League of Wednesdays: SPIDER BABY (1968)

Having just seen, loved, and written about Girly (1970), I must delve into its American cousin, Jack Hill's de-lovely Spider Baby (1968), for Stacie Ponder's Ye Olde Film Club Day over at the definitive Final Girl. 

And if you needed a reason to love Spider Baby, think of its homicidal purity in contrast with, say, the new Addams Family musical, which I've read disturbing things about via the NY Times' Ben Brantley:

Gomez (Mr. Lane) and Morticia (Ms. Neuwirth), the heads of the family, discover to their alarm that Wednesday (Krysta Rodriguez, left), their 18-year-old daughter, has fallen in love with Lucas Beineke (Wesley Taylor), a young man from a middle-class all-American home. What’s more, Wednesday has invited Lucas and his parents — Mal (Terrence Mann) and Alice (Carolee Carmello) — for dinner, and insists that the family try to act “normal” for the night.

Wednesday grown up and asking her parents to act "normal'" and not embarrass her in front of her bland boyfriend? Why bother making the play at all? Nothing's worse than when a genuinely macabre family gets watered down and sanitized to appease Times Square tourists. Imagine a Spider Baby remake starring Michael Cera in the same situation as Quin Redecker (above) --tied down and at the mercy of a nubile nymphet with two butcher knives. Cera would squirm and make lame excuses and try to talk his way out of the situation, just like a big...fat... bug... caught in a spider web.  Redecker still squirms, but he's a swell fella, with some real class and a thorough knowledge of horror films.

Spider Baby has a come a long way and endured many setbacks en route to its current cult status, like being barely screened at all when originally released because in late '68 no one wanted black and white films at the drive-in anymore, all of a sudden. It resurfaced later on blurry video where it became a slow-burn cult favorite, but even then it was the kind of film you had to dig for. At least I had to dig in 1990 when I'd watch it every night around three AM, drunk on bourbon and ginger ale - it was on a 6-hour tape I made, betwixt Mesa of Lost Women and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill --all culled from Scarecrow video rentals. Together they formed for me an inner sacred space of the devouring Kali goddess cinematic energy, a womb where death and life were all in the hands of batshit insane dark haired spider ladies, and set the groundwork for my appreciation of Camille Paglia's 'chthonic' vision when I read her Sexual Personae a few years later. Prurience, punishment and drunken self-loathing all came together for me watching this film, transmuting into to 127 proof gold of the absolving Kali.

No one can climb into the lap of a tied-down uncle Peter (Redecker) or mix girly baby doll sexuality and creepy murderousness like Jill Banner (above). Though Beverly Washburn as her sister Elizabeth comes in a respectable second. Together, it gets no better. Cordelia's more about tattling to the family cutsodian/chauffer Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.) while Virignia's thing is the "spider game" and presumably is the titutlar baby; her sister Cordelia doesn't even like spiders! As usual with these film dionee, the brother is a wild child simpleton (Syd Haig), the patriarch long dead but still in his upstairs master bedroom, and Bruno is the best kind of dad to step in as guardian, eternally gentle and decent with his homicidal charges.

We all love Chaney's farewell monologue with the children gathered around, as he comes up with the solution to their unwanted house guest problem, a solution which will mean the death of them all-- and a gleam of sadness comes into his eye and you know he's using his personal career rises and falls and awareness of his own mortality and bogey man obsolescence to access that melancholy and ravaged relief -- everything in poor Lon's life, from his childhood sleeping in the vaudeville trunk of his thousand-faced dad, all the way down to fucking up his live TV Frankenstein--it all comes pouring out so beautifully you can't help but tear up. It's his "Home... I have no home" speech, and he does it so well he never has to vary from being mellow and glowing, happy that all their woes will soon come to an end. Lon shows just what he was still capable of and it makes a nice capstone for a great actor mauled by Hollywood's fickle taste changes and his own genetic predisposition for booze. In this single scene on a film that crawled out of the obscurity basement all on its own, he transmutes his entire squalid life into an unqualified triumph.

As with GIRLY, described in my last post, this is a movie that seems to merge with my psyche as if it had been made just for me... zeroed in but not in a sort of overkill give the people what they want kind of way (as in the overkill of Rodriguez's Planet Terror or the too muchness of Charlies Angels Full Throttle), but a perfectly-realized, just gory and strange enough but never to the point of post-modern narrative disruption way. Nowhere are there the tedious elements that usually mar old dark house and murderous family films: snarky reporters, imbecilic cops, doting old ladies and suspicious tire salesmen, to name a few.  None of that! and yet there are all sorts of groovy meta links to the gonzo films of the past in the casting: Monogram mainstay Mantan Moreland who opens the film as an unlucky telegram Sam; Carol Ohmart, the archetypal broad in House on Haunted Hill (1957) and The Creature from the Haunted Sea, great at making greed and contempt super sexy; Sid Haig, the Jack Hill perennial; and Beverly Washburn! Why, the whole thing just stinks with atmosphere! (that's a quote from the sun-dappled, roughly similar and underrated Boogeyman Will Get You (1943).

I can't find my copy of the old version DVD but I ordered the director's cut direct at his Spider Baby Online site. I'm hoping going through that, director-writer-producer Jack Hill gets a bigger cut of profit, so he can get rich and make more movies. Stop meditating and start scarifying again, Jack, you've got a great eye, ear and wit, so use it, por favor--and Stacie Ponder, you are the Mother Queen of all horror and strange film bloggin's. Yours was the first "blog" I read and related to, years and years ago! You showed monsters and perceptive writing could be fused!

