Not with a Wimp but a Banger: KICK-ASS 2, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, ENDER'S GAME

Look deep into the screen, my children. Any screen, all screens --this is your new reality: screens in the classroom -- a big one instead of a blackboard, a laptop on your desk, the phone on which you secretly watch movies with a well-concealed earbud; screens on the way home on the bus (your phone) or car (DVD player above the dash); screens at home, the big flatscreen in the living room, the small one in your room, your laptop and phone still flickering as well... wake, and repeat. How many more minutes of life can the screen co-opt? There aren't many left. 

With their action figure and video game readiness, their graphic novel and teenage sci fi novel roots, a batch of films recently regurgitated up onto blu-ray and prove, to my 'grown-up' eyes, to be great examples of what Guy Debord called recuperation, which is to say using the trappings of subversion in service of the institutions you're subverting (i.e. the Che Guevara emblem used on a Budweiser label: "Viva l'revolution... responsibly."). I saw them all over the weekend so I feel, however falsely, plugged into product placement pulse of teen fantasy nerd America and all the synergy and branding that implies! Piggyback on, Jackie! Wonder Twin Powers Activate! Form of Coors Lite Ice! 

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KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there in coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of your life, but if that justifies dressing up in goofy costumes and sticking your pretty face harm's way in the name of a safe America, then Yog Soggoth bless, because if like me you loathe the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count of the old A-TEAM show (or T2: "Casualties Zero"), then its very realistic damage done to property, life, and limb makes KICK-ASS a priceless precious thing, as gleeful in its sociopathy as Wendy Kroy or Mr. Blonde.

Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is the supervillain again, hiring cop-killing badasses from the dregs of his late father's mob business to kill, pummel, strangle, gut and maul Kick-Ass and all his friends and family. Meanwhile witless cop Morris Chestnut doesn't want his orphaned ward Hit Girl (the still-glorious Chloe Grace Moretz) doing any more killing. He wants her to experience the 'beauty' of a childhood (where the hell did he grow up, Shangri-La? Normal suburban life is about the worst thing you can inflict on a fifteen year-old!) I kept praying Chestnut was one of the cops to be killed during the massive slaughter inflicted by 'Mother Russia' - a gigantic female ex-KGB assassin, just so Hit Girl could get out from under his buzzkill sanctimony.

That's the real lesson here: just because you promise something to an adult doesn't mean you have to deliver on it. Parents are clueless. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kids drawers for drugs seems to be the in thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search the drawers. So hide your drugs outside your window, on a string, like Don Birnim's bottle in THE LOST WEEKEND!

Complain all you want, and some have, even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids to the premiere, and was shocked at all the beheading), but to me the film's absurdist brutality-- its gleefully 'real' cartoon violence-- is a long sigh of relief after an eternity of teen-friendly action movie hypocrisy. That said, the romantic / sexual elements are sexist and cliche'd. Though Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) has a great midriff, she's subjected to a strange rape gag, which I did not care for. I also don't like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your attack dog!!

But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist way or just unconsciously it doesn't matter. In short, I dig the cut of Hit Girl's jib. With Hit Girl + her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and as Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much-missed 30 ROCK, Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. She's alive, and an artist, which means (in the movies) not being squeamish about ripping someone's throat out with your teeth. Viva la revolution... irresponsibly, as Thanatos intendeth!

Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant, but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' (Jennifer Lawrence) as just another morose girl who likes hunky boys to fight over her, but we barely explore that by-now dulled triangle (except as an oblique analogy to Hollywood's lavender marriages) in order to nail down the nerve-shredding implications of 24/7 media coverage, wherein celebrity hinges on survival and failure to smile with casual joie de vivre for the cameras or failure to adequately pretend to be in love with some short dude is enough to ensure your family is killed and your village fire-bombed.

The concept is ingenious, because HUNGER GAMES is a cottage industry at its own throat, equating its dystopia with the ceaseless flash of paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits endless award shows, and high pressure to be smile that is the grueling regimen of our modern starlets. I can only think of three other films to explore this: the slow torture of a dance marathon in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY (1969)- here; the sexual enslavement in a neoconservative dystopia of 1990's A HANDMAID'S TALE) and the very similar to HUNGER GAMES, (almost too similar) the Japanese BATTLE ROYALE (2000).

