excellent. The Queen was simple; I think it was so simple that it's hard to see how hard it must have been to make. It was so well done it just seems effortlessly made. Borat was of course incredible, just a miracle movie. Another very well edited film. Definitely a force that shows the possibility of what can happen with movies. You know you can't do that with theater, or a book, and you can't really do it on TV--though Sacha Baron Cohen does it on TV, there was something different about it being on the big screen and larger budget. Having a large audience to experience it together is also different than just seeing it on TV. I think Casino Royale was really professional and appropriate. I think that was a real triumph for the producers, and for that matter Daniel Craig and everybody else. It was a real high-wire act. I also really liked Rocky. It was a really oddly paced movie for a studio release. It had a bizarre texture for an early 21st century sports movie; it didn't feel like that at all. It didn't feel like The Rookie or Miracle on Ice or any of those sports movies that the genre is now. Rocky isn't like that at all. It was something else, an odd thing. Inspired choices were made in that movie. I think it got ignored by a lot of people because Rocky-slash-Stallone now is a cliche in our culture. I think it deprived people of the pleasure of seeing that.

There weren't that many [great movies]. I liked Letters from Iwo Jima but I didn't think it was a masterpiece. I thought Notes on a Scandal was well acted. There were a lot I enjoyed, but few that stood out as the best movies of the year. United 93, The Queen, Venus, Borat, and Rocky, those were really the ones that I thought, off the top of my head, were the best of the year.

Well, thank you for answering my questions. I really do appreciate your willingness to have interviews taken with people in the blogosphere. We really appreciate it.

Well, you know, we want to be a part of the community. We're trying to create a network of podcasters and bloggers on our website as opposed to just a bunch of links. We want to get a relationship going with everyone. You know, it's really the soul of the internet: blogs and podcasts. That's where the creativity is, and it's probably going to turn into something else in the future. So thank you very much, but we really appreciate you taking the time to talk about BlueCat and other writers. We're just wanting to let writers know that we're out there for them.

Gordy Hoffman Interview. Part one.

2007-02-16T12:35:00.000-08:00

I recently had the pleasure to interview Gordy Hoffman, writer of Love Liza, which starred Kathy Bates and Gordy's little brother Philip Seymour Hoffman. Gordy won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance for the screenplay, and his last movie A Coat of Snow, which he both wrote and directed, garnered him the 2006 Domani Vision Award at VisionFest.

Gordy Hoffman is also the founder of the BlueCat Screenplay Competition, which is dedicated to discovering new, talented screenwriters. During the first half of my interview I asked him questions about BlueCat and how it distinguishes itself from other large cash prize screenplay contests.

For those of us who don't know, tell us a little about the BlueCat Screenplay Competition.

Gordy Hoffman: Grand prize for our screenplay competition is $10,000 and we have four finalists that each receive $1,500. One of the finalists is the recipient of Screenplay Live, which is a live staged reading of their script at the High Falls Film Festival. So we've got some pretty large cash prizes, but everyone who enters receives written analysis, which really sets us apart from everyone else. There really isn't anyone else who has this size of a prize and gives written analysis like that to everybody. Some competitions will give you one sentence of feedback, but we actually write out a mini-coverage. It's approximately 750 words of written analysis and everybody gets that. We've been around eight years now, this is our ninth, and we've got a very good track record. Our winner from 2005 just wrapped shooting the movie he wrote, our 2006 winner is negotiating when he's going to direct his film and it looks like it will go into production later this year. Our 2004 winner just won Austin with the same screenplay he won our contest with, and our 2003 winner was in the top ten of Nicholl's, and our 2002 winner went on to win Nicholl's with a different script.

We pick good writers, so if you are a good writer and you've written a great screenplay, if you submit it to us, we will find it. Everyone who wins BlueCat has never won a contest before. We don't accept anyone who has won a competition before; we want to bring in new talent.

Yes, I understand that the emphasis of BlueCat is in discovering new talent. Are previous finalists encouraged to continue resubmitting?

We get a lot of finalists resubmiting, but we've never had a finalist one year resubmit and win the next year. But yeah, they come back. I think that's the power of the process, people want to continue being a part of it.

How do you select the readers?

We hire them in Los Angeles and outside of Los Angeles. They are always experienced readers; I handpick all of them. They submit samples of their analysis which I personally look over, and I go from there. If I feel what they are saying is a legitimate, intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate opinion, then that's all it is. It's not like there's somebody out there who knows exactly what's right and wrong. You need to find someone out there who has an idea about what they feel, and is capable of expressing themselves about it. I look for people intimately familiar with the process of writing and getting analysis and feedback. I get a lot of people submitting and I'm very careful about it. My direct hiring and management of the readers allows me to exert control over when the screenplays come in and when they're read. Considering the success of our past winners who go on to win awards or get signed, I think something's definitely working.

Are there any perceptible trends in terms of style or technique that past winners and finalists seem to be distinguishing themselves with?

It's always been if there's been an authentic personal voice behind the story; that usually seems to be what drives it. The last two winners, their stories have been completely different, but they are both rooted in the personal experiences of the writers. Our 2005 winner Gary the Tennis Coach is a comedy about a janitor who takes over the high school tennis team. The two guys who wrote it played tennis in Nebraska and were able to infuse an authentic voice in it. It's not necessarily writing about what you know, but writing about what you know about yourself intimately--writing from a vulnerable, truthful place. Every year I think there's been that kind of touch to our winners. I really think with each year there's better writing going on.

Would you encourage undiscovered writers who are early in their process of submission to be very experimental in the construction of their scripts then, or would you direct them to stick with a more personal, traditional voice?

I would tell any new writer to write whatever they want to write. I would also say that anytime they hear a voice telling them "oh, that's too weird," they should ignore it. You should write whatever you want to write. The turning points in cinema history have been when someone broke free from what they were supposed to be doing and wrote what they felt they needed to write at that moment. Don't write outside yourself, that's not how that works.

Your past films, Love Liza and A Coat of Snow, are pretty darkly themed, and I know your next project is going to be as well. However, I know your personal taste in movies isn't in keeping with this trend in your writing at all. Have you been wanting to write something lighter?

Yeah, I actually have written some comedies and I have developed some lighter stuff and more romantic stuff. I'd like to direct something like that, but my next project isn't going to be like that.

Would you encourage writers to experiment in different tones? Should new writers not limit themselves to one genre that they may feel comfortable in and be more adventurous--should they discover things about themselves through that process, or is that authentic voice you talk about emergent regardless?

I've really caused a lot of confusion for myself trying to second guess and triple guess exactly what my next move would be, and it gets a little crazy. At this point keep it simple. If you feel compelled and inspired by some idea that you come upon, I think you should support that. Try and follow that. Get about the business of writing it. That's it.

The deadline for submissions to the BlueCat Screenplay Competition is March 1st. If you've got a screenplay lying around, I'd get some postage and submit. Entry fee is 45 dollars, and again you are guaranteed a page of feedback analysis. Samples of analysis and other information are available on their website.

In Part Two of the interview I ask Gordy about what it was that inspired him to write the script for Love Liza, and his last film A Coat of Snow. I ask him about the difference in experience between giving a screenplay over to another director, and directing your own material. Gordy also tells me what his favorite films of 2006 were.

Who wants to live forever?

2007-02-05T23:42:00.000-08:00

There's something missing from Darren Aronofsky's new, beautiful film The Fountain, and I found myself tonguing at it like a hole in my tooth all throughout the movie. Stanley Kubrick was dogged by the criticism that his movies were all head and no heart, that he denied his movies and his characters of the sentiment that separates us from dumb animals and water-cooled CPUs. While I always felt that was an unfair criticism in Kubrick's case, in Aronofsky's case here it seems valid. The film is visually breathtaking, plays with narrative form, and is a careful meditation on the ways in which we are defined by our mortality. But the vehicle for all this style and philosophy is the romance between Tom (Hugh Jackman) and Izzy (Rachel Weisz), which exists in the film only as a predicate.

Though Tom is clearly consumed by Izzy's terminal condition, it feels more like an intellectual obsession than one that comes from an ache in the heart. Izzy seems like a cherished possession to him, not a lover, not a soulmate who enriched and shaped his life. Meanwhile, there's Izzy, so busy trying to accept the inevitability of her death that she's a world away from Tom, already letting go to whatever it was that would have given us a glimpse into their feeling for each other. During scenes of urgent kissing and touching I felt like I was watching a strange form of necrophilia, where the bodies were still animated but the souls had left.

With movies like Pi and Requiem for a Dream Darren Aronofsky proved himself to be gifted at showing how circumstances and conditions beyond a people's control can pulverize them into a fine, pink mist. In The Fountain Aronofsky is following the same track of inevitable degeneration, but attempting to show transcendence in the face of it. I think his intense focus on transforming philosophical despair into spiritual exaltation caused him to ignore the emotional centers to his two characters, which would have engendered a sense of sympathy for them. Tom's obsession, like his love, comes off hollow and pointless, and his final ascension, though an awesome spectacle, is also without any emotional catharsis.

Two allegorical narratives branch from the central story of Izzy and Tom. The allegories are strong, rich, and beautifully constructed, but the central storyline misses its emotional beat and doesn't reveal the full characters, which was its charge. What we're given in place of a tender communion of souls, are sensual moments of warm breath rolling over the tiny blond hairs of Rachel Weisz's neck, and fingers tracking down the contours of soft skin. Aronofsky tries to capture sublunary love in a purely visceral way, as if the bond between a man and a woman living on earth is dominated by the flesh's hungers. But the movie then ignores the loss of a perspective during a person's death, that loss of a collection of ideas and their daily, dynamic metamorphoses. This thing we call consciousness and soul, during death it dissolves into--what? Pure energy and matter to be reabsorbed into the cosmos and mysteriously, unpredictably redistributed? Aronofsky seems to take comfort in the moral connotations behind a natural process of death and rebirth. We flawed and fanatical little creatures cannot selfishly claim a permanent ownership of any of the universe's resources, and that, apparently, is as it should be. If we were animals driven only to eat, rut, and reproduce, I'd be inclined to agree.

As staunch a materialist as I may be, I believe there's more to a person than the desires of their flesh, and more to love than obsession. The mind and its relation to other minds is capable of much complexity and much transformative power. This missing length of human existence, and what it means when physical death robs us of it, would have made this a perfect movie and a true comment on the human condition. As it is, it's a rather beautiful, thoughtful movie, and another feather in the cap of a budding auteur.

Reality satire is a-very nice.

2006-11-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

I think one of the most deceptively thoughtful comedies ever made must be Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. It's easy to lose sight of the satire that Sacha Baron Cohen is creating through real-life interactions, especially during one particular scene featuring Borat and his near 300lbs companion, Azamat, wrestling naked all through the hallways, elevators, and dining areas of what appears to be a four star hotel. The film cautiously paces the nature of its comedy. Borat consistantly elicits nervous laughs from an audience that is never sure if Borat is the butt of the joke or the person Borat is interviewing, but the movie is rapidly punctuated--with the pacing of a good rock song--with uproarious physical and "stupid" comedy, cleansing the pallate for the next painful interaction.

Borat's charm, as I see it, comes down to two elements of his character: he sincerely desires to be courteous to his wise American teachers and benefactors, and, perhaps more importantly, he is equipped with a childish grasp of the English language. When confronted with these two qualities in other people, it's very difficult to resist projecting a notion of innocence upon them. They're trying so hard to understand you, and so hard to communicate with you, that it's only natural to wish to reward this behavior with warmth and agreement. Borat also plays on our false liberal notion that all other cultures and ways of being are no better or worse than our own--that somehow a person's cultural identity and practices are unimpeachable, and practically holy. Indeed, unless the practices of another culture involve something like genital mutilation or genocide, we seem remiss to condemn them. Sacha Baron Cohen has shrewdly crafted the character of Borat in response to this, and he traps us between two very hard places: political correctness and bigotry.

Borat is a delight, because we view him as a child. We just assume he doesn't know any better when we see him making out with his sister, the number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan (since I've been following Da Ali G Show, I noted that apparently the quality of his sister's "sex in mouth" seems to have declined, for she was number 2 prostitute not but one year ago). When he wants to show people pictures of his teenage son's penis, we just assume that's the norm in his culture--he still doesn't know any better. When he intimates that he rapes women, we... well, I can't really hypothesize as to the rationalization required for such an admission not to register as unforgiveable with the people he speaks with. But I guess he's still not supposed to know any better?

I think Sacha Baron Cohen finds this curious as well. Cohen believes that racism doesn't necessarily originate in socially or personally ingrained prejudices deeply rooted in our psychology; he believes his escapades as Borat are a "dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity, as much as rabid bigotry." Borat represents dumb conformity, but so do our reactions to him. Consider the scene where Borat meets with a group of feminists, perhaps one of the least funny segments in the movie (which is actually a compliment to how funny the movie is) because Borat behaves like a chauvenist pig, and the feminists react with disappointment and outrage. They react as we would expect them to, and as they should. If, however, you are laughing at the feminist's reaction to Borat, and seeing them as the butt of the joke, then I would suggest you have a great deal of resentment towards assertive and empowered women. It's a mistake to believe that this movie's satire ends with Borat's interactions with people on the screen. I believe it would be an equally disturbing and comic endeavor to interview people who have just left from seeing the movie, asking them what their favorite parts were and why. In fact, if I were behind the marketing of this movie, that's what my mid-release trailer would be composed of.

But Borat is somehow sympathetic. And he's sympathetic by virtue of his behavior in comparison to some of the individuals he meets in America: the searingly racist man at the rodeo, the woman-hating frat boy, and Pamela Anderson. Unfortunately, some are criticizing this movie for attacking "red state" Americans, but I'm not buying it. I don't believe that people who are permissive of Borat's behavior, awkwardly laughing at his jokes about his retarded brother raping his sister, are any more enlightened than the preacher and his wife who become filled with horror upon seeing Borat consorting with an obese black escort in hotpants. If anything, this movie made me wonder what my genuine reaction to Borat would be. Sacha Baron Cohen would undoubtedly skewer me with his character, because if you condemn him he will reshape himself with vulnerability, but if you appease him he becomes a monster. But these are choices we have to make, especially since Thanksgiving is coming up, and we'll all be eating turkey dinners with our extended family. We all have those uncles or grandparents that have a little Borat in them; sweet and vulnerable, but subject to sour, racist expletives as if they're living in a culture that fully endorses them--but maybe we're just still giving them the idea that it does.

Beta Blogger and me.

2006-11-08T22:21:00.000-08:00

So, after much delay, I've upgraded to blogger beta. I was reluctant to do so for a few reasons. One reason was because I'm lazy and didn't want to have to manually re-enter all my categorized links from the old template. Another reason was the fact that, after looking at the new template layout, the links to my past film reviews in the sidebar would look long, ugly and stupid. The third reason was I'd have to relearn how to make expandable posts, which is something I have been entering (now old) code for in nearly every post I've been making for the past year.

I've thus far solved the first and third concern. The first problem was solved with getting off my ass (well, actually, remaining on my ass but in an upright position behind my laptop) and enduring the tedium involved in entering them in again. I've pared down the list a little bit, mostly because a lot of the blogs I'd listed were dead or have otherwise probably forgotten about little old Vodka-Yogurt. If your link is gone and you'd like to remind me that you're alive and still reading & writing, drop me a line at my gmail account (or post a comment if you're brazen enough) and it shall return.

As for the third concern, click and behold.

Is that fucking cool or what? Now I can have expandable posts which will not force you to bounce back and forth between my index and individual posts. That alone makes this upgrade worth it. Should you wish to integrate this feature into your own blog, you can check out this post at Hackosphere. I highly, highly recommend it.

As for the second concern, I think I'll be setting up index pages listing all of my movie reviews, some of my liquor reviews (which I think I might continue writing more of given the feedback), and maybe a general section featuring other commentaries that I've allowed to disappear into my general archive. I suppose I could set up tabs, but, seeing as I've got over fifty film reviews posted, I still think an alphabetical reference index may be worthwhile. It'll take awhile to compile an adequate list for all the posts and find a convenient way to implement them, but I've got a few days off work to utilize towards that end. In any event, this thing will be looking nicer and hopefully end up easier to navigate than before.

I am sorry. Here is some deliciousness.

2006-11-01T22:23:00.000-08:00

I'm deeply sorry for not having posted anything recently. I've written a review that I'm currently unsatisfied with for The Fountain, but I'm going to cure that soon. I've also got other movies I'm going to be writing reviews for. This blog is not abandoned. I've just been dealing with a nasty period of work, depression, and poverty. However, I will be on vacation soon, spending it in Ashland with my college buddies and fellow burger flipping geniuses. I will post about it, because these people are by far the finest human beings I've ever known and the best drinkers I've ever had the delight to share a corner of the bar with. Hell, I consider the bartenders themselves great friends of mine.

By the way, should you notice a decline in my postings here, that normally means I'm posting a little or a lot in my myspace blog. At first I was keeping posts there sparse, but that blog has begun to take a unique shape of its own. For the most part, I'd say that blog can be described as my thoughts on body rhetoric and evolutionary psychology--perhaps easiest and most alliteratively described as "the melancholy meditations of a materialist." It may be worth reading.

And now for some fun. Here's a conversation I had with a friend of mine. We were commiserating about the quality of people we encounter during work. For impatient readers: the quality of character in this particular instance is low.

God of styx: I had to deal with some weird fucking people today
God of styx: I had a lady come up to me and ask me "Hey do you have any books on faeries"
God of styx: And I said. "Well art work or stories"
Me: heeheehee
God of styx: And her reply was, "No, a book on how to get rid of them"
God of styx: I was stunned.
God of styx: I said "what do you mean"
Me: well duh
Me: she needs to get rid of some imaginary creatures
God of styx: Then she said "A crazy witch casted faeries upon my house and they stole my car keys"
Me: ....wow that stole her car keys
God of styx: Lol, yeah man. I was trying so hard not to laugh.
God of styx: But oh the story gets worse.
Me: Do go on.
God of styx: After talking to her, I went up to a coworker who is a little weird and started the story with. "You wouldn't believe this." and told her the story.
God of styx: My coworkers reply was. "Oh yes, that happens. Faeries like shiny things, especially keys."
Me: I am very drunk, by the way. They told me I didn't have to go in to work today, so I decided to hurt my brain oh so good.
God of sty2: Ha! you lucky bastard!
Me: Oh, so your coworker is also crazy.
Me: What a fun discovery that must have been.
God of styx: Yeah exactly....I was even more stunned. Thinking, "Fuck there are a lot of people in this world this fucking crazy."
God of styx: And I thought Christianity was bad.
Me: Oh God, so please tell me you listened in on the two crazies chatting with each other about the appropriate book she needed.
God of styx: Lol....
God of styx: Yeah I did.
Me: Oh please, please describe.
God of styx: And my coworker was like. "You have to understand, it isn't just faeries. Goblins and Trolls do the same thing. They are very miscivious creatures, they love doing that stuff." "Here you need this book, this will explain about all three of them and pay attention to small details so that you can learn how to dispel them, if it is a witch that sent them there."
God of styx: I stood there with my jaw hitting the floor man.
God of styx: Then my coworker started to explain to her the technical details of how faeries get there.
God of styx: As they come from some "magical" realm in the woods.
God of styx: Then into your home.
Me: I see. I take it there are woodlands near her home?
God of sty2: Lol!
God of sty2: No.
Me: Or at least a park with a watertower
God of styx: Its flat fields everywhere here
Me: maybe a shrub near a swing-set?
Me: heeheeheehee
Me: oh god
Me: But I'm sure she was convinced, right?
God of styx: Yeah, they were both very serious about it.
Me: Well it's very serious business, dealing with faeries.
God of styx: And the other lady said a friend of hers was a witch and was being mean and cast the faeries on her.
God of styx: Lol.
God of styx: They were talking like she had caught a disease or something.
Me: Oh God, if I was there I would have been fired.
God of styx: Lol, it was so hard to keep my mouth shut, and even worse to keep from laughing.
Me: I would have piped in: "yes, indeed, faeries are often called 'grass scabies.'"
God of styx: heeheee I mean seriously how is a sane man who is on the clock suppose to respond to that situation!
Me: I often wonder this question myself. In fact, I wondered it the other weekend when an obese man wandered in from the hotel and waddled over to me as I was setting up the bar
Me: "Hey. HAY! What if I like... grabbed that statue over there in the golden bikini...."
Me: "Uhh--"
Me: "And... and what if I started to have sexual relations with it?"
Me: "Well, I think--"
Me: "In the POOL!"
God of styx: Hahahaha! What!
Me: "I'm pretty sure security would intervene after awhile."
Me: "Awwwwww, man! Really?!!"
God of styx: Hahaha, did you really say that
Me: "Hey, I don't make the rules. That's the Man."
Me: yep.
Me: How else could I respond?
God of styx: You gave him the opportunity to think that he would have "awhile" until he was told to stop.
Me: Well, I'm not one to completely discourage people from doing things like that if it means I might be able to tell a more interesting story.
Me: But what the fuck kinda way is that to introduce yourself to the employees of an establishment?
Me: Let's say I were to accept about myself that I'm a fat and disgusting human being. Now, when I wander into an establishment that serves food and liquor, I would like to think I'd still--at the very least--wait a few minutes before inquiring about what the store policy is if I were to fuck any of their decorations.
Me: You wait on that kinda thing, like after a few cocktails.
God of styx: So you could at least have an excuse, and maybe buy the decorations a few drinks first.
God of styx: Make them think you deserve it.
Me: See, that'd be my reasoning.

Magical status seekers.

2006-10-31T03:34:00.000-08:00

The male of our species, on average, has a tendency to be an anti-social fellow. Psychological studies often reflect that men, for some reason, have a greater fascination and drive towards objects and concepts than towards social interactions comparative to women. Men also involve themselves in more high risk behaviors than women do, which may have something to do with our higher suicide and mortality rates. Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that this extreme behavior is a product of how the evolutionary process has shaped the mind of our gender. We see it in nature over and over but rarely admit it about ourselves: extreme behaviors and displays attract mates and social status. Of course, we don't think about it in this way consciously, we just feel "driven." Consider Geoffrey Miller's comparison of the human artist with the Satin Bowerbird that instinctively creates wildly ornate nests:

If you could interview a male Satin Bowerbird for Artforum magazine, he might say something like "I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with color and form for their own sake, quite inexplicable. I cannot remember when I first developed this raging thirst to present richly saturated color-fields within a monumental yet minimalist stage-set, but I feel connected to something beyond myself when I indulge in these passions. When I see a beautiful orchid high in a tree, I simply must have it for my own. When I see a single shell out of place in my creation, I must put it right.... It is a happy coincidence that females sometimes come to my gallery openings and appreciate my work, but it would be an insult to suggest that I create in order to procreate."

The difference between the human male and the rest of the animal kingdom is the sheer volume of extreme behavior that he has to select from. The Prestige is a great movie because it highlights this behavior in its simplest form. The art of an illusionist has no social utility in the strictest sense; it does not reinforce ideology of any sort. It is an artform that deals in the supremacy of the performer over his audience. The magician flaunts his possession of a secret, which the observer will probably never be able to explain. That gifted illusionist sits at a crossroads between faith and reason for all people--those who believe in the supernatural existance of magic, and those who believe in a universe strictly governed by science--because only he holds the secret to his process. The magician holds people rapt in a state of meaningless mystery, aroused and bewildered.

The evolutionary process is wasteful and cruel, however. It instills people with varying degrees of varying drives, all as an experiment determining whose genes will carry on and whose genetic lines will end. The Prestige highlights this beautifully, as two men are driven towards an obsession which is larger than the fruits of their craft could ever provide. This is probably why so many critics are suggesting the movie is without depth of character. While Alfred Borden (Christan Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) are relentlessly driven towards very specific and simple goals, aren't most people? This singleminded, headstrong attitude their characters represent doesn't diminish them; they're complex individuals, but allow their lives to become defined by their need to embody the perfection of their craft. In my experience I've known people driven towards a specific goal in their lives--in terms of art, career, or simple financial success--who would have no one person, however deeply loved, stand in their way of attaining it. I suppose, to a larger degree than I'd like, I'm one of these people.

But in its most extreme incarnation, one sacrifices himself for his masterwork. I've heard it said that there are many things worth dying for, but few things so precious that they are worth living for. This movie is so exquisitely warped and perverse, that its characters find ways to do both. And for what? For another performance. For another chance to confuse and amaze. For another opportunity to mystify you. Mostly, though, to mystify their rival just one more time, and assert themselves as "the best." And that's both the pathetic and majestic position of the alpha male. All you have to do is take everyone's breath away; it doesn't matter how you do it, or if it means anything. Cosmic satisfaction is wrapped only in one package: the dropping of a jaw, and the widening of an eye.

The only fault in this movie is sentiment. The Prestige should have no victor. Neither character deserves to live or have a normal life, because I can't see that as something they would desire or possibly be content with. Sadly, we're supposed to believe that one character is capable of this. It's too much of a stretch, and wholly without emotional catharsis or moral balance.

After the film concluded my friend said to me: "Uhh, I think that movie was evil." Perhaps that is what I love about it so much. Neither character was someone you could sympathize with completely. But it was a sight to see, just watching them. Often, that's the case with people: there's a certain something that bonds us to individuals who are truly driven by a force none of us can explain. We all feel the tendrils of desire to be like Angiers or Borden, but we don't all feel it so intensely. Some of us are content to simply pay to witness its horror and majesty.

A short gripe, a quick review, and a hopeful speculation.

2006-10-14T14:30:00.000-07:00

Anyone else lamenting the barren landscape that is the local cinema's marquee? The only movie currently in wide distribution that is likely to be worth seeing is The Departed, but I've been so disappointed with Martin Scorsese lately--or maybe just exhausted from the marketing engines blaring louder and louder with each successive release of his. The Departed, I fear, will be one of those movies I'll need a friend to drag me to. Ron Howard, Stephen Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese have reached a point in their careers that one can see a preview for a movie of theirs and assume that seeing the film will be an inevitability. You won't be able to help it. It's on too many screens in too many places for a person who watches as many movies as you to avoid being in just the right place at just the right time. I dunno, for a person who tries to follow his tastes and prioritize his viewing habits accordingly, feeling the approach of these blockbusters is a little demoralizing.

