Dawn of the Dinkins: RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE (2013), BLANK CITY (2010)

I came late to the party in Manhattan, but in 1992, moving in gradually via couch osmosis, it was still at least a party. The white boy funk thing was big - Spin Doctors, Blues Traveller, my band, the Mud -Wetlands, New Music Cafe, Tramp's, Nightingale's, most closed or sold. It didn't matter, we never went in - you could drink on the street if your had a brown paper bag around it. So I've seen it all happen, on the curbs. You read my 2011 piece, Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock, wherein I admonished the average New Yorker for letting all our lovely sleaze disappear. I predicted a time when the city shall be sleazy and crime-ridden once more, to allow cheap rents, and flourishing arts.
Man, was I wrong. This is where money goes to regroup and get its second wind. No one is taking the accursed city down into the artistic abyss anymore, not without a grant, you know, to cover the insurance.

Godard homage indicated by pose and striped shirt

Ashley Cahill feels as I do about NYC and he's done something about. A Brit filmmaker who has lived in NYC for most of his life (but keeps a posh accent trimmed and burning), Cahill looks like a weird cross between Seth Meyers and Beck, but he's made a fauxcumentary where he kills random citizenry in order to set the fuse on what he hopes will be a rent-lowering, Summer of Sam-style fear-upping art-blooming crime wave. The film's had more than a few titles, CHARM, for example, but here it's RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE and its on Netflix Streaming with one of those ubiquitous torture porn-looking covers. You have to look really close to see the blood around his mouth is the NYC skyline. If you share my mistrust of all the healthiness NYC is touting these days, you should look that close.

Celebrity friends should always be displayed proudly.

Godard and Truffaut T-shirts

scenebomber

It's one of those first person meta-documentary violence commentary films ala MAN BITES DOG (or Wayne Gail's film about Mickey and Mallory Knox), with Cahill as Malcolm, a slightly more homicidal version of, presumably, himself. Since both he and his character are Godard-hip and so able to use the low budget and stolen shot approach as contextual meta commentary beyond just the subject (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller). And though he never says so outright, he clearly shares my dislike of the second-guessing anxiety that sabotages so many homicidal comedies, i.e. the need to have Winona Ryder feel bad when she kills teens in HEATHERS, or just putting them into comas for SEX AND DEATH 101 (see "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise?); or to have Dexter only kill other serial killers. You know, they're afraid to get all Alex and his 3 Droogs-level challenging to our limits of audience identification. They want to be Scorsese but are afraid of Tommy DeVito. But once Malcolm does his first random stabbing you know he's not fucking around.

From the first, when he stops addressing the camera in his blithe discourse on the greatness of 70s NYC (when it beat out Detroit as "the murder capital of the world") when someone answers the random door he's been knocking on, we expect some kind of standard pre-arranged greeting (wherein a camera is already inside waiting for him as per so many reality shows). Instead, he races in, grabs the unlucky inhabitant and stabs her repeatedly and rapidly, without any drama or Bernard Hermann scissor music; the effect is chilling. He's suddenly moved faster than the camera man and become a real threat. We're just not expecting it and its genuinely shocking. Even though we know it's not 'real' per se it's hard not to shiver. So many faux-que-mentaries have tried to get to this spot, only to pull back like little pussies. But Cahill dives in, and ignores our ashen complexions.

Your reaction will probably be centered around your own neighborhood; to me the suburbs are far scarier at night than the city --there's usually at least three doors and dozens of ground floor single pane windows that even a child could break into out in suburbs. In NYC we have deadbolts on thick metal doors, and only one possible entry window (the one above the fire escape), and that has bars -all leftover from the 60s-70s crime era. But if your buzzer goes off or there's a knock on the door while you're watching this film, it could be quite scary, and going to theaters has become the last bastion of social vulnerability. When Malcolm garrotes a guy for texting in what looks like the Anthology Film Archives' downstairs screening room it's fun to imagine seeing the film there and realizing you forgot your turn your phone off. Even if it's a bit unnerving, one must applaud the filmmaker's full commitment to the tenets of starting a crime wave even as, as is always the way, he turns on his director, and quirky girl friend friend, and even his own French girlfriend when she objects to his SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE-style birthday present. Well that's to be expected. What's not expected is the deader-than-deadpan approach that never trivializes the violence Malcolm commits while never judging it either, so we end up in a very unique zone in that it's the opposite of HEATHERS' hypocritical inference that we're all so impressionable we need a pretty girl's buzzkill morals to remind us killing our high school enemies isn't "cool."

