Lashes by Covergirl...and Centurions: THE TOURIST, MASQUERADE and THE SEVENTH SIGN

Where o where hath my Angelina gone? The one who burned a whole through GIRL, INTERRUPTED, or even the one who dazzled with her mix of mature romanticism and aerodynamic toughness in MR. AND MRS. SMITH?

Like Natalie said in THE BLACK SWAN: "She's gone!!"

In SALT (2010 - see my review," From Russia with Adamantium Cheekbones") we saw the once mighty Jolie beginning to look a little frail. We winced when she fell from high bridges onto highway traffic, for her bones seemed brittle like a bird.  The only wincing in THE TOURIST (recently arrived on DVD) comes from the contrived situations and dialogue, barely audible as Jolie's manipulative narcissist triple financial double-crosser never speaks above a posh British purr she must have borrowed from Eva Green in CASINO ROYALE.

Jolie was only around 35 when she made THE TOURIST but she seems much older thanks to a Joan Collins-level makeover: botox frozen smile, cheeks glossy, deep black layers of smudgy eye liner, and the endless cutaways to rich beautiful younger men looking up from their Rolexes and Cristal flutes, enraptured, parting before her at the ubiquitous ball like a black and white formal sea, nodding in admiration as this old-before-her time diva passes in the latest expensive couture, walking like she's holding a vial of nitro in a place where no lover has ever trespassed; all that's missing is a tag for Godiva chocolate bars, or rejuvenating night creme. If it was 1984 and this was a TV movie called Jacqueline Susann's Venice Nights and Jolie was pushing 50, it would make sense.

Even in her seventies and drunk beyond measure, Marlene Dietrich, for example, could still pull off the trick of shining through such airless luxury and making mass adoration believable. And you might say you can't compare Jolie with Dietrich, to which I'd say, yeah, duh! Jolie could act circles around Dietrich, and is just as hot if not hotter, so why is Dietrich at 70 sexier than Jolie at 35? The truth is, these handsome moneyed guys on these euro-trains wouldn't give the Jolie in this film more passing glance if it wasn't her movie and the script required them to. Her vibe is dour; she seems to expect adoration too much --it's all that keeps her from crumbling into mummy dust. She's a black hole of compliments, and I've known girls like this--drop dead gorgeous but frozen solid in their personae like victims of their own mirror Medusa-- and any man who can afford a Rolex has already learned not to even make eye contact with this type of pretty woman ("it's so expensive!" as Mischa Auer noted in MR. ARKADIN), unless, of course, the director insists. 

When Bette Davis made herself the object of every man's desire in her films, for another contrast, it was fascinating because 1) she wasn't remotely hot (post, say, 1935) and b) she didn't try to hide her psychotic intensity. If she dreaded getting old, she'd just scream at the mirror in full Baby Jane make-up until the madness passed. Bette was so cool she even made films like THE STAR (above, with Oscar and Jim), which spoke to the tragic absurdity of actresses clinging onto juvenile roles long past their prime. In short, Davis embraced her own ridiculousness like a champ, like a boxer who doesn't even flinch when enduring a flutter of sharp jabs to the face.

THE TOURIST screams for a Davis! Lacking one, it insists we believe its phony emotional catharses and triple crosses; it prefers we swoon at Jolie's perfume ad acting while it itself remaining steadfastly cynical about its own ambition$ (the final line is as shameless a piece of subtextual vanity as I've ever heard). When the climax of a film involves the heroic self sacrifice of actually paying back taxes, you know you're watching a film made by people who've never flown coach or cooked their own food, or been chased by the cops, or slept on a floor, or drank Piels, a beer so bad you can only drink it ice cold via funnel; but who nonetheless think they know plenty about life.

Maybe that's the alchemical transubstantiatory rub, this is a film where rich people fool each other into thinking they're poor - like internet dating in reverse. But the film itself hasn't fooled anyone (it bombed), least of all the Cult d'Jolie. Our baby is a dinosaur now, with an array of war orphan leeches draining her charisma daily. Will we ever get her back? All signs point to no.We're stuck with the waxwork substitute.

 

Speaking of back taxes and fooling each other with false personae, there's a forgotten, similar film called MASQUERADE (1965) on Netflix Streaming, which is marginally better than the very similar THE TOURIST, if only for its droll William Goldman script and wry performances from British spy movie regulars like Jack Hawkins and Charles Gray (Blofeldt in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER). The plot involves the 'kidnapping' of a young heir to an Arab kingdom who is about to turn old enough to depose the acting emir who's in league with the communists (the heir is pro-British). A coup is feared, and the kidnapping prevents it. Only who hired bungling playa Cliff Robertson to guard the chicken coop?