I saw Renaissance on Thursday. It's a movie so deeply in love with its visual inspirations and relentless drive to become the most noir-saturated film in history, that it fails to engage the audience in a plot. The film relies on the mood it establishes through architecture and starkly monochromatic character profiles to such an extent that when it does attempt brief character backstories or revealing discoveries, it all feels tacked on, predictable, and ultimately irrelevent. The voice work is subpar and melodramatic, beyond even what the genre of comicbook adaptation can support. What's more, the animation involved in the characters' speech never quite seems to sync up with what they are saying, and I remember thinking to myself that it was like I was watching the cinematics of a video game. There just wasn't much this movie offered which justified it being commissioned as a 105 minute feature, but it would have made one spectacular music video--maybe even a decent 20 minute short.

It was a little disappointing to get out of the apartment to see yet another movie I felt more or less indifferent to. I return home and find nothing on either Cinemax or HBO's On Demand channels, save for the masterful A History of Violence, which is sitting on my DVD shelf anyways. I find myself nervously fidgeting, scratching, and tugging at the bottom of my shirt as I await this year's Oscar season to launch. I'm particularly chomping at the bit for this weekend's release of The Prestige. Christopher Nolan made up for his hatchet-job adaptation of the remarkable Norwegian film Insomnia by drying all my tears over Joel Schumacher's destruction of my favorite comicbook hero. Batman Begins was damn solid. The Prestige looks better. I'm looking forward to being able to call Nolan a true talent again, whose name associated with a project alone is worthy of my 8 dollars and the bone sacrifice of a small, rosy-skinned baby.

We must all be jackin' it instead...

2006-10-14T02:58:00.000-07:00

One of my recent favorites in the way of The Daily Show special reports was Jason Jones' "You Jackin' It?!" Jones aims his satire at Cleveland's own WKYC investigative reporter, Carl Monday. Monday had a six-part exposé about catching a recent high school graduate, on video, looking at pornography and masturbating in a public library. Impressed by the man's ability to publicly humiliate a slow witted teenager and put an uncomfortable spotlight on his entire family, Jason Jones decides to do some investigative reporting of his own on Carl Monday. You know, to get a better feel for a master's style. Check it out:

Also, WKYC has footage of "dueling microphones" between Jones and Monday. Curious that they are hosting this video, since it, too, makes Monday look like a moron.

Now, as it turns out, Carl Monday has his own blog. I'm surprised by a few things I found on it. One, I'm surprised that Mr. Monday has below an 8th grade grasp on the conventions of the English language, and has somehow found a career as a journalist. I'm convinced he just puts an ellipsis down anytime he thinks his reader wants to stop for a breath. Even when teased in his comments section about misspelling words like "comedy" and "Jon," he still neglects to correct them. His comments section also perplexes me, since I would think his disgusting behavior as a journalist and a writer would merit at least, say, four hundred or so comments heckling him. It's not like I had a hard time finding him, either; his blog is literally two clicks away after searching for his name on google. But, as of this writing, he has totalled a paltry 89 responses. We can do better.

Now, The final thing I'm shocked about: he provides a phone number where people can leave him messages on what they believe might make for good story ideas. And he posted it in his blog after receiving all the flak The Daily Show special generated. How in the hell is it that droves of internet pranksters haven't descended upon him like bloodthirsty jackals?

Oh, right, porn and masturbation.

The Exquisite Bettie Page

2006-10-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

Poor, sweet Bettie Page. I was trying to think of a word or two that concisely describe Bettie, expressing why it is that I—even I, a gentleman thrice removed from her generation—have a little crush on her. I think it is this: Bettie is complexly naïve. She represents curiosity and experimentation, but is profoundly driven by the only moral that means anything: do no harm. Tiny and abstract maxims such as those, when applied to the real world, create all kinds of dilemmas and present all manner of strange crossroads. They create wild, ever-expanding crystalline structures of philosophy, which dwarf the human mind and leave the soul prostrate, confused, ashamed.

Unless you’re Bettie. Then your mind may be, at times, confounded, but your driving spirit somehow remains unaffected, cheerful, willing to extend faith. You’ll have the kind of faith that gives you an unwavering adherence to the teachings of Christ. You’ll have the kind of faith that when a photographer asks you to take off all your clothes, or be photographed in a corset spanking a gagged, half-naked woman with a rider’s crop, you trust their sense for the photographic aesthetic and the gentility of their clients. It’s just a little fun with role playing, anyways. Right?

Well, I don’t think we know the answer to that question yet, but we’re still barreling down to the bottom of the smut industry to find out for sure. However, Bettie’s position in the then budding pornographic empire looks vastly different from today’s. Therein lies the crux of the film, and I think perhaps our fascination and love for Bettie. I do not believe she was manipulated or abused by the industry that made her famous, nor does she. In fact, I think she’d object to being considered as a participant in the pornographic industry—at least insofar as its connotation holds today—and rightly so. The photography and films that she was in carry erotic significance, but the shoots themselves have this bizarre innocence. This innocence exists within the context of the shoot and is occasionally removed post production, specifically in the still photographs. In one scene Bettie’s love-interest, Marvin, sees some of Bettie’s bondage photographs, saying: “Bettie… doctors write books on this sort of thing, it’s… it’s abnormal... Do you understand what kind of man buys these pictures?” Bettie insists that her photographers and the clients are nice people, just with strange tastes: “They’re for special customers who like these kinds of costumes. High quality people... I’ve met one of them, he’s very nice, wouldn’t hurt a fly!” She says the gags the ropes, they’re just “silliness; we’re laughing all the time when we’re doing this stuff!”

This element of silliness and deliberate unreality Bettie talks about carries on in softcore porn (and even in the non-gonzo hardcore features) today, which is easily observable to anyone who subscribes to Cinemax or rents glossy titles from Hollywood Video like Bounty Huntress: Undercover. Perhaps if one remains only partially submerged in the fantasy, grinning and giggling like a bad actor aware that his or her role is a construct not a character, the fantasy becomes more wholesome because it is therefore more foreign.

So the disconnect between a person of Bettie’s experience and Marvin’s lies between the symbol and the signified. For Bettie, she understands that for some people this is pure fantasy, and exists only in a realm of adult fantasy and role playing which has a lot in common with its childhood counterpart. Bettie is mostly exposed to this group of people, and is confused by and at times worried about the other culture of men and women whom submerge themselves in a level of fantasy where there is no laughter, and it is not silly. The problem is that you cannot cater to the former group without catering to the latter, and the publishers and editors like to walk the line in between because that’s where the sales are.

Mary Harron, whom you may remember from her last feature film American Psycho, teamed up again with Guinevere Turner, and together they treat Bettie Page with careful and sincere warmth. The movie reminded me of David Lynch’s obsession with the naïve heroine, exposed to a depraved, shadow-subculture emerging in her suburban home or in Hollywood. Except Harron excises the surrealism, and with it a lot of the sardonic humor that Lynch takes at the expense of his heroes and his villains. Bettie isn’t cartoonishly abused, but she is abused. Bettie is idealistic and naïve, but she isn’t comically removed from reality. And my God, she’s breathtaking.

The real Ms. Page was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times and had this to say about the title of Mary Harron’s film: “"Notorious? That's not flattering at all. They should have used another word." During a scene in the movie, a director says to Bettie Page after she has auditioned for a role: “It’s quite a treat to meet the notorious Bettie Page.” Bettie walks off the stage looking stung and dejected. Oh, Ms. Page, please understand the title isn’t unflattering to you. Rather, the short, ironical title speaks unflattering volumes about those who would apply it to you.

Phillips Union.

2006-10-04T02:48:00.000-07:00

So there's a new whiskey in town, and I feel compelled to weigh in. A few words on drunkard culture beforehand, though. We whiskey drinkers like being a particular breed, just like the gin drinkers. If you specialize in drinking rum or vodka* cocktails, you should know that when gin and whiskey drinkers get together, we make fun of you--unless someone comes along drinking Apple Pucker or peach schnapps. We'd make fun of the Jagermeister people, but... you tend to want to give them and the hardcore tequila drinkers a wide berth. From what I've seen, these guys drink that shit because of the gambler's angle: will they wake up in a strange bed, a ditch, or a jail? Clearly we begin a night of drinking from entirely different starting points, aim towards different goals, and the only brief intersections our nights might have are at the dartboard or pool table.

But I digress. Point being, until now, I didn't really believe there was much room for aggressive elitism within the bounds of whiskey drinkers. Now, I abhor Jack Daniels, but thankfully it's a Tennessee whiskey, so I don't have to admit that it is a part of the family of genuine Kentucky bourbons or Irish whiskies of which I am so fond. My love remains pure. So there's admittedly a bit of a sectioning off: the bourbon drinkers, the irish whiskey drinkers, the JD drinkers, and the scotch drinkers. If someone sat down next to you and ordered J&B or JD, well you teased them for being "one of those guys," then they teased you back, and, after sipping from your rocks glasses after this exchange, you promptly teamed up on the guy drinking the vodka-cran or the fuckin' mojito.

See, if nothing else, all whiskies seemed like pretty burly, character driven drinks. They are designed for the misanthrope with a sense of humor, the nerdy bookworm with the tribal tattoo on his neck, and the rugby player that wants to forget how his cousins would dress him up in women's underwear and pelt him with water balloons. It's an interesting cross-section of humanity, and I like it. We've learned things on the path to our prefered drink, like patience. Cheap well whiskies burn without apology, but provide a necessary comparative yardstick to the more nuanced flavors and gentle warmth of bourbons like Woodford Reserve, Knob Creek, and Bookers. You had to work up an appreciation for whiskey, like you had to work up an appreciation for coffee and beer and porn with amputees. You had to invest in it for awhile without receiving immediate dividends. Phillips Union wants to undermine this sacred rite. Phillips Union wants to populate our ranks with amateur drinkers who have finally found a whiskey they thought tasted good from the first sip. They will therefore consider themselves bourbon drinkers, and believe their opinions would matter to people like me. Phillips Union is trying to destroy my whiskey culture.

Phillips Union is supposedly a blend of Kentucky bourbon and Canadian whiskey. And besides being a bastard whiskey to begin with, it tastes like no bourbon or Canadian whiskey I've ever had to boot. It is sweet. Absurdly sweet. Maple and vanilla flavors are strong throughout, but on the finish it feels like I just took a bite out of a maple bar. It does not burn, it barely warms the stomach. Somehow it is 80 proof.

But that's not all, people. Aside from making a whiskey for the child's palate, Phillips Union thinks it's a dandy idea to make cherry and vanilla whiskey blends too. And I'm here to say they probably succeeded to an extent beyond what I could have imagined, and it'll catch on. We won't like it, but these goddamn frou frou cocktail drinkers will love it. Vodka people will think we have things to talk about: "Do you think they'll try any citrus blends? I bet that would taste good." And the electric jolt of arousal I get when a woman says she drinks whiskey will forever be laced with a suspicion that she's talking about Phillips Union, or even worse, one of their god damned artificially flavored blends.

It's the blends that mean the end of the world. We'll never be able to interest any of the people introduced to these accursed liquors in forming a taste for regular whiskey. Maybe Phillips' regular whiskey blend could be used as training wheels for people who refuse to scuff their knees like the rest of us did. Maybe we could train their palates to enjoy the more adult flavors and subtle sweetness of matured bourbons. But when we're drinking Ancient Age or Seagram's 7 for its nostalgic impact (or because we are poor), they'll be shaking their heads in confusion, disgust. God, and the kids. The underaged kids that'll be drinking this crap and smoking their lime-flavored Camel cigarettes, saying how much better hard alcohol is from drinking Smirnoff Ice. These are the same people that will only know music by The Doors through the techno remixes they download. One day we'll meet each other in a bar, he'll be drinking his cherry-flavored Phillips Union, "L.A. Woman" will play on the jukebox, and he will say "I hate this version." And then I'll have to find a lawyer who can accept defending me with a temporary insanity plea.

I've got a bottle of this stuff now. Its smoothness and ease going down the gullet... it's like an old friend who just back from a Summer at a religious retreat, where he ate nothing but cream of wheat and read only from the Book of Mormon. He's still a nice guy, but that unwavering smile is inexplicably enervating, the robin's egg blue sweaters seem an insincere attempt at wholesome avuncularity, he won't tell filthy jokes like he used to, and he just doesn't bitch about anything anymore. I keep looking at my watch, hoping he'll get the hint that I want him to leave, but he just keeps smiling, not understanding my deep unease.

*Erin, I think you're a vodka drinker, and that's ok, because I've seen you drink it on the rocks. If you have this intimate a relationship with such an unfriendly, unflavored liquor, that earns my respect.

Watch it.

2006-09-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

For those of you who spent your college years partying more than I did--electing not to rent DVDs about major film directors from the university library because there's only so much time for beerbonging in the day--well, here's your chance to make up for it. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is available (in four parts) for watching in its entirety on YouTube. Go watch it and learn about the greatest motion picture director the world has known. It features interviews with Stephen Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Woody Allen, Alex Cox, Jack Nicholson, Malcolm McDowell, the late Sir Peter Ustinov, Shelley Duvall, Keir Dullea, Matthew Modine, Arthur C. Clarke, and everyone else who was relevant to his movies or life. It's comprehensive, polished, and edifying. Seriously. Watch it.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

And Man created energy, and said "Dude, tell me I just didn't do that! I dare you!"

2006-09-19T01:32:00.000-07:00

My roommate recently stumbled upon a story that is kicking up quite a stir in nerdier circles, and thus found a story that kicked up a small stir in our living room. Recently, in the Economist, a company called Steorn placed an ad challenging scientists to review--no joke--a perpetual motion machine they claim to have invented. Steorn says that they've had reputable scientists already verify that this machine of theirs creates energy, but want a legit peer review. Wikipedia, as always, is on top of the story:

Steorn states that the twelve scientists who get invited to validate Steorn's challenge will make up the jury that will test the technology. The jury will appoint one of the scientists as its own chairman. Steorn will then present the jury with an in-depth explanation of the technology and provide it with data from various tests conducted in the past.

Steorn states that the validation process will consist of three phases. The first phase will confirm or deny that the Steorn technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%. In the second phase the jury will decide whether the operation of Steorn technology affects any of its component parts. The third and final phase will carry out a full thermodynamic analysis of the technology.

Steorn states that post validation, irrespective of the results, Steorn will publish the analysis of the jury on its website. It will then seek to license the technology in various markets and will also launch its own products that it is currently developing.

Now, I'm a pretty cynical guy when it comes to human nature, but when it comes to the potential for scientific innovation, I've never been able to keep my head from drifting into the clouds. This has more or less caused me to focus my skepticism of this claim based upon what I believe this company could stand to gain from spending money on a hoax. As I see it, if they want public visibility, they've gone about it completely wrong, because they've appealed to the scientific community first, instead of focussing on pushing the headline in major newspapers. However, if they want to piss off a bunch of scientists and confound skeptics like me by appearing to not care at all about what the general public thinks, and maintain the facade of having a singular focus on validating and understanding the nature of their invention in a timely manner--well, then, they've done it. A weird game of chicken has begun and we all know the scientific community doesn't flinch. But, juror applications from scientists have already been taken and now Steorn is in the process of selecting their jury. The validation process is supposed to begin before the new year, and the length of the review will be determined by the jury itself, not Steorn.

Wouldn't it be a lovely Christmas present, to have the laws of physics defied and a whole new era of human life ushered in? Think for a moment what free, created energy would mean once a device like this is fully utilized. Transportation costs would be reduced to the maintenance of a vehicle no longer degrading due to corrosive chemicals and small explosion-based engines. So, no more gas price worries and fewer trips to the mechanic. No more electricity bill. Courier services would be reduced to covering the initial costs of the vehicles and packaging, leaving only the wages for the movers of parcels themselves to be paid. Energy costs for the production, maintenance, and manufacture of foods and products would be eliminated. Everything would suddenly be cheaper. Threats to our environment would be resolved. I'd never again be thrown into a violent rage while trying to change the channel on the TV only to discover the batteries in the remote have died. And this is to say nothing of what a shift in scientific and philosphical thinking this would represent. Humanity would be completely untethered to the energy resources contained in the raw materials of our planet.

A lovely Christmas present indeed. But I can't help but feel like I'm coming close to believing in Santa Claus again. After all, what is the likelihood that something like this would come out of the private sector (and from a small business in it), and simply involve the creative use of magnets? It's preposterous on the face of it. But, again, I just can't wrap my mind around the benefit for a company--ironically dedicated to the prevention of fraud--to commit to this kind of shenanigannery. At any rate, this shit is more interesting than how the Raelians claimed to have cloned a human being. So yeah, I'll register and add my name to their mailing list.

Let it burn.

2006-09-08T17:22:00.000-07:00

One cannot talk about Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man without first talking about the original cult classic by Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer. What made the original such a delight was its ruthless two-front satire of religion. On the one hand, we laughed at the Catholic, virginal, morally outraged Seargent Howie for his astonishment and repulsion to a sexually liberated, pagan community. On the other hand, we, too, had a suspicion that for such a peaceful and joyous bunch, there was some high-grade lunacy underlying their utopia. The crux of the film seemed to be that all religious belief systems--through concepts like ritual, sexual morality, and martyrdom--have a terrifying illogic and violence, which can easily masquerade as sensible and just. The film tickles, delights, and, in the end, sics grubs and cockroaches under your skin. I recommend it highly to anyone who is a fan of camp and uproarious satire.

I do not recommend its remake for anything other than a pretense to take your girlfriend or boyfriend out in order to engage in some hot and heavy necking and petting--but surely there are even less obnoxious movies in the theater that one could pretend to watch. I had some hope that Neil LaBute would add a provocative and modern spin on this movie; he's a talented writer and director, to be sure. I'm hoping this movie was rushed. I'm hoping... Jesus, I don't know, maybe I'm just hoping that this movie was made by a different Neil LaBute, or that the credit was listed in err. When the end cast credits ran I was depressed and confused.

Labute's script has gutted the movie of all its humor and most of its impishly sacreligious content. Some amusing quotes from the original were left in, but get no laughs because we're not sure if we're supposed to admire Sheriff Edward Malus, or if we're supposed to laugh at him. Nicholas Cage doesn't clear this up for us at all; he plays his role with neither zeal nor total disinterest. He hangs in there like a wet ball of toilet paper stuck to a wall. How are we to know how to feel about a character neither adequately satirized nor holding any character driven interest? He's a stock-grade hard lining cop, with a stock-grade haunted past, who is confronted with predictable, stock-grade spookery. The word "quixotic" is used to describe Malus more than once, yet he has none of the lovable and funny qualities Don Quixote possessed. Miguel Cervantes would retch at such a bland character, both in terms of his gallantry and his lack of spirit.

Evidently LaBute changed the role of Lord Somersisle to be played by Ellen Burstyn, apparently to add a feminist touch to the movie. Huh? Frankly, I don't know what's so feminist about this movie. In the pagan community men are reduced to mute laborers who are valued only by their physical fitness and fertility. The women of the commune call all the shots the way it would be in an oppressively patriarchal society. Suggesting that this movie is a feminist film is a bit like saying The Stepford Wives is intended for the chauvenist male. Hey look, there's another classic horror movie with a shitty remake. I'm getting more depressed by the minute.

What does this movie even aspire to be? There are cheap elements of horror, some cheap elements of tragedy, and I'm not sure if Neil thought there were some elements of comedy in it, but, if so, he was wrong. Yes, that's what this movie is. It is wrong. Not in the taboo-breaking, morally incendiery sense, but in the simplest most literal way. It is the cinematic equivalent to a misspelled word.

Sex and Narcissism.

2006-09-08T01:50:00.000-07:00

Caveh Zahedi is a modern day mystic. It's thrilling simply to watch his expression as he looks directly at the camera, or even at another person on the screen. His gaze appears to penetrate into a reality hidden from the rest of us, and the changes and fluctuations in his smile seem to confirm it. It is indescribably enchanting; the man is an amalgam of philosopher and mushroom chewing oracle. Roger Ebert wrote that, after his wife asked him what exactly Marlon Brando and he talked about during a 45 minute phone conversation, he responded: "I don't have the slightest idea... but he made it sound fascinating." Caveh Zahedi is similarly gifted with the ability to make whatever he is saying seem fascinating and profound. (Some of you may remember Caveh in the film Waking Life, discussing Andre Bazin's concept of the "holy moment," and therefore may appreciate some of what I'm saying here.)

This charismatic manner of his probably had a big role in preserving his life as a sex addict, who ruined several relationships and marriages over his fetish for prostitutes. I am a Sex Addict is a confessional film about these specific chapters in his life. It is, therefore, narcissistic, but who could anticipate such a conscious level of it? Years of Zahedi's life unfold as he moves from one embarrassing rationalization of his behavior to the next, devastating all the women who form deep bonds with him, and keeping the prostitutes of San Francisco in new fishnet stockings.

Early in the film we learn about the fundamental and irreconcileable conflicts between Zahedi's ideology and his sexual desires, which plague Caveh for the duration of the film. The first conflict being that Caveh considers himself a feminist, and even walked in anti-pornography marches; however, his fantasies often involve putting women in demeaning positions and indulging in violent roleplaying. The second rub being his arbitrary decision that sexual jealousy should be something that ought to be transcended--but he finds this rather difficult to apply to himself whilst he is being cheated on. Early in the film I was wondering why Caveh never seemed to question the belief in lust's validity over jealousy. For a man so interested in philosophy, this seemed like a crucial question in need of a rationalization. Though he believed marriage was a corrupt institution during his twenties, surely the notion of monogamy can be dissevered from that politicized union and considered based upon its own merits. But perhaps for someone growing up in the 70s, to even question the concept of "free love" was anethema.

But human nature will always reign supreme over people's dreams of a more perfect and unrestrictive way of loving. After his first two relationships implode, Caveh gives up on polygamy but still tries various ways to satisfy or reduce his sexual urges for other women. If one can't love more than one person without catastrophic consequences, perhaps we can still be adults and realize that men have certain desires (often refered to as needs during their more brain-bubbling intensities) which can be satisfied in the absence of love? If sex can mean nothing more than an orgasm, then what's there to be jealous of? But again, that hardwired, irrational emotion resists this rationalization effortlessly. Caveh does convince several of his partners that his sleeping with prostitutes is no threat their relationship, but all his calm, spiritually charged speeches and gentle coersions cannot assuage the pain his behaviors create.

Here's where I find myself either confused by how this film was made, or confused by Caveh himself. While Zahedi closely examines his own motives and needs--as well as his partner's--when he witnesses the pain he causes people, his reaction is more or less one of apethetic curiousity and confusion. Though there's no question the man does have deep feeling for these women, his need to understand and satisfy all his desires always seems to take priority. Zahedi falls into that painful-to-watch category of intellectuals who, while thoughtful and interesting, are so aware of the intensity of their own introspective lives that they can easily disregard the feelings of other people as simple and less significant. When you believe you are enlightened, you feel entitled to manipulate people--because you, naturally, know best. Consequently, Caveh walks about his life treating everyone else as if the world were populated entirely by Caveh Zahedis. There are two scenes where this is powerfully evidenced. During one scene he explains that one of the actors, playing his old girlfriend, refused to perform in a scene where she would simulate a blowjob. Zahedi lets us take a look behind the scenes as he tries to convince her to go forward:

Caveh: "[you won't do this because] it's, like, domineering to women?"
Emily: "No, it's just... it's something I'm not very comfortable with."
"You're just not comfortable?"
"Yes."
"Well, could you just do it anyways?"
"No."

Odds are that was just the tip of the argument over her doing the scene or not (her dry responses have the ring of being at least thrice uttered before), and he filmed her explanation for a comical nondiegetic break. During another scene Caveh narrates that he had a mystical moment when going out with his girlfriend: "it was then that it happened: I looked into her eyes and I saw her soul. Until then she had just been someone I had wanted something from. But in that moment I suddenly realized she was a real human being with needs and feelings of her own. It scared the shit out of me." This is not to be confused with the moment of gazing into a woman's eyes and realizing you are in love with and in awe of her soul. This is the mere realization that another human being genuinely has a will of her own that is worthy of consideration and concern, not just manipulation. The way Zahedi narrates over his montage of warm-lit slides, you might too be inclined to view it as a more profound and heartwarming moment than it should be.

Though I'm painting Zahedi as an unbearable narcissist, I must admit that I was right there with these women in hoping he'd start to realize the harm his behavior was causing. He obviously doesn't want to hurt these women. It seems more than likely to us and his girlfriends, that if someone could just convince him how legitimately damaging his sleeping with prostitutes is--articulate exactly how his behavior is immoral on an abstract level--then he'd earnestly try to stop. His problem is that he doesn't see his behavior as immoral, just curiously disruptive; therefore, his search is always for a scenario where he can indulge in cheating without all the nasty consequences.

Eventually Caveh has the necessary revelation about himself, which we know is coming thanks to the title of the film. What's remarkable is how long it takes this poor man to realize that he is an addict. Caveh plays for us a recording he took of the first sex addicts anonymous meeting he attended. In the recording he breaks down, sobbing, realizing the stories of the other sex addicts, having all left a wake of broken marriages and hearts behind them, are narratives that mirror his own history. He's so overwhelmed with feeling that he can hardly utter a word. It's a much needed authentic moment, and a little startling in its rawness. We've seen such a distant and thoughtful Caveh all through the movie, like a wide-eyed Woody Allen on valium, that I'm not sure I would have believed his performance had he tried to recreate his moment of catharsis.

The movie is funny, sad, and more than a little exhausting. But the cruel nature of addiction is in its ability to cause even the most insightful addict to deceive himself as thoroughly as he deceives others. That someone could make a documentary about 15 years worth of sex addiction this entertaining is an achievement alone.

Not that drunk.

2006-08-31T22:31:00.000-07:00

This movie brought out the worst in me. Or the best, depending on what type of person you are. As an aspiring critic, I have to believe in full disclosure. As such, let the record show that I was drunk during my screening of Beerfest. Also, it is now around 20 minutes after the movie has ended and I am drinking 40 ounces of budweiser.

Beyond that, I'm biased because I like the Broken Lizard movies. They are pictures conscious of the fact that they are fun, frat-boyish films. They, therefore, must be judged in keeping with what they set out to achieve. The energy captured in the Broken Lizard movies is present in all the finest buddy comedies--which are also overwhelmingly regarded as wastes of time by critics. I don't understand it. Why are movies like Super Troopers and Tommy Boy reviled by critics but Harold and Kumar Go To Whitecastle praised? I think those are all very funny and very watchable movies, and I cannot discern what it is that the latter possesses that the two former lack. These movies aren't as shrewdly crafted and cutely erudite as Coen Brothers' movies, but comedies shouldn't have to be.

