Coal and der switches: JINGLE ALL THE WAY

When it comes to holiday entertainment, nothing tops the "heroin-smuggling nuns" episode of the BIONIC WOMAN that played Xmas eve back in the 70s and has never been seen again. But we must settle. Mom wants the CHRISTMAS STORY marathon on TNT ("you kids loved that movie as kids, remember?") My brother and I roll our eyes since we endured high school with co-star Scottie Schwartz. My brother Fred likes BADDER SANTA but that kid grosses me out. I vote for the Pagan Solstice celebration of THE WICKER MAN! There's no kid at all in that, just evil Celtic children snickering at a cop's befuddlement, which is badass. We settle, always, for them all... and just wince whenever 'good' or 'normal' kids are present. Sooner or later they all remind us some kid who annoyed us in school, either on purpose (Scotty) or by accident (everyone else).

Bridgewater-Raritan HS's Scourge

Then there's a second problem with Xmas movies, the classic example of which is in SCROOGED when Bill Murray starts his lengthy rant about how we should all sing soul music together because he's finally learned the meaning of Christmas. My friends, this is nothing more than Münchausen-by-proxy syndrome, the Xmas version, which I call Coal and Switches Syndrome: it's that thing where an egotistical workaholic proceeds to create pointless disasters so that Xmas is almost ruined, all so he can race in at the 11th hour and save it. Beside Murray's Scrooge, there's Nic Cage in The FAMILY MAN (2000) and Arnold Schwarzenegger in JINGLE ALL DER WAY (1996).

To get back to the kid's thing. If kids could have any wish, could be anything they wanted, more than anything they'd want to be adults. They don't ever imagine themselves as kids. There wasn't a single kid in STAR WARS because Lucas understood this (but then forgot it).  Boys especially want to see themselves as men, not as wide-eyed kiddies. Misunderstanding this fundamental rule of viewer identification processes led to the idiotic decision to create sidekicks like Robin and Superboy and all those movies where we don't just see what a kid would imagine, but a kid imagining it.

I mention all this because Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of those men children want to be. His overly muscular body is almost a burlesque of how kids confuse muscles with prowess; we love his comically stern accent; his straightforward way with a catch phrase, wherein you can't tell if he gets the joke or not. But in JINGLE, Arnold is just an ordinary gym owner/personal trainer and largely absentee father, avoiding his son's karate performance because (subconsciously) it would mean some other athlete getting the applause. Arnold thinking he can get away with being an average suburban dad in the first place makes him suspect. He's like a reverse superhero alter-ego with no superhero to turn into but also totally unconvincing as a normal person.

Arnold needs to realize he is not, and has never been, an average dad figure. He is not all-American Joe material, if he was, why would we bother paying to see him? In the symbolic structure of the film, though, being unaverage is a crime tantamount to neglect and he must atone by finding an unavailable/sold out super hero action figure for his emotionally blackmailing son, the superhero itself a burlesque of impotent male (child) rage. Arnold wants to be his son's action figure, but such a character is defined (in a child's mind) by his absence. And in the guilt trip nanny state PC 90's a absence is tantamount to neglect, so he has to bow down to a plastic imitation of himself because his son prefers the totemic imitation phallus to his dad's genuine absence. It's a bit like Jesus being told he's not a good messiah unless he buys all his disciples Christmas presents, for his own birthday.  

JINGLE has hints of turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself (which Guy Debord dubbed détournement - often expressed via subversive graffiti on advertising or re-word ballooning comic strips): the film digs a canal into the rotting roots of the American capitalist frenzy Xmas tooth, only to fill it at the last minute with souvenir gift items available for purchase in the lobby. Like any good capitalist product, JINGLE knows how to incorporate its critique against itself within itself.

my attempt at a detournement

One way Arnold tries to become the action figure phallus-fetish is through the aforementioned Coal-Switch Syndrome: He creates drastic emergencies for himself, crises anyone who's lived in suburbia for more than five minutes would easily avoid. But he's an adrenaline junkie who rides suburban angst the way Charlie Sheen rides air currents in MAXIMUM VELOCITY. He ignores his secretary's notes that he needs to go to his kid's karate practice just so he can speed down the emergency lane at the last minute; he combs through every toy story in town on Xmas Eve like a maniac as he realizes his son's asked-for toy has been sold out for months; he asks for help and invites contemptuous laughter on himself so that he can throw a fellow dad into a toy display; an inability to get a call through to a radio station giving away one of the dolls leads to him smashing up the DJ booth; his son's Xmas wish gives Arnold the sanctified excuse he needs to push and shove old ladies and children, resist arrest, trash a kid's jungle gym in the mall, willfully commit legions of traffic violations, impersonate an officer, terrify innocent pedestrians, break into and rob his neighbor's house, punch out a reindeer and inadvertently interfere with a bust on a bootleg toy factory (run by carny schemers dressed as elves and Santas in the film's funniest bit).

