The Little Mescalito that Couldn't: CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS, MAGIC MAGIC

Psychedelic awakening, madness, and tonto re forro puta madre yankee nonsense is afoot in Chile, and a beady-eyed, hawk-nosed, blonde-tousled Michael Cera is there, a-swooping down from El Cóndor Pasa with jellied arms akimbo, fulfilling the soul deadening norteamericano tourist promise even into the ego-dissolving mescaline maw. Luckily the locals are so chill they don't even tell him to go take a flying leap. To these beautiful people, enlightened by socialist higher education and lax taxation, he's just another Yankee, which is to say, accepted by them despite his inability to accept them or himself. Over the course of two 2013 films, Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva, Cera trips, trails, shoots, swims, jumps, screams, freaks out, titters, ducks, and wakes with his face in the bush, so to speak. Brave, foolhardy, invincible, he's not handsome enough to be Peter Fonda, loco enough to be Dennis Hopper, menacing enough to Bruce Den, or devilish enough to be Jack Nicholson, but he does have a dash of Dern skeeviness, Jack loucheness, Hopper dementia, and Fonda remoteness. Separated like Pyramus and Thisbe only by a lean ridge of a nose they're forever trying to peer around, his beady little eyes are in front so he can judge the distance to his prey, but can he swoop down on the bunny before creeping self-awareness blinds him to everything but his own black hole navel?

It doesn't even matter. Because today we'll be using Dali's paranoic-critical method' to pick at these films paisley scarabs:

According to Dali by simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one's rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, "For instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all" (Marcel Jean). The point is to persuade oneself or others of the authenticity of these transformations in such a way that the 'real' world from which they arise loses its validity. The mad logic of Dali's method leads to a world seen in continuous flux, as in his paintings of the 1930s, in which objects dissolve from one state into another, solid things become transparent, and things of no substance assume form. -- Language is a Virus

With Magic Magic especially we can count Sebastián Silva part of the Darionioni Nuovo, which is an emerging international school of filmmakers picking up the breadcrumb trail left by 70s Argento that connects back to 60s Antonioni and Polanski, to 50s Hitchcock, in the process baking up a beast that has Tennessee Williams' sparagmostically flayed wings, Robertson Davies' manticore "tail," and a single-first-person keyhole crystal ball eye passed amongst its three gorgon hydra heads: Berberian Sound Studio, Amer, Scarlet Diva, The Headless Woman are some of the other films that fit this unique niche (a style too paranoid to be acknowledged even by its originators): each young artist devoted in his and her fashion to the paranoid-critical dissolution of sexual mores, the unsettling feeling of conspiracy that comes when the comfort of steady signifier-signified connectedness disappears and the "real" emerges like a strange, rotting fractal fruit that becomes, with a blink of the eye, a rotting parrot corpse.

Magic Magic taps into that Polanski mid-60s rotting-on-the-vine paranoid feminine, finding the dead pigeon under glass on Judy Berlin flatware in a Yellow Wallpapered room surrounded on all sides by Lynchian buzzing, fecund jungles and horny dogs, because while the Crystal Fairy film is, for all its mystic leanings, more or less a conventional 'shitheel learns to respect others' moral tale (Rohmer on Roybal) as well as a very good look at what it's like to have a bad trip where you're so bound up in your own petty thoughts and sexual frustrations that maybe you're depending far too much on the trip to cure all your ills in a single flash. But the San Pedro cactus-derived mescaline (in this case) only forces you to experience the full feedback squall of your own DSB venom --no one surrenders to the mystic without first a great deal of terror as the bearings one has in reality dissolves and the horror, the horror, emerges as the wide-screaming abyss of the impermanent --and the ancient Mayan gods demand full existential dissolution before the rapture comes. The farther we are from this baseline awareness the less 'alive' we feel, so breaking out of the faerie bower has to be that much more violent, until the whole self splinters like a glass goblin back into its red, green, and blue component cables, back into the awareness/terror/impermanence of unprocessed signal.  If you're not ready for that, the Mescaline Gods' mystical awakening is really more of a reverse keelhauling, as your squirmy psyche is lifted out of its comfy depths and exposed to the sun and superegoic jeering in a northerly clockwork motion, and the comfort of the dark murky underside of the ship longed for like a Linus blanket.

Crystal Fairy manages to get this exactly right, but in the process it reminds us that even if we're nowhere near as obnoxious as Cera or Crystal Fairy, compared to the easygoing balanced chill of bros and ladies of South America, we're all hinchapelotas.