Insofar as fun-loving comedies are concerned, the Broken Lizard troupe is quickly becoming king, as National Lampoons degenerates into juvenile tit-less titilations for the PG-13, straight-to-video crowd. The plot to Beerfest is simple: a group of college buddies are gathered together to avenge the memory of two brothers' grandfather and lovable whore grandmother. The means to this goal is to drink all the international teams competing in a beer drinking contest under the table. Cross-cultural alcoholic humor ensues.

There are hardships the team encounters along the way, like full-figured African-German-American spies and even the death of someone close to them. When I left the film I asked a friend of mine: "were you waiting for them to find a way to bring that character back too?" He agreed, and we both declared that these movies thrive on the deus ex machina.

Why, though? Why is it that in a "normal" film, or the dramatic comedy, the audience (especially the critical one) is lost when they inject a quick, saccharine fix? Perhaps it's because the Broken Lizard gang make it clear from the beginning of their films that they will not be bound by petty narrative standards and laws of physics or biology. If they want to make a joke about jerking off a frog, they'll just force us all to pretend the amphibian's genitals are capable of such stimulation.

You know the types of people that make these movies. They are the glorious under-achievers. This is where my real bias takes hold. I was the guy who was out drinking with his friends, hanging out in bars far past their closing time, playing pool with the bartendars (thank you Gary & Holly, and the blessed Oak Tree--and Jason, our slender and surly Norm). On more than one occasion I would wake up, hungover, and about an hour and a half before class I'd write a paper that was assigned sometimes as many as two weeks prior. I never made excuses and none of my papers were ever late because of my drinking habits. I also never received a grade lower than a B, and received few Bs. This is because I loved school, I loved learning, and I loved hanging out with my friends and creating stories with them just as much. Sometimes you know you're not a genius, but you know you're ahead of the curve; you know what you can get away with, and you know that an important part of being human is deliberately acting the fool. Sometimes all you really want to be is a lovable oaf who occasionally slips in an obscure reference or makes a sesquipedalian remark, grinning as if you told a corny knock-knock joke. "Hermes vaccilates between rationality and irrationality, sense and insanity. I figure I can too, for the time being," a friend of mine who'd been stoned every day for two weeks straight remarked. Such was our motto, but with every passing year we calm down a little more, drink a little less, yet still romanticize and, whenever possible, nourish the knowing trickster-god inside us.

We were also pretty sad people. Not sad to watch, since we had plenty of people gravitating around us, just quietly melancholy at times between manic outbursts. Alcohol has a dual function: as a spiritual or emotional analgesic, and as an intensifier of the party atmospher. Beerfest is about that moment in a party where everyone is getting along, when even the people who normally hate each other are magically, chemically finding the good side in each other; everyone is laughing during that peak hour that necessitates the hangover--a warped version of Newton's third law.

Broken Lizard have reminded us with the classic Super Troopers and again with Beerfest (though to a lesser degree than their first film), that there was value to those ephemeral moments. The moments where to laugh at ourselves and laugh at each other was the same thing. In comedies such as these, it's the wink that comes after the joke that makes the joke funny. In this film, I felt the wink directed at me, and therefore it was funny. Broken Lizard still hasn't topped Super Troopers yet--at least in this silly man's book--but they've surpassed what they accomplished with Club Dread.

A Tepid Proposal.

2006-08-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

Indecent Proposal is an entry in the pantheon of movies whose concept alone secured its enduring position in popular culture (and is it any wonder that after this film Adrian Lyne then took a shot at adapting Lolita?). It is a movie destined to be referenced continually, even by those who have neither seen the film. Honestly, they're not missing much. The movie is a painfully simple morality tale with painfully simple dialogue, infrequently lifted out of its mire of bad writing by Robert Redford's style and sheer presence on screen. Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore, by contrast, seem as confused and naive about the characters they are playing as their characters are about Redford's proposal. Diana and Dave Murphy are perpetual highschoolers, navigating through their lives with an idealism and lack of adult awareness that I could buy, if there weren't these moments of tin-eared moody profundity and stupidly dramatized false revelations.

Part of the problem with the movie on an intellectual level is that it doesn't understand its own morality. There are two tacks that the film could have taken which would have been satisfactory: the notion that jealousy exists on a biological level outside of our rational sense in some ancient region of the brain, or that through the sacred, sacrificial institution of marriage not only does one person's mind but also their sexual body belong solely to the spouse--that there are no temporary dissolutions of the marital contract. I'd buy into the former more than the latter, but there's definitely the potential for a good story in either area. This isn't to say this film doesn't touch ground on either of these topics, but it does so with an unforgivable superficiality. Diana and Dave are not bright people, and watching them go about a life the philosopher would describe as not worth living for 117 minutes is grating.

We look to the character of John Gage to mix something interesting into the plot, either to seduce Diana or strictly ruin the Murphy's lives because he's rich and powerful. The world is John's labyrinth, people are as mice to him, and he's equipped with an endless supply of cheese. We beg him to be a Machiavellian Don Juan, or even a villain who ruins people's lives simply to beat a case of the doldrums. But he doesn't. His infatuation with Diana isn't particularly vibrant, and seems more like a dull product of what psychologists call transference. Regardless, in seeing his persistence we at least know how he got his billions.

The ending of the movie is as slathered in corn syrup as the beginning. We come full circle and realize that maybe Gage wasn't such a bad guy after all, just a little sketchy in personal ethics now that he's at an altitude of wealth and power where one's moral sense gets a little thin from time to time. Diana and David get back together and presumably live happily ever after, now that David has had his revelation: "I thought he was the better man, but he wasn't. He was just richer." And like that the jealousy is cured! No more dwelling on the noise that it must have made when Robert Redford's wrinkled, naugahyde flesh sweatily slapped against his wife's backside. No more evenings spent with his hands clutching his head wondering if she had an orgasm or two while earning her million dollars. No, finally, he can get back to loving Diana without all that insecurity, knowing he was the better man after all, because... well, because she originally chose him for her husband, I guess? Because he's teaching architecture now? Because he just spent a million dollars on a hippo?

Not buying it? Yeah, neither did I. The movie knows the symptoms of jealousy but not the source nor the antidote. Even if most of us don't know either, we know authentic feeling when we see it, and we don't see it in Indecent Proposal.

Note to horny young men with Blockbuster cards or Netflix accounts:
We also don't see a lot of good sex. When David asks Diana if Gage is good in bed, she says "yes." At this point we know she has had sex with David, John Gage, and some guy named Bubba, and should justifiably be wondering how she'd know a good performance in the first place.

An analysis of The Shining you can fall asleep to.

2006-08-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

Fresh from the first lukewarm response in decades both from the public and critics alike for his film Barry Lyndon, Kubrick set his bead on adapting Stephen King's The Shining to the screen. The director's vision is largely reviled by Stephen King acolytes, and the author himself. King’s fans hate it for not being true to the novel; King hates the film because it was directed by a “cold” rationalist who “thinks too much and feels too little.” I particularly loathe this facile impression of Kubrick and his movies, but I do think Stephen King stumbled upon an exposed corner of the essential problem or strength (depending upon your perspective) of this innovative approach to the horror narrative: Kubrick’s blurry stance between atheism and spiritualism. Kubrick was not religious and didn’t believe in any traditional God or the supernatural; he was, however, vastly imaginative about the possibilities inherent in our universe and within the human mind. Science fiction is uniquely tailored to Kubrick’s worldview, but the horror genre, excepting slasher films, seems to be exclusively predicated on the existence of other supernatural worlds whose spirits find ways of invading and manipulating our own.

Like his exploration of intelligence and capital-I Intelligence in 2001, Kubrick’s exploration of the supernatural is deliberately ambiguous, aspiring to satisfy those who believe in ghosts and those who do not. Ultimately, the only aspect of this movie that is out-of-the-ordinary is the overt telepathy shared by Danny Torrance and Dick Halloran. Considering Kubrick’s belief in the power and inevitable evolutionary ascension of the mind, I believe it wasn’t so much of a stretch for the filmmaker to explore the idea of minds communicating through a psychic broadcast. The concept is still more science-fiction than horror, especially given how the telepathy is contextualized: as a heritable trait in Dick and Danny’s families—with the latter family also having heritable mental illness. The formula for horror and suspense in this film emerges from the telepathic interaction of sick minds, which create a haunted reality.

Like Pictures in a Book

The first appearance of a “ghost” in the film is while Jack is in the hotel bar. Jack begins talking to the specter before we are aware of his presence, which creates the impression that Jack is probably still talking to himself in an empty bar. Later, when Wendy appears, frantic from hearing Danny’s story that a woman tried to strangle him, Jack is indeed sitting at an empty bar.

For the majority of the film we are only exposed to the visages of past hotel inhabitants and employees through Jack’s perspective. Nicholson’s performance is exaggerated from the beginning of the film—which prompted Steven Spielberg to say to Kubrick after screening The Shining “I thought Jack’s performance was almost a great Kabuki performance.” This also chaffed Stephen King, although he attributed Nicholson’s air of craziness in the film to having been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, suggesting audiences would already think he’s insane (nevermind that he wasn’t actually crazy in One Flew Over…). Though Nicholson has an undeniably off-putting face, right from the start of the film his expressions are far more warped and eerie than in any of his other performances. During the scenes in which we are locked in Jack’s perspective, it’s hard to trust that what we’re seeing is really there, just like it’s hard to trust Jack really means it when he holds Danny and says with a lupine smile “I’d never hurt you.”

During the scene where Jack is easily seduced by the nude woman of room 237, the contiguity of the scene is interrupted with a shot of Danny in his room, having one of his intense seizures, right as the hot, wet, and nude young woman turns into a wet, nude, and rotting old woman. This is directly after we’ve witnessed Danny shining to Halloran, so it's clear Danny has a role in what his father is witnessing. As Danny slowly dissolves into apoplectic terror later in the film, we also see Jack’s visions becoming far more expansive and detailed. The more Danny sees, the more he seems incapable of looking away, until Danny isn’t there anymore and his alter-ego Tony emerges, whose motives are totally unknown.

There are two hypotheses I can envision regarding the Overlook. The first is that the hotel is inhabited by real and evil spirits that try to absorb Jack and his family into their collective. The second hypothesis, which I feel is probably the correct one, is that the hotel is, as Halloran described it, containing markings of past events and personalities which people who shine can evoke. One of the problems with the first hypothesis is that the ghosts focused all their seductive energies on Jack, and focused all their persuasive powers on him to act out violently against his family. Wouldn’t these ghosts try to more actively pit the entire family against each other? Wouldn’t it aid in the absorption of souls if Wendy and Danny, too, felt the need to stay in the hotel for eternity?

The second hypothesis makes more sense to me in terms of how Jack, Danny, and eventually Wendy experience the hotel through shining. We’ve known Jack is a violent alcoholic, who is probably a classic case for anti-social personality disorder, and his desire for isolation, resentment of his family, and need for escape is salient. This is a simple recipe for how Jack will read the historical shine-imprints in the hotel and react to cabin fever. Danny’s intense telepathic abilities, and his own psychological ills, cause him to send for help from Halloran and attempt to scare his father into leaving the hotel by exposing him to the embrace of a decaying old woman. Danny’s reaction to the hotel is one of fear because he is perceiving (far before his mother) how his father is reacting to the hotel and ultimately what will result from it.

Wendy is probably the most wretched and abused character in the whole film. She’s cruelly dominated by Jack all throughout the first half of the film, and as her husband goes completely insane she transforms into nothing but a bundle of raw nerves, draining sinuses, and quivering flesh desperately trying to save her child. She sees the hotels ghosts only after her son is lost and her murderous husband is loose in the hotel hunting him. By this time, I think I’d start seeing ghosts in unlit halls, even without the help of my son shining them at me.

There are only two events in the movie that run against the grain of this second hypothesis. One is Danny’s injury after going inside room 237, which was inexplicably unlocked. The second is Jack’s escape from the food locker. Jack gives us a startlingly plausible explanation for Danny’s wounds: “Maybe he did it to himself.” Indeed, it’s possible, though we don’t particularly want to believe anything coming from Jack. The fact remains that Kubrick deliberately never showed ghosts interacting in the hotel environment and emphasized large passages of time in the family’s stay there, where we have absolutely no idea what may have transpired. When Jack is freed from the locker, we only hear it being opened, and we only hear the voice of Grady. When we next see Danny, he’s been up and about, repeating “redrum” over and over. Danny is still in his Tony personality, and we really have no idea what he’s capable of in that state. Regardless, there are many alternative explanations available for these two unexplained events, each as unlikely as the existence of ghosts. Perhaps that is what makes the whole movie so eerie, that reality is never fully giving in to the complete irrational governance of the supernatural, yet never adding up to a remotely satisfyingly rational narrative—too many pieces are missing, too many perspectives have been tainted by insanity and distress.

A Collection of Disturbing Images

I’ve always found The Shining’s strength is in the extreme craft involved in how it was filmed. The story itself is rife with frustrating ambiguities, its characters all seem as partially skewed from reality as their situation, and the film concludes like a fall down a mineshaft. Still, images and sounds linger. You can’t help being absorbed into the scene where Danny is followed in a long steadicam shot through the halls of the massive Overlook, the sound of his tricycle wheels alternating from riding atop carpet and hardwood floors. The lengthy close-ups on all the characters faces, especially Jack’s, sink into some deep iconographic stores in our minds, and have successfully invaded and endured in popculture. The movie’s power is in these scenes, not in its whole—it’s through the actual experience you have while watching it. I defy you to bring up this movie in a conversation and limit yourself only to discussing it abstractly. It’s impossible. You have to talk about the hedge-maze: how your eyes widened watching Jack lumber after Danny like a wounded, rabid animal, and the tightness you felt in your gut watching Danny carefully walk backwards in his footprints as his father murderously wailed for him. And have you ever seen a creepier set of twin girls in your life?

Kubrick relied completely upon atmosphere and image to bring about tension and fear, which is probably why the movie works more and more on me during repeat viewings. The more familiar these images get, the closer you want to look at them, and the more haunting they become—and considering the outrageous order of takes that Kubrick placed on virtually every scene, I should hope so.

A Picture on a Wall

Finally, a discussion of the last shot of the movie, which has always troubled me. It is the only shot completely untethered from any character’s perspective in the movie, excluding the shot right before it of Jack’s frozen corpse (though he still seems somehow “there” in that shot). As a consequence of the shot’s lone omniscience, I’m tempted to interpret it symbolically, rather than literally. If taken literally, then Jack was absorbed into the Overlook and has had his adult image imprinted in a photograph dating back before he was born. Surely this means the ghosts existed after all, and, gee, thank God Kubrick cleared up all that uncomfortable ambiguity in a final, cheap, and anticlimactic shot.

I tend to think of it as a playful symbolic representation of Jack becoming, as Halloran would put it, another picture in a book. Jack has left his imprint in the hotel, and anyone capable of shining will be able to reconstructively conjure “him.” If the idea of a “ghost” is the notion of a spirit trapped in this world but incapable of acting in it, then what better way to represent it than as the memories and markings we left the world with while we were here? Our spirit then lingers only as the aftermath of our most memorable actions. Even if we knew who Jack was during his career as a teacher, during his early romance with Wendy, and his alcoholic years, could we remember him as anything other than the man who went crazy at the Overlook and nearly killed his family? I doubt it. It certainly wasn’t the case with Grady.

“You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir; I’ve always been here.”

How do you market a platypus?

2006-08-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

Virtually everyone who knows me is painfully aware that I have a deep, sloppy, and perpetually renewing love affair with the novel House of Leaves. I recently bought my third copy of the book, since people insist on borrowing it from me and not giving it back--which wouldn't be so bad, if they'd at least finish the God damned thing. It's hard to believe in the significance of a book when you're confronted with people either completely ignorant of its existence, or apathetic about it. Whatever, Bret Easton Ellis says its the shit, and he's the shit, so he oughta know. Bottom line: I'm through trying to sell people on this book. I'm going to read my sexy "Remastered Full Color-Edition" again, clutter it up with post-it notes, put a nice coating of highlighter fluid over its pages, and keep it in a locked drawer. If anyone ends up "borrowing" it again, they will be forced to contribute their skin to the binding of my fourth copy.

I am, however, mentioning this book for the second time on my blog, because after six years Mark Z. Danielewski has finally produced a follow-up novel, Only Revolutions, available September 12th. Everything I'm reading about this book from his publishers screams "train wreck!" Nevertheless, I'm still confident that I'll fall in love with it. Danielewski seems like the literary equivalent to Charlie Kaufman, and that unique sense for narrative structure poses problems for reviewers and advertisers alike. Any attempt at enticing an audience with a brief summary of plot will result in confounding people--or worse turn people off completely by melodramatically showcasing its experimental nature. My suspicion is that anyone reading this and anyone I tell about this book will probably say to themselves: "Well, that looks interesting," and have absolutely no idea how they're connotatively using the word "interesting." Anyways, I know what I'll be reading this September, and I'll do my best to review it.

Speaking of empty ejaculations of "interesting," I saw the film A Scanner Darkly a few weeks ago, and I've come to the conclusion that I have to see it again before I know quite what to write about it. It's been the only movie I've watched in years where I can't quite decide on the first viewing if I was satisfactorily entertained or intellectually stimulated. It's both an envigorating and embarrassing experience for me.

In general news, pertaining to the future of this blog: yes I'm still gonna put essays and reviews up here. It's just been difficult for me as of late. Work at the bar & restaurant is exhausting, bills are crushing me, and I've been avoiding doing a lot of critical writing in favor of writing to people and reading voraciously. Acclimation to my new surroundings is going bumpier than I'd expected, and I spent the last three weeks reading a book that had me lost in often deep and uncomfortable thoughts. When I wasn't lost in thought, I was trying to avoid thinking altogether by playing lots of video games and watching crappy movies on HBO On Demand. (I actually tried to watch Sliver last week.) Add my weekly workout regimen to that schedule, and that's basically been my sad little escapist life. All I can say is that I'm trying to pull out of it.

Late nights in big cities are fun.

2006-06-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

I posted this entry in my accursed myspace blog, but I might as well slap it in here too, seeing as how I've had a lack of content in here lately. Later tonight or tomorrow afternoon after work, I'll finally put up the first part of my essay on sex in film. I've also got some reviews of The Ice Harvest and Murderball in draft.

Anyways, for those of you who (wisely) don't visit or know about my myspace blog, here's somethin' for you to read until I get my shit together:

I had one of those not-quite-rare-enough evenings where the universe piles it on you from all angles. You try to put in as much good karma as you can: you tip anyone who provides a service to you, you listen to anyone who is upset, you do a bunch of extra shit for people to help 'em out, and generally put yourself out there because everything that could possibly go wrong for you currently is. You hope maybe your goodwill in the face of all those storm clouds might coax the universe back into balance for you. Today the scale remained woefully tipped.

Earlier tonight, as I was stranded downtown, a 55 year-old, gay ex-con and crack addict said to me: "oh baby, people in this town take your kindness as a sign of weakness. It's so lonely." This was after he cajoled, then berated me for refusing to smoke the weed he offered. He suspected my refusal was a response to the fact he was black. Before he took his leave of my company an hour later, he called me a coward because I wouldn't agree to go out with him sometime. His name was Robert.

Out of all the new people I've met in San Diego, I probably held the single longest conversation I've had here with Robert. He was the most "real" person I've met locally, and certainly expressed the most interest in my life. He was right though. I was frightened of him. But I was frightened because I don't see how a person can withstand having to cope with such a profound loss of human dignity and all that social isolation, which he expressed was simply his everyday existence. I don't see how his life could get any better; the only thing people see when they look at him is his lack of teeth, his age, a red eye with a milky pupil, and clothes that haven't been changed in two weeks--and let's not kid ourselves, more people probably factor in his skin color among the list of negatives than don't, sadly. He is one of those unfortunate people visibly slipping on society's last footholds. It would only be worse if he was a schizophrenic, like the one who was wandering around behind Robert and I, shouting at phantoms only he could see and dragging around a garbage bag filled with God knows what.

There was another black man nearby who was six foot tall, probably 240 pounds, and magnificently built. He was holding his dry-cleaning and staring off in innocuous directions, like everyone learns to do at transit centers late at night. Everything about his manner radiated a calm strength and mental acuity. His presence comforted me somehow--so, naturally, he didn't stick around for long, because that would have been nice. The fact is that it wasn't Robert's blackness that I was afraid of, but it was probably easier for him to believe that than be made aware of why I was frightened. It's just terrifying to witness a person's hope and sanity gutter like a flame burning through the last bit of wick in a candle that has melted all its wax. Crazy, flickering people-candles, brilliant and robust yellow flames one instant, and tiny blue specs with thin whisps of smoke the next.

I gave a 19 year-old a buck fifty so he could get a bus ride. It's a little scary to give people money at one in the morning downtown; it exposes you as a person worth mugging. The kid was from L.A. and said: "thanks. That was really good of you. I'm scared of everyone out here, man. I'm just trying not to get noticed. I want to go home." I think all of us felt the same way, and some of us had homes.

I learned today that one of the managers at work, who recently turned 45, was an actor for 15 years and is a playwrite. He studied in the same school as Robert Duvall. He moved to San Diego when his mother fell ill. He's not sure what shape his life will be taking in the next few years. He misses living in a big city where their version of "culture" isn't eating expensive food, going to a ball game, and getting drunk.

All tonight I've felt this sinking, sucking sensation, like the entrails of my spirit were being slurped out of my soul's ass--like those kids I saw on that Dateline NBC special who sat on an industrial pool drain. They lost several feet of mucosa and bloody intestine. Some died, some just can't digest things fully anymore and have colostomy bags. I wonder what I'll do.

The Go-Gos played at our bar today. They all seemed rather irritable during the soundcheck, but were very bubbly and personable during their performance. Their voices were all very high when they spoke, like 6 year old girls. Some people suggest there is a correlation in grown women with very high-pitched, childlike voices and sexual molestation at a young age. Everytime I hear such a voice or someone describing a woman's voice as cute, a little part of me knots up and turns green and grey.

I am so very tired.

Ouch.

2006-05-31T15:54:00.000-07:00

This has absolutely nothing to do with film or film reviews (sorry). I've been hitting the gym pretty hard lately and an old pain has resurfaced. My suspicion is that my left rotator cuff is in some pretty sorry shape. The pain is more a nuissance at this point (though because I work out 6 days a week for about two hours each day, I'm guessing the ol' endorphins are killing a lot of the pain for me--that and I'm a stone cold stud of a manly man: hair, testicles, red meat, fart jokes, pro-wrestling, women's golf), but I'm concerned that eventually I'll end up really blowing my shoulder out, which would really irritate the hell out of me. Quite irritating indeed, since I currently lack medical insurance.

So! Anyone out there have or have had rotator cuff issues and discover a way to alleviate the problem through exercises and other non-vicodin related therapies?

Gradations of rape, and neo-machismo in Straw Dogs.

2006-05-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

What a sickening work of juvenile hate and cowardice Straw Dogs is. Perhaps I'd be less repulsed by the movie if it had been made by a lesser diretor, or if the movie had not succeeded in evoking in me suspense and brain activity. Hating movies for their pretension and schlockiness is preferable to loathing a very talented artist's cleverly packaged misrepresentations and misperceptions about human nature and reality.

Contrary to popular belief, the battle between barbarian and intellectual rages on today in stalemate, despite our emergence from nature's jungle stage; this concept is where the film's concern lies. Peckinpah's movie is about the mind's triumph over the brutality of men-as-beasts, or, to put it in less abstract terms, one mathematician's triumph over drunken roughnecks. Our poor mathematician's trials with the local toughs alone not being sufficient, the story also contains broad strokes of misogyny for good measure--'cause our hero just wouldn't be as heroic without a helpless, repeatedly brutalized, and betraying woman in his life. I have never seen a movie more clearly influenced by an artist's need to assuage his own feelings of immasculation and fear, while justifying chauvenism and Nietzschean philosophy.

If nothing else, this movie attempts to outline what it is to be a man in contemporary, almost civilized times; it's all about neo-machismo. Enter Dustin Hoffman as David Sumner, a mathematician, an intellectual, a total outsider in the rural English town in which he has relocated with his wife. He is bullied and ridiculed by the local men who inhabit the town's pub, and who, as chance would have it, also happen to be doing construction on his new home. Enmity between the men and he escalates to the point where they are actively harrassing him, making his wife, Amy, feel uncomfortable, and killing his housepets. Amy demands David do something about this, and his response is to continue trying to integrate himself into this group of men, both to defuse the escalating hostility, and to feel like just one of the guys. Circumstances naturally lead to yet another humiliating moment for David. On what he thought would be a hunting trip with the guys, he is abandoned in the middle of the woods while his wife is raped at home. Upon David's return his wife calls him a coward for not standing up to the men when she first asked him, and things look a little bleak for their marriage and David's conception of himself as a man: as protector, as providor, as sexual object.

But let's backtrack a little and talk about the rape scene. Amy is first raped by a man whom she'd had a fling with prior to moving to the states and meeting David. There's sexual tension present between these two prior to the rape scene, but Amy clearly feels a larger level of repulsion towards him than sexual interest. During the rape, he beats her and forces himself upon her despite repeated protests, but her resistance and horror to this ebbs until she finally seems to be enjoying herself as much as can be expected given the circumstance. The human brain is an oddly layered thing; our sexual desires seem to exist on all floors of it, and how one experiences sexual desire in the reptilian brain isn't necessarily in agreement with higher eschelons of consciousness and thought. Viewing her emergent desire for her attacker as existant on a primal level frames the scene in a historical context, hearkening back to humanity's long stay in the brutal jungle--when our brows were thicker, our bodies covered in more hair, and where rape was commonplace, necessitating that it be dealt with in a manner that didn't completely destroy and traumatize a woman. Lower functions of the brain take over when higher processes are overwhelmed. It's the path of least resistance and psychological harm to finally embrace those suppressed desires during the assault, however repulsive, than experience it completely as a helpless victim.