In short he is the worst thing about American foreign policy, the living embodiment of America as perceived by Communist and third world countries, so frenzied in our consumption and desire we trample every country who gets in the way, barging in wherever we smell oil and trampling any ecosystem that dares gets in the way like it's some slow-moving old lady shopper.

I imagine we're supposed to sympathize with Arnold's amok American dad, but the only ones who could possibly relate are the Hollywood elite who aren't off their cell phones more than a few minutes a year, and would be as dumbstruck as Arnold is if they suddenly had to do their own Christmas shopping (fine in itself, but don't expect our sympathy). It would be more believable if Arnold was a toy come to life, fresh out of the box, believing his own cover story, like a Buzz Lightyear or post-Recall Quaid than how it is here, where he's supposed to have been present at this family suburban house since you know, before his kid was even born.

When all his feigned ignorance and willful bull-in-a-china-shop methods fail, Arnold eventually solves it all by becoming the real life version of toy, by positing himself as the kind of father who's not afraid to use a jet pack to trash an African American family's living room as they're sitting down for Xmas eve dinner, praying, Arnold missing their heads for their heads are lowered in prayer, the only mention of God or Jesus anywhere in the film --all to prevent another African American from stealing the toy he's (unfairly) awarded to his own son by endangering the lives of pedestrians through his unauthorized flight. Needless to say, this was before 9/11 and now his behavior seems more unnerving than comical, like showing your son you love him by leaving unmarked black suitcases around an airport. We don't need satires and jet packs any more to point out the monstrosity of consumer-driven Xmas, just look at this:

Who is to blame for this madness?

1) TOY MARKETING STRATEGIES: Perhaps it makes sense from a PR standpoint for toy companies to deliberately limit production on certain popular toys to drive the demand up, but in a country like America where everyone's self-worth hinges on providing their child with whatever they 'wish' for, it can create real stress on the national fibre. There's no reason that the most productive country in the world (China) can't meet the demands of the most demanding country in the world (U.S.) so the blame becomes personal. Movies themselves do this all the time. Disney lets their classic titles go "into the vault" to drive up resale value and ensure higher sales during releases / promotions, and certain rarefied cult director iconoclasts insist on releasing their own films on their own label, like David Lynch or Russ Meyer, ensuring the price never gets too low and avoiding middleman and PR fees. But kids don't understand supply and demand. They only know that if they don't get the toy they want, there is no Santa, and so they may as well become a derelict drug addict.

2) MEASURING-UP ANXIETIES: I don't have kids so I don't quite understand, but from movies like JINGLE I glean a certain fear of measuring up to some paternal ideal that, to be honest, I don't remember seeing when I was a kid in the 70's. Parents once looked after their own good time first (as on MAD MEN) and got us some, not all, presents we wanted. To get us all was considered bad form, 'spoiling' us. Overall we were much more bored than kids today. We had no internet or cell phones. But, in knowing our father didn't need us to feel validated, we at least felt secure. We could hate him with all our might for not giving us a certain toy, but he made sure the electricity stayed on, and our beds were warm and there, ready for sleeping in. Arnold's kid might get the toy he wanted but pays for the luxury with a great deal of collateral anxiety. If the son says he wants a jet ski, for example, and the next day one is waiting in the driveway, what a great dad! But then the kid feels guilty because he sees dad's car is missing, clearly having been sold to pay for the jet ski. Now the kid can't even get a ride to the lake to use it. The indulgent yet largely absent father figure granting consumer good wishes at the cost of security and genuine nurturing, using presents the way moviegoers use their coats to hold their place while they go get popcorn.

3) NO ONE LEARNS THE RIGHT LESSON FROM CAESAR MILAN: If you don't assert your dominance over your dog, your dog assumes you are weak and thus feels he must take over as pack leader, which makes your dog a nervous wreck --how can a dog take care of a family when he can't even open the front door?  Kids with needy parents wind up in the same position. Adults are able to navigate the social order and assess dangers far better than dogs or children. But if they are too weak-willed to be stern and authoritarian when need be, then the children or dogs feel, however unconsciously, that they have to step in. This is why the red states are so unnerved when Obama bows and scrapes before other dignitaries. They know that if a leader is too skittish to make big tough unpopular decisions, if he is dependent on constant validation, then we can't chillax knowing he's got it covered.