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Head Under Heels: GIRLY (1970)

Much as I love grindhouse cinema, I'll confess some of the themes--the rape-revenge and WIP sub-genres in particular--often leave me feeling soiled and soured on humanity, walking the streets adrift like a Tennessee Williams heroine, pining for dead ideals and sensing only brusque, licentious hostility all around. As an English major at Syracuse during the mid-to-late 1980s, I was caught up in a time of great liberal backlash/sexual hysteria--Satanic panic and the dawn of PC thuggery--wherein sensitive new age guys like me were conditioned to feel guilty for every impure thought. I've since been protective of women to the point where I forget to be aggressive; moves go un-busted for years and years.

That's why, perhaps, I've always long been in love with dangerous women, the type who kick ass, smoke, drink, dose, wear fur coats over nothing but jeans and a torn t-shirt, carry guns and laugh at the cosmic joke and can beat a frat boy to death with a champagne bottle all at the same time. Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted is my guru. Yes, I know, that's a pretty bad choice for a guru.

And yet, look at America; it's got some bad taste in gurus. I'm right with the times digging psycho bitches since the poster girl for the era is Sarah Palin. I love her tan and form-fitted bright red raincoat and MILF glasses, standing on a podium surrounded by crisp Alaskan snow; her hot breath steaming the microphone, spouting enough fear-inducing fascist rhetoric to make Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate wince. In that film Lansbury used her husband as the dummy while Palin is her own dummy and I dig that. I dig when girls rise up and use their sexual super powers for evil instead of good, and if they can't have their revenge on Seattle like Francis Farmer in that Nirvana song, then let them destroy all the side-burned swingers, angry lawyers, priests, parents, and homeless they can get their claws on! Hence my deep love for: Spider Baby,  Don't Deliver Us From Evil,  Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, Vampyres, Mesa of Lost Women, Daughter of Darkness, and so on (if you know any others, do let me know).

Thank heaven, then, for little Girly. The film's treacly decor (lots of dolls and paneling) could have been too much to handle, but director Freddie Francis does the impossible and makes the whole dreary Brit tackiness thing seem actually cozy-- the real thing--instead of soap opera imitation. Girly possesses a sense of giddy feral freedom. There's a remote broken down castle in the Shire, some delusional family members and a hot young maniac, what's not to love, even as the axe comes roaring down? The insanity of the matriarchy resembles Grey Gardens at times, but it comes by it naturally: dolls, pre-empathic (latent) sadism, games like 'grocery store' and cowboys and Indians are all part of a devolution brought on by incest and trust funds. They have no father to initiate the children into the social order; it all comes down to lots of finger sucking, macabre nursery rhymes and chants, strange "rules" of the house, and the way, as it ever does, sex destroys everything.

A knock-out of the Sue Lyon as Lolita /Jill Banner as Virginia (aka Spider Baby) / Carroll Baker as Baby Doll / Darryl Hannah as California Mountain Snake in Kill Bill variety, Vanessa Howard captures the spirit of wicked evil as only young girlies can. Her eyes are alight with unholy mischief, and then -- later, the guilty pangs of blossoming womanhood--and all the drag that implies. And she's got lovely legs. They're always on display in mod skirts, including a beech-skin cowboy costume. Her straight blonde hair demarks a princesses and her simmering red schoolgirl uniform is like a pomegranate-squeezed hallucination against the perennial grey garden fog of the green, brown and stone English countryside.  She bites into her character with such a cunning glee that you want to lick the juice off her chin. 

The other cast members are smashing as well: we especially adored the droll restraint of Ursula Howells as Mumsy (the original title is Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly) and the slow burn of Pat Heywood as the sexually frustrated Nanny. The interloper who wisely seduces the lot is Michael Bryant, who kind of looks like James Coburn and he does a good job in a difficult role even if he's not; Imogen Hassall is his fur and white-dress clad Italian-ish girlfriend; she's excellent at being bored and unaware of immanent danger. Francis's camerawork is imaginative and rich, replete with some good crane shots, though some of the interiors seem flatly lit and the palette is very mushy even if there are plenty of dark greens and maroon reds. Bernard Ebbinghouse's score is a nicely subversive mix of bouncy elevator and nursery school maniacal, but in a good way.  It's a favorite film of its director, who won the Oscars for cinematography in The Elephant Man and Glory.

Man, this film's got my number. I'm trying to less subjective here but if I love a film I take it very personally. Love kills everything it touches, including objectivity. As Burt Lancaster said in Visconti's The Leopard: "Marriage is six months of fire and forty years of ashes." If you ever were a swinger, you might use that line to justify a lifestyle that includes occasionally waking up from a two-day benders on a stranger's couch, snuggled against a snoring pit bull with a severed hand in its mouth, like a cigar. In the words of our celestial Desi: Wha happen?! I still don't know, but you've chosen the swinging path over that of the spouse and ungrey garden and that's your life, and you'll probably do it again. Such is our hero's lot in life,  the male version of Looking for Mr. Goodbar.\

Man, I'm off topic!  Let me pull in some help from one of 60s-70s-era British cinema's best friends, Cinebeat's amazing Kimberly Lindbergs:

Before Freddie Francis started directing horror films he worked as a cinematographer on celebrated British dramas such as Room at the Top (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). His unique talents helped give birth to the British New Wave and he was partially responsible for ushering in a new era of British cinema. Francis considered Girly to be one of his best films and I think it’s fascinating to view the movie as an extension of his previous work as a cinematographer. In some ways Girly could be seen as a seamless blend of Francis’ early beginnings as a member of the British New Wave combined with his bleak sense of humor and macabre sensibilities.

Speaking of stingers, I dedicate this blog entry to my favorite new show: Investigative Discovery Channel's TV crime doc series, DEADLY WOMEN! And on that note, free Brenda Wiley!