 Soon the kid is kidnapped from the kidnappers, Cliff finally realizes he's the fall guy and a traveling circus/smuggler troupe led by Michel Piccoli that includes femme fatale Marissa Mell (both were in DANGER: DIABOLIK!) and a knife-throwing dwarf are running the show. Double crosses galore, mes amis! No one is who they seem! Robertson owes back taxes to the British!

At least MASQUERADE has the self-awareness to regard its own facile nature with the same witty acumen it regards espionage and if there is no difference at least they're British enough to admit it. In MASQUERADE if you're not a triple agent with golden parachutes from here to Madrid, then you're worse than a fool, you're a patriot. THE TOURIST would probably smile at the notion of actual patriotism if it could (too much botox).

Luckily THE TOURIST's bombing at the box office showed we don't praise the golden mummy; we sell it on ebay. THE TOURIST will soon reside in the $5.99 rack next to THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE and SHANGHAI SURPRISE... and one day re-emerge from the rubble, like MASQUERADE did, half a century from now, like a memo from a presumed long ago melted-down-and-sold as-black-market-ingots golden calf.

Another Netflix streaming pick for this week is THE SEVENTH SIGN (1988), which as you may have heard is about 'the end of days,' set to happen this week or, failing that, 12/21/12. Excited? It stars Demi Moore as a pregnant Yenta busybody who--while snooping through her tenants' mail--discovers an ancient document: it seems Demi's child is the harbinger of the end of the world and Jurgen Prochnow (la tenant) is the looming 'Lamb,' opening seals and bringing down plagues, rivers of blood, snow in the desert, dogs and cats living together. Michael "I came back in time for you, Sarah." Biehn is the dad, which lets you know their kid is going to save the world from SKYNET or the Antichrist, maybe - that's called associative casting!

A low budget film of the kind that rarely get theatrical releases anymore, SIGN at least has the courage of its bizarro convictions: it's played stone-cold straight, all the while casting some doubt--not too much--as to Demi's sanity, making it the dead opposite of THE TOURIST. In fact, watching both in a period of days was enough to make me realize that Angelina Jolie is the lamb of God;  THE TOURIST a cinematic equivalent of morally bankrupt Sodom; Johnny Depp the hapless lamb led to slaughter at the altar of Jolie's martyr complex. Gone are notions of good guys and bad in all three films. What's left is just the soulless and bejeweled zombies that still walk slowly across the Saks Fifth avenues of the Earth, their souls half-devoured by invisible demons from the Orion constellation, and abetted by personal shoppers. But then of course there's always the mothers like Demi who won't let humanity just die for once. No one, but no one, is allowed to die on their watch. As GODSEND taught (if you never saw it, read my piece from 2004 here), even dying is no escape from their righteous clinging!

 

Semi-SPOILER ALERT--the possible pro-life associations in THE SEVENTH SIGN made me root, as I'm sure many have, for the end of the world, rather than this STEEL MAGNOLIAS / LIFE BEFORE HER EYES/ SWITCH/ soapy martyrish ending. Is Demi serving mankind or just the moral 'majority' by dying for her child? How can you tell if a woman's sacrifice is noble or just a symbolic subjugation? Well, either way, those Christians are gone in just a few more days and maybe Angelina Jolie will be able to resume undermining the status quo of feminine oppression like she did in FOXFIRE and GIRL, INTERRUPTED and stop pandering to rich materialistic women of a certain age on behalf of high-end make-up sponsors. After all, Demi Moore's dating Ashton, and that's ballsy. Why can't Jolie do something ballsy? Adopting endless amounts of orphans is not ballsy. I mean, am I the only one who's jealous of those little bastards? I get the impression they are responsible for both her terrible project choices and her weariness.

Maybe in the future the good guys and the bad will once again be distinguishable based on something other than who's offering who the most money to stab their own unborn grandchildren in the back, and who oppressed the Third World first (the British) vs. who wants to do it now (the Russian Mafia / Zionists, the NWO, the CIA).  THE SEVENTH SIGN at least lets you contemplate your own ambivalence about humanity's inherent goodness and whether your soul's old enough that the end of days seems an impossibly sweet 'get out of eternal reincarnation jail' free card or young enough that all you care about is who will look after the children. Either way you can't help but thrill at the prospect of things changing and all those idiots (whomever they are for you) finally rotting in hell like they deserve. Those bastards!  In the words of Malcolm McDowell as CALIGULA, "If only all of Rome had just one neck!"