At any rate the photography is lovely. By the end we're managing to hallucinate into the beachfront rocks the way Dali used to do along the Costa Brava and if like me you've ever been stuck tripping with the Crystal Fairy type (patchouli, hairiness, den mother need to treat everyone like kindergartners and so naive as to lecture South African black people on Apartheid because she 'once took a class') or the Cera type (can't shut off their motormouth solipsism for five minutes, "I'm getting off are you getting off yet?") you may wince, but at least you know Silva feels your pain. Apparently cast members did ingest the San Pedro cactus being depicted which may explain the lacksy-daisy progression; I can imagine freaking out grandly with a big camera crew following me around as I frolicked on the beach, thinking I was making Citizen Kane but really making Hearts of Age. I would hate to be in that frame of mind and have to play an obnoxious twerp like Cera's comeuppance-craving George "Magnificent" Anderson of a psychedelic seeker just as I would hate to trip with him. Cera handles it all well - but is there really a point? In its way, my problem with Crystal Fairy is the same as with Magnificent Ambersons - a fatal misjudging of audience empathy for a particular actor that makes the film hard to watch, like a big cookie filled with delicious arsenic, but they forgot the sugar so why eat it? I have the same problem with both Ambersons and Lady from Shanghai -- in each case the entire point of both films seems to be to allow Welles the chance to play a larger-than-life egotistical swine but at the last minute he gives the plum role to someone else - and neither Tim Holt or Everett Sloane can fill Welles' mighty big shoes, and isn't that why, unconsciously, he cast them?  

Magic Magic is the better of the films because Cera is only a side player, so his horrible lesion of a self-conscious shitheel matrix doesn't pollute our minds, but rather the mind of Alicia, an American tourist even crazier than Crystal Fairy, but less obnoxious, cuter, played by the great Juno Temple. She's upon a Blanche Dubois-goes-on-a-Repulsion vacation where instead of isolation (with just a dead rabbit and demons in your cozy London flat) it's the lack of privacy that drives her mad. No sooner is Alicia is getting off her flight from L.A., in a foreign country for the very first time to visit her pal Sara (Emily Browning) then she finds only to find a car full of other people, including Sara's boyfriend Augustin (Agustín Silva), his sister Bábara (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and Cera, the Ugly American, speaking Spanish with ease but still unbearable, picking her up for a spontaneous holiday to some remote island, not the kind of thing an exhausted probably bi-polar L.A. girl getting off a ten-hour flight wants to hear and it gets worse, suddenly Browning's nurturing pal is called away and there's no one to hide behind to avoid Michael Cera, the only one who can talk with her since she speaks no Spanish.

Things go downhill fast, for her, anyway, and we go from feeling her pain to theirs, because sometimes shit be America's fault. She can't blame it all on the bad cell phone reception, fear of water, alienation, insomnia, and being more-or-less a captive audience to any dumb animal that won't stop humping her leg.

I dig it - because I know well the feeling: tired from the trip, staying with a bunch of relaxed, groovy people up to party all day and all night, at ease in their skins, seeming to be taunt you with their niceness, but sleeping on the couch means you have to get up with the early risers and stay up with the night owls and so the moody irritable lack-of-sleep depression kicks in and you begin to hate your fellow revelers for rubbing your lack of joie d'esprit in your face.

For me this was visiting friends up in Syracuse after I'd graduated; they all had cats and I'd be wheezing and gasping all night, depressed by lack of sleep and too much speedy Sudafed which made me intensely depressed and paranoid and didn't even really work. And then the auditory hallucinations: some girl in the kitchen says "can you pass me that Pepsi?" I'd hear it as "you can't sleep with Erich --he has hep-C."  Which I don't!  I totally would have slept with her, too. Bitch be cockblocking. See? It's already too late - I now hate that girl who asked for a Pepsi. Such great crazy oddness is what Dali's paranoid-criticism is all about. If you cultivate it, seek it out - dive into the madness rather than running from it, then the world is yours. Once Carol takes up the razor in Repulsion she's no longer scared. She's free, hacked clear, carving a wall of human flesh, dragging the canoe behind her, beyond time's Ulmer barrier.

But for the full effect of the paranoid-critique you need to see the preview for Magic Magic before you see the film - then mix them up together in your mind - because the preview makes it seem like a Most Dangerous Game meets Svengali meets Funny Games horror movie but it's more a Red Desert-style modernist melt-down mixed with I Walked with a Zombie-style poetic ambiguity, a hard thing to pull off really well but Silva pulls it off and the photography by the amazing DP Christopher Doyle only justifies his reputation as a leader in his field with his stunning lenses and uses of color (stark yellow raincoat against a purple-blue sea) in a way you can imagine the mid-sixties Polanski trilogy: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-Sac, would look like if in color. Hell yeah, Polanski and Val Lewton both would love Magic Magic.

Not sure if I'd want to see either film again but I bet I would have been pretty happy on the shoot for these - there's a sense that vacation vision quests on the part of the actors are well incorporated. Then again, all their relaxed and spontaneous but higher educated bonding might have really got on my nerves if I didn't feel their nerves were worse. Vacations tend to fill me with an overall ennui that can't be shaken for several days, so I have to fake it. The addiction to language is like a thin rope hanging over what your ego tells you is a lake of fire but if you let go anyway and just fall down backwards, laughing at your own fear, it's really a warm, amniotic feather bed. Your fears are still waiting at the lip of the pit trying to tell you hey you're burning, get out of there, you'll die, you'll go insane, but you don't have to listen anymore; you can wander away, leave their voices fading in the distance, ignore the urge to run back up and apologize, ignore their tears and screams, and run towards that dizzy high you feel the first nights of waking up somewhere other than your own bed because if you have to go looking farther than your own backyard, well go! 