And strange coincidence, almost all my own films have the same Venus Flytrap / Vagina Dentata theme, particularly QUEEN OF DIC/SKS.

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Secrets of 2012, or the "The Day of a Million Relapses"

Sorry to be so late to the party in loving/trashing Roland Emmerich's 2012, but I got so much to say, You HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME! We're running out of time! First, First, I love the insecure way Emmerich steals bits not just from himself but from James Cameron, and Michael Bay -- they steal bits from each other, as if there was only one 99 cent bag of tired action movie cliches and they had to share it between them, and make it last three hours. Emmerich of course is the worst, stealing everything while sticking to what he knows best - destroying the world on a bigger and bigger scale and refracting the escapes and deaths through the on-the-street perspectives of an an offensively cliche'd cross section of 'everypeople'-- each a unique distillation of stock characteristics defining their Ameri-racial heritage.

There's enough great carnage in 2012 to forgive it its trespasses, of course: Las Vegas collapses into a giant flame hole, all of Los Angeles gets a long fly-over as it sinks back into the earth, the Vatican (!!), and other tourist spots collapse and a joyous time is had by all, though it's rather like having a lover who covers up the fact they don't have an erection by performing an elaborate courtship dance. 

But hey, we've all died before in other lives, we know it's hard, and Emmerich makes sure we all are represented by one stock character or the other. Me, I resonated most with Harry (Blu Mankuma), the beautiful old African American jazz man father of the bleeding heart geologist son (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The two have a nice farewell via ship-to-shore phone (Harry's pianist in residence on a cruise liner) and upon hanging up--his responsibility to his son completed--Harry grabs a Jack Daniels off a passing waiter's tray. His old sax man (George Segal) remarks: "Harry, you haven't had a drink in 25 years!"

Harry doesn't even answer, and our movie makes sure we actually get to see him drink that first drink in 25 years, a healthy swig, thus letting us know that (a) he's cool and b) he's doomed, and c) he's relapsed and doesn't give a shit! As someone with half his 'time,' I can't help but cheer!! Someone in that scriptwriting pool knows the score!

Sadly, the next time we see Harry he's not abusive or sprawled on the floor, or staggering around on his second fifth of bourbon, or even playing some mournful blues on the lounge piano as the room fills with water and waiters wade by in slow motion (they're on a cruise). So many missed opportunities... but finally a disaster movie actually put in what every sober alcoholic waits for--the unshakable excuse to relapse. There's an old saying in AA that I made up about promising to drink again when hell freezes over: one day we're bound to find ourselves on a Zamboni machine heading down into the flames.

So that's 2012 for me, and I don't even have to tell you the rest of the plot: A perennially late divorced slacker dad (John Cusak, flailing wildly) racing to pick up his kids for the weekend from hot, beachwood-aged-wife (Amanda Peet) and her shallow dork of a plastic surgeon, lawyer or stockbroker boyfriend/husband (Tom McCarthy). Cusak is one of those dads who talk baby talk to their children long past the expiration date that such condescension passes for parenting. Dude, your daughter's watching the world cave in around her and you're the one panicking like a hysterical over-acting ninny.

I'm always glad to see that Hollywood for all its smarm is deeply concerned about micro-managerial parenting and the crippling anxiety it creates -- especially in men, causing them to run away from responsibility and dread every weekend of custody, terrified the kid will slip and fall on their watch. Like Tom Cruise in Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS remake, our spazzola action movie everyman is caught at ground zero of immanent catastrophe right at the time he's most anxiety-prone: child custody weekend. His first thought once the meteors start is to return the kids asap so he can be free to die with dignity. Is this how real fathers feel, or is it what teenagers are afraid they'll feel as fathers?

I'm childless, no kids y'all, and the whole "road not taken" fascinates me,  not in a fuzzy way but in a queasy way -- like watching your friends fall into a giant threshing machine and come out looking thirty years older, but with a nice shiny 'warm-colored' patina, telling you in their pod person voices "Once you have a child, your whole outlook changes, you appreciate life." Thus, God opens the door right as the floor falls away behind you, and he expects you to jump through only at the last possible second, your mouth agape, going "Ahhhhhhhhhhh!"

Next thing I love about this film? The covert condemnation of liberal bleeding-heartedness. I mean, can we be honest? Do we really care if four billion people die, or an extra hundred crrazy idiots get to come on the ark or not? Would you really care so much, Holly, if one of those little ants down there stopped moving? Either way, why INDEPENDENCE DAY and DAY AFTER TOMORROW did this so much better was by eliminating the whole ark crap. The mad chase across the globe to fight to get on some escape craft is a kind of hack ploy to show a lot of different lands getting wiped out, but a close reading opens up all sorts of THE BOX-style Pandora-ish issues of empathy and survival instinct that  come off best either being addressed in Brechtian reflexivity or in a film noir-style survivor guilt way (ala 28 MONTHS LATER) or not at all. Don't lecture us for enjoying watching ant-sized people falling out of burning skyscrapers if that's what got us in the seats. We didn't come for character development.

The moral quandry is brought up and simultaneously side-stepped by this strategy. Ejiofor plays his bleeding horn whenever he learns someone he knows has died, demanding everyone drop their own issues to acknowledge that these people he knew had NAMES, feelings!  Meanwhile, the "self-preservation" other of the equation is Cusak as the kind of dad who promises his kids front row seats to Justin Bieber  and on arriving at the stadium (without tickets) and learning the show's sold out, panics and proceeds to storm the doors, blow the family fortune on scalpers, sneak in through the back, make a big scene with security about how much it means to his kids, cries and pleads, traumatizes everyone-- not just his kids--and eventually incites a small riot and burns down the stadium, and the kids don't even really care about Justin Beaver, at all; they hadn't the heart to tell him.