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From Russia with Adamantium Cheekbones: SALT (2010)

I totally dig the idea of Soviet "sleeper" agents, second only to covert Satanic networks in their possible omnipresence. Think about it: any (or all) of your friends could be a Russian spy and neither of you even know it. You might be one and not even know it! One day you just go to get your shoe fixed and an old Russian shoe repair guy looks in your eyes, startled: "You want sole replaced? Five Dollars." You suddenly blank out and find yourself saying, "The hole is too big for that" He nods, reaches under the counter, and gives you a gun, which you accept without a word. Or wait, was it just a receipt for your deposit?

I'm a real-life sleeper agent, but for booze. The old Russian shoe repair guy would be any bartender in any bar; all I have to do is drink what everyone else is drinking and my trigger is pressed. If you ever 'activate' me, i.e. somehow get me to drink even one drink, I will turn into Laurence Harvey seeing the queen of hearts on the table in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962). I'd become a black-out sleeper drinker of such catastrophic power that my bank account would be sucked down in a week and I'd vanish, leaving only a trail of empty bottles and ATM receipts. My intended target, programmed into my brain from birth? Myself. There isn't a target in the world so ironically deserving.

Making the audience connect to such insanity is the goal of the existentialist spy film, like THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD or THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, wherein working for any one side turns out to be a bad idea; all values are turned upside down and intimacy -- even with family members -- is always up for questioning. The good guy, your boss, is using you as a chess piece to get your own KGB moms killed by her own people.  The only way out is with humor, and that's why the best moments of SALT aren't so much the BOURNE or OCEAN'S twists as much as Evelyn's use of a taser to spur on the near-dead driver of a police vehicle while she's handcuffed in the seat behind him, or the no-nonsense way she goes about fulfilling tasks in the most direct, outside the box manner.

This Evelyn Salt falls into a long line of super spies that are fun to watch as they're usually a few steps ahead of the audience, which means we can relax and not worry about their safety: the J's Bourne and Bond are key examples, but based on the frequent use of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS framing (i.e. a close-up of a face, eyes staring right into the camera in the middle of the screen with dead space on either side of the frame) I'd say we're also supposed to think of Evelyn as 'Hannah Belle Lecter.' Is old Lecter just the true antecedent of these indestructible genius types? Not just, Clarice, what did they do to you in that Korean prison camp? Leon, What's the first thing that comes in to your mind when you think about... your mother?

It's now common pop mythos that the "super prowess" of these sleeper agents stems from their being trained from birth at a remote and clandestine spy school, usually in Russia, where it's cold and harsh and there is no mercy or child protective services, only vodka. Through this relentless training they master endurance, marksmanship, martial arts; they are fed cutting edge body-healing-enhancement drugs and so were their parents so they were already born gifted superhumans. This is all so it's more believable that girls with thin limbs can kick the shit out of bulked-up army men, SWAT guys, and street brawlers.

The idea that you can craft super soldiers if you get them early enough is something that's long been a staple of Hong Kong cinema, with many of its action stars coming out of the draconian Peking Opera School: the whole 'brutal training by a stern father figure' thing often happens around the opening credits -- ala NAKED WEAPON or AZUMI or THE PRINCESS BLADE -- or comes in flashbacks, ala ELEKTRA (below), and ALIAS, and KILL BILL.

It's implied rather sweetly, that women are man's natural superior, needing to absorb only our Wu Tang sacred men's club scriptures (ala Jade Fox in CROUCHING TIGER) in order to beat us at even the most violent of our manly figthin' games. In a way it's a kind of guilty payback to the woman at the center of this sort of film, who is in a man movie, a pawn avatar juggled between the fanboy writers and fanboy viewers. Men love to see themselves kicked around by hot bitches and I shudder with 1980s liberal arts major-Peking Opera-imbued shame to admit I'm no different. One look at that picture below and I feel like I've already been kicked in the gut. That jawline with those bangs, that straight long hair, those lips, good lord.

And then to add to the 'believability' of a girl asskicker it helps to bring in the Russians, or some 'Other' from far away.  In America we get an overall impression or Russia that's icy and bitter on all levels, unlimited vodka being the only sorth or warmsh. It stands that no one is afraid of death there because A) life sucks without American commodities and B) death's not scary when you're loaded on vodka.

Americans have only the sketchy concept of 'freedom' as an asset in lieu of all that fuzzy drunken tough guy stuff. And we all have been bred from birth to know that Russian women are so tall, red-headed and ice cold ruthless they'll suck a schmuck they meet on the internet clean down to his penny stock portfolio and kick him to the curb before he can even finish typing "I'm wiring you $1800 for a plane ticket, my love!"