Perhaps to metatextualize these implications, Jennifer Lawrence spends most of the movie caked in enough bronzed make-up to weigh down three Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley. Her glum face beneath this load would get too much to bear without some of her old spark, so thank god Jena Malone shows up, the Night Bitch if you will, of one of the other districts. Malone looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood. While Lawrence sulks in her gold pancake make-up, Katniss schemes and writhes and comes onto the big-jawed lap dog whose supposed to be Katniss' boyfriend.

All the old cast is back as well, including Donald Sutherland as the evil emperor, whose failure to grasp fundamental tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader the most unrealistic thing about the film, since he genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. A man whose reign hinges on TV propaganda should know enough to mass produce that verboten mockingjay symbol as a keychain, and have his jackass TV host (played by Stanley Tucci) greet the TV audience with it (in short, comrade, to employ recuperation), the way MTV has done to every underground music movement since its inception. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolution --it all but ensures it. And so it is the evil Sutherland's preference for bloodthirsty draconian brutality is off-kilter, as if he's trying to throw us off the scent of the film's own ingenious use of recuperation by showing his obliviousness towards such a practice, for I have no doubt those 'mockingjay' pendants are on sale just a few stores down from the multiplex at Forever 21, and if the evil emperor endorses them to help pacify the gum-chewing masses, real-time sales might drop.

Other signifiers are probably not going to be sold at the multiplex, such as the garish fashions worn by the hoi poloi, thank god. With their frills and pouffiness drawing obvious parallels to both the Reagan 80s and the French Revolution, the series offers enough hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés of the sophistos up top and the peasants starving and flogged below to make even D.W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM seems subtle. That said, there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act other than as a shrill mouthpiece for plot exposition.

Then there's a rare treat lacking in the other films discussed, a genuine drunk hip older dude, one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens: Woody Harrelson. Advising Katniss how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, he also eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things than validating Katniss' useless sulking. Another priceless factor is bizarro twist of having to imagine spending all your time with the dude you don't like yet must pretend to love, and he's shorter than you, and how his being so sweet and staid and supportive only makes it worse. That tweens are swooning for him only shows there's still hope for short guys and hope is a dangerous thing. 

(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)

ENDER'S GAME (2013) is a little removed from the love nonsense, but there's a lot of care and time spent getting the glistening eyes of the space bug exactly right. And Asa Butterfield as Ender is himself is a kind of fourteen year-old Hannibal Lector-for-good recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts.

I hated LAST STARFIGHTER and its bland 'every lad' though I didn't mind the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP because we were supposed to think of them as delusional caricatures, not 'ourselves' not as 'normal suburban teens' as imagined by guys who haven't seen a normal suburban kid in 30 years. Ender is different, he can defend himself and underneath his nervous ecotmorphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer. His nebulous doubts about the rightness of his mission are played up but we never really get the full HEARTS AND MINDS story before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for sequels. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens within the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens, in other words, what the military is doing right now! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!

Real life drone pilots at their gaming consoles

The last thing any kid wants is to see an 'average' kid like them in a sci fi movie.
We go to sci fi to get AWAY from ourselves!

As in CATCHING FIRE, ENDER wants you to want the sequels, to get the DVD, see it again on the IMAX, in 3-D, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth through sheer will, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should buy them, like an indirect post-production Kickstarter, but... you know -- it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the nerd no one else likes. You can never shake them off once you do.

I feel like I should defend JOHN CARTER in particular because I read all the original Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, as well as Burroughs' Tarzans and Carson of Venus, Robert E. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser. 

from 1946! I got it for cover price
at the Lansdale PA Bookswap!

The best part about all of those books? No fucking kids! No 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. No 'Boy' in the Tarzans ('Boy' ruined the later movies), no boys at all. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adults, the ones who could kill the oppressors of their conscience without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those adult heroes back! Imagine STAR WARS if Han Solo never showed up, replaced instead by a 12 year-old boy with really normal hair and a nagging mom?! Horrible!

