"Forgotten Men with Steam" (Pre-Code Capsules): GOODBYE AGAIN, ARSENE LUPIN, HE WAS HER MAN, THE BOWERY, HELL'S ANGELS

HELL'S ANGELS

1930 - dir. Howard Hughes (w/ James Whale, Edmund Goulding - uncredited)

***1/2

All the Howard Hughes' Aviator-Womanizer Extraordinaire mytholos aside, this is a pretty interesting film marred solely by a pair of charisma-deprived actors playing unlikable WWI pilot Yank brothers from Oxford, one of whom, Roy (James Hall) is a cowardly womanizing douchebag, the other, Monte (Ben Lyon), a naive simp who expects nymphomaniac Jean Harlow (in the role that made her an instant iconic sex symbol) to live up to his goofy moralistic ideals since, you know, she kissed him once. Refusing even to believe his own brother shagged her, he's sneer-worthy, and Hughes invites us to share a conspiratorial groan at his old-fashioned naivete. Some guys, man, a girl winks at him and he suddenly insists they're going steady. You know the type. Hell, I used to be that type - weren't we all, once upon a time? I passed up on so many nymphomaniac hotties because I had to make them mix tapes first, and anguish and pine and call too soon even though it felt like weeks of agony to me; I couldn't just start making out with them within minutes of meeting, no matter how drunk I got, so they went off with someone else. But even I was never as big a chump as Roy. "Never love a woman, just make love to her" Monte tries to tell him, and so in a way, Hughes tells us. Indeed, HELL'S ANGELS fits squarely within my 'older brother cinema' concept, wherein the director aims his messages at an imagined younger brother, the way few directors ever do (Paul Thomas Anderson, Hawks, and Linklater are the only ones come to mind).

The thing about Hughes is, he walks it likes he talks it: there's a cool sense of uninhibited sexual congress, with one of the best all-time 'fade-outs' in the pre-code code, connecting a scene of Monte and Harlow making out on a couch, over to naive brother Roy sulking back at the bunks having been blown off by her, and then back to the couch at Harlow's pad where the vibe has shifted from simmering to cold and sad. Monte's ashen mood and Harlow's nonplussed attitude ("It seems colder in here now, doesn't it?") indicates how much he now hates himself and thinks she's a slut now because like a true douchebag he lacks the self-awareness to realize his post-orgasm depression is not her fault and will pass within an hour or so. Dude, this is pre-code shit we could have used all through the 40s and 50s. Damn Joseph Breen to an angel-less Hell, if he's not there already.

Anyway, the two boys are drags, as I say, and part of the blame lies with the actors and Hughes, who clearly casts lame ducks to make himself more charismatic by contrast: James Hall is like a vaguely bloated mix of Richard Barthelmess and Bob Newhart and he overacts horribly; as Monte, Ben Lyon is a big improvement, while unconvincing as a ladykiller he does a decent job with his scenes of his being seduced against his very weak will by Harlow, who with her jet black eyebrows and platinum wave almost steals the movie from the spectacular aerial combat. It's for her and the fighting we're here, so every scene of the two brothers engaged in their worldly nonsense seems worthless unless Harlow is there, coming between them.

A word on that: Harlow is a different beast here than she would be later for MGM -- less a gutter-baby-talking brawler who likes sex and lounging around eating bonbons and babbling to her maid--and more an upscale nymphomaniac whose refusal to be a one-man guy is never disparaged by Hughes' script. Instead it's Roy who comes off looking like a dopey punter and Monte not far behind. There's no Joe Breen around to hobble Harlow for Roy as he thinks is proper since she winked at him once, six men ago, to spot-weld her chains to the kitchen so he can fly away in confidence. And right behind him in assholery is Monte who seems to resent any girl who would be dumb enough to shag him. Two chumps from Oxford indeed!

 But who cares? I've never been a HUGE fan of Harlow's MGM baby-talk blonde but she's different here, maybe it's that she's a lot thinner, and younger, and those fierce black eyebrows make her seem accessible --you can feel the hair on her arms tingling with animal attraction. She's like a living electric sheet of fire. She's not perfect, but she's dazzling. (Compare to how kind of busted she looks just a year later in Public Enemy, below).

Second big bang for the buck here -- superb aerial action. This being the film that was begun silently and finished with sound there's a certain freedom to be found not worrying about sound in the lengthy aerial combat: all the sounds of all the guns and the humming of the biplane engines as they go buzzing about is strangely soothing, especially in a very long and riveting scene involving a German zeppelin attempting to drop bombs on Piccadilly Circus by lowering the bombardier down through the clouds on a cable (the zeppelin's only chance to escape getting blown out of the sky is to stay up where the air is too thin for the old school bi-planes). Hughes being an aviator delivers not just action thrills but a very clear and graspable sense of what was really involved in dogfighting and bombing - the mix of luck, patience, not freaking out or choking on the trigger, and just how damn slow those planes were compared to today. Hughes went all out for this stuff especially with hand-painted color tints. And nary a word is granted the brave young German lowered down on a cable below the cloud line from a gigantic German dirigible so he can direct the bombing of London - but who lies to his commander, and has them drop the full load of bombs into the Thames instead. And Hughes milks the tension - the Germans speak in dubbed German! (with silent film intertitles instead of subtitles! Ausgezeichnete!)