You can't run but you can hide, from at least the volume of your ego's pleading desperate din - if you couldn't, you'd still be stuck with your very first, second, or third girlfriend, the one who cried and demanded long twisted apologies when you tried to break up with her, and so you stuck around for six more miserable months until finally you let go of the ledge and landed that feather bed pit she'd convinced you was fire --you can still hear her cursing and threats and vile oaths from her window as you make it down to the street, and you're glad you had the good sense to bring your bass  and amp when you ran out of there and back to the party.  

At any rate, producer-star Cera and the writer-director co-star Silva make a good combination, and taken as loose sequels the two films progress almost of a piece, with one casual encounter leading to another, so if the drawback to feeling made up on the spot is not knowing when to end, that's a sacrifice I'm glad Silva and producer-star Cera are willing to make. In playing such a shitheel in these two films (and in This is the End), Cera earns my respect in ways he failed to do as the neurotic Bluth boy-- but at some point you can't just destroy your good graces, it's a movie, after all - we're stuck with you for over an hour. You got to do more than simper and snivel. What would Richard Widmark do? 

I've been the Cera character, desperately hoping a psychedelic trip will bring me out of my self-absorbed shell, wanting to feel as happy and interconnected as everyone around me seems and not being able to get there no matter how high I get. The ego can't be burned off by taking too much of anything. You can't fight it, only coax it into giving up on its own via being nice to other people, through empathy and through self-expression, or you can have it flayed off you like skin. Drugs don't always work but writing about how drugs don't always work does, which brings us to this moment: Back in the 90s, the downtown Manhattan lounge scene, flitting from one exotic storefront lounge to the next in my tuxedo jacket and feather boa, wondering if the special-K I had snorted was working or not, struggling vainly towards feeling spontaneous and free, and failing even when ecstasy was flowing in bumps right off the table and I was dancing with lovely ladies while Moby and Fancy spun away and the city beamed up at us from Windows on the World; even with all that it was as if some heavy blanket of strained artificiality was choking the joi de vivre right out of me-- but THEN some people from Britain or Germany or Ibiza or wherever would blow through town. The sun would come out and these cool, beautiful souls would brighten our scene. So it was a double bonus --my roommate would jet off to Ibiza all August leaving me to try vainly one more time to drink myself to death and then in September or October, when New York City is the best place to be on Earth, whomever he'd crashed with would come crashing over at our place and suddenly the clouds of despair would lift - these Brits or Venezuelans or Germans could get all of us united, dancing, alive, happy, in love with the scene, joyous.

Then they'd be gone again... 

Well, it could have been worse, what if we didn't even know how in despair we'd been?

We might have been Michael Cera.  

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Your Clowns Bid You Goodbye: THIS IS THE END, IT'S A DISASTER

A cohesive, 'tight' film, funny even into the maw of Hell, THIS IS THE END (2013) comes long after 12/21/12, late to the apocalypse party, which is of course in character considering the cast of stoner royalty --James Franco and Seth Rogen, still soaring on PINEAPPLE EXPRESS fumes, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Jay Baruchel, Emma Watson, Channing Tatum, and so on--all playing themselves. Unlike 95% of its ilk, END skips the zombies and instead goes full literal-biblical, mixing heavenly ascension, childhood buddy friendships stressed by fame and distance, growth and kindness as essential to survival, an actual bible, LA vs. NYC rivalry, raping demons, ethical dilemmas, and lots of weed. The genius touch is to have them all play themselves (only more so) and they bring a lot of brutal self honesty: Jonah Hill acts like Oscar's A-list sycophant, bandying the word "tight" around and treating resentful New Yorker Jay Baruchel like a special needs child. Jay instead blames his own paralyzing social shyness on LA; Michael Cera snorts coke and bullies groupies in fits of drunken Reptillian overlordsmanship; Daniel McBride ramps up his dirtbag townie craziness; James Franco is a vain but guarded host with a weird bi-curious vibe; Rhianna, Aziz Anzari, and countless others disappear down a giant blast furnace hole in the ground. Being a star guarantees nothing as the flame pit widens and the stars are revealed to be tough and resourceful only via movie magic. While the demons howl outside and devour those unlucky stragglers, these dudes duct tape the cracks in the concrete of Franco's party fortress, pool their booze, and wait for the cable to come back on.

When I was counting days inside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, I used to like to imagine Armageddon as a great excuse to relapse on whiskey, and hoped one day I would get the chance, for whiskey is so so good. But if an alcoholic vows to drink again only when hell froze over, sooner or later he'd drive down into the flames on a stolen Zamboni. That's in the bible... if you know which bible I mean. Still, for some of us, the apocalypse is our last chance to reunite with our deranged lover, whiskey...

In other words, I would be the first to volunteer to leave the compound and forage, because maybe somewhere in the hellish mist of the Hollywood Hills, there might be unbroken bottles of bourbon. That's the comfort for an alcoholic in the apocalypse. No demon can compare with that one, no scare or threat can stay the thirsty drunk. Without that carrot lure I can't see ever stirring from my bunker. But I am alcoholic. I am the thing in the black crib with the upside cross baby mobile in ROSEMARY'S BABY. I am the third heat, the eternal thirst carved large as Asmodeus' initials into the EQUINOX oak tree soul. I guess we all have our reasons for wanting this damned parade to finally end, in a blaze of glory. That's one of mine.