Jamie Frey (of the Brooklyn What?) left

But even if our sense of identification is pushed to HENRY or RICHARD III extremes, we trust Cahill because he's so openly homicidal he shatters walls well past the 'fourth' and beyond the metatextual infinite. The phrasing Cahill incorporates into his speech conveys a deep absorption of GODFATHER 2 ("you gonna help me with these things I gotta do, or what?"), TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, and BREATHLESS. He's in the zone, and I applaud how much that zone ties into film fans' sweeping rejection of banal reality and I can't help myself for applauding Cahill's brazen ballsiness - a near Don Quixote-esque quest to exhume the twitchy corpse of New York's badass past, to go all MS. 45 on SEX INTHE CITY. Like all great quests, it's doomed to backfire, but then again NYC hasn't ever been the same, not once in its 390 year history. It's like a mutating geographical variation of THE THING. Any chance to shape its mutant rapid evolution to our liking has long since gone - it's just too big to frighten.

Vince Gallo!

BLANK CITY (2010) is a real documentary about the time and place Cahill longs to return to, specifically NYC's underground 70s scene. Full of exquisite glimpses into the early 8 and 16mm films of the artsty downtown druggie enclaves centered around CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, Tompkins Square Park and the Alphabet City shooting galleries. The age of youtube, Final Cut, and digital video put an end to the uniqueness of the scene. When we used to project 8mm and 16mm films on white walls or sheets for gathered friends and/or family members, each showing was a one-time event, special in the way no amount of today's day Skyy Vodka sponsorship and gift bags can equal. And the kids then had more drugs -they could afford them living in $10 a month loft apartments with ten other people. So with ample footage from the original films (by people like Amos Poe and Richard Kern) and talking heads like Lydia Lunch, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Deborah Harry, and various members of various punk bands, it's better than being there, I'm sure - at least smell-wise, and has a good sense of humor about the poverty-enforced ingenuity of these early filmmakers. I especially loved the snippets of ROME 78 - a re-enactment of the fall of an empire as filmed on the sly around the City's more Roman-esque landmarks --so while a kid in a toga dies in the Central Park fountain, tourists walk by; a coliseum scene occurs in front of the Bronx Zoo lion cage, etc. It's the kind of gutsy shot stealing that makes New York City great!

ROME 78 - John Lurie (bottom)

It's that kind of poverty-is-the-mother-of-invention ingenuity that makes these film clips impressive and invaluable, and the scene's inclusiveness is impressive (a coordinated effort merged the downtown punks with the uptown African American WILD STYLE graffiti artists, dancers and street poets) as is the proletarian mix of thick New York accents, kids kicked out of their working class Bronx neighborhoods for being gay or fleeing their midwestern nowheresville hometowns like MIDNIGHT COWBOY, the idea that if you're literate, young, and hot you can never be considered homeless in a land where everyone takes care of everyone else and the class system is part of what's being rebelled against.

But then money and the eighties led to skyrocketing rents, which meant big real estate investments, which meant the need to protect those investments, which meant Republican mayors, so gradually, especially with the incursion of Giuliani in 1994, the herald of zero tolerance smoking, the abolition of the 'brown bag' drink, and the Cabaret Law that Kevin Bacon fought successfully in FOOTLOOSE in the 80s but we lost in the 'real life' of the New York streets; the crackdowns on the drugs in the club scene, the rise of swing dancing and my own near death over and over from alcoholism. I blame Giuliani for all of it. We could use a man like Ed Koch again.