And as the German who first duels with Monte (before the war) and then later questions the boys after they're shot down behind enemy lines, Lucien Prival is a delight. A leaner feral version of Erich Von Stroheim, he steals the final chapter of the film. Don't forget the Germans weren't yet Nazis, there was still a lot of chivalrous, sporting blood between Germans and the Allies- they'd all been drinking and dueling together scant years before. Of all the characters in this filthy war, it's actually Prival who glows the hardest, seems the staunchest of fellows. Harlow also earns her bombshell wings and can make fans of even on-the-fence-about-her types like myself, but man, those two brothers are just stinkers.

GOODBYE AGAIN

1933 - dir. Michael Curtiz

***

Warren William is at his most frivolous in this Warner Brothers comedy, maybe even too much so, and I say this as a die-hard William fan who even like Satan Met a Lady, that original Maltese Falcon adaptation where he hams it up so much he seems continually buzzing on his first martini after a hard day. Here in Goodbye Again he's even airier, but he has a weird cool chemistry with Joan Blondell, with whom he's appeared in many a WB pre-code. Here she's his tolerant secretary and he's a ladykiller romance writer; Helen Chandler (Mina from Dracula) is the sister of WW's current (married) conquest (Genevieve Tobin). She's already looking a world older and stranger than she did two years earlier in Dracula (she was a notorious alcoholic who burnt herself up in a fire shortly hereafter). Wallace Ford--bespectacled!-- is cast against type as a litigious relative (and Chandler's husband). Dragging Tobin's husband (Hugh Herbert) in tow, they set about following William from Cleveland to Albany on the sleeper train, and there's a great scene where their presence in the next car all but forces William to sleep with Tobin, waiting in his sleeper in a sexy negligee. It all ends in William's Albany boudoir where he jumps around on the bed and generally carries on while Blondell is gradually revealed to be far more than a secretary but hitherto 'open-minded' to his dalliances with ladies such as Tobin - usually, but because she's married and he's lying to her about it, she gets pissed.

That's about it --not much to write home about though the actors sure strive for a farcical peak. It doesn't come but William is onstage every minute, almost, so it's tough to care about anything else if you're a fan (and why wouldn't you be?) even if this ain't his finest hour. He needs more menace to be really riveting. Here he's coasting on his wolfish charm like he knows we love him no matter what. We do.

HE WAS HER MAN

1934 - dir. Lloyd Bacon

**1/2

Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell hustle around from the Turkish baths of NYC to Chicago to Marina Del Rey or thereabouts before seeking refuge in a small Portuguese fishing community, the kind showgirls and good-hearted whores go for their second chances, you know, to be respectable, and marry some big hunk of hick local or dumb lunk of a fisherman (see also: Tiger Shark, Anna Christie, The Wedding Night, The Purchase Price, The Wind, to name merely a few) - almost like one last dig at the sanctity of, as Blondell's heart-of-golder puts it, "good honest decent hardworking people, which you wouldn't know anything about, Dick Jordan!"

Believe it or not, the big surprise here is Victor Jory as the hulking fisherman, the kind of guy usually played by Gary Cooper or George Brent (if he's the hero) or Edward G. Robinson or Ralph Bellamy (if he's the foil). Jory might not be as good an actor as any of those guys, but he does have a deep voice, a looming height, the stoic poise of a stock company Sitting Bull, and gravitas that belies his then-lean years. He might be burdened with a hack-accent and mangled syntax but he's no rube. Cagney and Joan might talk faster and hustle more but Jory actually steals the show, or at least gives Cagney a run for his money. It's even got one of those typically succinct encapsulations of the advent of Joe Breen's draconian code rubrick, the sanctity of marriage prevails and Cagney walks off into the sunset, arm in arm with his killers. Let it come down.

THE BOWERY

1933 dir. Michael Curtiz

***1/2

Robust Raoul Walsh direction makes this turn-of-the-century New York City Darryl F. Zanuck opus The Gangs of New York-style farce to beat, with all the downtown warring fire brigades (they brawl in the street while burning Chinese laundrymen plead in vain out their second story window in a bit of sly callous racism), Tammany Hall corruption, nickel beer, sawdust, playful brawling, tear-stained pathos, and freewheeling publicity stunts the era can offer. Wallace Beery plays Chuck, the big shot of the Bowery (the Bill the Butcher); Jackie Cooper is a racist version of his orphan self, who lives for throwing rocks through "Chink's winders;" Fay Wray is the good girl who ends up keeping house for the pair of them, and George Raft is Chuck's rival, an up-and-coming sharpie with a saloon and fire brigade of his own. Chuck don't like that much, and he's so tough he saps a broad who drunkenly crashes his table, as illustration to Cooper that women are "only after yer spondoolicks" since Cooper's gone in for trading cigarette cards "from guinea kids." Yeesh! Coogan's presence is somewhat superfluous, but he does his best with a third wheel role that seems affixed to Beery like some kind of blubbering lamprey.