Arnold in JINGLE is just such a weak pack leader, illustrated perfectly when he calls his wife to tell her his car is totaled in pursuit of the doll, and Hartman answers the phone saying he's eating Arnold's wife's cookies while she takes a shower. Arnold shouts into the phone: "Put that cookie down! Now!" It's gone on to become quite the meme and gives Arnold the quid pro quo revenge excuse he needs to Grinch up Phil's tree :

While we're expected to root for Arnold, it's actually rival doll-seeker and uncouth mailman Sinbad who is the most complex and the only one worthy of sympathy: first he's the only one at the store who doesn't sneer at Arnold's confusion over the absence of Turbo Men. He even offers to join forces, an offer which Arnold coldly rejects. As we're treated to then-relatively unusual sights like people macing and tazing each other over items at the department store, what's most amazing and sad is how completely oblivious Arnold is to the idea that he is not the only dad in the world who waited too long, that he is just another dopey sucker paying capitalism's harshest price for waiting to buy but buy. He genuinely believes it's his right as an American dad to use excessive force in pursuit of his individual needs, never questioning the rightness of his Coal and Switches Symplex. Even having a coffee with Sinbad, his only friend, guarantees nothing: Arnold shoves the poor mailman aside to be the first caller into a radio station then seems genuinely shocked and hurt when Sinbad does the same to him.

But I adore that, after he hits bottom, Arnold shares a beer with the reindeer he knocked out the previous shot. It's his moment of alleged redemption, making up for decades of bad blood between him and the animal kingdom from when he drunkenly punched out a camel in CONAN. And even if it skirts around being a total anti-consumerist parable, I applaud the film's brutal satirization of the consumer mindset and the Coal Switches Syndrome, even while endorsing each in the end. That's the unique problem of a country with a free press, namely that once an institution incorporates its own critique, it nulls all criticism by depicting the critic criticizing it, of having the thing itself critique its own thinghood. There's nothing left to say because it's already been said, like the kid who punches himself in the face so the bully doesn't get him first. Arnold wouldn't know about that, because he would never punch himself in the face, but can only fight big guys and have it be fair....just like Rock Hudson has to wait until the end of GIANT before he finally finds someone in his same height and weight class. (Sinbad comes close, as does this guy:)

The point is, fatherhood's integrity takes a bullet in the name of commercial fetishization and makes us wonder: who is it that thinks kids most want to see parents suffering indignities on their behalf? The same idiots who think kids want to see kids seeing at all? Arnold's kid is an emotional blackmailer --he NEEDS to have his father not get him the action figure; he needs to feel that terrible sting and get over it, it's part of the maturation process. But this is a kid's movie for kidswho don't understand that emotional blackmail only hurts themselves in the end. Adults like Arnold in JINGLE are not avatars of how boys want to imagine themselves, but stooges, cautionary tales, figures of revenge. Comical, neutered, pleading, desperate, pissing themselves in vain attempts to win their children's fickle favor. Ideally, kid audiences should should be sickened by this horrible reversal. A kid trying to impress his father is natural and helps both parties grow, but a father trying to impress a kid is unnatural and stunts the world, for the kids now have nowhere to grow but down. This is what feminism, the nanny state, equal rights, maternity leave, and anti-smoking legislation hath wrought; they have taken the balls from out the father and then kicked him where they used to be, saying 'if they were there, man that would hurt, so you're welcome!'

A very handicapped man once said "we let 'em smoke, vote and drive, even put 'em in pants! And what do we get? Russian roulette on the highway, a Democrat in the White House, you can't even tell male from female.... unless you meet 'em head on."

That old man was played by Stuart Lancaster, and the movie was the Russ Meyer's 1965's FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL! It's currently out of print, but if ever there was an Xmas movie worth running someone over for it's this one. RIP Haji... you were some kind of a woman... and ballsier than most men.

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Sweetheart of the Somnambulist: SVENGALI (1931)

Perhaps its forgotten status is due to the one spliced-up source print being used on public domain DVDs, or it's the stodgy pacing and oversize performances or the highly unusual mixture of comic and dramatic/horror elements, but this Archie Mayo joint from 1931 seems right at home alongside similar early sound horror classics like FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA and THE BAT WHISPERS, even though its horror elements come and go.  The plot involves hand-out hungry beard-so-pointy uber-manipulative music teacher Svengali (John Barrymore) discovering a “mouth with a roof like the dome of the Parthenon” in Trilby (Marian Marsh). She's an artist's model who poses at the expressionistic garret of artists Taffy (Lumsden Hare), the Laird (Donald Crisp) and naïve young Billie (Bramwell Fletcher), where Sven's been known to mooch. Finding out his would-be protégé suffers from headaches, he “cures” her using hypnotism, ensnaring her to his will in the process. Billie thinks he'd rather have her suffer the headaches than be cured that way --what a patriarchal little jackass! It's not up to him whether or not Trilby should suffer from headaches or be permitted respite. No sooner has he fallen in love with her than he feels dashed to despair finding Trilby posing in the nude. It's implied she's slept with nearly every artist she posed for. He should be psyched. Virgins suck. No wonder he couldn't handle more than a few scenes in THE MUMMY (1932) before turning into a blubbering mess. He seems to be cast in things to make David Manners appear earthy and robust.