That's how I'd view it, anyhow, because I'm not as cynical as I suspect the writers of this movie were. I suspect the writers viewed the rape as something which would unlock in her a full desire for her rapist and former beau, serving as catalyst for an affair (after all, she asks her rapist to hold her after he finishes and courteously apologizes). When held in the context of things yet to come in the film, the scene is not there to explore Amy's psychology, but to express the possibility of Amy eventually engaging in an affair of her own volition, and the film immediately judges her for that. This event is the first assault upon her moral integrity, and it's ghoulish. Then, to add insult to her injury, her attacker and former love interest then holds her down as one of his friends proceeds to rape her. It's as if the writers are teaching her a lesson for her response to the initial trauma and what its aftermath may have led to, by forcing her into a worse moment of degradation, betrayal, and humiliation.

Events in the movie unfold to where David is left in the care of a mentally handicapped man, Henry, whom he hit with his car. Henry is thought to have assaulted a woman, and is hunted by five of the townsmen, two of which happen to be Amy's rapists. David has to defend his home against their attempt to invade it and apprehend Henry, whom they intend to beat to death in a drunken rage. During the tension of the attempted razing, Amy pleads with David to give up Henry. She reveals herself fully as a coward by saying she honestly doesn't care if the men beat Henry to death; she just wants them to go away so she can feel safe again. She has no faith in David's ability to protect her, and when her first rapist--the one who held her down during her second rape, mind you--whispers to her through a broken window that if she comes out no harm would come to her, she believes him and attempts to leave. And here's where the real dishonesty enters the film. David the passivist, the intellectual, and the diplomat, proves that he is indeed all these things but not a coward. David slaps Amy around and orders her to stay inside the house or he'll break her neck, and the scene in which he beats her is filmed in the same stylized way as when her rapist battered her. But we're supposed to view it differently, because David has proven himself to have moral integrity--he is defending a weak and disabled man against a mob of angy drunks and rapists. It's for her own good, you see, as Amy has no moral compass, and therefore her character becomes defined by one who allies herself with whomever has the most power over her. She's reduced to a frightened animal and a stupid opportunist.

Here is where we learn the old conception of masculinity is much like the new one: a man's power is defined by his dominance over other men, over his environment, and over women and his command of their sexual desire for him. When push comes to shove he is capable of inflicting his will upon others, purely. Only now, unlike in the past, there's a thin layer of moral fiber where our paragon of machismo takes mercy upon the weak and helpless (so long as they are perceived as morally unimpeachable), and he also separates himself from animals with his strong intellect (for animals can be a brawny bunch too), thus exponentially increasing his cunning. It is with his smarts that David is able to defend his home against these roughnecks nearly twice his size each. It is with his supposed moral integrity that he leaves his much abused wife standing on the stairs, stunned and once again traumatized.

One could almost defend the presentation of Amy's character: she's afraid, manipulated by a town full of chauvenists and sexual criminals, and her husband has seemed overwhelmed and unresponsive during earlier threats of violence. But the film makes it clear that David is our moral divining rod, and at the end of the film he leaves Amy and views her on no more flattering terms than the men who attacked the home. She attempted to betraye him and did betray his most fundamental ethical values. All of her actions up to that point in the film are now colored by this taint.

In reviewing A History of Violence Roger Ebert wrote: "If Tom Stall had truly been the cheerful small-town guy he pretended to be, he would have died in that diner." David is Tom Stall if Tom Stall had never lived as a gangster, and yet he does not die. So the film extraordinarily distorts reality, or at best decides to conclude itself with the most unlikely of endings simply because it makes us feel good: it makes us feel good that David stood up for what he believed in, and we feel righteous in condemning everyone that ever grew up in that low and awful English town.

This film attacks women, attacks the lower class, and delights in violence-as-porn, literally and figuratively. And it does it so manipulatively, because we really do loathe all those work-a-day drunkards. I would bet many people probably don't even view the first rape scene in the movie as a "real" rape, because she wanted it after all, didn't she? The moral of the movie seems to be that man ought to be satisfied being, and indeed aspire to being, the lonely and humble hero going through life beating, shunning, and dominating everyone else in the world for being base animals.

"Hmm, I guess they weren't made out of brass."

2006-05-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

Hard Candy is one of those ambitious movies that wishes to set us at unease, to force us to ask uncomfortable questions, but also desires to shock us on primitive and superficial levels too. It's a smart movie that doesn't want to get too smart, and as such seems to leave both general audiences and critics feeling somewhat unsatisfied. After turning over the question if it should be considered pulp, or provocative and thoughtful indie film, or psychological thriller, I realized there wasn't a fulfilling answer. Finally, without feeling any notion of the film transcending the aformentioned categories, I disinterestedly gave up. I can say that I'm glad I saw the movie, but could easily go without ever seeing the film again.

Ellen Page's performance as Hayley Stark is definitely the stronger in the film, possibly because she looks so disarmingly early-adolescent. The audience neither expects that level of performance to emerge from her, nor does it expect the character to be as sophisticated in speech, culture, and understanding of her own and others' psychology. Her character and performance both arrest the audience with suspense and curiousity, which the end of the film sadly does not bring to climax and resolve. All this isn't to say that Patrick Wilson as Jeff Kohlver brings a weak performance to the screen; it's a good performance but he's limited by the constant reactionary nature of his role. Each time Jeff shares something that the audience finds interesting about him or we feel he's being sincerely and revealingly vulnerable--giving us clues about the origins and conflict inherent in his dark nature--Hayley immediately disregards him or changes the subject. This results in Patrick Wilson and his character Jeff hardly having a chance at being the star of the film, even with the entire movie being shot from Jeff's perspective.

The game of cat-and-mouse can get a little labored on screen, even if it is between a 32-year old photographer who we suspect is a pedophile and maybe a killer, and a 14-year old who transcends words like precocity and genius. As a curative, we're given some material almost worthy of intellectual chewings-on, as Jeff's true character slowly emerges from his deceptions. It is only partially satisfying because the character of Hayley, the oddly packaged vigilante so youthful her body still resembles a boy's more than a woman's, is never revealed to us in the slightest. She's like a comic book character in a first episode, where we learn of the heroine's obsession but never its cause. We're introduced to her alter-ego which lures pedophiles to her, and then we're introduced to her real role as the moral judge, jury, and unflinching executioner. When Jeff is screaming at Haley: "Who are you?!" it's a question we're all waiting for an answer to as well. Her response is not satisfying, but I won't spoil it for you no matter how tin-eared and tritely it was written.

In witnessing what Haley intends to do to Jeff, one can't help but get a little squeemish--at least, I would suspect most audiences would be a little reticent to grant her complete moral impunity. This is a strange choice by the writer, because it removes our sympathies towards Hayley, and makes her interactions with Jeff seem like a crazedly evil person hunting a man dabbling in the realm of everyday evil. I perceive Hayley's character as evil only because her sociopathy blatantly overshadow's Jeff's, and there's no way of accessing any suffering inside her that has brought her to this unquestioned and unreflective moral superiority she feels towards her prey. The human parts of her are missing.

I did have one thought on Hayley's character that very nearly made the movie interesting enough for me to visit again. During one of the scenes where Hayley is interrogating Jeff, she chastizes him for not recognizing that pre-adolescent and early-adolescent girls may flirt with older men, may even behave in an adult manner designed to impress and provoke older males, but this behavior is mimetic, not genuine adulthood. It's a girl clumsily experimenting in what being a woman might feel like, but being wholly unprepared for what might come next. Of course, this movie begs the question that if Hayley is brilliant enough to psychologically manipulate and physically render Jeff helpless, doesn't her successful outwitting of an adult therefore put her on an equitable or greater level of informed volition? However, the speech Hayley gives Jeff has another layer, which is evident in her character's ultimate position as a cipher to us. Hayley is invulnerable to any but the most speculative of psychoanalysis; all we know about her is what we know she has read: medical books, advanced fiction, probably both fiction and nonfiction books on crime. Perhaps Hayley was the victim of molestation, or knew and cared dearly for someone who was, but I view Hayley's reaction to whatever trauma it may have been that set her down this path as being comparable to her hypothetical girl flirting with womanhood. She's picked up all the right books, tools, and mannerisms necessary to carry out her plan and inflict the pain she wishes--yet it's all still an immitation of things she's read about, of her conception of her role as a hunter of adult men. There is no genuine 14-year old girl that emerges on screen during this movie.

Strange and incomplete thoughts of dubious value aside, the movie lacks a satisfying ending, and the dialogue slowly degrades as the movie progresses. The wind dies right before the sailboat reaches the dock, and the audience is forced to paddle the rest of the way. The movie succeeds only as an exercise in making you feel uncomfortable on visceral and simple psychological levels. You don't want the pedophile to get away or gain control over the situation, but you'd prefer Hayley not have her way with him either. In the way the movie was filmed, it's very easy for the audience to feel trapped in that house with Jeff and Hayley, being vicariously tortured, hoping that someone will suddenly burst through the door and escort all parties to the nearest mental health hospital. Indeed, that may have made for a better ending, for then I would have stood a chance at knowing why the filmmakers thought I should sit through the first three quarters of the film.

Your patience will be rewarded.

2006-05-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of one of those pesky life transitions that necessarily put everything else on the back burner. My time in Ashland, and the entire state of Oregon for that matter, is coming to a close. I've got my degree, and on the 16th of this month I'm going to be heading for San Diego. Once there I will begin the task of building something resembling a life. I wish to eventually get hooked up with a graduate program, but all in good time. It'll be nice to relax for awhile, listen to some good music, do some writing, make a little money, and meet a lot of strange women over cocktails.

This move changes absolutely nothing about my dedication to this little blog of mine. I still plan on continuing to put movie reviews and essays up here, and may actually have a lot more time to do so. Vodka-Yogurt is a little over a year old now, and checking the stats today I discovered that, since I started tracking the traffic, this blog has attracted over 10,000 visitors. Not bad for what a tiny little place on the internet this blog represents, not to mention its rather specialized interests. It's always fun to watch the statistics when I'm posting a lot, seeing the daily average visitors go up to 60. And then I come back to check on a day like today, after a long period of absence, discovering visitors are down to 12 per day on average. That makes me feel the pinch to get new content up like nothing else.

Anyhow, the essay on sex in film is going slowly but I'm generally pleased with what I've got so far. All of your recommendations were extraordinarily helpful. I'll probably be posting a review of LIE before I put the first part of the sex in film essay up. Also, I'm going to be seeing Thank You For Smoking and Caché this next week, and maybe reviews of one or both of those movies may be coming as well. So hang tight, content is coming.

Needing your help, readers.

2006-04-07T04:23:00.000-07:00

I'm planning on writing a (thus far) three-part essay on sex in film. I'm in the process of compiling a list or lists of movies which represent one or more of three categories: eroticism, perversion, and sleaze/exploitation. These are tentative categories and their number is subject to expansion. My interest here is to examine both the cultural and political responses to sex being depicted on screen in various movies, old and new.

Looking at my DVD library alone, this seems a daunting task (apparently, I like a lot of erotic and perverse movies). My already long list notwithstanding, I'd like to elicit some help from any of you who have seen movies which you'd immediately qualify as fitting in one of those three categories--should you ascribe the film to one of them for an individual scene or for the entire film as a whole--or movies which you'd even abstractly define as "sexy." Ideas on other ways to categorize sex in film are welcome as well.

I've also got a bunch of other films which I need to see, namely those which feature unsimulated sex but still find their way "above" the porn category (currently on my list: The Brown Bunny, Intimacy, and Baise-Moi). If you've seen movies which feature actual sex taking place, please list them (I have already seen Ken Park and you've seen my review for Pink Flamingos already), and I'll decide whether or not to seek them out. My interest in this is whether or not unsimulated sex can be in a movie, add a quality to that film which simulated sex could not, and not disrupt the general mimesis. Ultimately, I'd like to investigate, putting aside the puritanical values which so influence the MPAA, if unsimulated sex inevitably belongs in porn and not in our theaters or displayed in plain view on our shelves next to the home theater system.

Anyways, give me as comprehensive a list as you can. If I don't get any comments, I'll just have to go this one off my own list and research--just don't bitch at me if the movie you're thinking of gets overlooked.

The heart and the mind.

2006-04-03T20:20:00.000-07:00

Fresh after co-writing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach returns to writing and directing his own films again with The Squid and the Whale. It's a semi-autobiographic film, based off Baumbach's experiences growing up in the shadow of his novelist father, and the effects his parents' divorce had on him. It's a strange kind of coming-of-age story, because it features individuation on a level which most movies haven't achieved. Whereas many films and books focus in on a key revelation that indicates a transition into adulthood, this movie isn't so much about revelation and catharsis as it is about someone learning how to begin defining himself on his own terms.

Jeff Daniels delivers a performance that is only at the briefest points sympathetic, which appears to be in keeping with what the character of Bernard was written as. Originally, Bill Murray was slated for the role of Bernard Berkman, but backed out after needing a break from making Broken Flowers. It would be interesting to see what decisions Bill Murray would have made differing from Daniels. There's something flat and caricaturized about Jeff Daniels' performance, which he occasionally tries to break from with varying results. His physical and mental posturing are both embarrassing and at times alarming to watch, and the more I think about it the more curious the roll would have been for Murray.

Bernard and Joan Berkman (played by Laura Linney) work as the diametrically opposed personalities, which we see have fused together and manifested within their children. Joan is emerging as a writer, virtually without ego, and pursuing other lovers under her husband's nose. Meanwhile, Bernard is struggling to get his latest manuscript published and trying to keep good posture and sophisticated airs, as they are clearly all he feels he has left. The oldest child, Walt (played with no small amount of twitchy neuroticism by Jesse Eisenberg), admires his father's strength and conviction, and immediately sides with Bernard during the divorce. The younger son, Frank Berkman (Owen Kline), sides with his mother, having never been interested in the books or movies that his father values so much, but struggles with his apparent physical resemblance to his father and what that could mean. A different movie would have probably tried to bring its characters to a point of equilibrium, where Walt and Frank would symbolize on an abstract level Joan and Bernard's characters working things out between each other where their real characters could not. This film, however, doesn't let its characters off quite so easily. The nature of the beast we call adolescence is the realization that you've inherited a lot of issues brought to you by your parents, and in trying to escape them you also create some issues original to yourself. In the end, the best we can do is arrange and contextualize our histories in a manner that makes it capable for us to live with and appreciate ourselves. This movie is honest in suggesting that, while still in those teenage years, you do not come close to that point, but may, if you're lucky, be moving towards it.

Watching The Squid and the Whale was a painful experience for me, because it reminds me of all the banal, habitually abstract thinking that writers and intellectuals pick up along their paths in the humanities and arts. It was also painful because, despite all the studies I've had in deconstructionism, I trust words and their logic; I trust them to expand my abilities as a thinker and, hopefully, in all my other roles as a person. I trust that they'll help me continue discovering and defining who I am in meaningful and productive ways. My words are the flesh and fingernails of my personality, and I try to stay well groomed. But Noah Baumbach's film intimates that our personality and even our intellectual sophistication don't emerge from words, but are constructed by the neuroses that emerge from our experiences. In a way, we use words to rationalize our actions, and with words we fruitlessly try to understand our irrational desires in relationships with family, friends, and lovers. But at the heart of it, our motives, our love and despair, and all those dreadful feelings emerge from a place our rational minds never fully understand and always act out of fear and resentment to control. There's a subtle nihilistic streak in this movie, I think, as we view the symbol of the squid and the whale locked in battle, which is neither defined as positive nor as negative imagery. The conflicts we have with our own minds and bodies and with each other, exist like any other thing: a raw force of nature, governed by enormously complex laws that may as well be infinite in number.

Absinthe. (For Brennon)

2006-04-01T04:04:00.000-08:00

March 26th was full of a lot of craziness. My friend Jason rolled in on a greyhound from Palo Alto, carrying with him a bottle of imported absinthe. I'm a pretty solid and steady drinker, not particularly into binging (though I've participated in my share of fuzzily remembered drinking games). Jason, on the otherhand, doesn't mind occasionally letting himself get so drunk that he ends up calling me at 4am in the morning to help him find out where he is via mapquest, because he'd been walking for three hours without his glasses--which he lost in a skirmish with a bush. I still wish I could have been there and seen him climbing up a street sign just to read what intersection he was at, and cursing incoherently everytime he dropped the phone he was trying to cradle between his shoulder and neck. But I digress. Point being, I had an idea that the night would probably amount to some heavy drinking and a few stories.

Let our experience serve as a lesson to all of you wishing to procure a bottle: step lightly in the house of the green fairy. I'm not sure how much Jason drank, but it ended in him blacking out for about 5 hours and vomiting all over my futon. I've never heard a person swear a blue streak while they were puking before, and it's a memory I'll cherish forever. Laughing hysterically, I ran to the kitchen as fast as I could and lept back giving him a cup for him to puke into, which he did. Then he threw it against my wall. Green slime was then all over my futon, my wall, and my fan, which I doubt I'll ever use again. Jason was mortified and surprised the following morning after I filled him in on what he was up to that evening. I, however, expected some destructive behavior to erupt from him and his little green bottle. Really, I'm just pleased I wasn't the one escorted into liquorice smelling, sour-stomached oblivion. Although, it was kind of a bitch to have to buy all that carpet shampoo and apolstery cleaner.

Anyways, the drink itself almost lives up to the hype surrounding it. I do not believe that its effects are hallucinogenic. I drank enough to have a hangover the following morning, and poor Jason, as I mentioned, blacked out but didn't appear to be experiencing hallucinations. Though the english language did periodically leave him entirely, during the periods in which he rediscovered real words, they weren't juxtaposed in a manner that made sense to me or my friend dougboy. Nevertheless, Jason didn't appear to be reacting to any social agents nonexistant in the room; therefore, absinthe--at least Absinthe Edouard, a well enough respected brand--does not cause hallucinations.

But before I get into that, I'll talk a bit about the taste. I did not try it straight, but rather imbided after the traditional ritual of pouring water over a sugar cube until it dissolved and changed the drink from translucent green into a milky, opaque sea green. The flavor is strongly influenced by anise, but it isn't aggressive like in anisette (which I hate). I'm not big on the taste of black liquorice, but this was mild and mixed with just enough competing flavors both bitter and sweet, that it was downright palatable. As far as liquors go, I'd rank it well above anisette and jager. Yes, that isn't really saying much, but after the first glass your tongue and mouth go pretty numb anyways.

Absinthe drunk is a very different drunk. I had about three highballs, which were probably the equivalent to 6 shots (I like my doubles). Just halfway through the second drink I was buzzed and rapidly became solid drunk post-quaff. The weird aspect to absinthe is its ability to mess your mind up first--you feel confused, like your head is being tampered with by alcohol, and... something else. It feels a bit like alcohol squared, is the only way I can explain it. While drinking it, I felt as if I were getting drunk for the first time again: one tries to invent new means to maintain lucidity and personality under a chemical influence, while also delighting in the strangeness of the whole experience. Absinthe surprised me because, typically, alcohol makes me feel a little relaxed, then it slowly chips away at my motor skills and balance, then I start to really feel the mental handicap. With absinthe, you first feel the mental handicap and a strange numbness that spreads from your mouth to the rest of your face. Then a little later you start the weaving and the slurring. This put me a little on the cautious side, because I realized that the level of tolerance which I determine solely from a bottle's alcohol content didn't really apply, 'cause something else was acting on me too.

I seemed to ride it well though. As far as recommending the drink is concerned, I'd say on very special occasions it might be a fun treat. I tend to seek out alcohols that cause me to feel chatty and writerly, and this one is definitely not in that category. I have absolutely no idea how writers like Wilde and Poe were able to drink this stuff and keep their marbles bagged for as long as they did (especially Poe, who, legend has it, drank it like a fish in water). It's pretty stupefying, and you find strange ideas popping into your head, and your words more frequently being jumbled up or lost during their transition between ideation and articulation. So whatever different effects absinthe has from other alcohols, they're very complementary. A friend of mine at work described the drunk from it "like drinking an entire bottle of cough syrup and then doing shots of vodka." Indeed, I did notice some disassociative effects, and the comparison seems apt enough... but still incomplete in some way.

I suppose most of the effects of absinthe are explicable only by the experience itself. It's not something I'm going to be seeking out, both from its prohibitive cost and the drunk being a little too intense insofar as the ease with which it interrupts cognition. But hey, some people dig that scene. What I would advise to people looking to buy a bottle now, is research it. Find a bottle revered within the absinthe afficionado circles and find a good deal on it.

Basic Instinct: a look back at the brilliant movie which has finally given birth to a sequel.

2006-04-01T01:39:00.000-08:00

The queen gem in my DVD collection is The Special Limited Edition of Basic Instinct, which came complete with an ice pick pen. But the real prize this DVD harbors is the exquisite writing of Joe Esterhaz and the masterful, tasteful direction of Paul Verhoeven.

Sharon Stone’s performance as Catherine Tramell and Michael Douglas’ as Nick Curran bring to the screen a dramatic intensity comparable to seeing a 25 feet tall ape named Kong fall in love with a fair haired starlet. There’s a magical realism to their characters, as the dialogue and facial expressions roll over the viewer with the impetus and brute force of a steamroller. The brilliance of the film is its reluctance to explain the motives and actions of its characters, rendering us clueless as to the origins of its suspense and horror.

Verhoeven loves close-up reaction shots of his characters: stares, shared glances, and eyebrows raised askance, all punctuated with Jerry Goldsmith’s musical score. These are in no way overindulgent; in the two minute scene where Nick and Gus are driving Catherine to the police station for questioning, I counted a mere 11 examples of these close-up stares and glances, which pause dialogue several beats of a resting heart rate. Had I counted 12 that would have meant one every ten seconds, which surely would have been over the line. I’m not sure if this ratio is held throughout the entire movie, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is. It’s astonishing to me that this technique to build tension is ignored by so many subsequent directors!

Not many directors have also dared, even briefly, to bring us that special kind of female nudity, which is largely relegated to pornographic media. But Verhoeven films Sharon Stone’s labia in such a classy manner. Had he merely implied the view investigators had from the famous leg crossing scene, it would break our empathy with her interrogators, for we too must experience this peepshow to attain the full effect. After all, Catherine is a strong female character using her sexuality to control and manipulate everyone in her life, who are alarmed by the aggressive way she invites and controls her objectification. Surely the same eerie effect is had on the acne covered teenager who was told to rent this movie based on the word of mouth generated by this scene. Verhoeven turned what could have been tasteless masturbatory fodder, into the most haunting of art. Later, Verhoeven and Esterhaz would team up to make the film Showgirls, and give us chills and shudders again with their use of female nudity.

The DVD includes a shamelessly positive commentary by feminist film critic and media studies of the arts professor Camille Paglia of the University of Philidelphia. She compares Sharon Stone’s performance as within the “main line” of femme fatales such as “Marlene Dietrich, and on.” The commentary begins right at the credit roll, where images of nude, gyrating bodies are seen through a fogged and fractured glass, which she observes as reminiscent of Picasso’s cubism and the undulating waves of the sea seen through a hauntingly fragmented prism. The musical score, she believes, is symbolizing man’s pursuit of woman and woman’s stalking of man. Paglia believes that Verhoeven is a part of the “main line” of the great European filmmakers, where Woman has again the mystique and glamour which she has lost in contemporary Hollywood films. Indeed, Hollywood rarely empowers women with philosophy doctorates, cocaine addiction, alcoholism, a phobic aversion to underwear, the impulse for serial murder, and bi-sexual compulsivity all in the same package—how shameful and degrading Hollywood can be, giving such one-dimensional roles to its hardworking leading ladies by comparison.

Plenty of ideas about the phallic significance of the ice pick, the dominance and seductive force of Catherine, and the juvenile nature of all the male characters are elucidated upon throughout the track by Paglia. She doesn’t once criticize the film’s banal clichés like other critics, but lauds these tin-eared moments for “settling” our nerves with B-movie qualities. She considers Verhoeven’s multiple borrowings of Hitchcock’s style “homages,” not “rape.”

Alas, Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction is doing poorly down at the Tomatometer (currently at 6% overall and 4% from the cream of the crop). Without the magic of team Verhoeven and Esterhaz, the movie can only attain a tenth of what the original achieved. But when the bar of excellence is set so high by an original, what can we expect of a sequel, but a watered down and washed out revisit of a familiar diegesis?

Have a good April Fool’s day, everybody.

John Waters tries to offend and disgust, and I'm ok with playing into his hand.

2006-03-22T04:19:00.000-08:00

Well, I knew eventually I'd have to see Pink Flamingos. Part of my interest in it was morbid curiousity, and part of it was feeling an obligation to be that "movie guy" at the party who, when the movie comes up in conversation, can confirm and/or dispell rumors circulating about it. People literally get angry with me if I'm unfamiliar with a movie they've heard a lot about, and I find angry people unpleasant. Therefore, watching this movie was a part of my avoidance towards negative social intercourses. But I knew this would be traumatic, and wrong to endure alone. So, I decided to grab some of my fellow film enthusiast friends to watch this key entry in bad cinema. I think it was possibly one of the most uncomfortable movie experiences one of them ever had. He said after the film was over: "I think Cannibal Holocaust was a better movie." For those of you who get that reference, and have seen that perverse and iniquitous film, that's probably all of this review you'll feel the need to read. You may continue avoiding this film, now feeling wholly justified.

What attracts people to this film, ultimately, is the same thing that compels people to download bestiality porn, even though they're not sexually aroused by it. Some embarrassing part of the human psyche seems to enjoy watching people do truly vile things to and with their bodies. It's why many of us engage in tricking our friends into drinking soured milk, or in offering them money to do shots of their own urine, and why we delight in hearing other people tell stories of waking up from a drunken stupor to discover they had a one-night-stand with an obese, hairy nippled bus driver. John Waters started his career in film cashing in on this depraved hunger in us. Something good did come out of watching this film for me. I made a discovery: despite all the repulsive things I've been witness to in my life, my stomach was still capable of being turned. I take comfort in knowing I hadn't been desensitized completely, and maybe even had something (dare I say it?) resembling innocence in me. It's gone now, of course. But, I take comfort in knowing I held on to it for longer than I had suspected.

So, I'm sure you want to know what the movie is about now. I'm not going to give a spoiler warning, for this film is invulnerable to them--indeed, I fear it is sustained by attempts at them. The plot involves two families who are vying for the title of "filthiest people alive." The first group of nasties is led by the massive transvestite Divine, who likes to stick raw meat up between her legs (this is some kind of marinating process, we learn, as she and her family eat the meat later), enjoys performing fellatio on her son, and eating poop. Her son, Crackers, spends his free hours having sex with chickens (and beating women with them), while his girlfriend--who's aroused by this spectacle, you see--watches and moans. Divine's mother also lives with them in their trailer; she is mentally handicapped and spends her time eating eggs, talking about eggs, and getting eggs all over herself. She sleeps in a giant crib.