But these guys--Seth Rogen, Franco, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, all playing themselves-- are more grounded than I am... which is odd, considering they don't seem to have girlfriends and the first thing they wish for (outside of weed) is a Back Street Boys reunion. Perhaps that's the secret to success; girls always Yoko up a band sooner or one of you goes to college, or leaves it. I can only imagine what would happen if I never moved to NJ or my buddy's parents didn't get divorced and turn him militant, or if I never became a hippy punk rock boozer. All these things killed our comic book making, super 8mm filming, dungeon and dragons module creating, and selling, and marketing company. Girls were but the coup de grace. 

If I had known nerds would conquer the world, that the "Comic Con" would one day be a prestigious event, I might have never have choked down that first pilfered warm beer at my punker friend's graduation party. I'm funny, too, man. Can't you tell? Why did I give it all up for a life of hipness, boozy abandon, and relationship-attempting? None of the dudes who wind up at Franco's seem to have any long term relationships, or kids, to worry about, and it's damned refreshing. At no point does any character say, "I can't leave without my children!" or "If Kathy's back there, I'm going to get her!" These guys don't give a shit!

The main star of THIS IS THE END though is the raw kinetic energy and flow of weird ideas that doesn't stop, just snakes forward from LAX to chillin' with buds to a party at James Franco's house all the way to....  The big budget CGI in the film isn't used for guns and nonsense. There's only one gun in the whole damned movie. Instead there's great towering demons to rival The Night on Bald Mountain sequence in FANTASIA, and Jonah Hell spewing green bile like a portly Linda Blair, but no monster is quite as scary as Emma Watson with an axe. Or more balls-out-gonzo than McBride gone cannibal - role of the year in the movie of the year.  Like many Piscean artists and writers I've always admired--from a distance--the McBride type. I never invite them to parties but they always show up, draining your bar but bringing you awful weird new drugs like angel dust, Jimson weed, and crank and introducing you to carnivorous whores. You can't get rid of them, so you may as well enjoy their ferocity. When the world ends and the savage reign, we could use a man like Frank Booth again.

I don't want to spoil what may be my favorite movie so far this year, but if you haven't seen it yet, you can still take a page from its bible and start to be nicer to people; even if there is no one true God it couldn't hurt your chances for ascension. I've written extensively on my arcane beliefs regarding soul density, in that the more self-centered and hateful you are, the more dense your soul gets, allowing demons to capture it when you try to ascend; it follows then that the more positive and selfless you are, the lighter and more expanded your soul gets, so demons can't capture it anymore than one can catch smoke in a butterfly net. Just a theory, based on a mix of Thaddeus Golas, Egyptian mythology, and David Icke.

So, yeah, bro, if only life were just buds and booze how simple and joyous but instead how complicated and downer-ish it is to watch dudes from your crew marry and--unless you join their creepy 'we have kids' cult--never be seen again. Maybe that's the real fantasy, that the world will end before maturity's inevitable bro-pocalypse wipes out your network and leaves you alone or a parent. I hear it's just like falling asleep.

And that brings me to the stifled world of the couple's brunch where, if they had girlfriends with bourgeois hipster tastes, the dudes in END would be going on Sunday afternoon instead of to Franco's on Saturday night (or if I was there and it was the 90s, both). I'm of course referring to the 2012 disaster comedy currently streaming on a Netflix near you, IT'S A DISASTER (2012).

David Cross is the stranger being vetted by his internet-met steady Julia Stiles' posse. He moseys around the nice house, drinks some Scotch with the boys, hears how they got problems of their own, blah blah. Suddenly, a neighbor comes in decked out in a hazmat suit. A dirty bomb has gone off downtown, poison gasses everywhere. Commence duct taping! And then the couple who are always super late try to come in, coughing and hacking and begging to be let it in. But the duct tape is on. What do you do?

Damn right.

That kind of satiric moral querying is welcome, and the swinger couple (Rachel Boston and Kevin Brennan) slipping a subtle menage a trois come-on to Cross are hilarious; America Ferrara mixing all the drugs in the house together to create some homemade ecstasy, determined to get super high to face the end, is my hero. While her beau seems to think ranting about conspiracies will turn the deadly real situation abstract enough to deal with, i.e. what you can deconstruct can't kill you, she's doing the right thing, the thing the old black jazz pianist on the cruise ship or Woody Harrelson does in the movie 2012. Overall it's some good ensemble work, giving off the impression these people all know each other and respect one another's comedic rhythms, and if it all seems over before there's any special effects fire and brimstone, well, it makes up with in the kind of inner-hell only the relationship-encumbered truly know.

So what in the end is the right scenario for you? A lot of us were hoping the world would end last December 21st, so we could skip that much-needed root canal, or get out from under our credit card debt. Now here it is a year later and we know we're saddled with seemingly immortal life. So pick your poison and live to die another day: going out with the bros is of course the more fun option than meeting the new girl's posse at a petit-bourgeois couples brunch, because the deeper you look the more you see how hard it is to grow when you can just blame your significant other for holding you back.