Based on 1894 George L. Dumaurier novel, Trilby, the film contains a subtext of anti-semitism: Barrymore is in his “dirty Jew” makeup, greasepaint-slicked beard and his favorite soothsayer rags; he avoids water and never bathes, thus implying he is "dirty" -to the point Taffy and company feel it necessary to force him, fully clothed, into a bath. They lock him in the room, wherein he finds Paddy or the Laird's clothes and money and then blonde Marian Marsh drops by their pad. He answers the door in Taffy's finest duds, falling for her instantly. Who could resist? Wearing a man's army coat, with epaulets, she looks like she just snuck out of bed with one of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts club band and stole his jacket, just as Svengali has stolen Taffy's. Their rapport is great because there's more than just hypnotist and subject, lecher and sweet young thing (Marsh was 17 at the time). There's an undercurrent of otherworldly sympathy - the sort Veronica Lake shared with Alan Ladd - or David Manners and Helen Chandler (in The Last Flight, not Dracula)

Marsh (then just 18-years old) radiates modern cool in all her non-trance scenes and her initial appearance, with her sexy demure aura, those epaulets and long straight blonde hair with bangs, makes her seem like the source for all the Marianne Faithfuls, Nicos, and Francoise Hardys of the mod world to come. Barrymore of course brings his vast lifetime-accrued repertoire of comic tics, swaggers, and pauses to his strange role; together they seem light years beyond the wooden and/or one-dimensional characters that surround them. Taffy, the Laird, and Bille live comfortably and pursue art more as a hobby, as the hip thing to do in Paris. But Trilby and Svengali don't have trust funds. They depend on their respective charms, one literal in the sense of spells, the other tied up in those damn cute bangs.

The real show-stealer here, however, is not Barrymore or Marsh, but art director Anton Grot, whose expressionistic sets and impossibly wide doors linger in the mind like a dream. The big horror highlight of the film is all his, an incredible tracking shot that starts with the white glow of Svengali’s eyes and then backs out over the roofs out over a crazy miniature Paris and slowly makes its way across the rooftops and into Trilby’s boudoir. Occurring about halfway through the film, it signifies a drastic dip from the relatively innocuous stuff that has gone on before. Hypnotism is one thing but this is remote viewing, telepathy, a whole new ballgame, and there's not another shot like it anywhere.... even now.

From then on things pick up for this rough and tumble pair. Trilby heads to the Seine to throw herself in as was the style of the time for fallen, broke women, all because of Billie and his prudish rejection. This is the part that gets me madder than anything else. Fuck Billee and his judgmental scowl! Even so, Svengali rescues her and just fakes her Seine jump (the way he didn't with his previous "student") and the next time we see them she's adorned in furs and jewels and he's got a dandy white tux. But she's a zombie so all his seductions end up being just "old Svengali talking to himself again." It's sad, it's the crushing reality at the core of May-December relationships; for the older person, every new day brings a wider gulf as death, impotence, and a lifetime of indulgence roar up like a Forbidden Planet monster to claim you and young bucks skulk around in the periphery of your territory, sizing you up and waiting for their chance to steal yo girl if she's hot, and if she's not, more's the pity. I made it, ma! Top of the Parthenon! But now nowhere to go but up... in smoke.

-------------------

There seems to be only one existing print of this film. The best transfer I've seen so far is the old Roan DVD, with deep blacks, and more detail visible in the sets than I saw in my old VHS dupe, but also a fine layer of grain, and lots of film blemishes, lines, acid marks visible throughout, which to me is part of the charm. It's a constant companion in my little go bag of emergency DVDs, all that great Anton Grot expressionism, the unusual tone.

So is Svengali a monster ala Dracula, a sad clown ala Lon Chaney or comic relief ala Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY? There is no answer... only the lovely hiss of the film going through the sprockets and the gorgeous playful innocence--and occasionally lustful knowingness of Marian Marsh adding an ephemeral ache we wouldn't really experience for another actress until maybe... Heather Graham?