Lydia Lunch

Shooting your own shit is so easy now it's hard to warrant a film festival at all, hard to motivate people to go find some shady address and sit on the concrete floor for three house when the movie you're showing them is a mere click away on the home screen - but back then if you had a projector and a camera you could make a movie on Monday and show it to a waiting crowd that weekend, since everyone knew everyone else and half the people were squatters, and half the people were in the movie anyway, it would just happen. Huge crowds packed into abandoned buildings. I used to love that! Showing my movies to a big audience was great, but Youtube has made public screenings too unreliable - there's no word of mouth anymore because word of mouth itself has vanished, and posting invites to Facebook is so easy that there are now so many options none of them end up being anything interesting. Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital - you know, like with Friendster. 

I left the red loading circle in, for art's sake

POST SCRIPT - There's this other documentary on Netflix, WE CAUSE SCENES: THE RISE OF IMPROV EVERYWHERE (2013), about a group of NYC hipsters who do big flash mob-ish pranks and I'm a little jealous of their huge turnouts, which would seem to contradict all I've said here, except for the whole rule-following aspect and I've never been good at highly organized 'spontaneity' - it's fine for some people but the New Yorker embodied by Cahill in RANDOM ACTS or the filmmakers in BLANK CITY might think it's just cult conformity in a new package.

safe for mainstream consumption

I can respect the original gaggle of dudes involved in the 'sudden improv' concept, but the idea that whole masses of people want to join up and be led into safe, happy flash mob style stuff makes me realize that cigarettes are essential to true revolution (and I say this as part of Shelley Jackson's SKIN project). It kind of lacks the 'everyone's in charge' freedom of similar movements (as in the Merry Pranksters or the Cockettes or Diggers) that relied on chaos and true freedom of the sort impossible without very strong psychedelics and tobacco. The idea that sober people eagerly participate in chances to get told what to do in order to 'break away' from the social reality makes no sense. This is how ideas like the Diggers morphed into cults like the People's Temple, and how the Rolling Stone mossed, and how Times Square became 'family-friendly.'

Thank god there's one artist who will never break that seal. Abel Ferrara, where is MARY and GO-GO TALES?

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pre-code capsules 5: WHITE WOMAN, RED DUST, GIRLS ABOUT TOWN, THE PURCHASE PRICE, MANDALAY

WHITE WOMAN
1933 - ****
Fans of KONGO, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS and Charles Laughton in general, phone your dealer and demand they remaster and restore this film and stop worrying about its controversial title; there's really not much in the way of miscegenation but! Charles Laughton as a psychopathic but otherwise borderline lovable rogue who operates a rubber plantation far deep in the tropics more than makes up for it. Employing escaped convicts and wanted men so they don't dare ever leave him, he bribes the natives to kill anyone who does, if the crocs don't get them first.

A truly marvelous scene occurs early wherein Laughton seduces Lombard while he's out in Saigon or wherever getting supplies. Coming off all down to earth and humbled by the loss of his wife, he's  truly touching and then as soon as they're married and he has her deep in the bush he becomes a bully in high MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY / LOST SOULS style. However, I think he's better and more sympathetic here than in either of those films, especially in his bemused rivalry relationship with fellow jungle rat Charles Bickford, who shows up out of the soggy swamps looking for a job. Spotting Lombard, Bickford makes no bones about his intentions to steal her out from under his portly employer, but Charles would much rather have an honest-about-his-shady-intentions rogue as his rival than the mealy-mouthed 'moral' pretty boy who does steal Lombard's heart (Kent Taylor).

Laughton is always hilarious and you feel the pain at his new wife's revulsion towards him and his futile jealousy over the young Kent underneath his bravado and smirking. You hate him for shooting the porter's monkey but you'll cheer his poker-faced Englishness during the big native attack finale. Can you believe Laughton made ISLAND OF THE LOST SOULS the same year? Talk about a roll!

RED DUST
1932 - ****
More rubber plantation action with Clark Gable in the Laughton role, so he does much better with the ladies, particularly Mary Astor (wed to a naive fever victim) and traveling 'salesgirl' Jean Harlow (she takes her famous rain barrel bath). The plot is the usual W. Somerset Maugham-style steamy love triangle, in the jungle where white Christian decency melts in the tropical heat and monsoons. MGM keeps the lurid indecency on a tight chain but they keep it hungry too -that one rainstorm kiss between a soaking wet Astor and Gable is hotter than hell.