The vodka aspect of Russian superiority is not to be overlooked in the crafting of superb fighters, either: as the DRUNKEN MASTER (left) could teach you. To be drunk is not just to have courage, to be drunk is to be loose of limb, flexible, relaxed even in the middle of life or death stand-offs, able to survive falls from fifth story windows twice.  If you have the genes, alcohol even makes you more coordinated. I know. I have the genes. I am the sleeper agent from the Kung Fu school of Drunken Monkey Claw.

The advantage with being one of these super drunks is you can fall from the off-ramp onto a speeding truck below and not even be aware you've fallen. You might not even spill your drink. Poor Angelina is not so lucky, I mean she drinks only one or two shots of vodka so she can 'ahem' with the bottle. And yet, after numerous hits to the face, the only thing at all puffy is those bee-stung lips; her cheeks don't have a single moment of puffiness. Adamantine, like Wolverine's, perhaps but worryingly fragile-looking nonetheless.

We're used to it by now, but still, in a weird masochistic voyeur way we "feel" the pain of body blows much more keenly and sharply when they fall upon an older woman and Angelina has lost her baby fat almost everywhere but those lips. Banged around from her moving truck leap-frogging or ledge diving, we realize she's not Gia anymore; we suffer for her from the bumpy safety of her simulacrated womb. We're her alcohol; we absorb the pain and punishment like an audience of opiate tea bags. And with Jolie the pain stings extra because she has become thinner in bone and meat since tearing through those Laura Croft movies. I kept worrying she wasn't getting enough calcium. Her hips could cut glass. We're not looking at a buff young killer, no Russian gymnast with the Bond larynx-crushing thighs. @e're looking at a woman facing the onset of osteoporosis.  

With males action figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger it's different: buoyed by his puffy gym muscles, he hath bore no children from his womb; he hath bones made hard from large amounts of amino acid and milkshakes as a German youth, and estrogen en absentia. Plus he's a bad enough actor (in a good way) that the more he strains to look hurt the less we believe him, thus cutting the masochistic chord and filling us with good cheer. Jolie makes her pain tangible if fleeting, eyes dilating with tears, and occasionally ennui. I still have sympathy splints from watching her run in those high leather shoes.

SALT's biggest drawback isn't it's lack of originality--that it seems like it was made after screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (the poet who brought us ULTRAVIOLET) watched ALIAS and fell in love with the way Jennifer Garner changes wigs dozens of times an episode, then forgot all the other things that makes that show good (for the first three seasons). For one thing, this is one film foolish enough to think we still care about averting yet another nuclear meltdown. By now there have been so many near-misses in action films that we just want to see one bomb go off, just to see what would happen. The first half of SALT has some ambiguity that holds the attention--is she good or bad?--but in the end we just don't care which side Salt's really on as the nuclear threat plot is trotted forth, and is so dusty at this point even the president seems like he's forgotten where ye auld Def Con Red button is. Nuclear war now has an almost nostalgic twinkle about it: we never did get to have that mushroom cloud senior prom moment back in the existential days of the Cold War. All those decades of tense nuclear posturing were just a tease. Now we just have very old bombs lying all over the place -- vintage nukes. Isn't it kind of a waste? Kind of un-American when you think about it? Let's press that button, Mr. President, for old time's sake, for the Gipper and for that most American of reasons, why we come to films like SALT in the first place, escape from boredom.

Thusly, with a romantic impetus as hackneyed as one of Leo's recent slew of dead wives, and no clear cut person to root for, you can only wince.. and wince again as Jolie falls two stories to land on her hip bones on a hard metallic surface, or grabs onto sharp metal elevator shaft corners by her delicate fingernails, then gets up and runs off, unscathed, onwards--ever onwards--her wig not even crooked, just pleasantly grayed with the dust of an exploded mid-town landmark. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's L'Oreal.

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A Star-Spangled Salute to America's most Acidemic Cinematic Women

My whole life changed--from nerdy punk to liberated hippy--sophomore year, 1986, when I met Sabrina and Kelly (not their real names), two gorgeous blond, LSD-quaffng, dope smoking, rock star-chasing maniacs who were (me coming from central NJ) the most beautiful and non-stuck-up-about-it girls I'd ever seen. I fell madly in love with both of them, platonically, which was good since they ruined soccer players right and left and a steady stream of hot guys paraded through our lives, looking sad and dejected and sitting in a table across the bar from our long back row at Chuck's (in Syracuse, NY), while I always sat in the center of their universe, never paying for a single pitcher. But I learned so very much from them and had my feminine ideals jacked to the moon.