Unfortunately real personal growth only seems to come with pain, fear, and trauma. With the boys up in the Hills of THIS IS THE END, though, there's no one else to blame, and so, convexly, no escape from the awfulness of one's own true self.

Oh how time flies / with crystal clear eyes

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The love every parent fears: YOUTH IN REVOLT (2009), ENDLESS LOVE (1980)

Being blown away by SCOTT PILGRIM I had to check out YOUTH IN REVOLT which promised to fully answer the question: can Michael Cera play anything other than his squirmy ectomorphic sexually-frustrated pansexual 'self'? PILGRIM seemed to indicate yes, but REVOLT answers uh... non.

Cera's essentially playing a dual character: his Nick Twisp (the usual shy Cera) and his 'dangerous' alterego--Francois Dillinger--who is clearly borne of obsessive desire for a sweet neighbor girl whose sexual boldness blows the normal Twisp clear into oblivion. Wearing a pencil-thin mustache with white slacks and an ever-present cigarette (does he ever inhale?), Francois is Cera's chance to cowboy up but he's still talking barely above a whisper. Dillinger never really materializes as a separate 'ballsy' character, just basically a pyromaniac with some foul-mouthed extra confidence, and proves, PILGRIM aside, Cera is still the Stu Erwin of his generation, the Eddie Bracken with less small-town corn and more art film savvy.

Why Cera? The Cera-phenom didn't start with JUNO or SUPERBAD --it began with ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, but in that series he was a confused hormonal kid trying get out from under the avalanche of contradictory instruction from his micro-managing father. JUNO and SUPERBAD made it A-OK for Cera's brand of high-voiced stream of consciousness to enter the realm of the horny nerd, and emboldened the horny nerd in the process to have interests beyond peering at dirty magazines. Now in between all the dick jokes  they can discuss Welles, Bresson, Fellini, Argento, Wood -- they even know that Ozu directed TOKYO STORY, not Mizoguchi. Tres intellique!

While REVOLT's pranks are less dorky and more property-damaging than the typical virginity-losing teen sex comedy's, touching that vein of troubled boarding school loss as it does, the film's source template emerges (as TAXI DRIVER was the template for Jody Hill's underappreciated OBSERVE AND REPORT) as nothing other than Bertolucci's ENDLESS LOVE (1981), a drama of tortured love and torched property. It was similarly about a lovestruck arsonist-pursuing his forbidden rich girl objet petit a, the world's obsession of the moment, Brooke Shields.

In the late 1970s, Shields launched the popularity of skin-tight 'designer' jeans with a campaign for Calvin Klein ("Nothing comes between me and my Calivns").  And she was 14, which is hard to believe in this day and age when Hannah Montana can be blasted to hell for showing her shoulder on a magazine cover. Shields won even more moral outrage playing a child prostitute in PRETTY BABY (1978, age 13) and going topless at age 15 in THE BLUE LAGOON (she had to testify a body double was used due to child pornography accusations), then in ENDLESS LOVE at 16, playing a sexually budding debutante in Franco Zeffirelli's worst film and biggest box office success.

I never really understood Shields' flash of appeal, being just 14 myself and more into older women like Cheryl Tiegs, Jaclyn Smith, and Bo Derek, but I remember the film's avalanche of hype: sexual movie posters and commercials and playground word-of-mouth, and so-- apparently--does REVOLT's director Miguel Arteta (THE GOOD GIRL, CHUCK AND BUCK) who was Brooke's age when ENDLESS LOVE came out and thus wouldn't have been allowed to see it without legal guardian (I was even younger). But bad as Zeffirelli's film may be, at least it has the courage of its sickly softcore convictions, being as much about Shields' nymphet stardom and Zeffirelli's desire to recreate the box office success of his 1968 counterculture-approved ROMEO AND JULIET. Straddling the difference between BREATHLESS's insouciance, the indie quirk-studded suburban character ensemble comedy, and ENDLESS LOVE's Franco Zeffirelli mania (there's some good scenes with Justin Long as a Zen-shroomer older brother), YOUTH IN REVOLT ends up being drawn and quartered in its saddle.

No offense to true romance, but as I've said before, John Cusak standing outside your window in the dead of night blasting Peter Gabriel from a boombox over his head is called stalking. Every time a girl says that scene (from SAY ANYTHING) is romantic, another girl pays the price as some obsessive maniac takes her rejection as a challenge to keep pursuing, burning down buildings, lacing drinks, blinding horses, breaking into dorms, killing rivals, and even taking telescopic pictures while listening to a "la-la-la-la" - the Ennio Morricone soundtrack (L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo).  Stand skeeved by their methodology if you're me, but guys learn fast, and so "In Your Eyes" has become the song every parent fears. And then of course there's the rich history of society helping abused women get clear of their abuser men, only to watch in horror as the women wind up going back to them anyway, making society feel like fools.

In movies, at least, the stalker attitude is a sign of a romantic ideal where a million true loves await your ceaseless internet trawling, and you can't quite pick one, so you go for the one you can't have... better to stalk and lose continually then win once and be expected to stay outside of the neighbor's bushes, where it's safe dark.