I like what Rupert has to say about it on Classic Movies Digest:

As Barbara, Mary Astor is even more unwillingly libertine in her adulterous lust for Gable's Denny when one knows the background of the actress' torrid and infamous real life amours. The fireworks are in their scenes together as well. Early on when Astor slaps Gable hard for a verbal offense, he enjoys it, grinning that Gable grin from ear to ear. Then she can barely conceal her growing desire for him as she watches the strong, dark and commanding Denny hold her fair and weak husband, nursing him back to health from the fever. The comparison of the two is indeed notable to the tingly Astor. Then in the scene immediately following, Vantine happily and boldly watches Denny undress for bed, only to be told to go to her own, which she does in disappointment. These two ladies have it bad. 

GIRLS ABOUT TOWN
1931 - ***1/2
I saw this at the Film Forum about ten years ago during their first pre-code festival, with a packed, delighted audience, and it was a hoot and a holler and a half. Seeing it at home is still good, though it helps to have seen a lot of other pre-codes first so you understand the haphazard amorality brought on by the Great Depression, when so many women were broke and on the streets and hustling in a kind of gold-digger limbo between outright streetwalking and showgirl social climbing. Like Liz Taylor in BUTTERFIELD 8, the GIRLS also have a phone service to get their dates, and while one or two of them get happily reformed by the end the final shot is of our fearlessly amoral survivor calling that number for yet another victim. Kay Francis and Lillian Tashman are the girls. Joel McRae is the reformer, Eugene Pallette is the A-list sucker, Lucille Gleason his hard-luck wife. George Cukor directed with his champagne touch already in evidence. Similar in a lot of ways to BED OF ROSES and dozens of other features of the early sound era, the story is predictable but pre-code to the core. Sure Francis reformed at the end but Tashman gets to keep her diamonds and booze, thus pleasing everyone long time. 

THE PURCHASE PRICE
1932 - ***
Barbara Stanwyck has probably never looked sexier than trying to seduce dumbass sodbuster George Brent in this weird pre-code crowd-pleaser. Tired of life as a New York City singing slickster, Babs runs away from her clingy gangster lover Lyle Talbot by switching places with a Montreal hotel maid who was supposed to marry Brent via long distance matchmaking newspaper ads. It's not quite fair the way Brent gradually changes from sullen hick to merely a college grad who's designed his own new kind of wheat germ but needs a bunch of money to pay the mortgage. Paramount's resident pre-code sleazebag David Landau (he was the villain in the Marx Brothers' HORSEFEATHERS - "Here's to dear old Darwin!" the same year) wants ti step in, buy the mortgage and get Babs as his, um, 'cook,' in the process (things aren't going great in the Babs-Brent marriage - she fends off his one lamely busted move and he sulks ever after).

The story's strictly from hicksville and Brent's too much a mealy-mouthed pretty boy to convince as either a hick or a horticulturist, but Wellman gives us, as is his wont lots of great pre-code nitty city and farm town grit, including: one pretty good barroom fight; a vividly etched and very drunken shivaree; burning cornfields, terrible wallpaper; and lots of leering through open doorways. No grit in the world is so nitty it can best Stanwyck in a negligee and thigh high stockings, though. Seldom before has adult sexuality seemed so tangible, vulnerable or rock-hard tough, via a young, rail thin and undressed woman who's still wearing all the pants in sight.

MANDALAY
1934 - ***1/2
If you're suspected of killing the guy who ran out on you, and get exonerated, and then the guy shows up alive, are you allowed to kill him? That is the question asked of many a pre-code heroine but few have handled it as coolly as Kay Francis in MANDALAY.  Ricardo Cortez is the good gunrunner fiancee who leaves her behind in a Burma nightclub to pay his debt to shady club promoter Warner Oland. At first she refuses to stay, but then gets a hang of the game, changes her name to 'Spot White' and is soon so deep in the bedrooms and pockets of the rich and famous that the wives move to ship her farther up river. But on the riverboat to Mandalay who should show back up? And right when she's trying to make it with one of the ubiquitous archetypes of these jungle expeditions, the drug-addicted (or here, drunk) but good-hearted doctor (Lyle Talbot) heading up river to work on yellow fever victims, which--as we learned from W. Somerset Maugham--is a great way to pay off your malpractice or adulterous guilt.