For instance: watching Kelly wake up in my friend Max's bed in the dorms (for we would congregate in his room for morning/afternoon bong hits). She would stretch and yawn like a cat and, and as the morning sun streamed through the windows, take a massive cannonball (huge gravity bong hit / slam a funnel of cold Becks / then exhale), smile sweetly, and pick up her acoustic guitar and purr out a gorgeous suite of Joni Mitchell songs, as relaxed and gently focused as if she'd merely had a nibble of honey-covered toast and a sip of herbal tea, not even a single belch...the morning sun shining through her golden locks, her voice sweet and high singing "I want to shampoo you / I want to renew you again and again." Yes my mountain flower, yes I will...thought I, feeling, for the first time in my life, connected and accepted by people I actually wanted to be accepted by... the star children Eloi. Connecticut were raising my soul up out of Morlock, New Jersey. 

I love these girls still, though both have since both have married with kids and all that stuff and I see them only once every few years. But I've found mirrors of these girls in cinema, and for the July 4th holiday, what could be better than to salute cinema's most acidemic American gals?! If not for them, this blog wouldn't exist, at least not in this form.

The definition of an acidemic woman: she never judges or condemns, but seeks a good time with tenacity, rolls with life's punches; she lives on the edge of her own forward momentum, never stopping to 'settle down' according to bourgeoisie mandates. These women have limited but undeniable telepathic ability. They've assumed an archetypal resonance that makes them transcend duality. They're afraid of nothing, not even of dying young or winding up in rehab. They may destroy themselves on the altar of decadence, or sell-out to the suburban exhaust pipe dream, but who am I to judge? They once burned so very brightly, and sometimes once is enough.

In originally doing this list I noticed more than 3/4 of the most obviously acidemic women were from Europe--especially Germany and England. Since it's the Fourth of July, I tailored the list back to just being aus der Amerikanische fraulienin und Filmen!  I had to disqualify Anita Pallenberg. I also disqualified femme fatale types who kill or seduce men into killing mainly for revenge or profit, as this counters the basic benevolence of the true acidemic lady. A femme fatale schemes to get somewhere at the cost of those around her - an acidemic woman is already somewhere, and brings us along if we ask real nice.

Here we go,
STAR SPANGLED SALUTE TO AMERICA'S
TOP TEN ACIDEMIC WOMEN!

Sharon Stone as Catherine Trammell in BASIC INSTINCT (1992)
 

 We all remembered and dug Sharon Stone as Arnold's hot murderous wife in TOTAL RECALL, and our suspicions of her genius were confirmed for Verhoeven's follow-up, this kinky explosion of noir and late night Cinemax trappings into the realms that dwells above camp, high art. Stone's Trammell is apparently Lecter-level smart thanks to a "Bachelor's in Psychology," so you know this is the liberal arts major's version of Fantasia. Stone even manages a straight face telling the cops lines like "I enjoyed fucking him," and smiles beautifully to herself at all the things she's not saying to Michael Douglas, no doubt even more cutting than her ice pick, because she likes "jagged edges." What could be more American than a ballsy character like Trammell? If she was French, you wouldn't even notice how cool she is, but as an American, she's "cracked it wide open." She derails the whole film and then snorts the rails. 

Angelina Jolie as Lisa Rowe in GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999)
 

That she rides her own strait-jacket insanity like a surfer too cool to admit that being sucked under half the time is slowly choking the soul right out of her is part of what makes Jolie's character not only cool and tragic, but realistic. I dated a chick just like that and though she almost killed me, I still wish her well. In a 2008 entry I compared Jolie's character to Johnny Boy (De Niro) in MEAN STREETS about whom Pauline Kael wrote:

His madness isn't explained (fortunately, since explaining madness is the most limiting and generally least convincing thing a movie can do). When you're growing up, if you know someone crazy daring and half-admirable (and most of us do), you don't wonder how the beautiful nut got that way; he seems to spring up full-blown and whirling, and you watch the fireworks and feel crummily cautious in your sanity." (08)

Crummily cautious, man. Pauline Kael knew the score... and Jolie, Jolie Jolie, Please don't take yourself away from our pop movie screens just to have kids and Oscars. 

Edie Sedgwick as herself in CIAO, MANHATTAN! (1972)

You could argue she's kind of tragic here, but just look at Edie, slamming vodka with her cute rabbit headphones on, living in the bottom of an empty pool, for Christ's sakes! Why should she bother to be coherent when she's already 'made it' to the other side? The film itself is kind of a mishmash between this new footage in the pool and earlier black and white stuff of Sedgwick and her friend waking up in some strange guy's apartment, stealing his stash of cocaine ("Look at all these drugs!") and hitting the streets, heading to the factory for random footage of Brigit Polk babbling about how her fat thighs just right for popping speed. Sedgwick is beautiful, strung-out, and occasionally hilarious throughout, but the rest of the non-factory 'connecting' footage can pretty tepid, so step strong.