The problem with the whole motivation of Leo DiCaprio in GANGS OF NEW YORK was swearing revenge on a man who his father fought fairly and is commemorated by. Swearing revenge would be like the grandson of a fallen German soldier tracking down the American who killed his grandfather on the battlefield, illogical and certainly nothing to root for and makes one wonder: does Scorsese even understand how vengeance works? Eventually the smoke clears and the auld love triangle coheres from the crowded streets betwixt Wray, Raft, and the jealous brute Beery --yawn. But at least it doesn't get it in the way of the scantily clad dancers. A better plot thread has Raft jumping off the Brooklyn bridge on a wager for Chuck's saloon; he makes it but almost used a dummy in his place, so reversals of fortune are always happening on the Bowery, including an appearance of vile liquor-bashing Carrie Nation and her armada of shrewish wives, living examples of the evils of sobriety. For a country finally free of the evils of prohibition (it was repealed in 1933 - the same year of THE BOWERY's release), the drunkenness on display here is almost patriotic.

ARSENE LUPIN

1931 - *** - dir. Jack Conway

Karen Morley is at her warmest in this pre-code MGM caper: The romance between her and John Barrymore starts with her naked in his bed at his party (he insists on being in the room while she dresses - with the lights off and it's pretty sexy -for he is no gentleman!) and --oh right, this is Paris, where such things are okay -- he doesn't have to go to the gallows to spare her having to confess she spent the night with him, and even if he doesn't believe her story about being an exiled Russian countess, he still likes her. I'm not a huge Lionel fan (he plays the head of the French Secret Service, sworn to bag Lupin before he retires - and is always is fussy and overly sincere) but I am a huge apologist and unrepentant fan for his great, drunk brother John - and the pair have more great rapport here than in all the other films together, and there's even some fun ambiance and dabs of old dark house mystery (it takes awhile to learn which brother is Arsène and naturally I can't spill it).

Even if, by the end, it's really not too much at stake and it all kind of resembles the later THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (i.e. no deaths), right down the daylight hour museum theft, it's a-pretty hot, breezy fun, and despite its rough treatment in the theft, the Mona Lisa is none the worse for wear. The real stealing going on here is the theft of Karen Morley from being in more films, appearing only sporadically after she left MGM (due to disputes over her private life, and later the blacklist). So we have only a handful of films with which to treasure her adult sexual openness and witty walk and the way she more than made up for actorly limitations through charm, wit, presence and her icy laugh. There's this film, PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD, SCARFACE, MASK OF FU MANCHU, DINNER AT EIGHT and, well, they're all worthwhile anyway, but with her... sublime. You can have Garbo (though I always cried during GRAND HOTEL when I watched it really drunk back in the day), for my money its her sexual chemistry with John Barrymore here that kind of melted the keys in my pocket, like if the sexy Jean Harlow of HELL'S ANGELS grew a few years and inches and went to finishing school but got kicked out for opium smoking, instead of suffering from a terrible case of renal failure, and dying at the tragic age of 26. God bless and keep these angels both, in whatever macabre heaven they doth reign in.

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All you need is holes: WONDERWALL (1968) and the Entomological Mystery Tour

Thisbe and Pyramus loved through a hole in a wall, and that made it to Midsummer Night's Dream, so surely there's room for a 1968 Britpop film called WONDERWALL that's really more about "all the lonely peepers," like Prof. Oscar Collins (Jack McGowran) at a waterworks entomologist who collects bugs and peeps through a hole in the wall at neighbor and fashion model Penny Lane (Jane Birkin). Through microscope viewer-size holes in their shared wall he can see her modeling for a photographer lad (Brian Walsh) who dresses in Apple records green, and dealing with her two-timing boyfriend (Ian Quarrier, who tries to get her into a menage a trois with Anita Pallenberg) but Birkin is so gorgeous and young, with such heavenly legs and crazy fashions- that we want to see her all the time and less of old Collins. But mostly we see her only in a round hole.

So what is going on? Is this a PEEPING TOM for the Carnaby Street dandies? Why do we spend so much dull time with Collins? When Quarrier visits him to borrow borrow ice and sugar at various times,  the professor always dressed as if hoping to be invited over and it's very, very dispiriting. The film drags on and we learn Penny's pregnant. Will Quarrier help raise his forthcoming baby. Will the professor ride to the rescue? I mean in some capacity other than cocking his head quizzically, as might a beagle trying to understand his master's command, letting us know he's more or less neutered and nothing to fear as far as midnight slashings or pantings or underwear drawer rufflings?