There are men who can act rationally when faced with crisis, and men can't, men who've just bled too much from their liberal martyr hearts to see the forests from the trees. These are men who will freak out because they can't find one girl's lost daddy and so righteously go around yelling even as huge fissures are erupting under the makeshift med unit and thousands are dying and burning all around. The only time this scene has been done right was in 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND (left), when Scarlett walks out of the makeshift confederate army hospital to get help and just keeps going right on home, after seeing the mass carnage spreading into the horizon. But Scarlet's morality was inherently dubious, what with slavery and all, and because Selznik hewed to the book, Scarlett was, almost by a fluke, allowed to be totally mercenary and immoral. (Everyone wants to make a film as sweeping and memorable as GONE WITH THE WIND, but have they actually ever seen it? The lead character's an unrepentant bitch, y'all!) GWTW could hardly even be made like that today, with such a ruthless, self-centered heroine. If the suits remade it, Scrarlett would probably end up a saintly single mom, and then all her capricious manipulations and treacheries would be solely to care "for the child" and therefore saintly.

To show you how bad things get without ambivalence and naked self-interest, let's return to 2012 and the only two guys with any maturity in the whole picture: Woody Harrelson as a Yellowstone hippy DJ who greets the huge volcanic eruption of old Faithful with a head full of mescalin (I'm guessing) and Oliver Platt as a blustery political something or other who soon regrets inviting Ejiofor along on the ark, especially when he starts to make emotion-cracked pleas to open up the arks to the unwashed masses rioting outside. Platt screams at him: "You might have gotten us all killed but as long as your conscience is clean." Amen. When Oliver Platt is the only one with any sense, that's a sad crazy day.

My fellow Americans, many must die so that John Cusak and his two rugrats may live and have last minute escapes, one after the other until the law of averages shrugs and walks away as if from his friend's nonstop video game playing. Of course if you really really really want to live, then come on! We have to get on that plane and take off before the earth splits apart but first I have to slowly do five things! There's a saying in AA, you know you're an alcoholic when you have to choose between believing in God or dying drunk, and need time to think about it. If to live you had to endure John Cusak's overacting, there shouldn't be a second thought.

Like, am I the only one who just wishes everyone died in this film? Why be loyal and liberal bleeding hearty to CGI stick figures? Let them die! That's what they're for!!! I remember in 6th grade, my friend and I drew stick figures killing and dying elaborate horrible deaths in each other's notebooks during class - it helped blow off steam. The teacher thought the drawings were cool (it was 1978) but we should pay more attention to class topics. If we pulled that in a 6th grade class today we'd be red flagged and the parents would be called-in, and the teacher would worry and admonish the way Ejiofor does to Oliver Platt: "Those things you drew - they're just stick figures to you, but they have NAMES, feelings! They represent real people!"

Like everyone's going to crack up with cheering and weeping if Cusak (who in his Jar-Jar spazzing nearly destroys all humanity) survives. If he had been a real hero, he would have just let his ex-family die like everyone else -  he'd be spared all the running and flailing, but no, he's that kind of dad, a total victim of the idea of "proximal morality" -- that is, the condition wherein something is important based on its proximity. You might be running to stop a bomb in a crowded restaurant, but if you pass a dog with a thorn its paw, you have to stop and pull the thorn out. That dog has a NAME, feelings, people! The dog's proximity preempts the bomb in the restaurant, cancels it out -- the squeaky wheel-greaser dad in action.

Thus, the ambivalence of Scarlett lives on in a passive aggressive display of parenting anxiety: Worrying about his children exempts him from responsibility for all the billions of lives that are being left to die. In this manner Cusak's no different from Billy Zane in TITANIC (1997, left), muscling his way into a lifeboat by claiming to be the guardian of some random kid he scooped up. If it was actually his own kid, he'd be considered a saint,. And aren't we all children of God, Nic? I mean John? Now which way is the bar on this sinking tub?

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In Praise of Dangerous Men: George C. Scott as PATTON (1970)

"The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans."

- Patton (1970)

Now that Kathryn Bigelow has made it safe for us to recklessly court macho annihilation again, let's examine one of the more respected and controversial military leaders of our time-- General George Patton, and the 1970 film that bears his name, starring George C. Scott, which I recently had the pleasure of acquiring on an excellent blu-ray disc, and which is highly recommended to fans of THE HURT LOCKER (2009), THE DEER HUNTER (1977) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) and anyone whose ever had a heart, who wouldn't turn around and expose its flank to daily howitzer bombardments... or who is interested in this new Tom Hanks-produced mini-series, THE PACIFIC (though Patton wasn't in the Pacific, it's still the same God-damned wonderful war!)

From the famous opening (quoted above) -- Patton's clinically insane and perhaps wrong but nonetheless inspiring opening speech in front of a giant American flag -- onwards, we know we're in for some heavy stuff, as Scott has no plans to pull punches, glorify the American dream or lament the unfairness of war. Indeed, as the esteemed general of the magnificent Third Army, Scott's ranting makes you realize, as a man, that part of cowardice involves forgetting there's no real reward to being alive in the first place, as a coward.  Unless you risk it all, it's all wasted.