Lori Williams in FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL KILL! (1967)

Of the three strip club motorists in Russ Meyer's ingenious (strangely nudity-free) sexploitation "car club" film, Lori Williams is the one you most want to bring home to mom. The other two --Tura Satana and Haji--are kind of creepy Goth butch (and I mean that as a high compliment, as you know), and anyway you step between those two coded lesbians and you get a tire chain across your back, so for fantasies of driving off into the sunset to the Bostweeds, Lori is your girl.

The other two girls are bad, "like a velvet glove cast in iron, and like the gas chamber." Lori on the other hand is just out looking for kicks. She rolls with Varla (Satana) and Rosie (Haji) because they're the most dangerous company in town but she's not really evil. Once she finds a big muscly moron and his Cutty Sark-swilling pappy "sitting on piles of loot," she promptly begins seducing the one ("I don't know what you're trainin' for, but as far as I'm concerned... you're ready.") and guzzling the liquor of the other ("Let's drink to trains!"), concluding her one-girl party with the immortal lines, addressed to her terrified kidnapee: "You know what Tiny Tim? When I have too much of this stuff, it's been known to be passin' out time. And it's just about passin' out time!" Come on son, let's take her in the house.

Natasha Henstridge as Lt. Melanie Ballard in GHOSTS OF MARS (2000)

She's got legs - she knows how to use them, like kicking your big leather boy KISS-bodyguard face in if you try and stop her from catchin' the ghost train. As I once wrote back in 2003: 

In pre-modern cultures, the approximate age of motherhood would be the age of the babysitter today, and just as (SPOILER ALERT) Michael Meyers is revealed to be Jamie Lee Curtis' brother in the TV extended version of Carpenter's Halloween, just as Norman Bates turns out to be his own mother in Psycho, or Ripley gives birth to herself in the Alien series, surely if there was time in a theatrical-release Carpenter film for big psychological twists,  Melanie would realize she is the mother of the Martian spores she rejects, probably via another flashback. As it is, we must hunt for clues, such as when Big Daddy Mars is able to sense Melanie watching him from beyond a hill with binoculars. He stops, turns to look in her direction with a sudden sneaking recognition, and then leads his gang towards her with all the ferocity of a rejected child can muster.

Another clue is when she actually does become possessed by a Martian spore and is left outside to turn into a ghost of Mars by Desolation and Jericho (note that they can't kill her outright, instead this becomes their non-dwarf version of putting Snow White in a glass case.) Jericho doses her with a hit of clear (a psychedelic drug on Mars) from her stash to "fuck with anything that's in there," i.e. the rock and roll Aldous Huxleyan last rite. With the help of this "spirit guide," rather than become possessed by the Martian intelligences, she has a vision of ancient Martian civilization, where Big Daddy Mars is conducting a massive rally of his army, generating cheers and hooplah. The drugged Melanie witnessing all this from outside their time, becomes their holy virgin "Big Other" for whom such ceremonies and rallies are conducted (perhaps Big Daddy Mars 'remembers' the feeling of this Big [m]Other's gaze from the aeons ago when he held that rally, which is why he can sense her looking at him?). ( Acidemic 2003 )  

 

Fay Adler as Miss "Pygmy" Allen - in MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940)
 

My buddy Max and I did a lot of drinking to WC Fields movies in the 90s. CHICKADEE isn't the best by a long shot of Fields' oeuvre (or co-star Mae West's for that matter) but it has its moments, such as a barroom scene wherein Fields runs into a pint-sized drunk billed in the credits as Miss "Pygmy" Allen. She only has one scene with Fields--who is tending bar, wherein she asks, slurring, if her husband had been in. Fields replies he doesn't know who he is and she cuts him off, slurring out: "ah, I don't care.." then launches into a drunken speech about how the worst woman is too good for the best of men, knocking over some drinks in the process. Fields orders her to a table (an old rule from the days when free-roaming prostitutes would try and steal johns from the bar's in-house girls) and she finally says "okay, you big tomboy!" Then Fields' perma-frowned old man co-bartender walks up during all this and asks, "Where's the funnel?" Max and I loved that --- so random -- a question we asked ourselves all the time in college, when funneling was the only way to drink enough cheap beer (all we could afford) to get a proper buzz. Somehow or other this amazing chick Fay Adler was only in one other film, Fields' next picture, The BANK DICK. But Fields should have married her instead of Mae West in CHICKADEE and they would be like a lot the happily dysfunctionally drunken parents of people I know!