The code came in around halfway through 1934, so the whole RAIN / PAINTED VEIL-ripped subgenre of commonwealth sin would soon be extinct in place of frilly frocks, domestic breakfasts, nannies, angelic children, but here in MANDALAY things are still allowed to be rife with all the lurid trimmings: drugs, booze, depravity, prostitution, gun-running, miscegenation, and murder. Michael Curtiz directed so you know there's nary a dull moment, even when nothing happens, and Kay's seldom looked lovelier. Dig that slinky Orry-Kelly gown above! Oh you kid! Awooga!

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Favorite Film Critics: Michael Weldon

It's hard to remember a time when the internet was still over a decade away; VHS rentals were mostly found in backrooms of local appliance shops, and books mostly at mall chains like Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. As far as film guides, well, there was Leonard Maltin, period. But then, in 1983, as if smuggled into B. Dalton from some strange alternate universe, was this weird thick, expensive ($25!) silver book called the Psychotronic Encylopedia of Film. Life as we knew it would never be the same again... is a cliche Weldon would never use.

Back then please recall, Quentin Tarantino was under the legal drinking age, and the Times Square grindhouse era was only beginning to die. I was 16 and my few grindhouse experiences had been traumatic: boredom trumped good sense and we NJ teenagers would take the train to Times Square the way farmers used to go to freak shows, to soak up the depravity from behind the protective barrier of our teenage alienation and sense of suburban invulnerability. All I remember is the awful stench of this one, the Roxy, showing films in at least three different shoebox size second floor holes, we came in at the end RUBY and left 1/3 into some Jackie Chan thing -- all on projector video: a mix of really cheap weed, freebase coke, urinal cigars, homelessness, unclean sex, and god knows what else in the air. I can still smell it after 25 years.

But my morbid acuteness of the olfactory senses didn't stop me from relishing the experience, and continuing to soak up the seediness from the safety of my beige wall papered tract home bedroom, and no one was better at conveying the lurid trashy glory of the unseen cinema than Michael Weldon. Psychotronic became my bible, my source book, my security blanket. I still have my original copy--bought with money begged from mom--and the page edges are black with my endless thumbing.

The best is the brevity of his prose. Most of the time there's not really an inkling of if the movie's good, sometimes he confesses he hasn't seen it. Most of it was written from memory, before the advent of home video. Instead of sitting around in the suburbs, Weldon was in two punk bands. He still writes but it seems to be more along the lines of pop culture criticism as in this editorial essay I found online:

"Some people have been complaining about pop songs being used as commercials since the 70s. I always loved The Beach Boys’ “Fun Fun Fun,” especially for the brilliant falsetto harmony ending and Sly And The Family Stone’s “Hot Fun In the Summertime.” And the intro of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” (featuring the drumming of Soupy Sales son) has become the new “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (or the 2001, Elvis intro theme) of TV ads. Key parts of all three are now being used for cruise ship TV spots. Music from an LSD casualty, a coke casualty, and a long time heroin addict to attract mostly retired couples to take overpriced vacations on ocean polluting ships that a record number of people have been puking their guts out on. Brilliant!  (Psychotronic #38)

No, Mr. Weldon. It's you who are brilliant for spinning it that way! I don't think Weldon comes by these observations via some Guy Debord détournement-recuperation angle, and that's why he's so cool. Well one of the reasons. His sense of the absurd is poker-faced in a way that would make Bunuel drop a woman's shoe in salute.

In 1998 I got one of my first steady freelance film criticism jobs, working on search engine entries for a vast director canon project, condensing all these classic films (given out by director) into 200-250 word capsule reviews, up to 20 a week. Some--like D.W. Griffith and Edmund Goulding--had over 30 or 40 films to cover; they taught me a lot about film history. Others, like Roger Corman, Jess Franco, and Edgar Ulmer had even more titles and taught me how to bullshit. Who would have imagined that my endless obsessing over Michael Weldon's tight-lipped style in Pyschotronic would come in so handy? His deadpan stressing of random details and gift for collapsing mountains of impressions and factoids into one smooth, hilarious, joke-free punchline was my boilerplate. I had absorbed some of his style, like the blob!