Whatever the motives, the soundtrack is a nonstop feast for the chemically-enhanced ear, with George Harrison's psychedelic melange of sitars, guitars, harmonica, tamboura and Indian horns howling, tinkling, and buzzing like an array of electric insects nearly nonstop. It's an entomological freakfest - a kind of mute Beavis and Butthead if they were just one guy who barely spoke but watched vintage Joi Lansing Scopitones through round holes in a wall, with only Norma Shearer in RIPTIDE (1934) and Isabella Rossellini in GREEN PORNO (2008) able to compete in the insect costume category (and no spider ala Lansing's "Web of Love" to provide a threat) and Harrison's buzzing tamboura and sitar hovering deep inside your ear ossicles.

From top: Joi Lansing, WONDERWALL, RIP TIDE, GREEN PORNO

The source story is by Gérard Brach, who wrote REPULSION and CUL-DE-SAC and THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who penned VANISHING POINT (1972). One gets the impression of Brach's earlier work that he never meant Professor Collins to be any kind of Monsieur Hulot-Chaplin type whimsy generator but a skeevy older version of Terence Stamp in THE COLLECTOR, a fellow who doesn't need to abduct a pretty young specimen for his jar because one lives right next door, and there's plenty of air holes. The idea that Collins loses himself and begins to demolish his apartment to better make a million holes in the wall to peep through is creepy in itself, but doubly so when filmmaker Joe Massott films these actions to a bouncy polka and double projection speed ala Harold Lloyd or Benny Hill. Instead of laughs, what Collins needs a good slashening by Catherine Deneuve's razor, especially once he makes it his business to break into Penny's pad and start nosing around. That's the fundamental problem, or maybe solution, to this film --that young Penny just happens to be trying to snuff it right at the same evening he busts in. Good old Collins!

But maybe it's also because this weird pro-scopophile angle that it's ultimately interesting beyond its basic function as a pretty eye-popping light show showcase for Birkin's heavenly gams. If you go in expecting it to be a dull story of a dweebish scientist shuffling around his apartment in his pajamas, a reverse-gendered REPULSION tale of mental disintegration coupled to some old nudie cutie comedy like THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS, then the pop art YELLOW SUBMARINER tangents will throw you left of field; if you go in expecting a pop art whimsy-fest be prepared to be rather unnerved by the inordinate amount of time we watch Collins "reacting" to all he peeps. Factoring in the Beatles and pop art psychedelic hipster culture elements, Collins is a Mr. Jones / Father McKenzie bowler hat type Brit in a student art film, REAR WINDOW's Jimmy Stewart if he had no friends and didn't even know Grace Kelly, but spied on her and we were somehow expected to root for this delusional creep too shy and out of it to even realize how creepy he's being, figuring a movie about him watching old Grace Kelly through a hole was enough of a movie subject, especially with his imagining having a big duel with her boyfriend for her, using as weapons things like giant oversize pens, lipsticks, and cigarettes while the lime green photographer snaps pictures, all just so she can load his hookah while he stares off into space. Really, if you're going to imagine yourself a young Turk, why not be cool? Who pictures themselves as an old square duffer trying vainly to look hip? That defeats the whole purpose. Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Collins?

Now I should preface by saying I adore Michael Powell but I'm too skeeved out by PEEPING TOM to ever see it again, ditto THE COLLECTOR, and I can't stand Monsieur Hulot and all those damned (in my mind) terrible Jacques Tati comedies. And when it comes to the Beatles I'm more a Harrison-Ringo-John fan, and find some of Paul's songs insufferably cheeky and guileless. Paul was always trying to bring in the lonely old timers and bouncy children along on the picnic, dumbing shit down so they understand, while John and George were about leading the brave into the future (and scaring the shit out of children like me in the 70s, who of course loved the Paul songs). And there's that same bouncy children vibe here -- the colorful psychedelic whirligig is seen at arm's length while the drabness of foggy London codgers is front and center, the way, say, the Beatle's MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (below, above left) tried to be cheeky fun for one and all but instead was kind of like a banal fever dream - a bus loaded with middle-aged and dowdy working class yobbos instead of lovely upper crust birds and fellas. Just look at the drab washed out image of the four of them in their animal maskies below - as creepy as the brown bear man in THE SHINING or the citizens of Summer's Isle.

From Top: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, SHINING, WICKER MAN

It's sad that Jack MacGowran, the great Irish Beckett interpreter, a titan of the stage capable of great oratory, who was fantastic as the gut-shot bank robber in Polanski's CUL-DE-SAC, is stuck playing a silent observer peeping tom scientist role, his mellifluent orating voice for naught; his hairy face like a feral Einstein, the whimsical electric banana I-am-a-Tangerine psychedelia regularly mystifies him but his playing along on his own side of the wall has a sad quality - wearing a tux that he keeps in a jar by the door.