REVOLT's reptilian adhesion to formality and mammalian desire for characters and change is akin to yesterday's Roger Corman films, studded with interesting characters but robbed of Corman's streak of true, genuine revolution. Random violence in the service of love is not true love, but obsession. It's like that itch on your back and your lover scratches it and it feels good for less than a fraction of a second before the itch moves on. It was never about the itch; the itch was where your incompleteness meant to hide and keep you shopping, drinking, hungering, writing lots of tortured poetry and sighing over LA BOUT DE SOUFFLE, CRAZY LOVE, TRUE ROMANCE, and the song: "My.... endless... love."

The girl of REVOLT, Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) understands this and 'creates' the drama version of the 'angry bed' to test her wannabe Lancelot, but she's never deluded into believing the tests are anything more than mere amusement-in-the-moment. The tragedy is that in the end the film itself believes the delusions created by her need for drama--as evinced in the final thought of our unreliable narrator: "After all that, Nick Twisp was enough." One is tempted to shout back at the screen: "No, he wasn't!" Cera's character is not even 'present' - how can any girl be expected to love a vertical plane of self-conscious neediness and ectomorphic myopia deluded into thinking it's a 'person'? And the same goes for Cera's Francois Dillinger, who turns out to be little more than a gimmick, though Cera's dirty talk has its moments, such as "I want to wrap your legs around my head and wear you like the crown that you are." Nice work. There is after all a difference between the well-laid bluntness of Serge Gainsbourg and the bitter smuttiness of the perennial virgin. For all the bravado, Francois can only skim the edges of the former.

The oxymoronic impression YOUTH gives off, of 'trying' to be effortless, manifests right off the bat in the dopey claymation credits sequence, which seems to beg the audience to see this as JUNO II.  But at least Diablo had the courage to get out there and do the things she writes about, to get the grody details right. Aside from a later shroom-lucination or two, the animation is too sophomoric and obvious. Effort could have been put into subtle changes like making the walls breathe ala THE BLACK SWAN, but it's too busy making dumb sex comedy jokes.  It's why all the best artists--like Portman and Aronofsky--are fearless self-examiners, exorcising their demons in public, screaming and howling and trashing hotel rooms, all to keep the crap of self-delusion and obsessive denial of death from fogging up their windshield and making it impossible to see their work from any kind of artistic vantage point.  If you look at two other 'portrait of an evil doppelganger as a young artist' films, THE BLACK SWAN and FIGHT CLUB, the pedestrian safehood of REVOLT--even with shrooms and arson--becomes clear.

Twisp's epiphany that it was "him" all along misses the whole point: magic bullet clinginess is not true love. Doing crazy things for love is fine if you bear in mind that love earned that way isn't going to last more than a night. Concentrate and you can feel an undying soul connection to anything -- a cat or a teddy bear even-- and then it's *Poof!* c'est finis. The moment ends, your attention focuses back on the TV and the cat skulks off into the other room, or Cera gets out of jail and finds none of the expected sparks and crashing trains when he finally shacks up uncontested with Sheeni. Rather than realize the error of his unrealistic expectations, Twisp will undoubtedly suspect Sheeni's sleeping with someone else and that's why he's not "happily ever after." If there was one lesson he could have gleaned from reading Cahiers du Cinema or listening to Serge, that was it. Twisp gleaned it not! Coupez spot publicitaire!



The guys in the above video exemplify here that you can be scrawny and white and nebbishy and still kick every ass in the room. Francois if you're going to wear mirror shades and a silly mustache, take a lesson from "The Chief!"

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Pilgri-dendum: The Man Who Forgot to Shoot Liberty Valance

Time: The weekend's most precipitous swan dive was executed by Scott Pilgrim. Based on the first of Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comix, directed by cult-classic auteur Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) and starring Michael Cera, North America's favorite perennial preadolescent, Scott was expected to open in the honorable $15 million range. Those who saw the movie gave it a lustrous A-minus CinemaScore rating. Problem is, few people saw it: the actual first-weekend take was a lame $10.5 million, which put it in fifth place, behind not only the new The Expendables and Eat Pray LoveThe Other Guys and Inception. "Well, this is disappointing," wrote Jordan Rapp of The Film Stage. "In an almost predictable fashion America got the Top 5 completely backwards." - Richard Corliss, 8/15/10 but also two older films, (Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2010830,00.html#ixzz0wmqoj33D)

Since I wrote that crazy Scott Pilgrim Vs. Stallone blog on Friday (see below), I feel guilty even though I'm sure I'm not solely responsible for the bad box office described above (THE EXPENDABLES was #1, PILGRIM below even INCEPTION in its whatevereth week). I expected, based on its hype (and Expendables lack thereof at least in my little sealed-off universe), that Scott Pilgrim would break box office records and Expendables would ride off into the sunset while the Sons of the Pioneers sang "Cactus Rose" and the Michael Cera / Jimmy Stewart / Scott Pilgrim archetype would set up his gaming console in the sheriff's office and our new age of digital combat would begin in earnest.