It makes sense that Francis Ford Coppola worked on the script, since the man knows a thing or too about the seductive lure of megalomania and the high of facing death on a daily basis. Coppola was kicked off the PATTON production but later found fictional editions of that kind of military mindset in characters like Kilgore, Willard and Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW, and brilliantly captured the way an ordinary man might find himself manifesting the cold reptilian killer via Michael Corleone's transformation from idealistic young lover of Diane Keaton to cold-as-ice Don in THE GODFATHER. And of course, there's the inspired use of Sicily, a deeply-rooted trans-historical lyricism seems to emanate from the very soil of that island, and Coppola knew it and let it infuse GODFATHER 2. 

In order to rouse his newly assigned group of men from their first defeat in North Africa (he's replacing an ineffectual general who let the boys get slaughtered), Patton initially presents himself as a maniac for discipline and army regulation, making his men fear and hate him, but the hate makes them better soldiers, and when they finally measure up, his admiration becomes enough of a reward that they're ready to die for him. As Cesar "The Dog Whisperer" Milan would say, he is an excellent pack leader, radiating calm, assertive energy and understanding that all affection must be earned for it to have value. Or as Tura Satana said in FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL KILL: "You don't have to believe it, just act it." Patton doesn't mind that your hands shake so long as you're trying to keep them steady. It's only when you cower and quit that he boots you into the deep end like a sadistic but wise pool instructor (my own most hated-feared childhood figure).

I don't dare presume I wouldn't be ten times more afraid and shell-shocked in the field of battle than the man Patton slaps, or even Jeremy Davies in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998). One can't know from a besotted armchair field position, but there are other ways to prove your courage, such as smuggling drugs out of Istanbul, or trying to score with the hottest chick in the room without any wingman or back-up, or bluffing your way past the velvet ropes at a hot nightclub, or even just not drinking, one day at a time. True adult courage is important to bear in mind as the alienating effect of technology quietly mutates us back into children via unsupervised lengths of time in complete privacy, allowing the illusion of a mommy bound to serve you instead of vice versa. If God had given us wings he'd expect us to fly, even demand it, so in the age of internet, why not go all the way and abandon your body? If God hadn't meant us to leave our bodies he wouldn't have given us the internet. Needless to say, that kind of alone time is deprived our common foot soldier or tank brigadier. You can get almost anything in the army except privacy. A soldier is booted into manhood and has to stay there until he likes it, and that could take years. By the time he figures it out, the war is over.

Patton's discipline is intended to create that condition of initiation, Stockholm syndrome in the service of country - there's still going to be the odd soldier who resists the comfort of berserker madness and thinks clinging to the crumbling shards of his childhood persona will preserve rather than destroy him. In the end all the military drilling and exhaustion is to weaken the ego's dogmatic hold, so you can actually be molded into a killing machine who can then run into the path of flaming bullets--against all self-preservational logic. But as long as one soldier can get away with pretending to be sick to get out of combat, the morale of the whole unit is in jeopardy. Hence a little bitch-slap, which he performs in a sense as performance for the other men. Watching this with my dad as a child I used to think Patton was being a bully for slapping the soldier. Later, as a hippie, I thought he was existentialist and square. Now I'm all into his heart of darkness. Patton must necessarily be excused from any consequences that may stem from disrespecting boundaries, for the best defense is a good offense and therefore disrespecting boundaries is the mark of a good general. Eisenhower also shows himself a good general too in the way he masterfully plays up the slapping event up to deflect Nazi attention from D-Day (he had Patton scoping locations in Turkey, tricking the Germans sure into thinking he would invade there, and that the slap incident was a flimsy smokescreen - double reverse psych!).  A slap from a general may be humiliating, but in a way it did more for the war than getting blown up by a stray shell from Rommel's Panzer corps.

A word should be paid in tribute to the blu-ray version of this film: Dazzling! Originally shot on 70mm the picture is deep, and that has made all the difference in the 1080 transfer, enabling a dazzling clarity that lets you look up the nose of a man in a tank 5,000 yards away. The many long range desert battles seem to be in 3-D. The horizon line of the desert (this movie is always very horizon line conscious) warps the sides of the frame (Todd AO fisheye Cinerama 360 lenses) into a sloped elongated triangle, so it's like looking into a sloping Victorian house attic with North African desert wallpaper. If ever there was a reason to get blu-ray, this or Polanski's REPULSION would be it for me. I tried looking at the GODFATHER blu-ray, but got freaked out that you could finally see Bonasara the Undertaker's yellowed teeth clattering in the shadows as he talked of "vengeance for my daughter!"

Scott's nose is amazing on blu-ray, too: we can see three layers of veins in.  But his aim sucks. When shooting at German dive bombers, you have to lead them, not shoot behind them! He should have shot straight over his head - you got to "lead" em (1)!

Consider the line from the hippest movie ever made, PERFORMANCE:  "The only performance that truly makes it is one that achieves madness." When George C. Scott looks out at the carnage along the River Elbe, and says of war, "I love it. God help me I do love it so," one's aware that this right here is a performance that "truly makes it."

I've seen this movie all through my life and my reaction to that line varies with age. As a child watching it with my dad on TV I thought it was pretentious. Later, it seemed existentially gutsy; still later, callous. Now I see it as a coping mechanism, the very nature of heroism is perhaps this coping mechanism, an alchemical transubstantiation that enables one to derive perverse, counter-intuitive satisfaction from horror, the "you must make friend of horror" aspect, a looking down under the pretty flowers and below the serpents under them, to the deep roots wherein one endures the unendurable through a cultivated detachment, the stripping away of illusion's bodice, to reveal the grinning skull and scythe below. The tripper and the warrior both must kiss this skull and call it love.