We must fight Morris Chestnut's call to safety and fight with all our strengths their glorification of 'being a kid.' Already the Chestnuts in Hollywood have gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing, from our cinema heritage. The Chestnut is out of control and he will not stop until everyone wears safety helmets even to bed. Stop him before he jabs his safety-first overhead florescent light even into the darkest recesses of our most secret-sacred heart. Because you know he intends to try. I say roast him on the open fire of aimless youth rebellion! Richie in OVER THE EDGE, thou shalt not have died in vain! Now which way to Forever 21?

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The Terminator Looking Glass: THE KEEP (1983), DARK ANGEL (1990) and Planet Arous

THE KEEP

1983 - ***

Director Michael Mann's so busy with capturing the way backlit German soldiers cast weird light and shadow as they Chariots of Fire through the fog towards no noticeable finish line under a haunting two chord synthesizer in The Keep that any semblance of story sinks deep beneath the ocean of consciousness. Fresh from playing a sympathetic U-Boat captain in Das Boot, Jürgen Prochnow is sufficiently war weary as the Wermacht officer assigned to a remote Romanian fortress that was built into the side of the Carpathians thousands of years before recorded time. Colorful villagers bring the food and sweep up and wear crosses for der mudder's sake and never visit after dark, and advise the soldiers not to either. Since the Keep's been there longer than their remembered time, they don't even know why they're so freaked. But Jürgen has his orders!

The first night a couple of sentries decide to dig the silver cross out of one of the walls, and what happens next will blow your mind, Mann hopes, so that you don't notice how most of the rest of the film is blown as well, like dust in the slow motion wind, sparkling like diamonds in cross-shaped rays of ambient light, illuminating mysterious spaces vaster than the ocean within the stone blocks of the walls.

Soon Jürgen's men begin disappearing at  geometric rate. Backwards fog machines absorb German souls for use incarnating a dark giant with glowing red eyes and a body that slowly beefs up from accumulated evil soul steroids; Prochnow doesn't see it but does notice his men are vanishing, and as an SS officer, Gabriel Byrne is busting his balls. So bottles are opened, drunk despair occurs, and bloody graffiti in an ancient text prompts him to send for an old Jewish archaeologist-linguist named Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen) currently cooling his wheelchair in a nearby concentration camp. The linguist brings his hot daughter (Alberta Watson), leading to attempted rape by German guards who are promptly absorbed into our monster via a lengthy shot of backwards fog. Is this the fabled Jewish golem? The original Dracula (this being Romania and all)? Whomever he is, he comes to Cruz to offer vengeance against Hitler in exchange for a small favor that will enable him to escape the Keep. As an advance, the being infuses Cruz with youth and he can suddenly walk and looks as young and spry as Ian McKellen was at the time, relatively speaking.

As this weird creature is so muscular he begins to resemble the Terminator, which then awakens the Hebrew Sex God equivalent of Kyle Reese (Scott Glenn). From far away he senses a disturbance in the force and takes a slow mo boat at dawn up the Elbe at sunrise, scored to hypnotic synths as the sky streaks red, letting you know all you need to about Mann's future Miami Vice series, which began the year after The Keep.  Like so many shots in the film there's really no point to this drawn-out dawn-on-the-Elbe boat shot (besides future placement on Mann's reel). Sorry if that sounds snide of me to say. If I wasn't stuck seeing the film on a crappy full-frame crop from Amazon Instant Video (it's not on DVD) I might have just swooned away as I did watching Mann's Miami Vice feature film on blu-ray.

Anyway, Scott Glenn's been making sure this being stays in the Keep, for centuries, and even if it means Hitler won't be devoured in a dust storm, Glen's got to stop him from leaving.  Maybe he can shag McKellan's daughter in the process, for he is no sourpuss Christian god, and everyone knows the Hebrews have never considered sex a crime. No wonder they're so damned sensual...