Man, was I wrong! Like Gore losing to Bush, like the shameful vote to uphold Prop 8, America is always ready to surprise with its penchant for pendulum swings to the right. Imagine a different end to Ford's famous THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962) changed, as word gets out that Stewart's lanky lawyer had a little "help" from John Wayne (or CGI) and thus didn't really shoot Valance (Lee Marvin) and thus the sleazy cattleman rancher running against him in the western territory election had won. Can you imagine!? Our west would look, well, not unlike the way it looks now. (Read my piece on VALANCE at Bright Lights, here)

If you read my savage entry last week and wonder how I can change my tune and defend Scott Pilgrim so fast it's because, well, a) I'm a Pisces and cursed to always understand both sides of an argument and b) my hatred of wussiness has a lot to do with the way you "hate" your little brother, but still would defend him in a fight if he was getting picked on. I thought Pilgrim would win, so I jeered him, but I never kick a kid when he's already down. In fact, I switch sides, bloodying my own nose and jeering as I fall to the curb, like Tyler's mirror double in FIGHT CLUB, bitchez!!

I remember getting all mad at Mathew Broderick for his grandiose dancing and lip syncing to "Twist and Shout" during someone else's parade in FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF back in 1986 when I was still paralyzed by self-consciousness and furiously smoking to the Violent Femmes and wearing combat boots and wondering why the world wasn't at my feet. How dare this little schweinhund Ferris presume he had the right to hog so much attention, to be so randomly adored by all, purely for his ability to lip sync a song he had nothing to do with writing or recording? I was a bass player!! To me that's the height of the icky self-aggrandizement, piggybacking on other people's work: The Beatles were still in Hamburg playing their asses off every night, dodging beer bottles and trying to decipher drunken German song requests ("und sie liebt Dich, ya ya ya") when they recorded that song. You, Ferris, just wake up late, skip school and take all the credit like the schweinhundt du bist. I've written about this in the past (2008- Kill all Jonesers). I should stop kvetching, as it will only result in my falling bloodied to the curb once more. 

So yeah, I perhaps squirm when I see Michael Cera (and Jesse Eisenberg) the way I used to squirm watching my little brother doing... well, almost anything. And as Justin pointed out in his comments to my comments below, it's very easy to attack hipsters and sensitive gamers. And yes, while I would like to see them put down their gaming cubes and fight and drink and live up to their trucker hats and giant belt buckles it's mainly because I want them to be cool. I'm worried for them, for their inability to maintain eye contact and for liking Animal Collective while not on LSD. I know that if I ever got in a fight instead of just rallying for peaceful violence, I'd be smashed up pretty good. I got glasses though --disqualified!! Glasses make you immune because any guy who punches you is liable to break his hand and your nose and maybe blind you so he's got to be ready to really get violent because after doing that to your glasses and you're a man you'll either be in a coma or trying to kill him from that day on. Am I right, Scott? Now go and get your fucking shinebox! 

 

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The Guns of Ceraberg: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Expendables

 It is perhaps no accident that this weekend finds two potential big box office hits going head to head for the same tweaky gambeboy audience, one is full of old muscle head icons of the 1980s-90s, one has an anemic white kid who looks like he can barely hold a bass, let alone play one in a band but who beats an array of tough ex-lovers of a would-be girlfriend via video game-ish duels.

That's just one problem for me with SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, another is that dumb poster art, as per below:

As a former rock star bassist, I can point out at least three things wrong with this picture. One, he's playing it like a guitar - and certainly the pose is meant to inspire this thought if you're walking past it and don't immediately know the difference. (four instead of six tuning pegs atop the neck are the giveaway), second, all 'real' bass players use their top two fingers to pluck and and a thumb to slap, never do they use a pick to strum. (Of course many fine bass players including Bill Wyman might disagree). Third, this Johnny B. Goode pose he's in is just all wrong for a bass player, for his or her job in a band is to hold down the rhythm, keep the drums anchored so the guitars can circle above, or vice versa. The proper stance would be legs wide apart and leaned back - even a girl in a skirt can do it, ala Tamara Thomas (below).

Now that's a bassist stance.

If you're already not a 'great' bass player you're much better off not trying to bust rock guitar duck walks, Scott Pilgrim! Methinks he does it to hide his face cuz he's shy. But just because I have to see this poster ad nauseum every day on the subway to work, that's not what's got my goat about Michael Cera and Jesse Eisenberg, it's what they've come to represent in the collective archetypal unconscious, it's 'the Ceraberg Principle.'

It's for me a heavy sadness that if there's any film to come out with a sensitive comedic white kid lead it has to star Michael Cera, or if he is unavailable, his slightly less anemic and curlier twin, Jesse Eisenberg. Nothing personal to either of them in real life, or as actors (they probably have much bigger ranges but are now pigeonholed), but isn't it sending a wrong message to the pale hipster dudes coming of age today? That they can be shaking in their ironically rhinestone-studded boots with longing for a hot chick, do nothing about it but stammer and then--when she gets bored of waiting for him to cowboy up, and tries to seduce him herself--skittishly refuse her advances, since she's "ahem" drunk or has 'issues'? (As Cera did in the and here I use quotation marks, "SUPERBAD.") In real life, kids that age are terrified enough -- they turn to movies to see how to act in real life and the movies just tell them "forget it, go be heroes in the metaverse, that's much more 'cooler' than real life."