(this is expanded from an old review I wrote for Scarlet Street magazine back in 2002)

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Last Year's Masks: THE PURGE, THOR: THE DARK WORLD + ABSENTIA

Mainstream movies have become mash-ups now, their big budgets making an original thought too risky to have except in the abstract. So THE PURGE is HUNGER GAMES meets FUNNY GAMES divided by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT + HOSTEL, telling a grim tale of a dystopian future that uses a mischief night-style no rules (no cops) bloody free-for-all as an excuse for wiping out the homeless, bringing population levels under control, boosting sales of home security systems, settling old grudges and/or hunting 'the most dangerous game.' It shares HOSTEL's grim nihilistic world view that all humans are really homicidal sadists at heart, and only the rich liberals get to sit it out behind steel shutters. So far so good, but like so many good premises before it, PURGE never dares to side with the violent. It has to all boil down to a rich white noble yuppie family with a poor sweaty black man duct taped to a chair, which then leads to moralistic hand-wringing as to whether surrender him to the masked yuppie marauders outside, who crave a chance for EYES WIDE SHUT-style maskies and lashings (even the idea they need to wear masks at all is confusing to the film's premise). This explains why this black dude was in their tony neighborhood but rather than just ride off in search of other prey the masked kids lay siege to the house, wasting hours wandering around outside like a mix of Whit Stillman preppies and the British drunks in STRAW DOGS. And finally you're like oh brother, can't we FF to the final bloodletting? (We did).

In other words, despite a novel premise it feels it has nothing to do, so just falls back on trite civics lessons. Of course the wife is a hot, willowy thing (Leana Headey) in perfectly-fitting white slacks that compliment her big round burgundy wine glass and of course the dad is Ethan Hawke, and they have a nerdy kid who likes to build robot cameras and whose naive hippie idiocy gets them in the predicament in the first place. There are nice touches like people putting blue flowers on their porches, the use of 'tick-tock momentum,' but the shots of masked figures standing silently in the dark backgrounds seem lifted from Carpenter and THE STRANGERS (without actually picking up on what made them effective) and the plot's over-reliance on Voight-Kampf empathy test double fake-out machina climaxery is groan-inducing. FEAR tread a similar climactic territory and bravely stepped outside itself and that movie was ten times better for the presence of Mark Wahlberg playing up the animus core of the sexual anxiety dread of it all. That film was bright enough to realize the villain needs to be the star. He only gets one night a year to make it work, and so this one night he's the fucking star not you Ethan!!

And that's the kind of animus dread the film needs. If, for example, one of the liberal family members had been all keen to do some killing of their own, there might be some countercurrents to the lefty posturing; the only character I found myself respecting was the main villain played with eerie grace by Rhys Wakefield (he's Australian, no surprise considering his Heath Ledger-ish psycho flair) and he's shut out of the house for most of the film. The idea that Hawke could outslug him in the finale is offensive.

Like so many 'weaker' versions of this story, THE PURGE confuses 'true' morality with hippie do-goodism. Ethan Hawke and writer-director James DeMonaco are trying to make an EL DORADO to go with their RIO BRAVO, which was their ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake. Dude, you ain't never gonna touch the Carpenter, which means no Hawks neither! Carpenter's 1978 original ASSAULT was made on no money but oh, that awesome electronic score, and the realization of true morality, which is a code expressed between people via cigarettes and dwindling shell supplies not finger-wagging and hand-wringing. Dududadah DUHdududadah Dududdadah DaDududaha.

THE PURGE has earned $64 million so far and cost but three, and so a sequel is naturally in the works. The only reason I even rented it was I'd gotten it mixed up with YOU'RE NEXT, but I didn't even like it when it was called THE STRANGERS (see "A Couple of Bagheads") and that's why you never let a stranger in your house, without first looking him up on imdb.

Then there's the thing with the new THOR movie, THE DARK WORLD (2013). I was excited to see Natalie Portman again as she and Chris Hemsworth had great chemistry in the first film, but now both seem coated in a CGI airbrushed patina and a veil of hangover, leaving their romantic sparks to the editor's trash folder and leaving Kat Dennings to supply all the human complexity and witty patter. She steals all her scenes, Bunnier than the CGI teams can catch, and thank god because otherwise this THOR would be as cold as a RESIDENT EVIL anteroom. The other saving grace in DARK is the complex arc of fraternal bonding and jealousy between trickster archetype Loki (Tom Hiddleston, all Sex Pistol elegance and complex eyes) and Thor who lacks a lot of the Valhalla resonance he had under Kenneth Branagh's wing in the first installment, though Hemsworth does wakes up in their big moments together.

Alas, Dennings and Hiddleston aren't around nearly enough and a lot of the rest seems coasting on fumes. One of the things that makes Marvel movies great is they don't open up with long elaborate prefaces about far-away armies battling the forces of darkness like we're supposed to be instantly invested in all the distant carnage. That's the kind of thing Uwe Boll or George Lucas or Paul W.S. Anderson do, not Marvel.

 I'm not blaming anyone --acting in all that blue screen must be like wading through a swamp to try and get at any real characterization. In the first film (it made my top ten!), director Kenneth Branagh kept the Shakespeare underpinnings alive and resonant below the manly muscles and CGI, but two dudes; Alan Taylor and James Gunn direct this one and together they bury those underpinnings deeper than even the zombie bard himself could reach.