The last time I tried to see this all the way through was in high school when my buddy Alan and his girlfriend (and mine) came over and we played hooky and hung out all day while mom was at work, having sex, which made the film even harder to understand through my ADD brain. It's almost too slow even now, on lots of SSRI meds, but Michael Mann's career is such that we can now admire it as a fledgling auteur's first attempt at transformation even if its ultimate hook--that all the bad guys are done in by their own unconscious manifesting their darkest fears and desires in the rarefied realms of the foggy backlit stony corridors--has been done to death and back again (it you substitute the keep for a mysterious planet or spacecraft, you have Galaxy of Terror, Sphere, Event Horizon, Solaris, and even to a certain extent Forbidden Planet). But unlike some of those films, which get way too solemn, Keep still has the mighty monster, a tall giant gray juicehead square with shoulder muscles that make the average linebacker look like Ichabod Crane and a ruthlessness towards fascism that even fascism itself might think extreme. 

Maybe if it was a shade less opaque or Mann used less slow motion it would be a classic, but still, it's worth any price to see Ian McKellan, who is now as old as the character he plays at the start of The Keep, suddenly cast off his current age and be young again. Imagine if that were true and we were guaranteed another 30 years of Magneto and Gandalf! Now that we so belatedly know and love him, we would not waste un minuto del McKellan!

Another benefit this film has going is its accurate portrayal of some complicated interrelation between the German army, the SS, and their Romanian allies. WWII historians watching this with their less-sophisto peers can use the events of the film to pompously explain the friction between the relatively sane German infantry and the conclave of sociopaths in the SS, here led by the evil but at least consistent Gabriel Byrne (with a Crispin Glover haircut) and why the Romanians signed on with the Axis (to help them fight off the Soviets) which makes an interesting corollary to the deal between this golem monster and McKellen's linguist. 

I'm a big WWII and horror fan and used to read a ton of comic books and this film reminded me of one of my pet imagination projects, an adaptation of DC Comics' Weird War Tales. The Keep would make a damn good middle entry in a horror-war trilogy. Its story could cut down to 30 minutes with ease. I think that's how long it would be anyway if Mann just sped it back up to normal speed. Either way it's weird enough (and played straight enough) to just about sneak by coherency's dozing sentry. And it's good enough to make me hope some day we'll get a blu-ray HD restoration and be able to fathom what what was holding Mann's attention so glacially.  

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I COME IN PEACE (DARK ANGEL)

1990 - ***

Speaking of thick necks, what about Dolph Lundgren's? A Swede with nary a trace of accent, he plays a tall anti-authoritarian cop in Dark Angel, AKA I Come in Peace. There are some cliche lines, a cliche lady cop girlfriend who is angry at him for not calling, and a cliche uptight yuppie partner, but the killer is all kinds of awesome, a kind of German Alec Baldwin on stilts with Wuxia hair, shoulder pads, and serious Lugosi-at-the-end-of-Bride of the Monster platforms. Turns out he's a drug dealer from another planet who's here on earth to harvest our opiate-spike pituitary chemicals. They fetch a high price back on his home planet. So he kills a mess of drug dealers with a flying CD, then uses their supply to shoot up random civilians with a crazy wrist snake device, then drills a hole in their forehead to harvest the ensuing dopamine gushes, and accumulates it all in little crystalline vials in a wrist pack for future off-world export. Man, that's about as cool a deviation from the standard alien drug dealer as I've ever seen. And brother, I've seen it all. I got lucky having not heard of this before the great Shout Factory blu-ray, so my first viewing is in crisp HD widescreen where the neon and explosions shine.

It wouldn't be a post-Terminator film if there wasn't also a cop alien, lagging behind and always a little confused, coming after the drug dealer with all sorts of sci fi fire power. There's also a conglomerate of great evil yuppies in a satisfying side plot that allows us to see them getting shot to pieces, and exploded, always a comfort in these harsh economic times, and the end is a long cool chase through an abandoned smelting plant, or something, ala the end of Terminator 2, and just about everything is thrown into an all-out brawl that's pure Dolph!

I didn't know much about old Dolph prior to writing this, but was shocked to learn he's a Fulbright scholar in engineering, a former Swedish Olympic karate team leader, still married to the mother of his children and looks like a damned cool dad. Check him in this picture below teaching one of his daughters some karate moves while on a family vacation!