Here's some random samples: For his review of THE FLESH EATERS (1964, above): "... (Kolsek) was a bottom of the barrel villain at Universal during the '40s and played Joseph Paul Goebbels at least three times. The film's other standout performance is Ray Tudor as the jive-talking, shipwrecked beatnik Omar." (p. 246)

What makes that pair of sentences such sublime poetry? Note the inclusion of Goebbel's middle name or the way Omar's whole groovy hipster shtick is collapsed into a three adjectives. And you could trust Weldon to understate, so if he says "the film's other stand-out" that means Kolsek and Tudor are better than the rest of the cast, but since it's Weldon you know it means more than that, Omar is AWESOME, and the rest of the cast isn't bad.

Then there's his quiet meta-statements, made all the more powerful by their rarity, as in his capsule for I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF: 

"Young Michael Landon (real name Eugene Horowitz) will never be forgotten as the troubled high school student turned into a snarling drooling hairy monster by Whit Bissell. No full moons or crucifixes are involved. Hypnotism causes the retrogressive transformation whenever Landon is startled." (p. 355).

Again, nothing jaw-dropping first-off, but note the way he just drops a weird word like 'retrogressive' in there, like it's no big deal, or the anachronistic mention of crucifixes (for werewolves?), or the lack of commas for 'snarling drooling hairy.' Savor the deadpan solemnity that's wittily undermined by the inclusion of Landon's goofy real name in the opening sentence.

Weldon's magazine has gone out of print, and so has the original Psychotronic Encyclopedia. His 1996 follow-up, the Psychotronic Video Guide is also essential reading, though by then internet and endless film guides had made it hard to stand-out as starkly as the original had 13 years previously. DVD has polished up a lot of these films poor Weldon had to see on streaky fuzzy faded dupes or in sticky Deuce seating, so that we could be free. It's up to us now to keep his flame alive, just as he dedicated his second book to 42nd Street, meaning "the" 42nd Street, as it used to be," so too should we dedicate ourselves to Weldon. I really need to rediscover this book, now that it's sitting in my lap, and order some of the magazine's back issues (at cover price, still!) from the Psychotronic website. Check it out here.

In the end, Michael Weldon is a bit like the Velvet Underground in that he never became super popular so much as hugely influential; every kid who read Psychotronic apparently became a writer or filmmaker. Weldon taught half-suffocated, tragically bored mid-1980s suburban punks and poseurs how to see deeply into even the most opaque 42nd Street garbage and find the shining gems within.

For the 25th anniversary of Weldon's landmark original Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Hollywood Bitchslap's Ron Gonsalves noted:

A note on the back of Psychotronic Encyclopedia reads, "Warning: The author of this book has been watching these movies obsessively since the age of 6. He is now unfit for conventional employment." Well, conventional employment's loss was our gain. I ache for a third volume of psychotronic angel-dust — maybe you do, too. (It's been twelve years, almost as long as the gap between the first two books.) But for now, we can simply raise a toast to the original gray brick's 25th birthday, perhaps take it off the shelf and swim around in it all over again, and give props to the man who was there before everyone else, without whom there wouldn't have been a Grindhouse or a Tarantino or a Film Threat... (10/08)

Writers, filmmakers, and artists can go to school all they want but in the end they learn by reading other writers. In other words, we're sponges. Many fiction writers spend a year or so trying to write like Hemingway or Raymond Carver, so do we film critics of a certain age and interest range spend a lifetime trying to capsulize like Michael Weldon.

But Michael Weldon is not just another big brother guide who led us from passive to active, from viewer to maker, from reader to writer. In his dry unobtrusive way he's also the grinder of the lens through which all the sleaze of yesteryear is re-evaluated as art today. So thank you, thank you, Michael Weldon!  In transforming schlock appreciation into a literary art form (of brevity and wit) you not only supplied expert guidance for our strange viewing interests, you taught us to how to fucking see jewels in the trashy street.

(See also Favorite Film Critics: Kim Morgan)

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