I'll confess I've been a big fan of these Marvel films overall: they reward multiple viewings and never take themselves too seriously (unlike DC's Batmen and Supermen with their confusion over true moral codes vs. tweedy liberal lecturing). Marvel scripts are often things of beauty, boiling vast prequels of exposition down to a few droll quips and no one is all the way hero or villain - the good guys have flaws: narcissism, drinking, insecurity, anger issues, passive aggressive relationship avoidance, and the bad guys have soft spots, stray rays of compassion, and charisma. That said, THOR: THE DARK WORLD lapses at times into DC self-importance and oh man those bad guys, the whole aesthetic of the 'Dark Elves' looks too familiar, like the filmmakers had never seen anything other than fantasy franchises. These 'elves' drive vertical tie-fighters and look like Orc Klingon Mordor Palpatine Voldemorts, with albino ponytails and masks that make them welcome during THE PURGE. Asgard looks so much like the Emerald City or Mongo in the 1980 FLASH GORDON that when it's zippy force field goes up you just know shit must be intentional. 

From top: Emerald City, Asgard, Mongo

These "Dark Elves" only have one saving grace: their total devotion to wiping out all life in all seven dimensions, a noble pursuit reminding me a lot of how I feel when I'm super cranky and hung over and trying to take a nap while kids scream outside my window and trucks back up beep beep beep beep and car alarms go off all up and down 7th Avenue for no reason. Oh to know that some power might just shut it all down, forever. But then of course, it goes away. And unless you really make that clear, why bother? The motivation for wanting eternal darkness has to be something we can understand, why should we consider these elves anything other than pixels. Branagh let whole scenes unfold in the first film, the men went out drinking, for example, SHIELD got in everyone's way trying to understand and control what was going on. Here we understand less than SHIELD did in the first film, but at least they cared. Where are they now? ABC keeps them too busy?

There is a great finale, which involves a big battle that rages across numerous dimensions and planets via holes in the aligned realms, wherein gravity disappears or fluctuates --and all the ancient monuments turn out to have been built during this same alignment to point the way to when it would happen again! Dude, that's some ancient alien shit, explaining how all these megalithic stones were moved without electricity, but they gloss right over it. Onto the big finale! It's rushed and too pleased with its CGI landscapes and steampunk landing gears and red glowing forge grenades but the final seven plane battle was so tight that I was, for a moment, brought giddily back to the Jack Kirby-drawn and Stan Lee-scripted brain-melters of the Silver Age. And even bad Marvel is better than most shit these days. They can't all be directed by Joss Whedon, Bryan Singer or J.J. Abrams.

Another Green World: from top: Prometheus, Dark World, Potter, Absentia

Speaking of dark worlds, ABSENTIA (2010): Katie Parker and Courtney Bell are two sisters, one of whom is pregnant in the process of declaring her husband dead after seven long years in the titular legal limbo; the younger one (Parker) comes to help with the pregnancy, this after some trouble with drugs and now she's allegedly clean. She jogs in the morning and goes through a mysterious tunnel that recalls Billy Goats Gruff in her mind. Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, but the movie gets the lack of visible monster right, so the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on  Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post, and just listening to the great rapport between the sisters lured me in. I was alone and it was getting dark faster than I was prepared for, and the film ingeniously taps into the fear of both, for me, the way only BLAIR WITCH has done before.

There is a certain type of person who sees a ghost and thinks they saw a ghost and there's a type of person who, like me, sees a ghost and figures he's hallucinating. I might have seen a dozen real ghosts by now and just cited flashbacks and/or a bad flu or lack of sleep or too much of it, and this idea is well-used in ABSENTIA: this girl's therapist has her believing that seeing her missing husband everywhere is just a sign of stress, borne of waiting out the necessary seven years in the missing person file before he can be declared legally dead. So even though we see him, and see her seeing him, she pretends not to (she doesn't see us seeing him, alas). Meanwhile, maybe there's some interdimensional portal that troll insect monsters are coming through and abducting humans but the cops can't write that up in their report, so you must be on drugs... again!

The fear of the unknown plus the sisterly rapport missing from most interactions in DARK WORLDS or THE PURGE or any other 'unknown'-courting film combine to deliver a slow simmer anxiety and Parker has this great ease with her body language and slow dawning beauty --you barely notice her at first and then suddenly wham, you're in love with her. ABSENTIA is the same way. It doesn't really ape any horror movie that came before it, so it may help to start watching it while writing this post. The small human scale, naturalistic low-key lighting, solid actorly rapport, a trap story that snaps shut behind you, trips to lawyer offices that underscore the legal system's inability to protect the present from the darkness, and a vaguely ominous two-chord score make the less-is-more argument so intensely it gave me a chill right down to the bone.