It would have been great if he'd been allowed to act the full breadth of his Swedish ubermensch intelligence in more films, as anyone can play a dumb cop with a gut instinct for crime who refuses to play by the book, especially by 1990, the pinnacle of lame catchphrase saturation. The drive-in era was dying by then, and where else was a film about a 'think from the gut' cop--the type who finds out anything he wants to know by going to a seedy strip club and shaking down the perennial sniveling snitch, Michael J. Pollard--going to go? It had to wait until now, on the Shout disc, bathed in the Hong Kong neon blue hue of 80s nostalgia, to shine crazy diamond-style.

All that aside, if you're willing to bask in this 80s capstone's sheer muttonheadedness then you can appreciate the weird aspect of the alien being on earth to siphon the brains of people getting off on drugs (he avoids junkies, since their glands are often burned out). It works best when trying to not be clever -- the action is easy to follow and the only distraction is how the editor prides himself on a million little clever smash cuts, from someone opening a car door to someone opening a bottle, for example; there's also the issue of the shrill yuppie smug FBI partner to get past, and the way the roundhouse kicks are filmed is such that one instantly looks for stunt doubles, which makes no sense; if your lead can do his own martial arts it pays to live in the wide shot.

But hey, it was the 80s, or rather the end of the 80s, the final in a long line of films about heavies from another time, planet, or dimension pursued by an agent of good from the same dimension.  It's the same formula used in The Keep, though in that instance it came out the year before Terminator's release. So... maybe it all really began with The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) with Gor vs. Vol. You seen that? Now that's a film you should see, oh alien brain word receiver, descrambling this mess of alphabet called a post. It's cheaper than a Jack Benny doorman tip, but John Agar, in dark contact lenses, ranting about world domination whilst under the possession of Gor, that's something even Fullbright can get behind.

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'Transgalactic Delta House Ebullience,' Comic Book Evolution, and Timothy Leary's Head - PAUL (2011)

Like most people I know who follow exo-politics, I thought PAUL (2011) looked grim from the outset. First off, this is supposed to be a brom-com about a surviving Roswell alien, and here his huge eyes aren't dark black. The black eye on grey aliens is, as we now know now, a kind of DNA-implanted contact lens, as if we humans decided we loved Raybans (tm) so much we had them surgically grafted. Without the dark eyes Paul looks just like a big E.T. / Close Encounters love doll - and it turns out he was the inspiration for both films (we learn this thanks to flashbacks of long chain-smoking phone calls he had with Spielberg in the 1970s) which makes perfect sense from a disinformation standpoint (if you see an alien on the street eating Reese's Pieces, you're a lot less likely to get taken seriously when you report it to the cops).

I remember well at the age of around 15-16, gazing at my surly, bald, bespectacled comic book store owner (Quality Comics in Somerville, NJ, if you were there, you know him) and thinking: 1. I'll never stop being into comics no matter that they say people grow out of them, and 2. I hope I don't end up looking and acting like this surly bald bastard. Back then 16 seemed suspiciously old to still be into comics, even if you were into the sophisticated stuff like Frank Miller's Daredevil. And now... these clowns.

In other words, seeing what I'd look like if I stayed friends with my Frost-ish pal and never discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll is kind of crushingly weird and terrifying. And Yet -  they actually grow as characters as the film goes on, how emotionally un-arrested of them! And Kristen Wiig is adorable, as the NY Post's Paul Smith noted: 

There may come a day when I tire of Seth Rogen’s shtick but I hope it doesn’t come soon. (Yes, I loved “The Green Hornet”). His sarcastic insults and Transgalactic Delta House ebullience keep things rolling along (even if the gay jokes are a little stale) as the boys pick up more enemies and a kindly one-eyed fundamentalist Christian (the indispensable Kristen Wiig) who says of Paul, “He’s not evil. He’s just a bit rude.”
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"Transgalactic Delta House ebullience" - I think we can all aspire to that, both as writers and as people. The ultimate message of this cosmic trip then becomes this: stoners are the smartest of all humans. Paul's very advanced, yet he acts just like a stoner slacker crossed with a less spastic Kermit the Frog. What does that tell you if it's not that stoners rule?!! That's what got me out of being a comic book nerd, I can tell you - drugs and alcohol were my socializing and talking to hot girls without blushing and stammering spinach. And as drugs, bass, and babes became the major force in my life, all the other comics stopped for me except Love and Rockets, Dan Clowes' Eightball (below), Pete Bagge's Hate, and old Zap! reprints. I yelled excitedly when I saw this guy (below) on one of Pegg's awesome T-shirts. That's a Clowes!