The Marbles, Raymond and Connie, are offended at the notion these people are thought of as filthier than they are. Raymond and Connie spend their time abducting women, shackling them in their basement, where their butler Channing rapes them until they eventually become pregnant. The babies are then sold to lesbian couples for five thousand dollars a piece. Raymond also likes tying chicken necks and hotdogs to his penis, and flashing women in the park.

These are the broad strokes of a film that caused me to reflect aloud after it was over: "You know, I don't think it was really that bad watching Divine eat dogshit, in comparison to the rest of what the movie offered." The room agreed with me, and we started ordering a list of which scenes were the most repulsive. I'm convinced that's all you can do with this movie, really. It asks no questions. It makes no observations. All these things which I have described, are shown in the film. They really take place, and are not simulated. The actors and actresses, and I'm dubiously categorizing them as such, are actually consenting to debase themselves in these ways. A chicken died from being raped.

While repulsed by the aforementioned and also unmentioned scenes during Divine and the Marbles' jousts and parries, I did laugh a few times at John Waters' dialogue. The man is truly funny, but in an unnerving sort of way that resides visually in that pencil line mustache of his. That a man as smart as he would desire to make a movie like this is a bit of a mystery to me, because I can't believe he did it just to make money. No, there was indeed some effort put into the script, which extended beyond the minimum required in linking one outrageous scene to the next. Pink Flamingos may not stimulate the brain standing by itself, but it does harbor a strange kind of intrigue to me when thinking of it in terms of its existence as an exhibit of some part of Waters' mind.

Avoid this movie. While you may have that impulse that I described above to witness people doing raunchy, nasty things to themselves, the joke will be on you. Pink Flamingos is the closest qualitative experience you can have watching a movie to sleeping with the hairy nippled bus driver, or drinking your own urine.

MTV, Guy Ritchie, and noir collide.

2006-03-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

Layer Cake is an entry in what could be a burgeoning genre of hip crime dramas to come from the UK. It's trajectory is a little askew from the level of comedy that Guy Ritchie likes to inject into his films, but it's hard not to be aware of Ritchie's influence in this film. The movie also has a traditional crime-noir narrative, and refreshingly avoids the tired arc that DePalma and Scorsese made so popular with American directors: guy works his way up the drug trade, guy becomes rich drug lord, guy marries doe-eyed innocent girl, guy and new wife begin using the product that brought about their life of opulence, and thus the inevitable descent leading towards betrayal and emprisonment/death ensues. I've always felt more sympathy for the characters whom come closest to, or actually do, have it all figured out, refusing to allow their heads to become unscrewed. "Have a plan and stick to it. Get out while you're ahead," is the credo of the nameless main character of Layer Cake, and that's what makes him easy to empathize with, especially with the gambling public and those partial to Nietzschean philosophy.

The plot is at times dizzyingly byzantine, which can at times undermine the suspense, as the character whose perspective we're locked into occasionally knows more of what is happening to him than we do. But, by the time things get truly complicated director Matthew Vaughn and writer J.J. Connelly have earned enough currency that we're willing to trust that by the end of the film there will be a satisfying revelation and resolution. And there is.

The appeal of the story is also found in its character's realistic ends. He is a businessman whose game is hustling drugs, but his approach to that business is not glorified or romanced. He's hustling both the buyers of his drugs and the business itself. He's in the game to make money until it no longer becomes safe to do so. He doesn't need to make more money than he can spend; he doesn't crave power or hegemony; he simply wants to climb the ladder until the wind picks up and he catches vertigo, or if he reaches the top. Ultimately, he's the guy we as the audience don't feel compelled to shout at on screen that he's getting too greedy, risking too much, or getting too lazy.

Daniel Craig's performance as the calculating protagonist is, in a word, sharp. From manner, to dress, to the delivery of his lines, Craig radiates shrewdness and the cleanest razor's edge of linear thinking. This careful performance amounts to a kind of slight of hand that leaves you jaw-dropped by the film's end. But that's all I'm going to say about that.

This film is the formulaic and stylistic antithesis to another movie that came out earlier the same year called I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Layer Cake is shot in saturated color, the story told with a frenetic energy and a charged soundtrack, and it works well--better than the somber and drained feel that I'll Sleep... captured, which divided both general audiences and critics. This movie is an example that the MTV generation of viewers who adore blaring soundtracks and rapid fire onslaughts of montage, can be appealed to without sacrificing story or character--or older audiences. Some critics said there was nothing new going on in Layer Cake, and that criticism may be fair, but there's nothing old which is boring or lacking in value in the film either.

Degeneracy and despair: the hollywood recipe for horror.

2006-02-15T16:43:00.000-08:00

Hostel awoke some genre criticism in me. I’ve been struggling with how I feel about the Horror genre, trying to anchor myself in some rough outline of what it attempts to do, and where its place at the table of cinema and art is located. I find myself a routinely irritated by horror films, because there could be interesting things going on within the genre but I think too often it’s just a mindless freak, fuck, geek, and gore show. I’m trying to think of any true horror movies that I feel the current need to add to my collection, and excepting a few sci-fi and horror crossovers, I come up blank. I realized the genre is completely unrepresented in my collection. The closest I come is with psychological thrillers like Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, or Frailty, and there’s a reason those movies aren’t ascribed to the horror category. They have the atmosphere of horror films, but not the constant crescendo of visceral power.

Horror movies’ primary aim is to cause a sustained level of vicarious fright and terror in the minds of the viewers. The goal is to make them squirm and feel uncomfortable about what is happening on screen. I think the most troublesome aspect of this idea is the frequency with which filmmakers focus on making the events on screen seem more real; when someone has a toe cut off we want to see the layer of skin separate from the pink flesh, the individual veins and muscle tissue slowly exposed, all the while hearing the meat slowly sheared, and then the eventual punctuating crack of the bone. That causes us the jolt, because our nervous systems respond to visual representations of something violent happening, and we’re reminded that we have fragile bodies, with toes and fingers and nipples that could be snipped off at any moment. There’s also the magic of what we don’t see on the screen, but that which is implied to be going on, letting our imaginations torture us in ways the director might not be able to convey. These are the master strokes of a horror movie, and my question is, should a horror movie be expected to provide something beyond those moments where you feel a taste of fight-or-flight? If you try to stimulate (ideally, overwhelm) your audience intellectually too, does that automatically reduce the energy of your movie and commend it to the category of psychological thriller where the academy might feel comfortable enough nominating it for an award or two?

Naturally, I mention these questions because Hostel did not satisfy what the intellectual side of me demanded of the movie, both in terms of superficial plot development and anything beyond. (Can someone explain to me why Paxton didn’t keep that gun? What’d he do with it anyhow?) Nevertheless, the film did make me wince and feel defiled. Since it aimed to achieve that reaction from me, I suppose it deserves some dubious credit.

For weeks I’ve been listening to two sides of an argument about this movie: it wasn’t as gory and frightening as [insert Japanese horror film here], or that it was a fitting continuation of the tense mood and aesthetic of the grotesque that Saw took a sloppy bite out of. It’s been a boring couple of weeks. I don’t think this movie is worth arguing over because it failed my primary litmus test for a passable horror movie, it made me ask too many times why a character was doing something stupid. And I do try to take into account for the stress of the situation obfuscating their better judgment. When a movie can't supply some basic answers on the behavior of its characters, I'm taken right out of the vicarious experience, and I discontinue caring about any further body parts that get severed from Jay Hernandez.

Ultimately, I found the first half of the movie boring instead of sexily titillating or repulsively hedonistic (I’m not sure which sensation Eli Roth was aiming for). Enter the basic plot twist where college kids on break go off to have a wild time but get more than they bargained for. If there’s one thing we can all learn from horror movies, it’s that amoral fun involving drugs and sex always ends with someone getting disemboweled. This leads me to the last half of the movie, which is intense but flawed on a level of mechanics. The actors earned the pay they were given. The script was mediocre but the direction was solid in terms of the genre. There isn’t much more to say.

Post-review genre wrap-up
Some people may have noticed, or checked the trivia section in IMDB.com and saw that Takashi Miike had a little cameo role in the movie. I’m a big fan of his and I realize now that I do indeed have a few of his movies on my DVD wishlist. It occurs to me that horror movies have to be brainy in a different sort of way to escape being psychological thrillers—exposition has to be minimal. If you spend too much time getting into a psychopath’s head, that means he’s not chasing you enough or killing your family and friends as rapidly as he should be. The key seems to be in powerful symbols, and the interaction of those symbols which constitute a kind of incontrovertible dream logic. Horror movies should be created with the kind of stuff that made violent fairy tales so absorbing to us as children; we can’t help but think about what these images and thoughts do to us after the story is over and our hearts return to their resting beat.

Horror movies should give us nightmares because what we see arouses something within our subconscious, and resonating and recombining with the other monsters kept in locked closets during our waking hours. Japanese filmmakers like Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa seem to me like they’re tapping into this idea, but stateside I think we’re still a long ways from it. Horror movies seem like they’re going down a path of dirt, filth, darkness, and hopelessness, just for the sake of getting us to slump in our seats before we jump or turn away in revolt. But this is such a conscious level of horror that I find it uninteresting, mostly because it can be easily experienced by holding a simple conversation with a homeless methamphetamine addict on a bus.

Good night, TV journalism.

2006-01-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

Being the age I am, I was never exposed to the kind of broadcast journalism that Edward R. Murrow was a part of. When politicians lie and contradict themselves baldly, the evening news broadcasters merely echo the rebuttals from the opposing aisle of congress. Television journalists have broken into two factions, it seems, those that report political happenstances as if it were a sports game, and those that are participating in the game and can lend no new insight but perpetuate the rhetoric. When I was a child the evening news was boring because my conception of the world was so small, now it bores me because my perception of the world is too vast. Print journalism is all I concern myself with now, and even then I need to browse at least six papers to feel "informed."

From what I've seen from this film, I may have felt positive about watching the news in Murrow's time. He was articulate, argumentative, and tried to foster a discourse of intellectual clarity during a time more frenzied than our own in ascribing people to extremist political views unfairly. This is the m ost powerful message of the film, in my mind, not the possibility that Murrow aided in the downfall of Joe McCarthy.

Clooney is careful in not implanting a more idyllic and non-corporate era of television than what was the reality. Smoking in black-and-white films is obscenely cool, and though Clooney uses the aesthetic in this movie he does so with twofold responsibility. We're tapped on the shoulder and reminded of both the reality of cigarette smoking and corporate manipulation, as a Kent Cigarettes commercial plays before a Murrow broadcast and plays off the integrity and appeal to authority that Murrow carried with his program.

Though the film is beautiful, it can be difficult to produce a film in black-and-white with a result that doesn't tickle the sense of aesthetic in movie snobs like myself. Part of me wishes, though, that the black and white form had been indulged in more, like the Coen brothers did with their visually breathtaking noir piece The Man Who Wasn't There. There's nothing particularly innovative or dazzling with the decision to convert the color film into monochrome in post, save for grayscale is how we will always remember Murrow. It was the right decision to make, all the same. David Strathairn's dour expressions and intense stares could not have been as arresting in full color.

It's not so surprising that George Clooney grabbed this project, given his experiences with the newsmedia and particularly Bill O'Reilly. This movie is a careful criticism of TV journalism, which should resonate more with journalists than with any political party. Since the dissolve of the Fairness Doctrine the radio and TV press cannot claim bipartisanship because the law no longer requires equal time. So the truth has become a game of quotations from other people in the news, with broadcasters seeming unable to regularly give the insight of a referee for fear that they will be labeled sympathetic with one party or the other. Sadly, television programming is judged primarily by audiences now in the binary: is it boring or entertaining? Merely wires and light in a box, indeed.

A recommendation you can dance to.

2006-01-25T15:10:00.000-08:00

So, it's no secret that I'm reticent to recommend music on this blog. I don't feel cultured enough, and am lacking a basic grasp of both the analytic tools involved and basic rhetoric of music criticism. But sometimes I feel compelled to share anyhow. I think the only other band I recommended on here was The Arcade Fire (and all of you should have their album Funeral by now). But the compulsion rises up in me again. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's self titled album is definitely some of the best indie rock 2005 had to offer, but I'm thinking you'll start hearing more about/of them as their 2006 tour sells out across the country.

The album is playful but with roots in deep feeling which I find irresistable. Their vocalist, Alec Ounsworth, is a bizarre, caffeinated fusion between Gordon Gano and Bob Dylan (particularly present in "The Details of War"). Their lyrics are more poetic in form than most of the contemporary bands I've been exposed to, and of course that endears me to them more. Though still indie rock and without press kit, if their next album isn't signed on to a major record label I'll be shocked. How about a few words from a real critic:

Clap Your Hands are a five-piece from Brooklyn who're known to break out both harp and harmonica. They've recently been garnering rave press in their home city, and, over just the past two weeks, burning up the internet like a vintage Lohan nipslip. The pundits are saying Wilco (not hearing it), Talking Heads (okay), and Neutral Milk Hotel (getting warmer), but if it checks in with a number of modern and classic new wave referents, the music sings for itself: Clap Your Hands traffics in melodic, exuberant indie rock that pairs the shimmering, wafting feel of Yo La Tengo with a singular vocal presence that sounds like Paul Banks attempting to yodel through Jeff Mangum's throat. Or imagine the Arcade Fire if their music were more fun-loving and less grave.

...

The record is consistently, remarkably strong, but "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth" in particular stands out, with its richly buzzing synth phrases, textbook Modest Mouse guitar lead (a trebly, gliding string bend skimming over the rhythm like a flat stone over a pond), contrapuntal bass, and shuffling drums. The song also features one of vocalist Alec Ounsworth's most memorable performances: He ramps up the urgency as the heavier chords kick in, his voice cracking and shifting in cascading waves as if someone were pressing his vocal cords to a fret board and bending them. "Is This Love?", with its clean, galloping guitars and fruit loop synth trills is the song most blatantly redolent of Neutral Milk Hotel (especially of the unhinged pop and careening vocals Mangum favored on On Avery Island), and its dizzily wowing vocal harmonies carry over to "Heavy Metal", where fuzzed-out bass and wheezing harmonica punch smart shapes into the fizzy guitars.

Check out Brian Howe's full review here.

Anyhow, it's a brilliant CD and you should buy it or grab it on iTunes for under ten bucks immediately. You can check out the band's website for tour dates and download two of their songs to check 'em out.

Huffman as man as woman.

2006-01-23T04:18:00.000-08:00

Had you asked me 40 minutes into watching Transamerica if I'd liked it, I probably would have slumped in my chair and groaned. It starts out awkward and abusively caricaturizing, quickly spending its novelty currency as a film about a pre-op transsexual finding her long lost son, the drug addicted male prostitute, and then finds itself in serious debt. It seemed like Felicity Huffman was just making the next movie where the lead woman is made to look masculine and unattractive by a gifted make-up crew, only this time it was intended to elicit cruel laughter.

By the end of the film I felt all my complaints about the rough start were subverted. Felicity Huffman as Bree gives a well measured performance as a man trying to be what he feels a woman is on the surface, and slowly builds from there as her character integrates true femininity into his identity. The film is not without its flaws, but captures a tenderness and humanity by its conclusion that doesn't frame its characters in cheap stereotypes nor does it provide them a clear answer to their problems.

One of the film's problems is a matter of psychiatric responsibility. I cannot think of a single psychiatrist who would advise a pre-op transsexual to fly across country to look after her estranged, drug addicted son a few scant days prior to surgery. It's a lot to ask. It'd have been more prudent, perhaps, to encourage Bree to integrate the new discovery of her having a child into her life as a woman, and not merely disregard all aspects of her past life as a man as being the memories of another person. Perhaps have a few chats on the telephone, help her son find a support group, therapist, and get into a good rehab center. No, this therapist wants her to go to him in person. Seems a little irresponsible.

But bad psychiatric advice makes for an interesting character study, apparently. At first, Bree and her son Toby are equally unbearable to watch. Bree is prudery and priggishness personified, while Toby is the uneducated, ill-mannered, and just plain dirty drug addict. Early on the ride west Toby explains to Bree, whom he doesn't know is his father, that he wants to go to California to be in the movies: gay porn movies. Bree corrects him on his grammar throughout. Doesn't sound all that funny, does it? Their early interactions aren't comic but painful and awkward, garnering nervous laughs more than they do the humor that may have been sought.

Nevertheless, Bree begins to sympathize with her son more than view him as a burden and stymie to her finally getting the approval she needs for her sex change operation. She also has to face her family (especially her disapproving mother) whom she'd been telling everyone was dead. I can't explain the transformation you witness on screen, because it's a magic that Huffman brings us perhaps more than even the script does. But soon we see an identity emerge from the mannerly exterior that Bree clings so strongly to. Perhaps this is because instead of trying to reinvent herself as a woman, she accepts that the reinvention isn't needed: she always was a woman insofar as the way she saw herself, but for a time needed to pretend to be a man because her biology didn't mirror it. We get to watch her shed gender pretentions and simply be human, which frames her early caricaturized performance as deliberate and necessary.

The character of the son I found particularly interesting. Mostly because his problems aren't solved by the end of the film. There is some bizarre sexual tension that developes between Bree and him prior to Bree explaining the nature of their relationship, which is the first case of an Oedipus and an Electra Complex manifesting in a young man that I've ever heard of. In the end, Toby loses an idealization of his father and acquires a new mother. There's a sadness to the film because these relationships are so complex and fringe that years of therapy can only help mend them, and the film is refreshingly honest about that. Yet the movie is also hopeful, as all the important characters seem to want to try to find a point of normalcy and find the necessary ways in which to love each other.

Health kick.

2006-01-14T15:45:00.000-08:00

Within the next three to four months I plan on fleeing this suffocating little Oregon town for California--although there's also a chance I may head north to Seattle too. Forecasting my future location is a bit like trusting the weatherman to predict the seventh day in the weekly forecast with the same accuracy as he did the present day (which is dubiously predicted as well). The only thing I'm certain about is that the eventual migration be to a location with a nearby theater that plays independent films, a video store containing a giant and diverse library of DVDs, and a bar where I might meet people who can tolerate me and vice versa.

With this change in mind I've been exercising more; I'd like to hit a new town looking and feeling renewed and chiseled. I've also had the tendrils of a large, intense depression licking at the back of my skull, and exercise has been about as effective in putting it to sleep as medication. I prefer the former because it makes me look attractive, overflow with energy, and generally feel more of the virility of my age. Though the medication can be nice too, particularly in how it delays orgasm for about 20-30 extra minutes, which can be nice when you're with someone that thrills in those marathon lovemaking sessions which are a work-out in themselves. I'm not with anyone currently, though, so screw that noise. (Mom, do you still read my blog? Oh my, I bet you could have done without that bit of information.)

It's been about a week since I've started weight training, and I went back on my old jogging regimen just last night. I'm surprised at how fast my muscles are restoring themselves, and how easily I was able to jog the old distances I was traversing about three and a half months ago. After all that time eating cheap and fatty foods, abusing my lungs, drinking a fair amount of whiskey and beer, and sitting in front of my laptop every spare moment, I suspect I'll still end up where I was when I was peaking in just a scant four more days. Behold, the magical properties of bodies in their 20s.

Returning to exercising and a strict dietary regimen isn't particularly hard for me for two reasons. One I already mentioned: it kills depression and, because mine are particularly vicious and debilitating, I have to keep a watchful eye on just how long I let myself coast into idleness and nightly libation. Additionally, I think I've a wild streak of masochism in me, which never manifested in unhealthy ways like cutting, self-flaggelation, or confessional poetry writing. Nevertheless, I've always taken an odd amount of joy in the accidental bruises, cuts, and burns I've gotten from the aftermath of a day's work, and I'm certainly addicted to the aches and pains that follow strenuous exercise. They feel like reminders that I'm alive and accomplishing things, in much the same vein of experience as the bitingly cold winter air can feel fresh and more present than the lazy summer atmosphere. Occasionally, in the right context, pain and discomfort is reassuring to me.

But motivations for re-sculpting one's body are also kind of nebulous. I've known I'll be leaving for awhile now, so why pick up exercising when I did and not right after christmas? Right after New Years? Maybe I'm trying to impress someone in particular, or maybe prove someone wrong, or maybe I'm just trying to do what I do best and escape something. All these things and what I've mentioned earlier could be true, I'm not sure. Whatever the case, all these motivations had to aline themselves like planets in just the right pattern for me to have decided on Monday to get off my ass and sustain the new pattern of behavior I whipped up. It wasn't a new year's resolution, it just started organically, abruptly. If my previous dedication to exercise re-emerges I'll probably be sticking with this for the next six months at least. This is going to cause an increase in insomnia and energy that needs to be put into something, so this month expect a relentless onslaught of reviews and facile musings like this. Hopefully more of the former than the latter.

Ang Lee for Best Director, damn it.

2006-01-09T19:30:00.000-08:00

Ang Lee has always blown me away with each successive movie he makes. From The Ice Storm, to Sense and Sensibility, to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, to HULK, he seems intent on never telling the same story in the same style. It's a risky business, but he does it so well that I hope he never stops. Here is a man in love with not only telling stories, but in love with the unique craft involved in giving each narrative its own separate style, form, and life. Brokeback Mountain is his best film.

Heath Ledger is stunning and steals the movie straight away. He's the low talking, far-away looking, tragically impoverished, pure tobacco-and-whiskey cowboy rancher. His character is the most fascinating because of how cosmically alone he seems. His manner and speech is what made Western film and literature so compelling. If he's not nominated for an Oscar you'll be able to hear my shrill cries of hate from any location on the globe.

Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), unlike Ennis, struggles a bit with the cowboy image; he's half rodeo star and half rancher, and miserable at them both. Nevertheless, the country was his home, despite the danger it meant in remaining there and seeking the company of men. But Jack and Ennis were raised in the country, and are as deeply entrenched in it and in love with it as they are with each other's souls. The film handles their identities as cowboys and lovers in much the same way: as matters of indisputable fact, of birth and immutable nurturing. The film escapes being political because its interest isn’t in morality or social commentary; it tells a love story inserted within a social reality. It feels like Portrait of Lady for men.

The early sex scenes in the film seem abrupt and hostile. Ennis and Jack frequently become reminded of their sexual drives in the middle of boyish wrestling, and usually at the exact moment where most boys would transition from wrestling to true fisticuffs with each other, Ennis and Jack either make love or brutally fuck. Later when Ennis marries Alma he makes love to her and engages in foreplay with his wife in much the same fashion: tenderness outlined with a reduced level of that same male aggression he exhibited with Jack. I mention this only because I wouldn't say that the love scenes--at least the early ones--between Ennis and his wife are patently false or awkward; they subtly communicate the level of love and attraction he feels towards her as only part of the full range of feelings he has towards Jack. Ennis, consciously or not, in those scenes tries to recreate his high watermark for intimacy and sexual contact.

Larry McMurtry, the immensely gifted western genre writer, wrote the screenplay (based off a short story by Annie Proulx) for this film in 1997. It's little wonder as to why it had such a difficult time finding a home. Thank God it finally came to fruition, because this story needed to be told. It is heart breaking, visually superb, a breath of fresh air in a currently stale genre, and crucial to our culture. I have every intention of going to see it again while it remains in theaters.

Imagine the task force they'll need for enforcing this.

2006-01-09T16:04:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite online pastimes is now illegal.

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

SOURCE

And, just like that, suddenly it's illegal--not to offend or emotionally harm another party on the internet--but to simply annoy them anonymously.

Thankfully this blog uses my real name (because I'm a reckless fool, who kinda romanticizes the idea of being murdered in his sleep by someone who liked House of D or Levity), so I can go on annoying whomever I want and not go to federal prison.

However, the spirit of Henry David Thoreau and Rosa Parks seems alive and well on the internet, as all the forums I've seen with this story linked have erupted into blisteringly hateful, C-word ridden flames. It brought a tear to my eye as everyone took shots at each other that they'd been holding back for months, saving up for just the occasion when the first ammendment was shit on or when they were drunk. Shine on you angry diamonds.

If only masturbation were what it was about....

2006-01-07T15:36:00.000-08:00

Even Oedipus didn't realize he was really balling his mother when he was doing it. David O. Russell, being the oddball filmmaker he is, just had to ask: "What if someone did?" He should have left it a rhetorical question, because, while I realize somewhere in america a handfull of boys who come home during a break from college may find themselves in a sexual embrace with their mothers, my guess is it'd take more than a strong vodka-tonic and the average sexual frustration of the age to do it. My guess is that Mommy would have to have been molesting young Ray (Jeremy Davies) much, much earlier in his life for him to feel that God damn sexually confused after a single highball. But she didn't, so the movie is inexplicable.

Spanking the Monkey is insincere insofar as people aren't behaving as they would in real life. When watching the film I recognized who David O. Russell was trying to represent: the quiet kid, his manic depressive mother, the neighborhood bully, the pothead friends, the old best friend who stayed in a small town despite his talent and acumen, and the curious, young girl next door. Now, as characters apart from each other, they work, but I never understood the dynamic they had with each other. None of those characters really like each other. So why do they hang out? Why are we supposed to believe that they ever hung out before Ray is on vacation? They all seem like friends of the same drug dealer but not of each other, yet there they are ridiculing and beating up on each other and Ray.

David O. Russell is a good director, though, and despite the many times you repeat to yourself "I just don't get it," the action on screen is compelling. The actors give fine performances as human beings living in a strange alternate universe. Davies is exceptionally good in the first third of the film as the stresses of giving up an important internship to care for his invalid mother, his inability to find time to masturbate (hello, movie title), and his dissociation from the town all crescendo to a point I was sure would end in a murder-suicide. I understood and could relate to the film up to that point, and I think it's this crucial half-hour accessibility of the characters that forces you to wait and see if any of them will navigate their way back to something resembling the map of true human psychology.

The movie does have a certain absurd and comedic appeal, which should have been more the focal point. It'd have been an easier pill to swallow had I laughed more, but Russell still wants us to feel shocked and sad by the end of his film. He wanted to make a psychological drama, despite how it was advertised. Unfortunately, we're not privy to the motivations of Ray or his mother. We don't know why Ray feels pangs of eroticism when he's rubbing lotion on his mother's feet and inside her leg cast. We may feel aroused at the notion of rubbing lotion on women, but the context of it puts a stop to that kind of arousal for everyone but Ray. Although his mother must feel isolated in her home, as her husband is the classic traveling and unfaithful salesman, why did the sexual attraction form with her son? Why not one of her son's friends who are smart, nubile, and also think she is attractive? I'm sure there could be answers to these necessary questions, but we're not given them.