To survive this awful surrender the hipster has his rueful irony, the court its jester, the American G.I. his endless complaining and satiric reading of army sloganeering.  The Germans never got that sense of humor -- they considered it our weakness.  They didn't realize that irony can be a kind of casual loyalty that works better than attack dog allegiance because--and this turned out to be a crucial advantage--the GI could improvise and think on his feet while the German was trained only to follow direct orders. As long as we can gripe and crack wise about it we can endure anything, that was what made us the winners: freedom to gripe about being losers!

One of my favorite war stories is how, during the Battle of the Bulge, the US tanks' top machine guns froze solid and couldn't be fired at the closely advancing enemy. Here it is, Germans breathing down their necks, bullets all around; it's freezing out, guns jammed and what do the machine gunners do? Urinate on them for a quick defrost! See, a German soldier would never think to do that. One needs a certain level of free-flying insanity to win a war, and that's what Patton had, and inspired in his men. To paraphrase Cesar Milan again: Insanity + Discipline, then affection.

Perhaps in war there simply is no rational response other than hoorror and heartbreak, neither of which wins wars. Therefore an irrational response is required: surrender completely to the "I love it, I do love it so," like a mantra, a relishing of the insane response. Do not the true prophets teach even that? To love your enemy like a brother even as you blow him to pieces? The movie ends with Scott intoning Patton's description of the triumphant Roman processionals of loot and conquered slaves before him: "And behind him, stood a slave with a golden crown, holding it over the conqueror's head while whispering in his ear, 'all glory is fleeting.'" But the film holds an even more shattering truth: life fleets even faster and death is not the end. Ladies and gentlemen, as he was in ancient Rome so shall he be in this future life. General Patton will be back!

(1) from the pages of the DC comic Sgt. Rock (c. 1980) - "You got to lead 'em! Lead 'em" when shooting at passing Messerschmidts. My friend Al and I quoted that a lot.

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The Bleating of the Wallies

A leading scientific journal in Pakistan, The Journal of Management & Social Science,* recently published a paper titled "A New Role for the Military: Preventing Enemies from Arising-Reviving an Ancient Approach to Peace," indicating that the military application of the Transcendental Meditation technique has merit. The paper discusses how militaries worldwide could use the Transcendental Meditation® and TM-Sidhi® program, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as a non-religious and scientifically verified way to prevent war and terrorism. When used in a military context, these meditation practices are known as Invincible Defense Technology (IDT). (Medical News Today, 3/23/10)

I saw The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) last night, then read the above article this morning. Coincidence? No such thing, my man, but then why do I have the urge to read Catcher in the Rye and go into a black-op black-out with a mission to excise all traces of Ewan McGregor's annoying narrator from the film? Seriously, was TRAINSPOTTING a total fluke? Either way, I'm glad the above article shows that meditation/druggie/hippie mind tactics in the military is not necessarily just the whimsical semi-truth of a trembling yellow (as in afraid) journalist afraid of a little LSD-spiked water. Ewan's character in the film, the kind of guy I wrote about a few years ago [Kill All Jonesers 11/10/08] in regards to needy biographers and journalists who try to absorb by proxy the glory of their subjects after said subjects are dead or disappeared, even though said subjects have or would have scoffed at them while they were alive.

Sad that his wife leaves him at the film's start (and who could blame her?), our smug self-pitying freelance journalist Bob Wilton (McGregor) heads off to Iraq to prove himself a man and show her a lesson. Not on any assignment or associated with any publication, and terribly out of place, he locks himself to the ankle of mysterious maybe-spy Lyn (George Clooney) and spends the rest of the movie being a cranky nag as Lyn tries to complete a strange shadowy mission. Bob is a real drag to ride with, whining about every little thing, refusing to believe or go along with anything Lyn says and then presuming--after the adventures are done--that he's now some kind of super op himself. Realizing at least some of what Lyn said might be true after all, Bob finally switches from neurotic to sanctimonious, determined to make sure the story is told even it shakes the government to its foundations. And um, what? Bob ranks right up there with Leo Di Caprio's little shithead in THE BEACH and MacGregor's 'poet' in MOULIN ROUGE as one of the most entitled little shits we were ever expected to root for at the movies.

I know, I know, you wanted to love this film. So did I. Well, if you think that Ewan McGregor stating he knows nothing about Star Wars or what a "Jedi" is makes for in-joke hilarity, then yes, you'll love it. (If you don't know that McGregor played a Jedi in the last three Star Wars films that makes you extra cool in my book) In fact, that tired in-joke goes by about five times; the director wants to make sure everyone gets it, right down to grandma in the last row.


For another painful example of this movie's level of wit, when Clooney confesses he feels bad about the time he killed a goat with his mind, McGregor blurts out: "The silence of the goats!?" as if he just decided on his entry for a New Yorker cartoon caption contest. And this guy is supposed to be a journalist? Who does he write for, Highlights? Ranger Rick? Dynamite? (left)


The goats themselves are awesome, but here again the movie shows no grasp on reality. The goats are kept in a big, dark, empty shed on the military base, labeled "top secret." Now, if you know anything about animals, anything at all, you know a few dozen goats aren't going to just stand around in a dark shed for years at a time in a stifling hot desert, waiting to be discovered by a snoopy journalist. Though they've been 'de-bleated' (yikes) so don't make noise, you would still smell them a mile away, and hear them trying to kick their way out, and then they'd all die of heatstroke or the fumes of their own piled up feces, or starve to death, within days. Goats need care, yo. Meanwhile goats wander all over the desert. Why not just buy one from a passing herdsman as needed? It's details like this which make MEN WHO STARE similar to one of those "earthy" romantic comedies about 'ordinary' people that were clearly made by rich Hollywood kids who've never even had a 'real' job.