It would have been cool in Paul to see examples of other aliens or humans working inside the alien vessels to further advance the notions of a global elite conspiracy but it's great the way the CGI alien interacts with the humans so flawlessly--on the level of Andy Serkis' Kong and Golum, rather than the stilted dread knots of Jar Jar Binks and SyFy channel stuff. It works so that you forget altogether he's just a CGI hallucination. So see PAUL with a bunch of friends late night after the young person's AA meeting, or while getting hammered and it will treat you right. There's a subtext in there that any dope fiend or former dope fiend will take to heart, and it's traceable back to--what else?--a comic book:

The one big genre-buster comic I know of that deals with the issues of life after death and the universe and aliens, the only truth that sets one free, is Timothy Leary's Neurocomics (Last Gasp, 1979) which describes the circular DNA arc of life with the following being indicative of where our Paul is on the evolutionary scale:

In this strata, the hippie stoner is a whole evolutionary cycle above the family man preacher (below) who is the end game on the highest level of 'terrestrial circuits' while the stoner is the lowbrow level of post-terrestrial, so a whole DNA sequence higher on the celestial step ladder.

 

(Read the full comic  here or download here)

This should be good news to the moms of stoners and trippers everywhere, and explains why the religious right considers psychedelic drugs such a threat. It's because the 17 year-old mushroom dealer is a whole circuit higher on the DNA chain than freakin' Jerry Falwell or Michelle Bachman, or even Osama Bin Barack, or whatever his post-Bohemian Grove mind control reptilian takeover name is. And that's enough that those comic book geeks Pegg and Frost should really grow up and start doing some drugs. Paul's got a great magic power where he can send you all the cosmic truths in a big rush of DMT that will take the dogma crust off any cutie pie conservative, and it makes a good point for arguing that the bible belt might come around and be less closed-off if they got a nice dose of LSD in their morning cup of joe. If you want to 'see' the truth, you know who to trust, and it's not those Bohemian Grove owl-worshiping conservatives and their masochist leatherboy slave Antichrist, but the real deal, Tim Leary! LEARYCON, now that's a comic convention worth believing in. Vote Leary's frozen head for president in 2012! 

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Sprays of Heaven: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (1976)

"Help means so much more than giving you weapons." 

What happens when a peaceful rocket full of sexy East Germans are lured to a western colonized planet and are subject to drugs (the red spray is "spicy" while the blue spray is "sweet"), erotic dancing and orgiastic staring contests?  Das ist die frage in Gottfried Kolditz's colorful, cool and just plain weird film, 1976's IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (Im Staub der Sterne). Classy is the word I use to describe this crew, four women and two older guys, well-dressed and even-tempered. Nice hair.

Answering a distress signal, this East German rocketship (from the planet Cynro) emergency lands and is greeted first by a woman dressed like Pocahontas driving a combination school bus-railroad handcar who comes rumbling up to the ship in welcome like she's Robby the Robot in FORBIDDEN PLANET. Suko stays behind to spy while the rest ride over to the club to sit on divans and catch snide insults from the local bosses. Someone wants this spaceship to go home, but first, why not invite them to the party? Pocahontas comes by later with prismatic plastic fantastic invitations for each of them.

The "boss" of the planet is a fey German artiste who gets his hair spray painted blue and is forced to play with lite-brite and a keyboard that controls a disco dance floor full of pythons and gel-lit frauleinen. Don Draper this guy aint. And let me tell you, his army sucks. Mostly the battles consist in a lot of standing around, working up the nerve to bust a cap, like a high school dance in Hell. These cavorting hedonists never speak, but spend most of their time spraying drugs of one color or another into their mouths, brainwashing nosy visitors with pen flashlights and doing licentious dances. The costumes aren't up to Mario Bava PLANET OF THE VAMPIRE standards but nonetheless pretty fetching, with an uncanny resemblance to UN peacekeepers. And it's nice that they change clothes about five times a day and stay color coordinated with each other, as if through telepathic EFSP (Extra-Fashion-Sense Perception). The patterns and styles are elegant and mod without being tacky or cumbersome, and they go well with the natural blonde shag haircuts of the majority of the crew. Jana Brejchová is the hottie commander (at right). She was once married to Milos Foreman!