We watch Ray's gradual disintegration with alarm and confusion. We understand the trauma response to what he goes through, but not what put him there in the first place. The movie is more mystery than it is psychological drama or comedy.

Myspace and such.

2006-01-02T05:25:00.000-08:00

I made a myspace account. I'm not going to link to it, because I hate the place. I hate what it represents--how it categorizes people in static, superficial, and dehumanizing ways. You become statistics, chronically defined by the bands you've heard, movies you've seen, and books you've read. Oh, and by the zodiac too. However, when I was reading my profile, I became aroused by the blunt way in which I am described. To wit:

Single.
Straight.
Atheist.
Scorpio.

It sounds angry, fascist and brutal. It has none of the ambiguity and fluidity I associate with my personality. I feel like if you met me, I'd be wearing a collared shirt, crying as I lick the glitter off some random girls' cleavage, reciting Neitzsche in between telling you how my seventh psychiatrist might actually understand my brand of bipolar disorder.

When I read it, it feels like I'm ice seeking fire. But really, I'm happy with whatever makes me burst open, unashamed--my blood and bone flying off into indifferent space, a shard covered in coagulated blood sticking to your uvula.

Familiar faces. Worn out places.

2005-12-21T05:09:00.000-08:00

Note: I'm seeing massive increased traffic to my blog over people searching the song lyrics to "Mad World," whose lines I borrowed in the title to this post. The song was originally written by Tears for Fears, but the version that I think you're all looking for (which is playing on the Gears of War commercials) is by Gary Jules. Jules has his own album with this song on it, Trading Snake Oil for Wolftickets, or you can get it off the Donnie Darko soundtrack. Now that I've solved this mystery for you, feel free to hang around and read about movies and booze anyways.

I'm about to head north tomorrow for Milwaukie (that's Milwaukie, Oregon, not a misspelled city in Wisconsin). It's a suburb, I guess, of Portland. Milwaukie is a town in the process of becoming a gigantic strip mall, generously peppered with residential zones and bars where everyone has a pint of something domestic, and lazily asks the man on the stool to the left if he remembers when this place was nothin' but farmland. Gang activity ebbs and flows; drugs are readily available in cheap apartment complexes and near public school campuses where townies welcome townies-to-be, teaching them how to trade CDs, bum cigarettes, and tell racist jokes; houses vary from poverty-line to that sweet-spot middle class, whose members erroneously suspect they might be upper-middle class; restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and bus stops are where people go to socialize when they aren't wandering bovinely through home electronics stores with reassuring names like "Best Buy" and "The Good Guys"; a new adult shop is launched every three to four months and tends to do very good business.

I've been thinking a lot tonight about the period of my life in Milwaukie called K-through-12. Not that I've been thinking about what I learned via the curriculum of shitty, underfunded public schools, but thinking of the people I knew, the experiences I had, and the brands of soda consumed. It's been five years since I've been a resident there, and while most of my big memories are easy to recall, the majority of my experiences from junior high to highschool are a condensed blur. I have mostly snapshot memories of elementary school, just images of people and things which phantom smells often trigger recollection of.

In hopes of jostling loose some anecdotes from my past that have been buried under my college experiences, I went on a series of searches on progressively painful-to-browse friend-finder sites such as reunion.com, Hi5, and MySpace. The most painful one proved the most populated with familiar faces, now filled out and rounded with adult flesh. Ultimately, that's all it was. Superficial updates on what people look like, what their responses to personality quizes were that rarely turn out funny or lend insight into their personalities. Then the obligatory stats: if they're married, if they're single, if they had college or just "some college," and what music they're listening to, what movies they like, and what books they're reading. People who were once a part of my daily life, now have their lives reduced to short commercials on obscure places of the world wide web--webspace paid for, by the way, by real commercials.

I also chatted it up with Bob and we exchanged stories of what we knew happened to some of the familiar people we grew up with--namely those who died or are in prison. Last I heard Randy Mitchell is still in jail for beating a man to death with three other guys, Jesse Keele overdosed on heroin, David Klingensmith was captured by police a few months ago for stabbing a man in the leg and neck, and my friend since grade school, Justin, committed suicide. These are just the stories I have confirmed through the media (and therefore am emboldened enough to name). There are other stories about my classmates that I've heard are budding wifebeaters, in and out of jail, drinking too much and doing far too many drugs far too often. These are people I grew up with, some I was afraid of back then, but many I considered friends and hung out with after school. Some people seem marked from the beginning to head down a terrible path, and some seem to acquire it later--or hide it well for a time.

So Stacy is married, Nikii is making music, Luke seems blithe as ever and I think he's beaten the cancer (again, and hopefully for the last time), Brett seems like he's still got his sharp, sardonic sense of humor, Rachel's a bartender, JJ won the Master Skipper award in the 2002 Portland Model Ship Regatta, and some other folks are still so camera shy that I only have theories as to who they are in my yearbook. Despite finding a few, many of the core people I most wanted to look up (Michael, Mike, Alisha, Angie, Nick--I still remember your names, at least) were nowhere to be found, and the common nature of their surnames makes finding them nearly impossible. I'm not sure I would have learned anything, though.

No memories of experiences I had with these people surfaced during this exercise, just that feeling you remember having most often in their company. You remember laughing a lot, or avoiding them a lot, or feeling awkward around them and cursing yourself for it. Many of these people have contact information listed, but I don't know what I'd write to them or what I'd want out of the correspondence. Perhaps, then, I'll drop a comment in one of their blogs if I spy an entry worth commenting on, but odds are I won't. The blogosphere and these vast networked communities are more often than not used as a space for people to vent away the ephemeral bullshit of everyday life, look hip, and feel plugged into something. It's like nearly every post is designed to elicit non-responses from others, the equivalent of two people of limited acquaintance walking by each other in a hallway, one saying "Wassup" the other saying "howzitgoin'." These comments sections are filled with just these kinds of interactions.

It seems as if people have become convinced that the most mundane parts of their lives are what they should be writing about, and only in as bare and simple of terms as you'd use when giving someone directions to a gas station. They litter their websites with music videos, pictures of celebrities, and blindingly colorful backgrounds which make their own text impossible to read. It feels as if people are deliberately trying to communicate that expression of their identity is subordinate to the media they passively consume. I can see people walking around town in a blank trance when all you see is mall, after theater, after mall, after Wal-mart, after mall. But here I thought we had a chance to share something about ourselves, or at least from ourselves.

I always thought of the internet as a place where we can lose our inhibitions and be relentlessly ourselves with other people behaving in kind. I wanted this to be the place where you can walk into a person's mind for awhile. I guess I was wrong. I hope I was wrong.

Kasdan's definitive masterpiece.

2005-12-16T06:49:00.000-08:00

Body Heat is a film I've probably watched over 70 times. It recaptures everything I love about good crime noir and captures the atmosphere, tone, attitude, and eroticism that comes with a summer heatwave in a slow town. It's the whiskey, the half smoked cigarettes, the thick phantom scent of marijuana wisping out of public restrooms, the sticking skin, the matted hair around the temples, and the obligatory corner of a light cotton sheet lazily covering your genitals. It's the intoxicating atmosphere that the invention of air conditioning has sadly marginalized to the poor, and left for romantic time capsules such as this movie.

Richard H. Kline's heavily filtered cinematography makes the light of day fierce and blurring, and the lighting in the evening full of cool, delicate shadows. There's a shot of William Hurt walking through a prison hallway that exists for no other reason than to persuade us to believe that a film shot in color can still use stark lighting as effectively as Gregg Toland did with black and white. The soundtrack of breezy violins and saxophone solos like a raised brow, complete this justifiably shameless genre film. Its indulgence is infectious.

Kathleen Turner is perfectly cast as Matty, the classic spider-woman, seducing Hurt into helping her become a wealthy widow. She's readable only in that subliminal way where our gut insists she must be evil, but the brain and the libido are still determined to give her the benefit of the doubt. William Hurt as Ned Racine gives a meticulously measured performance as the sympathetic, often amoral dupe, who works so hard at staying one step behind the mind that will trap him. Ted Danson (as Peter Lowenstein) gives a vibrant performance despite how early along in his acting career he was at the time. Lowenstein is sharp, jaded, but comic, and Danson combines these qualities to shape a whole character as opposed to a cacophonous one.

The film is marvelous in how we never truly grasp the mind of Matty Walker. It's hard to say when she's lying and when she's truly being emotionally vulnerable. Perhaps she is throughout, or perhaps she never is. There are scenes where she expresses her continuing love for Ned and seems to believe herself, but all her recognizably human drives are subjugated to the relentless need for independence and wealth. The movie is a cultural theorists dream, where feminism and marxism intersect in a nebulous cloud of sex, murder, and heat.

I'm not sure what happened to Lawrence Kasdan over the years. He's always been an ecclectic writer and director--The Big Chill, French Kiss, Mumford, and the hideous, hamfisted Dreamcatcher--but has never matched the power and artistry of this, his first feature film.

Rar.

2005-12-15T18:06:00.000-08:00

So, I've been working a lot and have currently embarked on a project with a friend of mine that has me writing for four hours a day, which is a lot of my free time. This blog has suffered as a consequence and that bothers me. A lot. Right now I'm about to go off for dinner, but when I come back later tonight I'm expecting to have a review of something up by around 4am or so (I have weird waking hours these days).

As an update on the whole iPod situation, I ended up going to the Apple Store a few days after I wrote that post. One of their technicians ended up confirming that it was out of warranty by a couple days, but said he would go ahead and replace it anyhow. Elated, I went back home with my confidence restored in Apple's customer service, and with a renewed sense of idealism towards human civilization. People you don't know really do occasionally stick their necks out to help you.

Yesterday that all came crashing down as this iPod's hard drive has also met its maker. That's my third iPod, dead. This one is in warranty--WELL in warranty--so I'll be replacing it again. Unfortunately, I expect this one to be replaced by a poorly refurbished iPod as well. My goal now is to get the refurbished iPod and sell the fucker on Ebay, thereby getting paid for making it someone else's problem. Goodbye social idealism, hello utilitarian cynicism. I'd feel bad, but, hey, they can go ahead and keep having it replaced every couple of weeks like I did. It's a bit of a bother, but their iPod will always look shiny and new.

I recently bought a copy of El Club Dumas which is the book that Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate is selectively based upon. I'm hoping the book answers a few questions about why that movie keeps drawing me back to it, yet routinely leaves me feeling under nourished.

I was also recently subjected to watching the film I Spit on Your Grave, which Roger Ebert still calls the worst movie ever made. His review of the film reads like a trauma victim's story. While I'm not sure it's the worst movie ever made, or even the most offensive I've seen, it's a truly ugly piece of filmmaking. It features Buster Keaton's Grandniece. I'm not sure why I mentioned that other than the fact I kept reminding myself of this useless piece of trivia all throughout the scenes where she was being raped, and then throughout all the scenes she was murdering people. By the way, I just explained the entire plot to you in half of that sentence. Avoid it if you can, but if a friend of yours with a morbid curiousity brings it over on a dirty VHS cassette, you'll know what to expect.

The second most famous blonde of his time.

2005-12-01T16:47:00.000-08:00

When writing about a social phenomenon--such as the story of two men who murdered a family and are on death row--it's advisable to establish professional boundaries, guided by your ethics, to apply to the relationship you have with the person at the focal point of your piece. Truman Capote's story is a sad lesson in how complicated things get when you implant yourself personally and professionally in a condemned man's story, and philanthropically in his cause. One of those categories of involvement generally has to be abandoned to maintain the others, and the one given up on is usually the third. The beauty of the path of least resistance is its ability to reduce the ease in which we can live with ourselves.

Capote is paced like a leisurely stroll through the rural Kansan landscape which the film idolizes like a Civil War era haunted house. The film doesn't have a climax, perhaps because the period it covers was the climactic series of events in his life, leading to the one thing he'd never let himself get over. In essence, it's the story of the monkey's paw or the genie, minus the monkey's paw or the genie. Capote grants his own ill-advised wish and we all know (or should know) what happens. Therefore, the path of the film is Truman Capote's psychological unraveling as he achieves his professional escape velocity into literary legendry. And who else could be considered for this complicated role of self-obliteration besides the man who is redefining the genre, Philip Seymore Hoffman? Well, apparently Toby Jones, whose performance--if he wishes it to surpass Hoffman's--in the next Truman Capote movie will have to be so brilliant and career defining, that it would ultimately shatter Jones' sense of identity and lead to his eventual suicide less than a decade later. Sorry Toby, but Philip Seymore sets the bar just that high. If you want to bring us any closer to Capote, you're going to have to die.

Philip Seymore Hoffman doesn't simply get Truman Capote's voice and mannerisms down to solid mimickry. You can see Capote's mind behind Hoffman's eyes, thinking the formless concepts before the words are chosen to express them. Both Hoffman's performance and the nature of his character diminish the significance of the other actors and roles, with the exception of Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). As Capote struggles more and more with the his conflicting interests in publishing the book and preserving Perry's life--goals diametrically opposed to one another--so does his apparent emotional and social isolation. Harper Lee and Capote's lover Jack Dunphy seem like members of the audience that were invited onto the screen, observing Capote and asking passive questions equivalent to "how are you doing?" They neither challenge nor console him. Capote seems like a guarded character but the movie shows us a portion of his life where everyone already has the kidgloves on in their interactions with him; we never see Capote rebuff and flee to isolation so much as find himself deeper and deeper in it. His friends start out as seemingly distant people who eventually distance themselves further after sensing his trouble. It's alarming.

The movie, on two levels, made me think about the ethic behind photo journalists who take pictures of starving children or people dying from shrapnel wounds alone in some forgotten ditch. Is capturing a singular representation of an awful reality for everyone to view more important and open up more possibility for a greater good, than immediately trying to save the people caught in the present situation? On one level in the film you have Capote trying to present a story which is true: two men killed a family in cold blood, were tried with poor representation, and executed. However, in the process of witnessing the story play itself out, he couldn't divest himself of not only sympathy for his subject, but also his immediate responsibility to it as a man possibly having the means to help save their lives. I began to wonder if it would have struck me as less immoral for him, rather than withdrawing his finance of and search for Perry and Richard's defense after a few years, to have never offered it in the first place. Despite the pain he'd still have gone through for having more than likely fallen in love with Perry, he may have been able to forgive himself easier by bitterly blaming a system he had no part of. Then there's the second level of the film, where Capote's friends and employer's were gripped and fascinated by his work and intellect, yet were unable to aid him in the maintenance of his moral character, despite knowing it was in jeopardy. Capote says of his relationship to Perry: "it's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he went out the back door and I went out the front." It would seem society didn't know how to deal with either man once they left by way of either door. Instead we opted to watch their lives until it came time to pass judgment on their one important moment.

iPods and my luck with gadgetry.

2005-11-19T12:59:00.000-08:00

You'd think that all you'd have to be is techonologically savvy in order to keep your hardware from breaking. A lot of people treat their equipment like it were disposable, plugging things in and unplugging them willy-nilly, and wondering why it is they lose data or break their latest acquisition. Hell, lots of people drop their shit. A lot!

Not I. I've been building computers and reading up on all the newest computer hardware and techno gadgetry for years now. I'm the guy who, when calling a tech support line, has to say "yes, I tried that already" 23 times before the person on the other line finally tells me "huh, let me get my supervisor on the phone." Suffice to say, I don't mistake CD/DVD-ROM drives for drink holders. However, this hasn't prevented me from having trouble with virtually every piece of hardware I've ever purchased. I've had to use third party BIOS software, juggle IRQ numbers, and get replacement after replacement of defective hardware just to make everything run smoothly. But I did it, and it made me stronger.

The biggest problem I've always had, has been with defective products. I've had to replace video cards, memory sticks, monitors, motherboards, DVD drives, and power supplies. The list is probably longer than that, but there's only so much disappointment your brain will let you relive in one moment. Point being, you learn quick to always, always, always buy from good brand name companies. Apparently, I still get raped by the good guys, though. My second god damn iPod has broken.

Same issue too! The hard drives in these fourth gen fuckers just don't seem to like me. I'll try playing one specific song and it'll lock up. I'll restart it, and then it'll make a recurring clicking sound until it gives up trying to restart, giving me the "sick iPod" screen instead. This has happened twice now. My Dad has had his iPod for two years, my brother has had his for around one and a half, I've gone through two in less than a year and three months. Actually, this last iPod, which I got as a brand new replacement from The Apple Store, lasted only two and a half months. Am I cursed or is this happening a lot more than Apple would have us know? I'm leaning towards the former because it makes me feel special, but I do wonder about the latter during those moments where I suspect I'm not located at the center of the universe.

When I don't believe in this curse, bad things happen. When I had my iPod replaced in late August, I thought: "Why bother renewing the warranty? Aside from it being obscenely overpriced, what's the likelihood this one will break like the other one? Joseph and Dad's have lasted all this time without so much as a hiccup." So, I walked away with the belief that even if it DID break, it'd probably take a year or so (like the last one), and that's still two years worth of iPod enjoyment. Plus, after two years I'd want to upgrade to a new portable media device that can serve as a hard drive, music player, and video player anyways. I am, like most Americans, a consumer whore.

But really, when was it that we just accepted the fact that gadgets can no longer be repaired for 20-30 bucks? Why is it that all our technology now is disposable? Every time a DVD player, an mp3 player, a cell phone, or other what-have-you breaks nowadays it's just time to replace it, and folks these things aren't cheap! I say bring back the reliable second and third party repair shops, god damn it. I'm sick of paying for warranties that I need 35% of the time, and usually, magically, run out right when the fucking thing breaks.

Oy. So, now I'm thinking of switching brands. Apple is fucking me almost as hard as Western Digital was with their hard drives. I've had enough! But, knowing I'm outside warranty, there's not much I can do, save for send a letter including my sad story and asking for an alternative besides taking it up the ass. I'm not expecting one to be offered. But here's the letter I wrote, and I'll be sure to include the e-mail reply Apple sends me in the comments section.

Dear Apple Tech Support,

About a year and three months ago I purchased an iPod (Model No. A1059: 40GB, black and white screen, click wheel, etc.) and after a little under a year's use the hard drive in it died. Thankfully, it was still under warranty and I had it replaced at the Apple Store. Now, two months later, my new replacement iPod has stopped working. At first it made a recurrent clicking noise directly after restart and refused to mount, and now it simply does nothing.

I have always taken good care of my iPod. I've never dropped it. I've never disconnected it from my laptop without safely unmounting it first. I've never let any undesirables lay their dirty hands upon it. I've never gone skeet shooting with it. Therefore, I do not understand how twice in a row I've gotten burned by a defective product from your company.

I'm not sure if repair or replacement is still under warranty (serial no: XXXXXXXXXX). I did not extend my warranty because I assumed the new 40 gig iPod I received in late August would last at least as long as the previous defective iPod, and by then I'd want to upgrade to your newest line anyhow. These now both seem like foolish assumptions on my part.

So, what I'd like to know:

1) How much would a replacement (assuming it is not reparable, just like it wasn't last time) cost without that apparently very advisable warranty?

2) Is there a common defect unique to the generation of iPod I purchased, and consequently had replaced?

3) Is there a common defect in your new line of video iPods?

3.1) If I were to give up on the current paper weight I have, how likely would it be that I'd have a similar consumer experience with your newest line of iPod product?

My future as an Apple customer is contingent upon honest and helpful answers to these questions. Anyhow, I hope this e-mail reaches you well, and that you didn't skip any meals before reading it. Thanks for your time.

--Adam Deich

Activity.

2005-11-13T17:15:00.000-08:00

Yeesh, writing has been like pulling teeth with me and the results have been at times heartbreaking. I'm not sure what it is--if I've just become hypercritical of myself lately because of some self-esteem issue or what--but when I sit down at the keyboard now it feels like it's made of wet gum. And wouldn't ya know it? When I finally do post something it's not on this blog. So, if you're bored, then fly, monkeys, fly! over to Mathematician Vs. Philosopher and check out my shrill and hateful piece about The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

Index of Vodka-Yogurt Film Reviews

2005-11-09T12:09:00.000-08:00

A History of Violence
Altered States
The Apostle
The Aristocrats
Audition
Auto Focus
Basic Instinct (April Fool's review)
Beerfest
The Big Lebowski
Blue Velvet
Body Heat
Borat
Brokeback Mountain
Broken Flowers
Capote
Capturing the Friedmans
Cloverfield
Crash
The Devil's Rejects
Exotica
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Fountain
Good Night and Good Luck
Happy End
Hard Candy
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Hitchhiker's Guid to the Galaxy
Hostel
House of D
I am a Sex Addict
Indecent Proposal
Kinsey
Layer Cake
Levity
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Lightning Bug
The Limey
Lost In Translation
Mulholland Drive
Midnight Express
The Notorious Bettie Page
Pink Flamingos
The Prestige
Secretary
Session 9
The Shining
Songs from the Second Floor
Spanking The Monkey
The Squid and the Whale
Straw Dogs
Transamerica
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
WALL-E
Wild Strawberries

Good for you, bad for me.

2005-11-07T15:46:00.000-08:00

Well, my presumption is that today's events are good for you because you're here at my blog and looking for new writing, and now I might be able to provide you such a service. Today and tomorrow I have off work (yay). I was especially pleased that I had this Monday off because it just so happened that one of the Emergent Forms Readings was going to take place, with authors Shanna Compton and Jennifer Knox. Happy day! I also awoke to a light dusting of snow on the ground, not so heavy that it would shut the city down, but enough to turn everything bright white. At the point of opening my door and being happily greeted by winter, my schedule looked like this:

12pm: Go hold office hours as tutor, and whilst not tutoring anyone, watch David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.

4pm: Go to the liquor store and buy a small bottle of Jameson whiskey and maybe a small bottle of cinnamon schnapps and cocoa for Joseph. Put them on top of the microwave. Smile and look satisfied at them for 3 mississippis.

6pm: Make a bigass bowl of spaghetti and make some garlic bread.

7pm: Go to Emergent Forms and hobnob with people from the West Wind Review as well as people generally interested in writing, instead of flipping burgers and making sandwiches for cranky old women with too many cats and ungrateful (grand)children.

9pm: Turn up the heat. Way up. Grab a blanket, a glass of Jameson (neat), and watch Sideways.

Midnight: Make another pumpkin pie. While pie is cooking, revise and complete first post on Mathematician Vs. Philosopher, and then revise and complete a review of The Shining.

Sound like a fantastic day to you? It certainly did to me.

But alas, Emergent Forms was cancelled. And I should probably return Sideways today before Blockbuster sends some large forearmed fellow over here in a bowler hat and suspendars to break my bony legs.

All in all, the cancellation of Emergent Forms has sapped my desire to sit around, relax, and feel warm until the wee hours of the morning. Now I'm frustrated, and when I'm in a pissy mood I generally like to focus on some form of work or productivity. So, expect a new review here and something I hope will be worth reading over at Mathematician Vs. Philosopher.

The beast that names himself.

2005-10-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

A History of Violence is, at its core, another chapter in David Cronenberg's ongoing fascination with man as an intelletual being built of spasmodic meat on calcareous bone. Cronenberg's exploration of how our physical bodies impact our sense of self, sense of reality, and relationships with other people (bodies), has become more subtle as of late (are the sci-fi, flesh morphing days of Videodrome, eXistenZ, and The Fly over, Davey? Say it ain't so!), but--for those of us that love his movies and his thematic obsessions regardless--his films grow more challenging and provocative in their nuance. A History of Violence is one of the best movies you'll see this year both in terms of how deceptively complex the questions the movie poses are about our nature as a species, and in what a sheer thrill the movie is to watch unfold.

That mini-review above is the furthest in depth I should discuss if you have not yet seen it in theaters. In order to review the movie I have to spoil some twists and treats the plot holds which are best experienced cold. So, go see this movie first, then c'mon back and argue with me about it. For those of you who have seen it, I cordially invite you to my third paragraph.

Viggo Mortenson gives a remarkably measured performance as Tom Stall, who, at the beginning of the film, is a paragon of what a small town father, husband, and restaurant owner should be: kindly, passive, easy to please. His performance is so careful that when signs emerge indicating that he has been hiding a secret, violent, former life before moving to the small, rural town where he rooted himself, we are as doubtful as his family is that Tom could be anything but what he claims to be. As it turns out, though, Tom used to be Joey, an inventively cruel man with ties to the mob. Through the course of his life as Joey, however, something happened that caused him to want to give up the lifestyle. Whatever that point was--and it may have something to do with what he expected the aftermath to be after he ripped Ed Harris' eye out with barbed wire--the result of the revelation led him to a small town girl, to marry her, and to start a family under a completely new identity as Tom. Twenty years later, Tom's restaurant gets ambushed by two traveling serial killers/rapists/thieves, and in order to protect his employees and patrons, he disarms and kills the assailants with uncannily quick reflexes. The story of this small town hero gets national press, and though the mobsters don't recognize the name, they recognize the face as Joey's.

What could be a rather bland and superficial story of a man's past coming back to haunt him has unexpected and thoughtful layers. Tom's son, Jack, has trouble at school with bullies and, like his father, tries to settle it diplomatically, passively. But, when it becomes clear that a fight is imminent, he surprises us just like Tom does in brutally beating his adversary into a leaky clump of burger. The question then is where Tom's son got this shared talent with his father? Tom isn't a violent man; Joey was, but Joey didn't raise Jack. The answer, if not in nurture, comes from nature--that inside Tom and Jack is perhaps something genetic, a hunter/protector instinct which surfaces fully when the adrenaline oozes into the veins. It's a history of violence, larger than the personal history of Tom/Joey, which is imprinted into our genes as the default means to end a threat. Some, clearly, are more gifted with it than others.

Naturally, this quality is attractive on a similar sort of biological level to mates. Cronenberg reminds us in one particular scene that while relationships are difficult enterprises, crucially dependent on trust, sex is still a pretty primitive urge written into the flesh. Tom and his wife, after his past is fully disclosed to her, have an intense and disturbing sexual encounter on a flight of hardwood stairs. It's been referred to by some critics as a rape scene, which I can understand on the same level as when I watch Nature programs and think the female, tusked boar is being raped. Elements of disgust and lust crescendo to an orgasm, followed by confusion and repulsion again, absent of lust. I'm sure we all can relate.