Thank god for Jeff Bridges, then, as the film lights up whenever he's there onscreen, abiding. Maybe he's never had a 'real' job either, but he's the dude, and that makes all the difference. In a military pep talk he says that his recruits will learn to "see and hear everything" and to "stop talking in cliches" and live in the moment. Did you hear that last part about cliches, McGregor? You remembered it enough for a flashback but via one of the most tired cliches of all - the 60s protest rock-scored montage. Better stop, children, what's that sound? It's 60s rock cliche, barefoot servants too!

So, if you come to this film hoping, as I did, for a psychedelic ride into the mind of the military, man will you be disappointed, as the film seems to side more with the annoying journalist, making the end result a bit like APOCALYPSE NOW if Cathy (from the comic strip) played the Captain Willard role ("Day four - the river has too many bugs, and how come the army doesn't serve cake? Ahhhhh")

Most journalists are way too cool to whine every step of the way as they tag along for a story; they keep quiet or ask questions but don't sneer at the answers if they get them. But the times have a changed-in' and young men these days are, apparently, well, if not all mice, perhaps unaware of their non-mice options due to lack of assertive father figures. Compare the whining of McGregor's character, for example, with James Stewart in REAR WINDOW, trying to explain life in a combat zone to Grace Kelly. And Kelly's ten times the man McGregor is, and cuter too.

A plus about the film is the way it cleverly oscillates between believing in the stories of these psychedelic warriors and realizing most of it is perhaps bullshit. Any good shaman knows that all  rituals are 50% smoke and mirrors, not to hide the fact it's all "just" bullshit--it's not just, Clarice--but to create the realization that it's all bullshit, which is to say, there is no no exit from the bullshit, and no is, and no no, and therefore all is yes, which mean all is love, so love is nothing and nothing is everything -- all of which helps rope off a cordon of disbelief that allows visualization to occur. i.e. the way a child can use a dude with a sheet over his head going "Boo" as a screen on which to project real ghosts from his or her imagination--as opposed to that one smartass brat who says "that's just a man with a sheet on his head." Who is more the fool, the one who thinks he's a sucker to imagine the ghost, and so has no fun, or the one who can see what may not be there, and get all scared accordingly? What's the point of doubting and dismissing as a lifestyle choice? And where does our projection of fantasy end and 'reality' begin? Who gets to decide where that border lies? The flimflam aspect of psychic power creates a split which allows real supernatural events to exist--and if they exist for the subject then they exist in the universe, that's what quantum mechanics proves, o dour devotee clinging terrified to the sterilized feet of dogmatic science! Rise now and embrace the pseudo-shaman!

So yeah, see this movie, but just once, for Clooney and Bridges, tricksters who "get" the cosmic truths behind the quackery and who each bump the film up a star. But McGregor's 'Bob' is what we back in the semi-psychedelic 1980s used to call a "Wally," the sort of schmuck who clings onto your crew as you run with dilated pupils naked to the cosmic sea like immortal inner-tubed lemmings, laughing and skipping. He shows up late, with water wings and a snorkel, and goes "hey guys, wait up! Where are you going? Shouldn't we wait for Dan (another wally) to come back from class? Hey, wait up!" and then once there he refuses to join in the oceanic dissolving of egoic consciousness, and yet thinks he should still be able to hang all night and drag everybody down. And eventually we all hide with the lights out and don't answer the door when he comes around. Then, one day, someone slips him a dose without his knowing it and, as J. Hoberman writes, "he loses a smidge of his smirk." (Village Voice, 11.3/09) and then thinks he's Gandhi times ten, the humblest in the universe! King of humble! He becomes a mad prophet and then winds up insane, violent, arrested and soon becomes exhibit A in the dangers of drug use. Sigh, let's get some ice cream.

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The Luxury of Desperate Gamblers: Andrzej Zulawski's "L'Amour Braque" (1985)

Niche film fans of all nations and genres can rejoice with the release of three borderline hysterical (in all senses of the word) Andrzej Zulawksi films onto DVD, via the amazing Mondo Vision. The first of them I've seen is 1985's L'AMOUR BRAQUE, an insane, coked-up little miracle which prefigures the anarchic Joker scenes in LE CHEVALIER NOIR (below), including the maniacal burning of mass amounts of money and gleefully lysergic/anarchic assaults on the conventions of the bourgeoisie and capitalism! Did Chris Nolan and Heath Ledger see this movie? Or are they and Braque's director Andrzej Zulawski birds of a feather? Or is Zulawski more like a slavering psychedelic poet, post-Panic Movement/post-gialli post-Godardian in his heedless kineticism, surfeit de style and spastic physicality? Or did someone just dump LSD into the Parisian water supply? Any way you slice it, what a real treat to find an underseen auteur of his maniac caliber presented so lushly-- with a whole catalog of awesome films few of us have ever seen (Mondo Vision plans to release nine in all) coming our way on beautiful DVDs.

Though L'AMOUR BRAQUE mimics a 1985 French action movie in its gloss-punk style, with the violent 80s nocturnal neon decor of films you might know like SUBWAY or LA FEMME NIKITA (with which it shares the amazing Tcheky Karyo) it's actually an art film, or a drug film, Brecht-fast style. Those cheesy 80s synth stabs just makes the content that much more palatable in its nonstop weirdness and Mondo Vision's subtitles keep up brilliantly with Zulawski's poetic post-structural dialogue in a way that echoes the accidental poetry of old HK movie subtitles. BRAQUE looks on the surface enough like a normal 80s French action movie movie that without subtitles it would probably weird out a whole room of relatively un-intoxicated bros expecting Luc Besson-ish linearity in addition to the Luc Besson-ish glamor. And action fans who wondered--as I did--if Karyo was just a dud actor with his stone-faced performance in NIKITA can now know for sure, as his character in BRAQUE is wayyy out there. Not even the same guy!