Pamela Sue Martin in THE LADY IN RED (1979)
 

I love you, Pamela Sue Martin! I discovered this Roger Corman's New World gem randomly on late night cable and never stopped loving it. Martin plays the girl who was with Dillinger the night of the Biograph assassination, but who didn't rat him out, goddamnit. Thanks to a witty, feminist-communist-anarchist script by John Sayles, Martin makes all the Corman/depression-era gangland stops--from exploited farmgirl to sweatshop rioter to women's prison inmate to prostitute to bankrobber, and rolls with the punches every step of the way. And man, is she cute, and tough.

Myrna Loy as Nora Charles in THE THIN MAN (1933)
 

Seventeen words: "All right, will you please bring me five more martinis, Leo? and line them up right here." Yeah, throughout the marriage-embattled Hollywood years of 1929-2009, there was  one woman any man would knock off a bank to wed: Myrna Loy in THE THIN MAN. As the series progressed, the code frilled her out a bit, but in this first film she's just a sexy, indulgent, compassionate, witty, never jealous or judgmental, heiress, with a brilliant dog, Asta and the willingness to match her alcoholic husband drink for drink, until the ends of time. Yes, they wake up in the middle of the night to have drinks; yes they drink in the morning and yes they drink in between but you're only immortal once, so make it count, and they did.

Catherine Keener as Maxine Lund in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999)

 Much as I love the ingenious scripts of Hollywood's misanthrope "it"-boy, Charle Kaufman, I wish he'd make his lead male characters just a hair less despicable. A rare example of how great his characters could be when such less a hair is found in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. As the foxy new employee at hairy puppeteer-slacker John Cusak's new half-floor office, Keener blazes through the dimness in a shockingly cool white dress, calls Cusak "Craiggy" and treats him like a cat treats a drunken, amorous mouse. Keener manages to get everyone in the cast in love with her while never committing to anyone or anything, just coasting on a groove, wittily presuming everyone wants to sleep with her (and they do)... and drinking at the Stuck Pig with a sense of comfort in her own merriment that's seldom been seen since.

Clara Bow as Nasa Springer in CALL HER SAVAGE (1933)

The weird trippy energy of Bow is ahead of even our time today -- she moves from emotion to emotion in the same “totally there” way as someone would on psychedelics, but she’s like that all the time. She’s one of those in-the-moment bad influence trouble girls who you meet and within five minutes are broke but ready follow her penniless and barefoot into the desert, and come weeks back later, even broker, drug addicted, insane from syphilis and announce: “I regret nothing!” Don’t you regret either, pilgrim!

Clara’s grandfather is a wildcat mountain man who sleeps with a load of lassies as he leads a wagon train west through Indian-covered Texas; one of his ill-begotten daughters marries an absentee rancher and grows up “comforted” by a stoic Native American with whom she doth beget Clara Bow. The rancher doesn’t realize that’s why a daughter presumably from his own boring loins could ever be so wild. And wild? She goes around acting like John Belushi–she can smash a good guitar–in Animal House, but even sexier! Just seeing her wrestle with a big dog or whip a half-breed (above) is enough to change your life forever, but when she tussles with Thelma Todd? You will want to gouge out your eyes and keep them on the mantle, cuz you know it will never be that good again. (BLAD/09)

So that's the list. Happy Fourth! xoxoxo

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Prepare the amphibious squadron!

A heady compendium of fanboy history and Weird Tales cover tunes, SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (2004) seems retro-actively retro-futuristic again after the art deco zeppelin action of Pixar's UP divided by AVATAR's use of CGI live action combo plattering. Kudos galore should be paid to SKY's writer-director Kevin Konran--a CGI art director by trade who got to make this feature after wowing the brass with a 12 minute short version.  He's a great collage maker, is what it boils down to, but he's no Brad Bird or Joss Whedon. In fact, he's more a Tim Burton with less box office mojo.

For SKY CAPTAIN, Konran melds lots of post-modern image collages into his rather non-existent story, about a crazy Nazi scientist who's plotting to blow up the earth, or something, and has armies of giant robots that fly and stuff, to get 'er done. This would all be well and good, except then in comes our hero, Sky Captain (Jude Law) to save the (yester)day. This bloke's a sort of David Manners pretending he's Clark Gable in TOO HOT TO HANDLE and smarmy. Law can do smarmy without being too offensive, you don't send a gigolo robot (in AI, below) to do a man's job, unless you forgot what a 1930s ubermensch is all about.