Despite the themes of man-as-animal, Cronenberg does give humanity one thing of true uniquity in the animal kingdom: intellectual identity. Just who is Joey/Tom, really? Are people the grand sum of their actions and beliefs over a lifetime, or can we reshape ourselves with such totality that we can point to a period of our lives and say: "That man is dead" and not be laughably overstating? In the case of Tom, he may have done it. Even his brother Richie (played with a giddy brilliance by William Hurt) observes "you've been this other guy almost as long as you've been yourself!" Richie and Joey share dialogue in that scene trying to pin down what kind of an internal identity Tom/Joey has, now confronted with both his lives intersecting: "hey, when you dream, are you still Joey?" Nothing really gets settled in a definitive way regarding his identity, but violence handles the more relevant issues they had left to resolve with each other. One might be inclined to view the scene afterwards of Tom going to the lake to wash the blood from his face and arms as a moment of purification, an official baptism wiping clean his history as Joey. Again, I had the nature shows on my mind, and just thought of it like an animal returning to a body of water to cleanse and rest before making the long journey back home. I think Viggo's expressions and mannerisms match up more with my interpretation--I didn't read any cathartic relief in his face.

Tom returns home to the dinner table after a day's absence. He hangs his head like a wild dog wandering back into the pack, unsure of how his reception will be. His children offer him his place at the table and the food on it. The movie ends as he and his wife reticently look upon each other, now with full disclosure. If the movie supplies an answer to the question of identity, and whether someone of such duplicitous histories is ever truly on one extreme or the other, it would be that he is for so long as he chooses. Funny though, that for how liberating choice and intellect are, one still seems limited in possible identities: criminal or family man, warrior or plebeian.

I swear to god!

2005-10-21T02:27:00.000-07:00

Reviews are ON THEIR WAY. Right now I'm trying to get in touch with a person that matters a lot to Jarod and I.

Stan Roberts! If you're out there, please visit Jarod and I. Regardless of where you've been/are or what you're up to, touch bases with us somehow. You're one of the kindest people we've ever known, and certainly one of the most supportive people we've ever known. We couldn't have felt as confident in what we are without you. Please. Please don't fall into obscurity. Jarod and I will give you a place to stay, food to eat, whatever. We want to see you again. CONTACT US DAMN IT.

"No. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing." --Hunter S.Thompson

2005-10-17T17:45:00.000-07:00

Vegas was as amusing as a place can be that rapidly drains your money and replaces it with free cocktails served by 37 year-old women all speaking broken english and clad in embarrassing leotards and tuxedo jackets. I’d like to thank my friend Matt for financing my tickets at his expense (a favor which I didn’t and wouldn’t have asked of him) and for generally being an awesome guy for letting me tag along and have a few days break from my oppressive work week. I found Matt’s roommates to be friendly and full of good character, which is to say we spent all our quality time on the long car rides and walking along the strip making fun of each other (ladies, this is how young men bond: ridicule, abuse, and farting on each other). Sadly, we all lost our shirts; the collective group loss is probably something over two grand. And just like that Vegas can afford another bucket of shrimp, some mix to put in a couple four-foot margaritas, and a stripper for tomorrow’s tourists. America’s biggest nightlight keeps buzzing, making the occasional zap, crack, and hiss as a wino gets caught in its filament.

Friday night was the highlight for me. We arrived an hour and a half later than expected, due to one of the worst car wrecks I’ve ever seen up close. The cars involved were crumpled up like crushed paper flowers. Traffic was stopped dead for an hour and a half, so we sat in Matt’s SUV watching Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, and blurting all our favorite lines before they were uttered, while the victims of the crash lay in their cars, listening to the sounds of their metal cages being sawed and pealed open, layer by layer. Perhaps all our luck on the trip was spent in the few extra moments we spent in Baker, ogling the world’s largest thermometer, trying to think of things to say about what Alien Fresh Jerky must be like, and complaining about the city’s transparent gasoline price fixing ($3.89 per gallon). It gave us the necessary 50 seconds lead from the wreck.

By the time we got to the hotel it was time to drink. I sipped a little of Matt’s Incredible Hulk (made with Hypnotik and Hennessy) enough to say I don’t recommend the beverage unless you want something overpoweringly fruity that doesn’t use non-alcoholic mixers. It tastes like a fruit punch liqeur and looks like liquid green baby shit. I then poured myself four (liberal) shots of Jameson, tossed in some ice, and we headed down to the casino floor. Once there, I realized the bar was set high for the evening: not a single person there was sober, save for the people serving the drinks—and perhaps not all of them. Women were laughing and smiling agape, a line of them nearly trampled over me while shouting: “WIIIIIDE LOOOOOAD.” I pointed at them and said to Matt: “let’s end this night like that.” He agreed and we proceeded to slowly lose our first night’s allotment of money, with a steady stream of long islands being brought to our sides. I tried to order a vodka yogurt after the third long island, but the waitress said the best she could do was a vodka cottage cheese. “Not quite the same thing at all,” I said, and settled for a vodka Red Bull.

The night ended with myself, Matt, and his roommate stumbling back to the hotel around 8am. When we awoke at 2pm there was a lot of water being drank at the buffet. We spent awhile that day walking down the strip and getting through the remaining haze from the indulgence the night before. The rest of the weekend was more or less one prolonged attempt to lose money as slowly as possible and gorge ourselves on shrimp cocktails and Chinese food at the buffets. I hit one 50 dollar jackpot and one 80 dollar jackpot, but when you bring $400 for fun money there’s really no sense in settling for paltry sums like that. Either you spend it all or come back home with double what you brought. So here I sit, empty pocketed. But I had a lot of good In-N-Out burgers, buffets, drinks, and little impressions of the city and its people (local and otherwise) that I can add to my collection of happy memories.

Apologies for not getting those reviews up before Thursday, but right before I went to post them on blogger my wireless connection stuttered, costing me all but my earliest drafts. I’ll see about getting as much done as I can today, since I had to call in sick to work on account of a four dollar, 7 pound burrito I ate in San Diego. I guess I’ve got some spare time in between trips to the bathroom.

Quick blog plug post.

2005-10-10T02:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, in my usual routine of opening about 50 blogs and giving them each a chance to impress/inform me before I disappointedly hit the close button, I discovered a fun blog that I'll have linked in my margin. However, Maria's Film Notes is so good I figured I'd give her mention in a post witin my blog too. She's largely covering foreign films; I've counted four in which I considered writing about but gave up on simply because I am limited by time and their appeal and availability are limited as well. But, if you like the kinds of movies I contend are worth exposing yourself to, then please, please, please check out some of her notes on oft overlooked movies. They may be a pain to find, but if you're a movie fanatic like me who feels a certain sense of loss each day you're not exposed to something new and innovative on screen, then she's probably got some recommendations for you.

Rushed week, but reviews of two movies in theaters are on their way.

2005-10-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

Say "hi" to Maggie. Do it!

Anyways, I'm really sorry I haven't posted new reviews in the past few days. What's worse is that it is not because I've a lack of material to write about, but I'm suffering from a lack of time and health. Because I've requested time off this next Thursday through Sunday, I'm working 7 days straight, all closing shifts. It would have been 8 days straight, if I hadn't been ill on Wednesday. But yeah, my hands are burned, my feet are sore, and I've got hardly any spare time long enough to think critically about things. At least, critically enough to satisfy the standards I place on myself.

It's been a bad week for other reasons too: I burned and blistered my hand, I haven't been able exercise, my paycheck was 100 bucks lower than it should have been, and I missed both class and work on Wednesday which always makes me feel guilty and like I did something wrong despite how sick and fatigued I was at the time. But there's always a silver lining: my brother bought me a bottle of Knob Creek, I'll be going to Las Vegas this Thursday to visit my friend on his birthday (I'll bring a digital camera and return with pictures), and my body is capable of regenerating healthy skin cells. The Vegas trip I'm especially excited about, as it has been a long time in the making, and Brimmy and I seem to have a penchant for finding ourselves in front of naked people at bars and being pulled over by police officers during our vacation escapades (never been assaulted by a drunk naked person or ticketed by an officer yet!). It stretches the limits of the imagination to guess what strangeness we'll find ourselves in at the Luxor and while cruising the main drag, but, again, I'll keep a camera handy.

As for the reviews, I'm going to post two before I leave on Thursday. One of them will be on David Cronenberg's A History of Violence which is a superb film that I think you should go see right this moment. Do not wait for my review; I loved this movie, it's one of the best films I've seen all year. Do not read any reviews, do not see any trailers, the plot of this film unfolds in a manner that you will not want any detail spoiled. Unfortunately, to review it I will have to spoil some of it, because its ideas are joined at the hip with the plot. So, again, if you trust my critical acumen at all, go see the movie now, don't wait for my review or anyone else's.

The other movie I'll be reviewing is The Constant Gardner, which I've still not caught yet. But Fernando Meirelles and Ralph Fiennes are two names I associate with quality films.

Y'all stay cool, now.

Sandra Bullock is in a good movie, despite her performance in it.

2005-10-04T19:30:00.000-07:00

There are traditional (read: cheap) ways to make an audience gasp and jump, like during moments of sudden violence with a machete or chainsaw wielding serial killer, or the surprise of seeing the ubiquitous cat leaping off empty, beat-up trashcans. When I was in the theater watching Crash it was the first time I heard people gasp and jump repeatedly over what people were saying on screen. Racist jokes may still persist in a culture of tolerance for this very reason—to shock and sober people to the reality of how much power ugly words hold.

Crash was a movie I was prepared to hate after the first twenty minutes. Though it effectively used lines so vicious and cutting that the physical violence on screen seemed mute by comparison, it didn’t escape feeling like a gimmick. Racism is ugly and base. We know this. So why watch a film that serves to desensitize you to this ugliness, despite its hiding behind a limp-wristed condemnation of what it titillates you with?

Paul Haggis (who penned 2004’s powerhouse Million Dollar Baby) makes his directorial debut answering that question. He gives us a sampling of the populous of Los Angeles like Paul Thomas Anderson did with the San Fernando Valley in Magnolia. Haggis has various characters meet and subtly illustrates the power relationships that precipitate a person’s defaulting to racist attitudes. It’s a particularly effective mode for telling a story of racism, given the audience has a more complete account of each individual, and can witness how brutal it is when another person is treated based on convenient, dehumanizing stereotypes. Though it’s no great secret that racism is birthed out of fear, the vulnerability of each character makes nearly all of them sympathetic—even at their worst. The primary target for criticism is the socio-political landscape, with politicians taking the heaviest beating. When the District Attorney needs to appear tolerant after his car has been hijacked by two black men, he puts a white policeman on trial for shooting an unarmed black man, and generates a media circus surrounding it. However, the fact this police officer had a clean record, and the man he shot was carrying several kilos of cocaine in his trunk, gets swept underneath the current of manufactured public outrage.

The ensemble cast would have given a bravura performance if not for Sandra Bullock’s mediocrity standing out like a pick-up truck in a lot of BMWs. I have no idea why she was given top billing; her role is minor and forgettable compared to Don Cheadle’s and Matt Dillon’s conflicted and vividly human portrayals—even Tony Danza’s thirty second cameo seemed more compelling. Bullock’s role as Jean may have been part of the problem. Jean’s anger is never fully explained and her scene of emotional collapse on the shoulder of her Hispanic housekeeper seems more the result of the housekeeper’s proximity to Jean during a time of need.

Without that one discordant key and the occasional problems the viewer might have in suspending disbelief during a few near supernatural plot twists, this film would have been an immediate contender for an Oscar. The ethics of the film aren’t oppressively preachy, which should refresh audiences already fatigued with the subject matter. Haggis merely wants to show what happens when people “crash” into each other, and out of confusion, fear, and pain try to judge another human being to explain their victimization.

Young adults can live up to their name.

2005-10-04T18:50:00.000-07:00

I was on a ride with my father years ago; I he was think concerned I was spending too much time writing alone in my room, or at the computer desk digesting hundreds of webpages a day, building a fortress of solitude in Mountain Dew bottles. I remember distinctly my dad turned, looked at me and said: "I know guys like you at work. They sit in front of a computer all day, write stuff, plug numbers in to calculators. That's not really work to me at all." The comment stung a bit at the time, and still does find its way down a serpentine path into some vulnerable area of my psyche to nettle me a bit. Dad was a welder and had always wished I could develop a hands-on craft: welding, electronics, construction, anything. But my passion has always been for the written word, despite many a relatives' scoff. Occasionally, you end up the artist in a family and community that didn't expect your kind to pop up. It can be uncomfortable.

Such is the plight of Green Graves in Robert Hall's Lightning Bug, a coming of age story that won't pickle your love for the genre or movies in general like House of D. Green is a horror movie buff, and crafts his own pictures, models, and plastic ghouls. However, Green lives in a near microscopic town in the deep south, snug in the most fundamentalist areas of the Bible Belt. Not the best place for a creative young man fascinated by the anti-aesthetic of monsters, horror, and the occult. To make matters worse his step father Earl is a violent alcoholic, intent on seeing his stepson work at the chicken plant. Kevin Gage plays Earl, and, although I knew Gage had a knack for playing villanous characters, he crafts his mannerisms in this movie in such subtle ways that while we register him as nothing more than an abusive, ugly drunk, we can seem him through Green's eyes also, as perfect inspiration for his monsters.

Despite adversity, as the best of creative people do, Green continues with his craft, not out of juvenile defiance but simply because it is a cemented into his identity. Bret Harrison plays Green in a way that is neither angsty nor brooding. His personality has an adult shape, but his body and experience haven't just yet caught up with it. Much of the tension that builds up as the movie progresses purely attributable to his sympathetic performance, which doesn't define late-teens as still hormonal, mindlessly rebellious 13 year-olds, but actual persons trying to find foothold in the adult world for the first time.

Laura Prepon (you might remember her as Donna from That 70s Show) plays Angevin Duvet, a girl who managed to escape the small town once, but found herself back in it after a few of her dreams were quashed. She works at the local video store, and her semi-gothic look and movie expertise attract Green. A relationship ensues which is on one level sweetly fueled by the naivete of youth, but also tempered by their years of experience existing as individuals in a place that had no categories for them to possibly wish to conform to. Prepon and Harrison have a chemistry on screen that is unmatched in coming-of-age romances, again, because they play young adults, not hollywood's conception of teenagers perpetually interested in effluvial nights out wearing minimal clothes, driving around town trying to rub against each other as much as possible. What a concept, young adults actually being interested in a person over shared interests and life experience, rather than finding the girl with the hardest nipples and the guy with the best hair.

But I digress. Some of the plot is predictable. The twist at the end of the movie isn't so much a twist, but an idea that the audience already hoped would have occurred to Green earlier in the movie. All the same, we're happy when it comes to fruition. The movie is both sad but empowering, much like the bulk of adult experiences--life has a way of encouraging you without giving you all of what you feel you need. Robert Hall based this movie off his experiences growing up; the church and the tiny video store in the film were the actual places of his childhood. This movie is a heavily dramatized version of his own life, which, he says, ended happier than his movie did. All the same, the film rings with truth, and is the sort of movie I'd like to see aimed at teenagers these days, instead of soul crushers like Bring it On or Swim Fan.

The tragicomedy of humanity.

2005-10-03T17:15:00.000-07:00

The characters we meet in Songs from the Second Floor are incapable of laughing at their own despair, but we are encouraged to--and thank God for that. The movie is a parade of sagging flesh and pasty faces, expressing only confusion as their lives along with the economy they are dependent on collapses from posionous corporate mores. In its surreal way, it's a narrative that captures the pathetic arc of all fallen civilizations, and probably all those yet to come.

The film is written and directed by Roy Andersson, who Ingmar Bergman is excited about for good reason. So many surreal films (including a few of Bergman's own) are interesting only to film students concerned with what new forms movies can take, and that post-viewing analysis exercise becomes more interesting than the movie screening itself. Though this film is avant-garde, I don't believe it's entirely inaccessible or unentertaining to anyone who likes David Lynch movies or reads a lot of poetry. Songs from the Second Floor is one of the most foreign movies you'll ever see (and I'm using both connotations of the word "foreign" here), but individual scenes never fail to engage interest, even if you're slow on forming the thematic connective tissue between them.

This movie demands your attention, and as such people who go to movies to be passively entertained will not enjoy it. The film was inspired by the poetry of Cesar Valejo, and the movie is, consequently, challenging visual poetry itself: a man covered in soot rides a subway as the other passengers slowly raise their voices in an operatic lament, a magician tries to present the illusion of a man being sawed in half but hasn't quite got the illusion part down, a little girl is blindfolded and walked up to a plank atop the edge of a cliff, business people walk in file down a street each whipping the person in front of them. These shots, these scenes, resonate within those foggy realms of the brain, carrying with them a dream-logic familiarity. The performances are like people behaving as if in a nightmare version of their work-a-day mundane lives.

What's easy to get about the movie is that everyone is dead inside as a consequence of unrestrained, unthinking materialism and spiritual bankruptcy. The only character in the film who is an artist--a poet--suffered a nervous breakdown and exists in a self-willed coma, as society scrambles to find a way for its burdens and debts to be carried by Someone Else. But as far as martyrs go, Jesus already paid some of our debt and his symbol isn't a hot enough commidity to restart the economy either; it seems too late for martyrs, anyways. But, that never stopped a truly desperate society from finding one, and by the end of the film we see humanity default to medieval superstition, simply because asking "why" isn't as complex a question at that point.

By the end of the film the characters walk the earth like ghosts haunted by ghosts, never knowing how much responsibility they bear in the world's crumbling because they were just carrying on as we've always carried on. It's haunting, but also funny, perhaps because these people are more deserving of our scorn than our sympathy. And there's always that anarchic glee we all feel at the thought of social entropy; to sit up on your roof with a bag of Kettle Corn at night, and watch the world die.

West Wind Review.

2005-09-29T02:45:00.000-07:00

Aside from tutoring other students who want to improve their English skills, I'm also on the staff of the West Wind Review this year. It's a literary journal my university publishes each Spring. We accept submissions all the way through November 20 (my birthday, oddly enough--and, more oddly, the publication itself started in 1981, the year of my birth--strange, eh?). I encourage anyone who has good poetry, fiction, or even photography or art they've been considering submitting to a journal to do so to ours.

But, more importantly, you should buy an issue. I've got an edition or two, myself. It's not uncommon that we have Pushcart Prize nominees/winners, Pulitzer Prize nominees, PEN Award winners, etc. published in it. It's damn good stuff, and, by virtue of my presence on the staff this fall alone, this year's edition will be the best ever. EV-VER.

Hmm, this whole post reminds me that I should write a review for Wonder Boys. First thing first, though, the next review will be of Songs from the Second Floor. It'll be up by tomorrow, since that's my day off (wew-hew). I hope y'all will enjoy it and maybe, just maybe, be swayed to find the movie for rent online or in some odd, local film fanatic movie rental store, owned and operated by subversives with aggressive facial piercings and bleached seven year old goatees.

A movie for adult kids.

2005-09-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is an unapologetically pure Wes Anderson movie, made for the Wes Anderson audience. Roger Ebert seemed so confounded by this specific style the movie possessed that, despite saying he thought on some level the movie didn't work, he wrote if you were to tell him you were going to see the film, he wouldn't discourage you from doing so. It's the first non-recommendation I've ever seen him write--that is, that he couldn't recommend seeing the movie or avoiding it. Ultimately, the movie caused Roger Ebert to briefly abandon his job as critic and write on in his column about the plot and quirks of the film, without really airing an opinion on it. The closest he comes to recommending it is in his last paragraph where he writes: "So you see, it's that kind of movie."

He's right; it's an odd cup of tea, to be sure. But, while Ebert wrote that his rational mind was convinced the movie didn't work, mine was fine with the mechanics and style of the film. Wes Anderson writes and directs adult children's movies. I'll explain that. They have all the qualities of a child's picture book, containing the vast and somewhat unrestrained imagination of a young mind, but his films are still grounded in the adult world insofar as the complicated relationships his characters have with each other. Live Aquatic plays out as if Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach took the experience of watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries as children, and, as adults, revisited that experience and made a movie of that perspective's reconstruction.

The characters in Life Aquatic, though older and more cynical from experience than children, carry with them still a childlike insecurity and emotional vulnerability. When Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) overhears two men ridiculing him from his work to his earring, he says to Ned Plimpton (his alleged son played by Owen Wilson): "People say that when someone says something like that, it's because they're jealous. But it still hurts. It hurts bad." All the characters in this movie have these moments of emotional tenderness, and each time its expressed in typical Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach's simple, laconic dialogue, you feel it: you receive it in the same sort of way you would when you were a child. Kurt Vonnegut said one of the most heartbreaking lines he'd ever read by James Joyce was simply: "she was tired." In Life Aquatic there is a six word line of dialogue Bill Murray delivers that made me cry, which is almost as simply constructed as Joyce's line, and similarly no other words would have done to express Zissou's state. I think (hope) you'll know it when you hear it.

The score by Mark Mothersbaugh, the strange performance by Willem Defoe as Claus, and the sets and animated animals could possibly irritate some audiences--mostly those that didn't like the films Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums either. Anderson's is a hard style for a filmmaker to adhere to, but it harmonizes perfectly with the theme of the movie and the shape of its characters. The movie succeeds in being a working comedy, working drama, and a working adventure, but also has elements of a different genre which I think has yet to have been given a succinct nomenclature. Criterion Collection is picking up all of Wes Anderson's movies for this reason, so be sure to check out the DVD--it'll have all kinds of nifty special features.

Touchin' bases.

2005-09-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

Some of you may notice the new clean-shaven picture of me in my profile. I really miss my beard but, alas, my workplace does not allow facial hair on employees. Anyhow, my brother took the picture while we were at the bar as I was sampling some scotches: J&B and MacCallen aged 12 years. I've decided, now that I've sampled four different kinds of scotches over the past month, I'm not a scotch man. There's something about the smoky, leathery taste that doesn't appeal to me--perhaps my tastebuds haven't aged properly yet. Regardless, I'm stickin' with the sweeter flavors of whiskies and bourbons. The best whiskies I've had are Knob Creek, Maker's Mark, and Jameson in that order. Be careful with Knob Creek though, it's so stunningly smooth going down that you can easily forget it's 100 proof. Drink responsibly. Don't throw up on anyone's cat.

I'm thinking in October I'm going to bite the bullet and just go for it: I will start reviewing movies by Stanley Kubrick. I have no idea which of his movies to begin with, so go ahead and put your requests in the comments section. Just know that I will not be reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey first; I'd cramp up like I was starting a five mile jog after eating an entire butter-frosted chocolate cake.

As for the rest of this month I've got my eye on reviewing Songs from the Second Floor by Roy Andersson, Life Aquatic by Wes Anderson, and The Constant Gardner by Fernando Meirelles. I know the first two will be positive reviews, and even though I haven't seen the latter it's hard for me to envision a movie made by the director of City of God turning out awful. As a result, I'm contemplating renting the movie Cube--which is on my list of worst films I've ever had to sit through--just to keep the tone of my reviews varied. A lot of my friends liked Cube, and I've had a hard time letting the battle against that movie and its acolytes rest; perhaps after writing the review I can finally put the final nail in that argument's coffin.

My muscles feel like they're rusty piano wire. I've been working out every day now (jogging five days a week and lifting weights 7 days a week), not really because I feel the need to bulk up but more that I'm disturbed by how I feel emotionally when I don't. I think my friends are starting to get used to me having a good two hours of the evening to myself for exercise. Hopefully, their acceptance of it doesn't take with it a bit of resentment, seeing as how now work and exercise are cutting into my social life, and exercise is easily seen by people to be elective and unnecessary.

In general, things go well with me as I hope they're going for you all. I'm sure you can expect me to be posting at least one or two reviews each week, because the best part of my day is literally when I get the chance to sit down and write them up. I hope that when you read them you don't feel that you're just reading about some movie, but looking for maybe something you haven't seen yet which will be challenging either in artistic formula or on a standpoint of social mores. Mostly, though, I hope you're actively questioning my judgments too (and your own), and not chickening out of leaving a comment.

Oh! One more thing before I forget, I'll soon be getting hooked up with either Net Flix or Blockbuster's online rental service (which is better? Anyone have an informed recommendation?). This pleases me mostly because I'll be scouring through my archives now and putting the harder-to-find movies that you readers have requested for review at the top of my list.

James Spader can spank me any day.

2005-09-19T17:47:00.000-07:00

Now this is a romantic movie. Arousal on a physical level can come from a nude and well sculpted body, but on the intellectual level—what drives our infatuations concerning the personality and behavior of our beloved objectified—always struck me as a little dark and nebulous. In looking at my own aborted relationships, I can see that I’m attracted to girls who challenge me (often in ways that frighten me), and I’m growing to understand that chaos, dominance and submission are huge players in what churns up lust and that sensation of need. And here comes Secretary exploring those same ideas, and positing that maybe that craziness—on both sides—if given the proper, complementary dosage, can find that stride of normalcy and stability that gives way to a long term relationship.

Secretary came out in 2002, and did well in many critic's society awards (Chicago, Phoenix, Florida, and Boston), as well as the Independent Spirit Awards. Maggie Gyllenhaal, always gifted at finding excellent projects to perform in, finds a great, award winning, role as Lee Holloway, and I can’t think of a more apt actress to make Lee's self-conscious mannerisms and idiosyncrasies flesh. Lee has just been released from a psychiatric ward for nearly ending her life by cutting her wrists. We learn, though, that she wasn’t suicidal at the time, but that Lee is a masochist—a cutter—and merely misjudged how deep she intended to cut herself in a hurried moment. Still, we’re glad she got to see some psychiatrists.

A pity they still didn’t do enough for her, because before long she’s got her kit of sharpened instruments and tincture of iodine, and is back to her old methods of controlling her emotional pain and stress. Her boss, E. Edward Grey (James Spader), takes notice of this behavior, and instead of firing her or referring her to a therapist, he commands her to stop. He demands that she stop, and then tells her to walk home instead of letting her mother drive her home from work everyday, and soon he starts dictating the routines of other aspects of her life. And thus begins a very strange and intriguing Dom-Sub romance, which goes unspoken about between them for a large portion of the movie. I’m resisting telling you more about it, because I want your eyes to widen and your jaw to drop during all the right scenes.