Zulawski has a weird way of feeding you his movie plots subliminally. Somehow or other, as you're pulled along by the scruff of your neck, with no time to get your bearings, you realize that, if you don't think about it too much, you know just what's happening: A down-for-whatever Czech refugee Leon (Francis Huster) is spontaneously adopted by the drunken (coked up?) Mickey (Karyo) and his gang of laughing, joking, Nietzsche-quoting Arab terrorists. The beautiful Sophie Marceau shows up as Mickey's--and soon Leon's--obsession, a perennial 'lost soul" rich girl using Micky and his terrorist friends as dupes. Acting coy and lost and doomed so they fight over themselves to wipe out her enemies, she also decides to come between Leon and Mickey, cockblocking and seducing right and left. They chase and are chased and adore each other and then there's Leon's hot cousin Aglae (Christiane Jean, below) who competes for his attention while performing in a version of Chekhov's "The Seagull".

Meanwhile, a strange cop follows the gang around, and in one sun-dappled grilling scene, notes that Mickey and company carry on with the "luxury of desperate gamblers", a telling phrase I bothered to write down and thought a most clever title, because it describes most of the film--indeed most of Zulawski's output based on what I've seen. There's very little stopping to regroup or fortify positions here, the way someone on a manic high knows that if they stop to go to sleep or nurture negative thinking, their luck will change and their whole holy mindset will crash into nothingness and despair, so they keep on drinking, gambling and laughing like maniacs, terrified that if they fall asleep it will all be just a dream when they wake up. 

If things get rough with this film, may I suggest good way to get through the weirdness of the onscreen action (if you're not going to 'roll' along, as the slangin' goes--which would be the best way) is to ground them in other movies you may be more familiar with, like bizarro world remakes in a vein of post-modern ultra-violence satire we Americans have hardly seen except for Kathryn Bigelow.  When you see the robbers in their Disney masks knocking off a bank in the opening sequence you might think of POINT BREAK, but when you see them horsing through an impromptu number on their getaway route, they're like a dozen Harpo Marxes on a blood bender or the Groucho-guerrillas in the films of Emir Kusturica. But these names just locate the onscreen insanity in some kind of loose contextual framework, because otherwise, goddamn it, this stuff is so fucked-up in its mad play on action genre and bourgeoisie art film expectations and modernist subversions that it can be hard to know where to set your bearings... I mean, unless you are first "experienced" or have spent time in a lunatic theater company, or seen a lot of Bergman movies about lunatic theater companies.

One might think that two hours of nearly nonstop shouting, kicking over vases, affronting the mores of capitalism and frothing at the succulently lipsticked mouth would grate on one's nerves, but Zulawski is such a master of pace and rhythm that he never gets you too worn out or cranky. And what works too is that, though these guys are all insane--and maybe this is just the French way--all the passers-by and authority figures go along with their gags, like it would be rude not to; when a crazy Marxist sticks a gun to your temple in Zulawsksi country, it's considered declasse' to panic or plead. One must do the right thing and smile and pat the man's hand in encouragement and go into a calm, submissive state  (Dog Whisperer, Cesar Milan). Sudden gunfights erupt, cars get smashed and people run around throwing smoke bombs and breaking windows and all it gets from the gendarmes is that famous Parisian shrug. What ever happened to these kind of films? The most recent attempt at this kind of thing was, I'm afraid was BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS starring Bruce Willis.

One of my biggest regrets as an actor/filmmaker was in QUEEN OF DISKS (2007), when a Clare Horgan as the Queen of Disks stuck a knife to my throat as I was drinking coffee I missed a chance to do a spit take! My innate decency and worry about spilling coffee on my ratty jeans stopped me from doing one and/or dropping the coffee cup, just letting it spill all over me and crash to the floor and break. You know how impossible those things can be to do intentionally? Like when someone pays you to pee in your pants, and you just can't do it, no matter how hard you try?

These guys in this film? They don't have that problem.

They crowd surf into total candy-coated confusion; they roll around on tables laden with food and the waiters don't bat an eyelash; they spazz out and sing at the top of their lungs while being chased by cops in riot gear; and it would all just be posturing if Zulawski didn't capture a realistic sense of Parisian hustle and bustle like he's a freakin' Oscar-hungry auteur riche. When you're wading deep into a well-crafted, lit, Parisian streetcorner, man, you're into some fucked up architecture if you're seeing it on a good HD screen, you can see right up into the cobwebbed corners between the gargoyles. 

It all makes you realize that while someone like Godard's a great one for deconstructing genre, he's a bad one at capturing the momentum of genre itself-- poor Jean Pierre Leaud or Belmondo, for example, always seemed to carry an inherent decency that stops them from peeing on people's trousers or throwing grenades into dining rooms or dropping coffee cups full of coffee on themselves and letting the cup shatter on the linoleum floor. If they did, it was often just to a picture of a comic book "Bang!" or riot footage that exploded. Not in this film, baby. That's action like Van Damme! Zoot alors!  A+

PS - Speaking of Godard and watching things 2 or 3 times to get all the details, I highly recommend checking in with Drew at the Blue Vial, whose been on a Godard marathon bender, and, neatest of all, actually lists the numbers of times he's seen each film and skewers the review towards how his thought this time around differ from his earlier thoughts on the same film. It's a very steady and interesting project, and you can't help but marvel at his attention span, considering all the long, tedious stationary shots of girls being interviewed by condescending pretty boy trust fund Marxists. I ask you this: in a Marxist society would we have such cool DVDs of L'AMOR BRAQUE? Non? Then to hell with Marx!

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