 I was so unnerved after the end, in fact, that I had to race to pop in my always-nearby DVD of the 1957 classic, THE BEGINNING OF THE END, to get some feeling of closure. Nothing says you're safe and sound quite like watching Peter Graves shoot a machine gun at rear-projected grasshopper. In 50's monster movies, at least, seeing is never the same as believing, and thank god.

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CinemArchetype #26: The Stoner

A sub-phyla of both the Hanged Man and the Holy Fool, the Stoner is both wasting their life and found nirvana. As holy as the Dali Lama, as singular of purpose in their mission as the Pope, and as frozen at the yellow wood road's fork as Travis Bickle or the Scarecrow, cometh, in his fashion, the Stoner. As lost as their or any generation will allow, if we liberal arts undergraduated within the prescribed four years at college, we weren't one of them. Somehow that's the only marker I can find to determine the stoner vs. the merely stoned, because I of course made it out in four.

The stoner in Cabin in the Woods was our confirmation that this character was ready to step into the fray, to get a spotlight of his or her own, inspiring my 2012 thesis "A Stoner Shall Rise."

1. Shaggy-- Dude in Cabin in The Woods (2010)

The signifiers and signs of horror (masks, knives, corridors, POV steadicams, phone calls, Martin Balsam in PSYCHO-style unmaskings) are now so beyond cliche they don't even need to be tied to anything substantial having a stoned hipster gesture towards them with his thumb is enough. The hipster's thumb is the new black. CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012) has taken this idea farther than anyone yet this year, metatexually refracting the cliche of attractive high school seniors heading off to the woods for the weekend into Lovecraftian abstraction. And stoners are the inevitable fifth or seventh wheel in such youthful crews, and have been since obnoxious brother in the wheelchair in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1977) first appeared. But he was a goner, always a periphery, but now one shall rise among them. A stoner... shall rise... man and survive, or the past tense, survave, man. And instead of a fifth wheel, lo! The unicyclist.

Yes, horror has recognized in its target audience a common thread that runs counter to general programming, the insider realization that pot protects you from evil. All along we were right to be paranoid, man, and we need Mary Jane's plant power on our side. And as so often happens, this concept is literally true as recent studies show.

What is even more troubling is that the United States Government actually did a secret follow up-study on the Virginia findings, in the mid '90's. When it only served to confirm the results of the 1974 research, and showed that THC (one of the main active ingredient in cannabis – and the one the government loves to hate), when administered to mice, protected them against malignancy, true to form, our government attempted to bury the results. Fortunately, a draft copy of the study was leaked to the journal, AIDS Treatment News, and the media covered the story. An excellent article by Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of NORML, covers this part of our shameful history. (more)

I can't really reveal what happens in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS since 'holy shit! no way! Really? O man!' reactions are so essential, but I will quote Gregory Cwik's article on it in the current issue ofAcidemic's Journal of Film and Media: "..after Halloween was labeled a morality play, its character's seemingly punished for acting immorally, smoking became a death sentence for horror characters. Instead, Whedon's pothead uses his bong as a weapon against the enemy. Maybe its a sign of changes to come." Maybe it is, if we kill enough old people first. You know the types: maybe the pot ban is good for that as so many of them die from being unable to keep food down after chemo. They refuse to smoke the pot that might help with that since it's 'the devil's weed' when all along it was their only true cure. Who's the real devil here, pops? Part of growing up should be the realization you can't believe a word Uncle Sam tells you. If you refused to read that memo, well, Darwinian nature shall take its course. Win-win. If you can't agree maybe you could stand to be higher.

2. Brigitte Fonda - Jackie Brown (1997)
When Sam Jackson's indelible character Ordell Robie in JACKIE BROWN critiques his little surfer girl's habit of being high, he says that shit fucks with your ambition, sitting around smoking pot and watching TV weakens your ambition, she says "Not if your ambition is to smoke pot and watch TV" absolutely goddamn right, sister. I sympathize with a poor recently paroled ex-con Robert De Niro in the film, caught up in her surfer girl stoner orbit, languidly staying super baked, unable to think clearly through a golden calf and green herb combo. I say this because I too have been caught up in such orbits, and Ordell too reminds me of her boyfriend (the chick I'm referring to). Damn man, writing sloppy, it's soo nice, and I can because, dig, you know, the topic.

3. Cheech and Chong, of course
I've never been a big fan, for their humor is way too dumb for me, but it is of its era. They are the groundbreakers, for the likes of Harold and Kumar, films like Half-Baked and How High? And on and on. I'm trying to remember where I know the girl above on the far right from, what other movie where I totally fell in love with her, back in the 70s. Man, brain cells, am I right?