In short, this is a very, very timid movie - it watches the hippies at play through binoculars like a dirty old man but gussies them up in enough insect coloring to give him the out that it's 'for educational and scientific purposes only.' Even happening to be in a position to come to her rescue, he hangs way back and lets the bobby get the glory and the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (meant to resemble making out, all the better to agitate old Professor Collins with, my dear). The whole film has the queasy vibe of someone trying to paint a DayGlo PG patina of scientific inquiry on something he knows deep down is prurient, puerile, and pathetic. Penny has to almost die for the prof to have a chance to kiss her without it being creepy but even then he flitters away too scared to remember even how to use a phone.

For all that, again, WONDERWALL can't be dismissed easily -- it has a lot of British fans, like old Liam Gallagher at the band Oasis. And I imagine if you discovered the film like old Liam did, likely at two AM on BBC-4 while coming down off LSD then well then you might write a song about it, too. And seeing it all swanky with pop art colors exploding off of the screen on the blu-ray while Harrison's music flows remastered and earthy-ethereal in a gorgeous remix, there can be no doubt it has druggy pop art allure: both apartments eventually look amazing thanks to set design by art collective (and Beatle haberdashers and mural painters) The Fool, and Birkin is progressively more and more gorgeous. So on the proper chemicals I imagine it would be quite the thing, and for the rest of us can certainly provide some help in the old spatchka department.

But this guy Prof. Oscar Collins is half the show and that's 100% the trouble. If we come to the blu-ray, we come for a psychedelic plasmatic gorgeous pop art happening, presumably, not a kitchen sink Benny Hill, and that we do end up with one addresses the lingering need of British counterculture to address the problem of the judgmental old duffer. We just shush them away now, but in sixties Swinging London, there was only the BBC and cinema --and British cinema has always been a mixed collar bag, with a socialist streak, a hard-lost sense of propriety and a penchant for turning nearly ever genre of film dishwater dull. And if an older fella really wanted to know what was going on in the swinging bird's pad, there was not yet media to let him know he was letting his bourgeois prurience get him in a stiff upper liplock. He might feel he has a right to move in and arrest them all if things look suspiciously salacious through the keyhole (and he can't admit to himself he too wanted to smoke hash with a naked Marianne Faithful on a bearskin rug). And he never doubts we'd love to see him seeing it all - that is to say WONDERWALL continually thrusts forward the idea of the audience needing to see who we're seeing through.

For all his faults, an American filmmaker like Woody Allen at least understood how that works, that basic truth of viewer psychology. Woody's going after girls young enough to actually be his daughters isn't something he feels we'd root for, yet he at least is honest about it and that's the very core of art, an elaborate disguise for something too twisted to convey any other way. In real life, Polanski is on the run, but Allen strides free, and WONDERWALL is somehow convinced it's Allen when it's Polanski, the way Michael Jackson was convinced he was Peter Pan instead of John Wayne Gacy on a short leash; each believing that their artistic drive is coming from somewhere other than the drive to create enough distracting noises to cover up the hideous heartbeat under the Poe floorboards. Allen's years of analysis have given him enough awareness to understand that it is the beating of his own hideous heart, his guilty conscience, and so his distracting noises are conveyed as self-aware comedy. And Polanski's awareness comes from feeling the need to film the heart directly, that the heart is all he can see and so forgive him if he doesn't even deign to make distracting noises. But Joe Massot's WONDERWALL is so distracted by his own distracting noises it forgets all about the heart, and so mistakes its beating as the sound of butterfly wings, and so he never asks himself the tough sordid Flannery O'Connor question: isn't every butterfly collector more liable to sniff through his prey's old cocoon drawer than save her from self-immolating?

By the end of the film we more or less resolve this episode in Collins' life, but for the rest of us we can't help but feel like Woody Allen trapped on that sad sack train at the start of STARDUST MEMORIES if the entire movie was spent with him watching Sharon Stone blow kisses through a window. But hey - it was 1968! The director, Joe Massot, had one more trick up his sleeve. In 1976, he was hired to make Led Zeppelin's SONG REMAINS THE SAME. He was Page's neighbor and had been pestering him and manager Peter Grant about it and they'd all knew WONDERWALL, his only other film, had Beatles mystique behind it (and they hadn't seen it, which would have been a dealbreaker). And so they hired him work unseen for SONG (and then fired him halfway through). I saw SONG for the first time on TV after a wild party, with no expectations, and a bunch of friends of some girl I was halfway hooked up with (a tale for a different post-here!), and tripping on too much acid to find fault with it, and I loved it. So set and setting are everything, but most importantly, no Professor Collins, no Monsieur Hulot, are present in SONG, just the crazy, violent, talented, dangerous, beautiful young adults of the Zeppelin. And while WONDERWALL is a worthy curio for Beatles fans and Britpop lovers, I'd rather not be reminded how long ago that wild party was -and that I'm now just a peeper, a spy in the house of love, a fool on on the hill. So take your concern for the bowler hat chaps and shove it where no one comes near. All the lonely people hate looking at images of lonely people looking at images. Cut out the mediary who'd pin Jane Birkin's wings to the wall so you can pay him for a glimpse, and free her with thine own electric eyes! If she never comes back, you never really saw her to begin with, and so, Monsieur Collins, adieu! J'snooze!