In a way, DUST OF THE STARS is the perfect Iron Curtain counterpart to the American space fantasia of 50's sci fi films, ala: CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON/MISSILE TO THE MOON/QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE and THREE STOOGES IN OUTER SPACE, wherein dopey male astronauts land on a planets run by space women with a hankering for new blood... in their lineage and on their mandibles. In DUST there seems to be mainly dudes on the planet, at least with speaking roles (aside from Pocahontas) and the men are in weird Studio 54-esque "boytoy" attire, all ready to offer a hit of primo "spray" to any crew member with an open nostril, er, I mean mouth. And the girls in the crew are the ones who call the shots! The two men on the crew are clearly both well-laid and mildly emasculated... a perfect Euro combination that Americans can only sneer at in envy. Both Paul Lind and Mae West would have loved them!

Kind of like HELL HOUSE (the Halloween 'haunted house' wherein Christian kids finally get to dance, pretend to do drugs and worship Satan in their own way), the licentious dancing and spraying of the aliens here presumably was acceptable to the East German censors because it was negatively depicted as a trap-- set by decadent western Imperialists--to ensnare good honest communists.

The parties these aliens throw are awesome, but for my money nothing can beat the black tights beatnik bar modern expressionist dancing of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Man, those girls just nailed it! And though one of the two men on the Cynro crew is pretty smart (usually in these films, only one paranoid crew member smells danger while the others consider him a buzzkill), the commander is a woman--and competent!-- navigating her sometimes overly compassionate female emotions with the same objective grappling of, say, Kirk on STAR TREK, and between all of the crew is a sexually relaxed vibe (they sleep with each other and make no big deal of it? Man, those East Germans!). My favorite is the girl at lower left; what a magnificently sensual pout!

I think her name is Miu. She's played by Regine Heintze, and I love her. Also, I love the offhand way that the film's sexuality and lovely female forms are displayed without any leering and/or slavering. It's like the characters in this film actually have sex rather than just winking and drooling and then finally having one chaste kiss like they're David Manners at an ice cream social. In DUST, they just do it and forget about it. The Germans have no patience for lovelorn leering! Stand straight! Are you slouching?! Achtung!

I am grateful to Netflix for having this film on instant stream and thus indirectly introducing me to the wonderful site known as Teleport City ("Bringing you yesterday's tomorrow... today!"). I love what their writer says about the loose nature of the crew (remember this was the 70s, pre-AIDS awareness, when sex wasn't a four letter word):

Now, in addition to their refreshing gender make-up, there are other things about the Cynro crew, only subtly hinted at for the most part, that make them just a little different from what you'd normally expect from the militarily-ranked team manning your average movie starship. I think, also, that these things are meant to suggest the way things roll back on Cynro. For one thing, this gang is just a tad more touchy-feely with one another than the behavior of those serving aboard the Enterprise and its like have accustomed us to. Secondly, Suko, as a not-all-that-in-shape middle aged guy with thinning hair, clearly has the arrangement to beat onboard the vessel, as he seems to be the boy toy of at least two of the female crew members, including the Captain and her blond colleague Miu. Miu, for her part, also might have a thing for the ladies, as one later scene seems to suggest. While all of this implied hanky-panky provides the opportunity for a bit of casual nudity and light petting between the cast members, it's all presented very matter-of-factly, with none of the exploitational hubba hubba you might expect. Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman this is not -- and the tone seems to suggest that the egalitarian ethos observed on this lots' home planet extends to everyone getting an equal piece, not just of the proverbial pie, but of each other, as well.

Now I don't know about you, space neighbors, but that seems pretty cool to me. If the wall hadn't come down, I might be tempted to hurtle it. I would disagree with Teleport City about the score (they don't like it). Yes, it's a bedroom-ish low fi casio-guitar soundtrack, but it's superb in its monochromatic moodiness; it's low-fi shoegaze twenty years ahead of schedule and as such is 100 times better than those super-slick-hyper-cliched Danny Elfman orchestral/children's choir cues that have been deadening so many big budget sci fi and fantasy films here in the states in the last 20 years.