Now, I admire Jude Law as an actor, not cuz he's pretty and dates (dated?) Sienna Miller, but because he's fearless in the face of his acknowledged limitations--he's trapped in a room full of mirrors. Annette Bening is the same way, for example, and it doesn't make her a bad actress, because she too can be aware enough of it to bring some existential reflection as to her inability to existentially reflect into the mix. And like Bening going full harridan in AMERICAN BEAUTY, Law's not afraid to dig deep into his inner creep (he was the best thing in Mendes' BEAUTY-follow-up, ROAD TO PERDITION, below).  Thus we'd believe him as the villain (or as an ambiguous nebula of audience alienation/identification, as in ALFIE and CLOSER), but when Law wearily informs his bitchy reporter girlfriend Polly (Gwenyth Paltrow): "I spent six months in a Manchurian labor camp thanks to you!" we don't believe him, because his nails are too perfect.  This is not a Captain Midnight-esque hero whose flown against robots and almost died a thousand times; this is a man speaking to a blue screen.  His voice is too silky and full of breathing exercise-nuance to have the forceful "I could give a shit"-ativeness that comes with tru gravitas (check out the way Clive Owen outguns him in their dueling douchebag dialogue in CLOSER). For starters, this guy should be smoking a cigar at all times.

I blame Law's miscasting for the film's lagging stretches, since he just doesn't have that John Wayne / Bogart quality where you feel kind of in the thrall of their competence. If he had it, then maybe his leading lady wouldn't have grown so obnoxious and curt (Paltrow was pregnant during filming which may explain that as well) in his presence. Before Law shows up (about 15 minutes in) she's doing all right. Although a scene where she's running down Broadway chased by giant robots is soooo unconvincing. There's a cutaway shot to Paltrow ripping her skirt so she can run that seems spliced in from a different movie, but before that she intones lines from Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast like she's listened to that broadcast as many times as I have, which is a lot, and so she's a "hell of an actor." She and Michael Gambon (her paternal newspaper editor) get off some shadowy underplaying before the fireworks begin.

And then proving the movie could work with some gravitas, you have Angelina Jolie show up halfway through or so as "Freddie", a one-eyed hottie version of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. A small part perhaps, but imdb.com informs us that "In preparation for her role, Angelina Jolie met with and interviewed dozens of British WWII veterans and pilots in order to adapt the proper mannerisms of her character. She also tweaked the script by adding bits of slang that were used during the era."

Hey Jude, why didn't you do that!? Jolie knows it's the little things mean a lot, Sky Captain. When she delivers a line like "Prepare the amphibious squadron!" you know what's up. You want to go prepare the amphibious squadron just for her, on your knees!

The music score is a bombastic piece of ripoffery, of course, and the sound effects and layered imagery are so over the top that at times it feels like there's an almost Brechtian disconnect, with nothing ever matching up. Still, the fractured nature of it all works to make us unable to focus on the actual story, which depending on the environment in which you see the film (it would be perfect at Radio City Music Hall or some Art Deco facsimile) can give it a meta-textual sense of breathing room. The result is like some Brechtian playwright being forced to write pulp fiction, or Godard reading smutty spy novels over the (non) action in SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL. Heavy use of words onscreen, oceans come with esoteric compasses layered above the waves, everything crashing around like a "Why We Fight" entry replete with Churchill-esque radio broadcasts about how only Sky Captain can get to the bottom of this "series of events."

The heavy (cost-effective?) use of black and blurry edge recalls the pages of Heavy Metal and the old Marvel rip-off of that title, Epic! Not that I didn't love both. Epic was a kind of tweener version, the last stop before the unapologetic R Rating of Heavy Metal. But it lacks the minimalist angst of the Frank Miller SIN CITY adaptation, or the comic book boisterousness of Peter Jackson's KING KONG remake.

But it's got the light and dark thing down pat. If you keep your expectations low it can be like reading Weird Tales while hiding from your parents in a dank basement, with two once-cool friends who are now a couple and just bicker all the time and think they're being amusing though you just want to give them both a bitch-slap. But then Angelina Jolie comes along and you forgive stuff, like how it all reminds you of having an interesting movie interrupted by a daft date going "Who? What? What remote island? What? Why" as you're trying to get lost in the narrative.  But it's a great movie to watch while your doing other things and though Konran is not quite as hilarious as Bruce McCall (below) when it comes to seeing through the cracks of rose-tinted nostalgia to the big emptiness of the Adobe photoshop real, I'd rather watch this again anytime than return to the smug wordiness of Pynchon's Against the Day. 

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