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Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT

Showing off scars, from top: Under the Skin, Habit

Under the Skin (2014), the new slick dark green opus from Brian Birth Glazer, is a film that links up panic attacks before and after itself (as seen by you, the viewer) and signals the future of cinema horror or science fiction as less about acting and thrills and more about the brain dissolving itself in a pool of black oil in the middle of a dark forlorn forest wondering as it fades how it hears the rain and sizzle without ears. It's 2014's first official transhumanist off-world chance to begin again --the Blade Runner for the 22nd century -- at that stage of post-modern social decay where the screen is as permeable as a jet black oil-filled swimming pool surface and anyone can dive in, not just a Cocteau Orphee, not just Shauna Macdonald in The Descent (the last UK horror film this good). Just don't expect to climb out in the same skin you wore when you dove or were sucked in.

I know how it is, bro. I began the weekend with a terrible panic attack as my whole world crashed down around me in hailstorms of at-work red tape hot potatoes, allergies, depression, anxiety. When my girl wanted to go out to the movies, my blood ran cold and I shook like the gallows pole was sliding up til she tossed a half-Xanax on the floor and like a good dog I went scrambling and so we caught the late show of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin down at the BAM and wandering back from it around midnight, through half-deserted and strangely-lit Good Friday-empty Brooklyn streets in a haze of alienated liquid light reflection, stale popcorn nausea and post-half Xanax glow wobbliness, we knew something weird had happened, to us, to film, to Brooklyn. I admit it I couldn't quite get past the feeling Glazer's film was more of a video art installation swerving towards an And then the Darkness detour than an actual movie. Instead of a flow there is, buried in mossy 'membrances of Basil Twist-y underwater shirt twirlings, the sense of drowning in place -- the darkness of the theater swallowing me up - even as we floated back home up Flatbush back to the smoky din, the paranoid terror red hot potato Poe-level paranoia waiting, unabashed, I felt half-digested.

Then, I realized where my paranoid terror was coming from. It was related to rewatching all six seasons of Mad Men in prep for the new and final season and realizing I'd mixed up Don Draper's forced hiatus from Sterling Cooper with my own work woes. I can't tell where the TV ends and my life begins anymore. I'm realizing I'm already half-sunk into the black oil image. When things get too intense at home, by which I mean onscreen, I move to the kitchen to fix a drink or go to the bathroom and repeat to myself, "it's only a movie, it's only a movie - I'm 'here.'" To our pets we at home must look often like statues, frozen in seated positions on the couch, before the glowing square, awaiting our orders....

But away from the safety zone, the world is cold, dark, harsh: Glazer lures us into a dark and alien theater on the power of Birth and the sexual allure of Scarlett Johansson. Set mostly in and around the dark shroud of Glasgow, Skin is rich with bleakly beautiful panoramas of bowling alleys, cobblestone streets with sad pubs, panic attack strobe dance clubs, drenching rain over misty mountain moors and lashing surf rolling and crashing down in fast accelerations on a family at play (at first), sucking them all into their presumed deaths in a chain of failed rescues, sans suspenseful music or any indication they've drowned, leaving only a screaming infant behind, a sequence so harrowingly existential Herzog-level dark that it kind of crawled inside my stomach like a nightmare I had as a child and suddenly all the layers of assurance and support that nothing bad can happen to an infant onscreen is swept up and away with nary a sympathetic string to let us know that the filmmakers too are horrified rather than mountain-level indifferent. We're not given any indication anyone cares, and it's chilling. And there's also working class yobbos, slang as indecipherable as an alien tongue setting up a class divide against Scarlett's posh Londoner accent and damn I get back to that infant. How do you get back to a film's familiar 'Mars needs Men'-style plot (the rural UK-set Devil Girl From Mars coming instantly to mind) after seeing that poor bereft toddler screaming, abandoned in the primordial surf as the sun sets down around him like an evil shroud? This poor kid's screams hang like a torture-tricked sucker punch cheap shot over the remainder of the film --until the sheer weirdness of the deformed boy pick-up throws us for yet another mickey. Whole reels of what the fuck seem to have been edited out, though based on our familiarity with films like La Femme Nikita and The Man Who Fell to Earth we can deduce those missing pieces, but why should we have to if it's only so Scarlett can suddenly turn compassionate Ann Bancroft at the Lynchian epidermal symbolism carnivale? I'm not an animal! See me! Feel me! Touch me! I'm dreaming. Take the shot, Miss Moneypenny, Glasgow is for drunks and junkie loo divers but too dangerous even for a black oil seductresses. Run, (into) forest! Not that one!