Similarly ahead of his time is the fey "boss" of the bad guys, a prancing Caligula-wannabe who parties with snakes and likes to change his hair color to match his mercurial mood. He could be knocking back drinks with any 1990s Manhattan loungecore crowd and everyone would assume he's in advertising -- but it's still only 1979 and he's a communist. And we think those East Germans were behind the times? In 1979 they were partying like it's 1997, which is to say, hard and unsmilingly.

In typical commie fashion, the action break-out finale looks more like a labor strike than a shootout, replete with hundreds of confused, identically-dressed male extras hacking at rocks, locking arms and shuffling around in nonviolent protest. No one seems very militarily coordinated on this planet, with opposing armies running to and fro like herds of awkward antelope, but they look good, specimen-wise. Boasting a mix of modular architecture and muddy grassland roughly parallel to Gene Roddenberry's TV special futurescapes of the era, the film earns extra points for the natural and uncanny weirdness of East German design, and the refreshing lack of western sexism. Not once does any male say anything condescending! And our director manages to make them all seem both vulnerable and strong, smart and gullible -- all while never missing a chance to show some sexy thighs (below left).

Much more bizarre in terms of sci fi plots is the moral quandary the crew faces: If they intervene on behalf of the oppressed workers of the planet, they'll have to stay around like a peacekeeping delegation and will probably get involved in an interplanetary war; if they just leave then they've turned their back on a people in need. It makes a good modern parable for a UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, Liberia or Darfur--or the reason, for example, that George Bush Sr. was too smart to invade Iraq ("no exit strategy").  The conquering Tem people know they can't kill or attack the ship directly if they want to avoid an "inter-galactic incident," but the miners are all fair game, used as human shields, slave labor and so forth, again, just like real life!

Another perhaps more controversial analogy is with modern UFO philosophy--i.e. the notion that we're (as in earthlings) under the rule of trans-dimensional aliens who harvest our genetically modified souls and have worked their way into the fabric of all levels of social leadership. The space travelers tell the enslaved Tekk: "We can't build a force field around your planet so you can develop undisturbed like we would like"-- a lament very similar to UN policy toward underdeveloped nations undergoing exploitation by slick multi-nationals, or the way grays try not to disrupt our evolution even as they tinker with our DNA on the sidelines.

Whoa! Don't think I'm crazy. I've just been reading Nigel Kerner's new book all weekend. It's not that I 100% believe we're a soul farm stud on Orion's Belt, but if we in the first world can't/won't imagine there might be some extraterrestrial race for whom we're a third world primitive society in the midst of being exploited (we learned colonialism from somewhere) maybe we deserve all we get, or may have already gotten. Plus, our East German rocket comrades bear more than passing resemblance to the "blonde" aliens sometimes seen cruising around in saucers or European dance clubs.You will now please erase this nonsense from your mind. Alles ist schone. Alles ist schone...

Due to budget or obscure communist censorship laws we don't see too much violence or special effects; most of the attacks are offscreen and we hear about them on the ship's radio. The big climax just involves one "important" death, which causes "the Boss" to smash his orbs, if you know what I mean. On both sides of the squabble there's a remarkably etched-in sense of collective teamwork, decision making and leadership skills. But hey, we don't have to see scenes just because the rickety sci fi framework plot requires them;  we've seen it all before -- fill in your own blanks, let your tongue feel the spray, and dig those astro-boots (right).

In the end, DUST says more about communist notions of decadence, binaca-style spray drugs and open-sexuality than a whole festival of Amerikanische schweinhunde filmen ever could. Most devastating is the implication that the need to get high and exploit nude bodies is perhaps just a capitalist-conditioned response to the repression and misery instilled by our Puritan forefathers. These East Germans don't need to do all that because they just have casual sex with each other, wear cool clothes, and forget about it. With a crew of beautiful, healthy German women to give your aching head a maternal massage as needed-- and/or dance while you eat breakfast, maybe you'd be just fine as a cog in the people's machine. After all, what are you exploiting the workers and getting high for, anyway?

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