Spader takes his usual soft-spoken naturally foreign attitude to a new level in this movie. His characterization of the man-seeking-submissive-woman is compelling, because it isn’t driven by an alpha-male attitude; it is driven by his need for a regimented lifestyle, where the amount of control he exerts on his life is precious and small compared to how he wishes it to be, as he hides in the closet from his ex-wife screaming at him to sign the divorce papers.

The dynamics of the relationship that Lee and Edward develop is challenging because we still want to ask if they are mentally healthy—mostly we are concerned about Lee. Though she’s no longer the hopelessly introverted and alone girl she was at the start of the film, Lee is still a masochist. Though, it seems she may have found the right man to take the reigns of control over her behavior. There will be no more scars or physical dangers in what she will subject her body to through her new instrument. But I worry, is this kind of relationship possible? Is it realistic? Perhaps, the idealist in me says, perhaps, but rare. But then, all the traditional formulas for romance have about the same rate of success. And that’s all a movie needs from me to say it was responsible to its characters and to the spirit of romance.

Donation and humiliation.

2005-09-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

Hope ya'll are enjoying the reviews. I've got one more on its way, and it'll be for a movie available for rental or DVD purchase, not in theaters like the last two. Oh, it's a great one. Kyle, I think you, specifically, would enjoy it. I wonder if you have seen it already? Hmmmmm.

Holy Christ! There's a quick-footed gerbil loose in my apartment.

On a more important note, my friend Brimmy's roommate's brother (...yeah, I think I wrote that out right) has a website called Daring is Caring, where he accepts dares for cash money, which he then donates to charity. It's a pretty neat concept and I certainly hope his site achieves some publicity 'round the net, especially considering the massive amount of money that is needed in the Gulf Coast. So, dare this guy to do something horribly embarrassing, and feel good about your money going to the Red Cross.

"I'm a stalker in a white Taurus."

2005-09-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

The past is gone, the future obscure, but at least the present is entirely ours, Don Johnston (Bill Murray) philosophizes in Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch’s newest film. An independent filmmaker to the core, Jarmusch’s movie challenges audiences with entire scenes containing no dialogue, and an ending that will leave many people confused and frustrated. I left the theater considering if people might have the right to be irritated, because even if a movie drops you into a very uncertain conclusion, the defense of “hey, life isn’t always so cut and dry either” is a weak one—the parts still have to add up to a whole experience. The parts to Broken Flowers do add up, and Bill Murray achieves a performance as good as in Lost in Translation but with fewer lines and more time on screen.

The story begins with an anonymous pink letter informing Don that he fathered a child who is now 19 years of age, and who has embarked on a search to find him. Reluctantly spurred on by his amateur detective neighbor’s fascination with his mystery, he visits several of his old flames looking for signs and asking questions which might reveal who may have written him the letter. Clues are in abundance in every household he visits, however, and the journey soon transforms into an exploration of who these women are now, and what artifacts remain of their old identity and his having been with them nearly two decades ago.

I love the interpretability of this film, and the way Jarmusch gives us so many perspective shots ensuring that we are typically thinking and making assumptions that Don is too, even though we are rarely ever given insight into what Don is thinking. We feel simultaneously like voyeurs and participants, projecting our feelings and thoughts onto Don, limited only by his mannerisms and facial expressions. The sequences featuring Bill Murray alone (both literally alone or alone in a crowd) staring off into a darkened apartment, or down the road, or straight ahead in an airplane, are as fulfilling as any scenes with explanatory dialogue or cathartic monologue for the active viewer. Murray has gotten quite good at playing older men reflecting on the successes of the past and the hollow feeling of the present (Lost in Translation, Life Aquatic), but they’re never quite the same character—differences aren’t just separated by plot lines, but the emotional IQs and philosophies these characters emanate. Murray is the only actor I know of today that makes the audience work hard to see that he’s not rehashing old characters.

This movie is slow. I mean that in every good way possible, and in none of the pejorative. I felt like I had time to look around and see what all was going on in the frame, like I was visiting the houses Don was entering, trying to rapidly digest the atmosphere of each woman’s life. The movie feels formally constructed like a traveling vacation you spend going five miles below the speed limit because you’ve never been through the land before. The movie is funny, but it no hurry to pull out the jokes. The movie is heartfelt and melancholy, but doesn’t attempt to bleed emotional arteries and scrape your nerves. Jarmusch wants us to experience his movie like Don experiences his voyage, reading the signs, trying to figure out the future and thereby make the right decisions in the present, which rapidly becomes as dead and final as memory.

Sadism and camp, like oil and water in Devil's Rejects.

2005-09-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

The violence in The Devil's Rejects isn't really beyond that of Rob Zombie's earlier film House of a Thousand Corpses, but Zombie turns up the sadism and brings in a few more laughs. The humor kept me from hating the movie, but neither the camp nor the sadism--certainly the strongest aspects of the film--worked to make it recommendable. In horror films camp and wanton brutality require a careful filmmaker to control them and get them to mix in a manner that keeps the audience laughing and cringing when they should, as opposed to rolling their eyes.

It's clear Rob Zombie is a big fan of the genre he's experimenting with, and if it weren't for the fact he's pushing the MPAA's standards and mores, I wouldn't even use the word experimenting. It's more like he's trying to revive the horrorcheese of the late 60s and the 70s. I felt like I was watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Last House on the Left updated to the quality of film, the contemporary parlance, and the necessary violence today's audience needs to make it morbidly appealing. As a consequence, the violence and sadistic behavior of the Devil's Rejects gang is boring because we expect it. In an interview on IFC's Henry's Film Corner, Rob Zombie said he wanted us to care about the characters, so the death scenes are as disturbing as snuff. That sense of proximity to the reality of the film just isn't there, though. The victims are nearly so underdeveloped they may as well be considered anonymous hicks. And, as for the film communicating a threatening evil from the villains, it tries a bit too hard in a scene with Mama Fireflies' flayling tongue, as she spits, curses, and tries to solicit the sheriff, who is meanwhile attacking her, makes her look neither demonic nor believably insane.

However, Sid Haig as Captain Spalding is the one character in the movie who works, both on a comedic level and in the level of unease he can fill you with. He's a funny, scary clown, which strikes me as the hardest role to make work in the entire film. If only the movie focussed on him instead of Otis (played by Bill Mosely) and Baby Firefly (played by Sheri Moon Zombie's buttcrack). Bill Mosely never quite makes those transitions from frenzied killer to calm, sardonic psychopath work, and Sheri Moon's acting abilities are still very limited. I honestly can't tell how much of her character was just poorly written and how much was just poorly acted, but I sense elements of both.

I'm reticent to ascribe a philosophical message to the film; so, instead, I'll call the reason the movie twists and pinches your nipples until you admit that the good guys are just as crazy, bloodthirsty and base as the bad guys an important "concept." Although there was a dull sort of thrill watching characters who are polar opposites--the devil worshipping anarchists versus the religious fascist who believes he is divine justice manifest--inevitably confront each other. The dullness, I imagine, comes from the campy dialogue which, because it isn't usually funny enough to laugh at, only serves to dispossess the characters of their conviction and relevance. Nevertheless, I was surprised at my renewed interest in the movie when the meeting between the Devil's Rejects and sheriff occurred. Sensing his audience might be interested in how this might play out, Mr. Zombie arranges a deus ex machina to remind us how silly it was to put faith in the possibility of receiving a satisfying climax.

Though Rob Zombie's abilities as a director and a writer are improving, he's still not yet separated himself enough from his influences to make anything more than an updated homage to old horror movies.

If you're here, you're probably horny.

2005-09-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

And I just don't get it, people. Every time a search engine refers people to my blog it is almost exclusively from people looking for pornographic content. Here are some search strings in order of frequency I see them:

1. "Bob Crane Porn"
2. "Severed labia"
3. "Willem Dafoe's penis"
4. "Crazy girls do it in the bathroom"
5. "asphixiating fetish"

A few honorable mentions that I've seen recently are "I let the young Jehovah men fuck me," "Vin Diesel naked gay fetish," and a variation on the asphixiating fetish where this particular web surfer wanted to see girl-on-girl choking action. Everytime I see these people referred to my blog I always check how long they stayed, most of the time they don't seem to find what they are looking for, except for the fellow who has a fetish for the pious young men in ties who ride bicycles and wake me up on Saturday morning. That guy seemed to find something he liked.

I realize that my posting this will probably make it even more likely these people will come to my blog searching for these terms, and, while I could claim I did not know when I was writing "severed labia" for the first time on Vodka-Yogurt that it would snag so many fetishists, now I have a responsibility to set things straight. So here you go, folks, how to avoid Vodka-Yogurt in your search for fetish porn.

1. When searching for porn, be careful to pay close attention to the text excerpt containing your search term(s). For example, when you look up "Bob Crane porn" you'll see the words "the movie Autofocus" and "starring Greg Kinnear" in Vodka-Yogurt's result. Now, simple arithmatic should lead you to believe that Greg Kinnear was probably not starring in any of Bob Crane's pornographic videos, and that he was actually in a movie about Bob Crane's dirty little life. And, really, you should be focussing on the results that have long non sequitur strings of naughty words.

2. Be sure to check out the URL you're going to. All my posts (except my archives by date) have their title listed in the URL, so if it doesn't sound pornographic, it probably isn't.

3. Why not add the terms "video" or "pictures" or "download" to your search string. Or better yet, add file types like "avi," "jpg," or "mpg" to your searches, I think you and your genitals will be flush with excitement at the results.

4. Be specific, but not too specific. Searching for "Bob Crane Porn" shouldn't really lead you to my website unless you're several pages into a google search, and I don't think you'll ever reach me if you use quotes around the string. If you're 17 pages into a search and haven't found what you're looking for, it's time to change your search terms. Conversely, if you get only three results, don't bother clicking on mine or the other two, it's time cut out some extra words.

5. Use porn search engines. I've never once had a referral from one of them, but if I catch one, I promise I will send a letter to that search engine in complaint on your behalf. I'll even post a copy of the letter here.

6. If you've found yourself continuously being referred to my blog during all of your sexy searches, I suggest adding "-vodka -yogurt" to your string. My blog will never appear.

Well, I hope this was helpful and that google will now refer you all to this page rather than my reviews, which I'm sure are a real boner killers. I may be wrong though. Please feel free to comment post-orgasm if my blog is a good masturbatory aid, and do post why. That would truly fascinate me.

Anyways! I'm gonna be seeing Broken Flowers tonight (yay!), and I also got to screen Rob Zombie's Devil's Rejects. I'm thinking Thursday will be a big day for me, review-wise.

The dirtiest joke ever outlined.

2005-09-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I was partaking in a section of an online forum which is dedicated solely to "flaming," which is forum lingo for abusing other posters--not behaving flamboyantly gay. This particular section has a warning on it where it says "Don't come in here if you can't handle the flames," and it's not meant as a joke. In my time participating in that forum I can say that, in its best threads, it can keep up well with a friar's roast. Leave it to me, then, to make a person so offended in the forum that he sent me a PM that if I ever wrote something like I did again, he'd somehow locate me through my IP and kill me. Words, apparently even in locations where we've all supposedly agreed they don't, have power. In Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza's The Aristocrats, we are encouraged to laugh at disgusting, violent, and depraved images constructed with words by people who believe, like I did in the forum, that in the proper irreverant context, nothing is off limits. I still believe in this concept, despite the death threats from people who discover they do not in an abrupt fashion after I or someone else challenge their sensibilities.

In his letter about The Aristocrats, Penn Jillette writes that his movie is political simply because it doesn't try to be political. He's right; the movie is getting a gradual release across the country and did not even seek an MPAA rating, because they knew it'd end up NC-17--or maybe even rated X thanks to Bob Saget's amazing but incomplete performance. This movie has no physical depictions of nudity or violence or sex, it just has words which depict all of the above. This is a movie that free speech begat, and it surprises me that it's being released as widely as it is.

So, "The Aristocrats" is a dirty joke, which has been passed down through generations of comedians and performers since Vaudeville. It starts out with "A family--a mother, a father, a son, a baby daughter, and their pet dog--go into a talent agent's office..." and ends with a very dull punchline with the talent agent asking the father what they call themselves; they are the Aristocrats. Now, the joke only works in however funny (read: gross, lascivious, offensive, etc.) you make the Aristocrats' act. The joke isn't the punchline, it's how amazed you can make your audience at what a filthy mind you have (incest, scatalogical scenes, and dismemberment are just the tip of the iceberg). As a result, this joke has been passed down through generations of comedians backstage. In The Aristocrats we get to hear from over 100 comedians, a few magicians, and one mime performing and/or dissecting this classic joke.

Unfortunately, my excitement for this movie extended beyond my enjoyment of it. I was frustrated at the editing of the film, which seemed to go against the grain of the message they were trying to convey about the success of the joke. According to all the comedians, the success of the joke is completely dependent on the teller, who brings his own unique style and rhythm to disgusting you into laughter. Yet, throughout much of the actual telling of the jokes, comedians are interrupted mid stream, and replaced with others already in the middle of telling their own version, leading you to believe that any Aristocrats performance can be interchanged with another. They also interrupt performances with other people dissecting aspects of the joke, or even explaining to you why a certain comedian is exceptional at retelling the joke (like Gilbert Gottfried and Bob Saget), breaking the rhythm of their performance. The only explanation for this kind of editing I could think of is that Paul Provenza thought we'd be laughing so hard we'd need a break so we could get ready for another onslaught of word-images. Well, shame on you, Mr. Provenza. I wanted to be doubled over in tears like Rob Schneider was during Gottfried's telling of the joke at Hugh Hefner's friars roast, instead all you got out of me were belly laughs as I leaned back in my seat. The best performances of the joke should have been discrete scenes.

I do have one criticism, not for the filmmakers, but for the comedians who refused to tell versions of this joke because they said "oh, you've probably already got plenty of versions." You awful cowards. If you're not good at telling the joke, just expose yourself as insecure and be done with it. With a number of these comedians--I'm looking at you Jon Stewart--you can just see in their eyes that telling the joke on film makes them uncomfortable. Big, big kudos to brave Bob Saget, then, who has by far the filthiest most unrelenting version of the joke, which I naturally laughed hardest at. I only regret we couldn't have heard versions of the joke from Rodney Dangerfield and Milton Berle, and many more of the old school comedians who probably had twisted minds aged like top shelf whiskeys.

Aside from those criticisms, the movie is obscenely funny, and with a little luck the DVD release will have some special features where I can see individual comedians tell the joke. But go try to see it in theaters anyways.

Garmonbozia.

2005-09-10T15:15:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to believe “Twin Peaks” only lasted two seasons on television. During the series’ broadcast it seemed everyone was asking if you’d seen the last episode and what your latest theories on it were. Lynch’s mysteries are especially engrossing because every surreal scene, narrative-disturbing shot, and green formica table with a bowl of creamed corn on it feels like an urgent clue. This can ultimately be a frustrating aspect to his movies, but it’s the initially attractive quality to his films, which is why they’re so hard to give up on once you’ve hit the play button.

David Lynch’s diehard fans love his style for the same reason we all love to analyze our dreams, hoping to return to the good ones to see what might happen. And here we are. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is more perplexing than the series, and, when all is said and done, I still don’t see the main direction(s) Lynch was interested in taking his story. I get that it is, on one level, a parody of soap operas, but the parts of the film that carry it beyond that are a potpourri of confusing themes, genres, and characters. In a way, I think Lynch is a little sneaky about convincing his audience early on that his story is going to be accompanied with an explanation or will make sense to us in the end. Towards the beginning of the film we see a woman with orange hair in an orange suit, mouth puckered, blinking, stomping around in front of three FBI agents. We learn after her equally bizarre introduction, that her random appearance and behaviors are part of a code the FBI use when giving out information on sensitive cases. I’ve no idea why they’d need to communicate in code at a private airport, or how the information communicated was sensitive, but it was nice knowing that Lynch didn’t just throw in a woman clad in bright orange for no reason. Relish this experience while you can, explanations are hard to come by from here on out.

I don’t have a clear sense of what David Bowie is doing in this movie, or David Lynch’s son with the plaster mask with the sharp nose, or the dwarf, or that damned bowl of creamed corn. Three of those things seem important aspects of the movie to me, but the fourth might be too—you never can tell with Lynch. Despite my confusion about all of this, I have to admit, I like the movie. Its strangeness is so unique, its mood so dark, and its humor still so playful, that I can’t discourage anyone from seeing this movie—and if you liked the series I’d definitely encourage you to see it. The movie goes back in the “Twin Peaks” timeline to give us a glimpse into Laura Palmer’s life before she was murdered, and a peak into some of the investigation of an earlier “Blue Rose” victim. Don’t go into the movie expecting the series to make more sense; the characters are fleshed out more, but we’re largely just teased with more facets to a mystery that we delight in hypothesizing about.

This movie barely escapes that category of movie which is “more fun to think about than watch,” and does so mostly with the humor it brings us—especially in the second half of the film which plays out like a demented “Beverly Hills 90210,” complete with 28 year-olds playing teenagers. If you haven’t seen the series, I’ll warn you, it’s likely you’ll walk away from it feeling confused, but I’d hope—like me, years ago—you get confused and then hop onto half.com and buy the entire TV series. A lot of these characters, and many of the ones not represented in this film but exist in the TV series, stick with you. Then there's the diner that serves the good coffee, and The Lodge that houses everyone's evil doppelgangers....

The D is for "Don't tell me it's 90 minutes long."

2005-09-02T21:04:00.000-07:00

Don’t watch House of D. It’s a lesson in how not to make a directorial debut. It’s a lesson in how not to write a script. It’s a lesson in how not to make your actors sound authentic. It’s a lesson in why not to put a mentally handicapped character into your movie just because you think he’ll make a cute sidekick and enhance the likeability of your protagonist.

I like David Duchovny as an actor, but he fails miserably as director and obscenely as a writer. The humor in this movie is comprised of all the sappy jokes you heard in elementary school. (Remember those jokes about authors whose names sounded fitting to the content of their books? I wish I didn’t.) This movie makes fun of how kids are made to eat brussel sprouts because their mothers think it is healthy. Yep, that’s about as new a ground as this movie treads. Words that went through my mind as I watched this film: sappy, insipid, sappy, sappy, sappy, cloying, sappy, sappy… sappy. Take a look at some of the main characters: the hooker with a heart of gold, the retarded man-child with a heart of gold, the pill-popping single mother with a heart of gold, and the gruff, chainsmoking French woman with a heart of gold. This movie wasn’t pieced together of even first-string literary and cinematic clichés. This is anemic, asthmatic, third-string bullshit.

By the time the movie finally achieves a reasonable level of darkness to suggest the movie has “tension” or “plot,” it’s still impossible to take seriously, because in order to deal with their troubles, characters have to step outside of themselves, gaining backbones and rough edges they don’t have because they never would have needed them. It’s not that all coming of age stories have to be unduly dark in order to be interesting, but they have to be honest, not bludgeoning the audience to death with glassy-eyed nostalgia. Besides, the movie ends where it began, glazed with the artificial sweetner that causes headaches, cancer, and suicide.

This movie seems made specifically for the afternoon Sunday movie on FOX or UPN, for the very reason that it is the good try gone bad: it’s a movie that has a good cast (Robin Williams, Tea Leoni, David Duchovny), it’s a movie that should appeal to the whole family, and it’s a movie that won’t be expensive to purchase for broadcast. My hopes for Duchovny are that either 1) he sticks with acting, or 2) he finds a new genre to write and direct in.

Katrina's wake.

2005-09-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

I don't get really political in here usually, but I'm really enraged with how our federal government and the local government has responded to Hurricane Katrina. Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote a good opinion piece on it here. An excerpt:

I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

Indeed, it seems that FEMA was severely neutered when it was absorbed into Homeland Security, proving once again that the government has a mastery of irony that I'll never surpass. President Bush even ended his vacation prematurely to focus on relief in New Orleans:

We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)

Thank God, I'm sure Trent Lott has suffered far worse than one of those poor or elderly people that weren't evacuated because they didn't have access to a vehicle. Anyways, at least I agree with Bush that the relief response has been "unacceptable," I only hope he can surprise me by actually doing something about it beyond public condemnation.

So yeah, people are suffering and dying. It looks like the worst case scenario has happened, and we're getting slow in getting a response from our government both in efficacy and sympathy, so please give support any way you can:

Red Cross
MoveOn
Liberal Blogs for Hurricane Relief

Dennis Hopper got mean after rehab.

2005-09-02T03:33:00.000-07:00

As far as his surrealist films go, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet is his least stylistically indulgent. There are no characters of inexplicable or supernatural origins, no scenes that defy logic or chronology. Nevertheless, there’s that stiffness in the actors, those scenes involving overweight prostitutes dancing to Roy Orbison on top of parked cars, Dennis Hopper’s brutal delivery of every line of his dialogue (“PABST! BLUE! RIBBON!”), and Dean Stockwell’s brilliant painted-face creepshow of a performance. The movie pokes good fun at the plucky investigators of pulpy young-adult novels, and the movies that adapted them in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But it also answers the question: “what if these paragons of curiosity and naïveté actually did find the uncensored criminal subculture of their quiet town?” It’s a bit like Far From Heaven but with nitrous huffers, fisting, and oral sex by knifepoint.

Like someone took Burroughs’ cut-up method to an amateur German porno and a Nancy Drew adaptation, it should go without saying that the movie is wickedly funny. However, its moments of deliberately tin-eared writing and supremely stiff acting (like George Dickerson’s reaction as Detective Williams, delivering the line with a wan smile: “Yep. That’s a human ear, all right.”) somehow don’t stymie sympathy with the characters. Perhaps it is because, deep down below the bitter layers of resentment brought about by life experience, we still like sweetly naïve people, and maybe we even like what towns such as Lumberton represent. At the very least, we don’t like seeing them hurt and suffer the way they do in Blue Velvet. Roger Ebert certainly didn’t, and was so offended by what Isabella Rosselini had to act out in the film, and confused as to why he was seeing it, that he gave this movie 1 star; an honor this movie shares with other titles like Christmas with the Cranks, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. (The special edition DVD also has an archived clip from Siskel & Ebert where the two critics argue over the movie—a delightful relic from the past that reminds us how much we miss Gene Siskel, why we are reticent to put much trust in Ebert, and why we hate Richard Roeper like we hated Dick Sargant.)

Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern are gifted actors in David Lynch’s hands (it’d be unwise to also trust them under the guidance of Stephen Spielberg or Paul Verhoeven, though), but Isabella Rosselini and Dennis Hopper steal the movie. Rosselini gives the most daring performance in the movie: her nudity is unflattering (and therefore perfect), her singing is painful (and therefore perfect), and her continuous air of desperation—and underlying arousal with her own suffering—is without flaw. It’s like hearing the saddest song of your life played off key by a drunken piano player who just learned his best friend killed his family. She is a complete portrait of the compound-fractured spirit. Meanwhile, Hopper, in this film, isn’t just that creepy guy you’d meet in a dark alley between an adult shop and liquor store; he’s the guy in your nightmares that you meet between an adult shop and liquor store, eating a dead dog. He’s pure predator—sexually, physically, spiritually, whatever ya got—and captures that manic wildness behind the eyes that sociopaths acquire when life becomes a frenzied pursuit of whatever desire they feel at the moment.

The movie left me feeling haunted. It snuck under my skin because of how familiar the saccharine dialogue was to movies and shows I’d see as a child, and, in that affectionate sort of mood we get into when we laugh with ironical amusement but with nostalgic warmth, I was really taken for a ride when this movie made a break for my jugular.

City of Dreams.

2005-08-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve been wondering if David Lynch believes what Freud meant when he said that in dreams “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” I’d be inclined to posit that Lynch does not, and would probably suggest that sometimes a cigar doesn’t necessarily have to represent a penis, or even one thing alone. Whenever I watch one of David Lynch’s films it feels simultaneously like I’m being fed the raw imagery of dreams, but, like in dreams, that there’s an underlying coherence to it—a code of images, where the longer I’m bombarded with them the more keys I get to translate it. Sometimes Lynch doesn’t give me all the keys, and I don’t always hold that against him, but in watching Molholland Drive I feel like he gave me all the ones I needed.

This film necessitates slightly more lucidity than some of his other surreal pieces like Eraserhead or Twin Peaks. Mulholland Drive is about the struggle between dreams—both varieties: waking and sleeping—and the reality outside of us. The movie hinges on our place as beings stuck with one foot off the ground of both these tilt-a-whirls, and therefore the movie's conflict is in finding an equilibrium between these two realms. In waking life we view ourselves from a perspective that we are comfortable with, creating our self image with a dash of fantasy and convenient omission, mixed and mingled with our factual histories. We craft and maintain a mirror reflecting reality, as the reality it reflects runs over it, conforming the surface to its natural shape instead of our own. Lynch delights in this movie at showing us just how much more real fantasies can be to people, how they affect us just as profoundly—and sometimes more profoundly—than what really is and was.

Naomi Watts and Laura Harring give great performances (great bad ones and great good ones), and there are some fun cameos by Dan Hedaya, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Lynch favorite Michael J. Anderson. He directs his actors with his usual imposed woodenness, causing clichéd dialogue to stand out so plainly that you can’t help but chuckle. However, Lynch inserts two scenes that are so absorbing with each of his female leads, that it feels like we’re briefly in a different movie—and in one of those scenes, we are. Both these sequences deal with becoming someone else, about turning yourself into a vessel where a performance erupts but is anchored in nothing real. These two scenes I’m talking about are what your understanding of this movie hinges upon, especially the second as we watch Naomi Watts perform “Llorando” (Roy Orbison’s “Crying” translated to Spanish) which is so breathtaking you’ll forget what Club Silencio is all about.

So most of this review is trapped in the vague and abstract, but I think that’s necessary. I don’t want to give away any specifics on how the movie develops, but I think if you focus on these themes that I’ve outlined, the movie will take greater shape in your mind. Mulholland Drive is about how we respond to our fears with comforting fantasies, how Hollywood hackery finds its way into our daydreams, how other people’s dreams for us are just as haunting as our own recurring nightmares, and what happens when the membrane of our happy delusions breaks. This is David Lynch’s strongest film, and he uses his own unique which separates him from most Hollywood directors to criticize Hollywood itself. One of the reasons I think this movie is his strongest is that it has a greater sense of its aim, where movies like Lost Highway were so experimental that it seemed David Lynch was trying to see just how stylistically his own he could make a movie, and it played out like a gift ornately wrapped but containing nothing but knotted-up shoelaces. So, if you see no other Lynch film, make it this one.