That's the problem with this film though I respect others who love it - lord knows I would have followed alien Scarlett J. anywhere, even over to the commercial multiplex wherein she's seducing Captain America and kicking ass instead of playing Venus Flytrap to some juicy soccer hooligans. It's strange and scary but she seems to have very little real power and decays in ways that make us hope Lars Von Trier is waiting in the wings to snatch her from the Kubrick coldness and douse her in the Charlotte Gainsbourg womb of old testament Griffith mortality instead of the unsettling idea that human males might be collectively more terrifying than any carnivorous alien sexually hypnotic prowler. Still, I saw some things I don't usually get to see at the movies - things so weird they're like the dark rural cousin to Matthew Barney's Cremaster. But I guess I'm on the fence (after one viewing) as to whether this is a real movie, a work of staggering foresight and genius that will one day be regarded as the 2001 of our era, or just a long experimental hot mess. Then again, I've seen 2001 and thought it was just a long experimental hot mess before. It took awhile.

The string of previews BAM showed before the film included something for Locke, which is set entirely inside Tom Hardy's car in real time as he talks on the Bluetooth. A whole hour and a half no doubt of artsy glistening street lamp reflections on rainy dark streets looking like luminous watercolors dripped on a black canvas whilst techno throbs hypnotically and family members and work acquaintances shout their panicked exposition at him via Siri's surreptitious digital strands and signals and strings. Is this preview meant to prepare us for the endless driving shots and slow loop to nowhere repetitions of Under the Skin? It seemed an ill omen. I felt the whole of Under the Skin was trying to escape that Locke, the idea that if you want a real movie that does real things you need to stay home - movies are now about big screen compositions set within cars and the minds of predators --they don't expand your horizons but shrink them until they grab you by the neck like a dominatrix dog collar and pull til you're purple. The next stage will be where you spend your ten dollars just to sit in your car and think about what the movie you paid to see might look and sound like if it was ever made, while you drive around. Dig, the movie is you, mate! Ten dollars!

Locke 

Another problem: what's with the mean male handler (Jeremy McWilliams) with the motorcycle humpsuit? There's a kind of icky chauvinist undercurrent--like male filmmakers aren't comfortable with castrating Venusians unless there's a man in charge (see my sizzling expose of cinema's pimps both before and behind the lens) and with Scarlett's voluptuous body stripped to black bra and skintight black jeans she becomes the whole show, just her and the black box rooms with the wet floors --so we really don't give a shit about this handler with his smug countenance. Ain't right. The first film of this ilk that transcends the pimp factor head on and smashes it -- Daughters of Darkness -- the most recent -- Neil  Jordan's Byzantium!

All that aside, Under the Skin tries hard to puncture some hidden and vital vein in our culture, the way any sense of a dislocated universal all-seeing perception dissolves in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere; Scarlett drives slowly trying to lure into her SUV figures of hunched over men, pummeling their way on foot through the darkness, shopping or working long after normal people go to sleep, for good reason, and Scotland especially seems as abandoned as some lifeless corner of the galaxy. From the darkness of an experimental intro that's just drones and a pinpoint of light, onwards to the rainy woodsy finish, it's hard to get a straight bead on anything. We're used to that pinpoint of light becoming a tunnel, but it's not going to be so easy. Aside from 'in Scotland' we never know where we are, except that we're treading the line between modernist ambiguity and hedging indecisiveness. In Glazer's debut, the Kubrickian Birth, we had a real soul in Nicole Kidman, beautiful with her Rosemary buzz cut and Anne Heche a brassy Lady Macbeth that colored the painting of our fear. It was more Kubrick than Eyes Wide Shut on some level, but still it lacked the feeling of planetary orbit of The Shining and 2001 -- films where you can actually feel the world turning below the feet of the Steadicam operator, and your own seat, the orbit of the Earth spinning around the sun and the longer orbit of the sun around the lip of it's galaxy as the universe expands outwards, and how one orbit --the film--and the other--your head-- meet and eclipse each other until both disappear, the sense that any kind of stasis or stillness is an illusion. Under the Skin has only one decaying orbit, and lots of flashy editing tracks and scars are displayed out from under its sleeve, including an extended melange of overlapping images through which Johansson's strange and lovely face gradually appears, but when the charm's unwound there's nowhere to go but towards the macroscope finality ala the end of Easy Rider. It's the kind of film that depends on Wikipedia and summations of the original source novel for sense. My GF read them to me afterwards but I was sick off too much stale popcorn, and was coming down off a doggie Xanax, and the terrors of bureaucratic power finally besting me am der werkhaus. My weekend was ruined! At any rate, I appreciate the hypertextual angle - a film that needs a drive or walk to and from itself, and also the internet to explain the source novel demands to be judged accordingly, thereto...