4. Reincarnated (2012) Snoop Lion
(top 3 pictures are also from this film)
A mind that is at once endearingly straight-forward and fathomlessly guiling, it takes a certain forceful naivete to decide to convert to Rastafarianism and drop the dog in your name, switching whole phyla of the kingdom, dig, from a dog to a cat, the sphynx, the smiling sphynx. He hard a childhood, and it's toughened him like teflon; he's split the atomic difference between the clown/serious guy dichotomoy; he's both Chuck D. and Flava, if you will (I'm old school to the point I stopped listening to rap when Dre's "Chronic" dropped. Course by then I'd even graduated from boomerang academy, if you feel me, "fam.'") The funniest part is that during his holy pilgrimage he goes to record in Jamaica's legendary Trojan studios and it's all white hipsters!

5. James Franco as Saul Silver in Pineapple Express
Right?

Saul: I wish I had a job like that. Where I could just sit around and smoke weed all day
Dale Denton: Hey you do have that job. You do sit around and smoke weed all day.
Saul: Hey you're right. Hey thanks man.

6. Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin - Flirting with Disaster
So much...

Mel: You made LSD? Is that what you're saying?
Richard Schlichting: We made LSD.
Mary Schlichting: Yes, yes. We made acid.
Richard Schlichting: And we gave it out to people who needed it. You know that there are hundreds of pharmaceutical executives in this country... that are selling drugs, FDA approved drugs.
Mary Schlichting: On the open market.
Richard Schlichting: Over the counter with incredible side...
Mary Schlichting: Horrible side effects.
Richard Schlichting: Terrible side effects. And these people are not in jail.
Mary Schlichting: They're not in prison anywhere.
Richard Schlichting: They're, they're, they're in country clubs or playing golf. They're having drinks.
Mary Schlichting: They're running the country, Mel.

7. Jim Breuer, everyone - Half Baked (1998)
Course, man! Everyone but the character played by Dave Chapelle, who gives up weed for some animus-dominated straight edge girl who don't understand the value!

Gregory Hines, who understands the value: History of the World Part 1

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8. Rory Cochrane in Dazed and Confused (1993)

"Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington, man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man, when he come in the door, man, she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man."

9. Michael Caine - Children of Men (2006)
I love so much about this movie, including the careful and accurate attention to proper use of a flask (and why Clive Owen reminds me of me), but the whole "oh man, like no children are being born anymore, so why not kill ourselves." And meanwhile there's immigrant problems and overpopulation all at once? That seems foolish, and very very Catholic, having your "holy mother of God whom I adore I am so unworthy of your breast milk, ai Maria" nonsense, positing Catholicism against itself, as in we all live only for the mother and the child so if we can't have them, then surely it must be not a sin to suicide. But Michael Caine sees through it all as a very believable weed grower with a dying, crazy wife for whom he buys a suicide kit and later goes out in a literal and figurative blaze of glory -- pull my finga!

10. Jeff Bridges - The Big Lebowski (1998)

"Take 'er easy, dude. I know you will, too."

11. Brad Pitt - True Romance (1993)
Here the stoner is again in the Tarantino-scripted Tony Scott directed putter on the mapper and way to Pulp Fiction layer. Dig, but is there such a character in Pulp Fiction? No, man, by then the guy was onto harder stuff. That's that Roger Avery shit, the coke and heroin mix-up guy. Shit that movie was dope, though.
Wait, so Brad Pitt in True Romance, a pretty easy role to pull off -- he don't even stand, yo!

 "Get some cleaning products?"

12. Claude - Over the Edge (1979)

"... Give the darkness to Claude, let him smoke it and peer unafraid into Bosch folios; let Matt Dillon create modern indie junkie comovage cinema with Gus Van and Francis Ford; Motorcycle Boy, YOU Live! We... we belong dead. We who have burned so very brightly, Roy, but not to last, we will go now, into the beyond. And never before or since will the bus ride to juvenile hall seem like such a triumph, a march into Valhalla on the rays of a beautiful sun. One day, when the world is much righter."

Dude, what the hell was I on when I wrote that, man? Optimism.

How am I going to pull this all together? Do I need to? Even if you never tried it you have to admit that this list reflects a pretty peaceful bunch. Sure they throw slushies and cavort in the flames but they don't shoot unless first shot at, and in general they prefer to sit around and watch cartoons, which leaves them safely off the streets and out of the way of the hustle and bustle. Which is good, because there's no room at the top anymore -- too many damned people, climbing over each other like those zombies in World War Z. So forget it, man, forget it. Weed, man. It's the dead end on the road through life, but just how far do you need to drive man, before you realize you're still in the goddamned driveway? 

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