Before that, there was Larry Fessenden's low budget Habit (Netflixed after admiring his You're Next) in post-Blank Generation style and Liquid Sky content, Fessenden wears all the hats and stars, as Sam, a bartender and witty drunk from the era of the 90s;  I drank the same way, at the same time, in his same neighborhood - (he bartends at the Hat, the great Mexican restaurant in the LES with the with the super strong margaritas --they'd give them to you in plastic cups for take-out!!!) I think I've even used his great line about committing suicide on the installment plan before. And with his wild hair and missing front teeth Fessenden is a great shaggy antihero, one of those where intellect and the ability to succinctly share one's inner feelings is not the mark of a square nor missing teeth the mark of a working class yobbo. He must have been really drinking cuz he's amazing. And there's some really great drinking scenes, where concerns about his girlfriend Anna (Meredith Snaider) and her habit of sucking his blood during sex come out organic and low key as any normal conversation, neither forcedly so or otherwise and she doesn't need a pimp to wave his wand and 'allow' her to feast.

Fessenden also has a great gift for framing within the tight confines of small realistically dilapidated apartments -- the Halloween party early on is a masterpiece of tight economical framing - we've been to that same party before and the low key conversational tone is also a marvel; sounding like an early Jack Nicholson but not trying to, and believably trying to navigate his way through a rapidly downward spiraling series of options! The hand job in Battery Park with Anna was one of the hotter sex scenes I've witnessed in some time, too, for being so sudden, realistic, intense, out of left field, punk rock, real - exciting --it left me bleeding psychic energy from out my limp imprisoned genital matrix in a way I've not been bled since Lydia Lunch in Kern's Submit to Me Now!

All that said, there's still the issue of the horror, the weakest element of this otherwise strong and moving film. The vamp fangs are clearly the two dollar plastic variety and while that could have worked --like if he was too drunk to tell if she's just joking or really trying to bite him -- plastic or real - etc., they play it straight and by then the film's run on kind of long, there's still no denying this is a significant and impressive low budget work; if the climax is a let-down it's only because the rest of it is so much better than it has any right to be.

The main issue with both these femme fatales of course is the weird dichotomies - Scarlett rocks the posh accent but dresses like a waterfront Lars Von Trier prostitute, and why is her spaceship an SUV? And as vamp Anna, Meredith Snaider is too short to be scary; I would have liked to see her taller, or more mature, played by a real gravitas-bearing actress who somehow seemed separate from the murky twentysomething slacker low-key characters in the film, none of whom seem to emerge from the murk to become any archetypal vampire types (the one kid tries to be a Van Helsing rescuer of sorts but it never pans out though he does get in a great stream-of-babblelogue about the real vampire being all around us in the choking overreach of society and popular culture). So in the end it's not as effective as a vampire or horror film but does work as an authentically booze-engulfed LES twentysomething denizen depiction, wherein the sense of world-weary isolation, the cultural vampire metaphor, works.

The reverse is perhaps true for Under the Skin, which has a few striking visuals involving black goo (are the aliens merely tar babies drawn from this murk, as in they're all one giant amoeba that occasionally splits off and dons a pelt like a wolf in sheep clothing?) and in one climactic shot we're able to realize the way even the most horrifying sight can blend in perfectly with twisting sunless old growth forest. Critics have noted the way Earth becomes so easily alien and terrifying through Scarlett's eyes, and how inherently alien she looks to begin with, and the weird similarities between these alien seduction / immersions and the reality of reported alien abductions, and the similarity between these aliens and the weird eye thing in Liquid Sky. While I get all that I'm still not convinced. Were my expectations too high? I wasn't high at all... just poisoned by panic... was that it?

Days later I'm still thinking about it, and the film did help strangeify that long walk uphill from BAM to our Park Slope digs on a late night Good Friday, half the locals seemingly gone upstate to visit relatives for Easter, leaving the neighborhood feeling very abandoned and surreal like an alien world. I guess, that's the best movies can do if they want to be both artsy and get us to not wait for video. To get us to trek out there into the dark foreboding night and pay over ten bucks to spend a couple hours parked next to strangers, our purse and coat pockets easily accessible to bed bugs and junkie fingers, the film has to seamlessly link up to all those things, to forge a doorway between our lives, where we are inside our own skins and their outer furs, wherein our seeing the film, and the film itself, become merged. If a film can't make the walk home resonate through a different pair of eyes than the ones we came in with, then why did we ever leave the safety of our homes to begin with? Wherein films of the past, like Habit, can link up to our memories of the 90s rather than our dreadful 20's tomorrows, and trekking to the neighborhood video store in the wearying sunshine of a Sunday used to help create some kind of anticipatory context, some ceremony, even for old favorites, all that is forgotten in favor of Netflix, the delivery system that sluggens down to a slowmo swim the last vestiges of our impetus to move through the tar pit black quicksand stasis of reality in pursuit of an escape. One day maybe soon we won't even need our own memories, our own darkness, a seat, speakers, ears, or the screens in our retinae. We'll be the viewer and the viewed in one looping orbital motion -the entirety of our senses transferred onto a stack of DVDs on a dusty shelf, and hopefully none of them, not ever, will be Transcendence. 

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