Often, a good boost of courage for these fellas can be found in alcohol! It would be nice to see Eisenberg or Cera actually grow a pair of balls after having a few drinks, but it's seldom that they seem to get much courage from the bottle. Another courage booster is to actually get them into a 'real' fight... but not even a legion of zombies can rouse Ceraberg from his--and here I use quotation marks--"adorable" paralysis.

And (SPOILER!) - don't even get me started on Eisenberg and his cheap townie move of deciding to show up like a stray kitten drenched with rain on Kristen Stewart's Manhattan doorstep at the end of ADVENTURELAND (2009). As I've said before, this sends the wrong message to the small town dweebs that hip Kristens of the world leave behind when they go off to art school in the big city. Said dweebs believe that--even if the Kristen doesn't return their calls or e-mails--all they have to do is pack a duffle and buy a bus ticket, and the girl will let them stay at her studio apartment rent free until the end of time. If they were real hipsters they would know the story of the Velvet Underground's "The Gift" almost by heart, and would know that if they mailed themselves to her, they'd end up with their skull split slightly by Marsha's hammer and issuing fountains of red that pulsate gently in the morning sun.

Bosses in big city companies, for example, expect you to ask for a raise in person--not in an e-mail-- and to be strong and confident, they want to see you be try to be professional and aggressive, rather than meek and mealy-mouthed. What kind of good influence is it to win a girl by betraying the confidences of your friend--her boyfriend--by leading her to the primal scene of his infidelity? (ADVENTURELAND, again).

In short, the Cera/Eisenberg movies encourage wimps to stay wimps, to be passive-aggressive and expect everyone to do the dirty work of putting themselves on the line, so that they can hang back and judge from afar--safe in the lap of their laptops--anyone who would dare actually try to physically change things in the scary world of immediate reality. An analogy would be that old comic book ad for Charles Atlas:

Now, that's all fine and good -- you get a weight set, you start exercising, drinking vodka before homeroom, suddenly you have chutzpah to spare. But the Cera-berg version would change all that. Instead of bulking up and working your way towards a slot in THE EXPENDABLES, the comic book being read in the fourth panel (above) would change to an internet gaming site, the kicking over a chair and bulking would be virtual, via his elvin avatar on World of Warcraft, where he blows away the bullies with a magic bass. Hurray for Scott Pilgrim!

When he returns to the 'real,' his girl is waiting for him, presuming he's done all this to get in her pants, mistakenly believing his stutter and stammer is due to his burgeoning libido... but nope, he then stops to let her know that this sex stuff doesn't fly because, she's, um, drunk, or something...or else you get her pregnant via your two pump chumpery and never change out of your gross track team shorts... better go call "pop-pop" in prison you little Arrested Development yitz! You Max Pisher!

 
Actually I don't mean to imply by calling him Max Pisher that Max FISHER, from RUSHMORE (1998), fits the Ceraberg mold, for he surely does not. In fact he's a great role model... and if no more rugged than Cera he can still at least exude confidence, Jesus Christ! And he even ends up both getting even with--and befriending his main bully opponent--a gruff Scotsman who calls him "Fisha!"And Max does so through resilience, genius and sass rather than mewly-mouthed avoidance and video game wizard-sublimation. Let's see some others, wanna?

BRICK (2006)

"Along with the amazing, clever dialogue and the great use of geometric composition to establish a sense of suburban desolation at every turn, this is easily the best neo-noir since The Last Seduction, and an important step forward in showing young male viewers a protagonist other than the simple minded hunk bore who gets the girl or the coded gay best friend hysteric in the chick flick, and the sneering pretty boy, the geeky obese avenger, and so on. Enacted by Gordon-Levitt, Brandon is an inspiring character who should motivate a generation of shy teens to stand up and take their punches like a man, then throw back with everything they have, all in the name of love... baby. Lukas Haas also scores as the drug kingpin. They have some great Sergio Leone-style staring contests." (One of my very first acidemic blog posts! 11/06)

Tanner (BAD NEWS BEARS, 1976)

What Tanner (above, right) lacks in size he makes up for in foul-mouthed courage. Shown here drinking a Budweiser (which has hopefully yet to be replaced via CGI with a coke in the DVD), tanner steals the show with great lines like "You can take that trophy and shove it up your ass!" and "All we got on this team are a buncha Jews, sp*cs, ni***rs, pansies, and a booger-eatin' moron!"

Well, hey, it was the goddamned 70s! We didn't have political correctness yet, so as someone who was Tanner's age when he saw this film in the theater, I'd like to cap it off by saying: "F**k you, if you're gonna stick up for that bunch of shaky nerves on a white boy stalk, Scott Pilgrim instead of rockin' with your cock deep in THE EXPENDABLES!" While the battles Cera engages in are clearly 'not of this world,' more like challenging opponents to game of Mortal Kombat 7, or Guitar Hero: Bass Edition, Bad News Bear's Tanner unhesitatingly picks a real life fight with two kids twice his size after they humiliate his even smaller teammate. He winds up in a trash can, somehow still victorious! So once again, F**k you!

Every last kid--including the girls--

(aside from the narc)--

in OVER THE EDGE (1979)

Michael Cera is probably at least five or six years older than even Matt Dillon in this film, and yet any one of the kids in OVER THE EDGE could kick his ass, except at Mortal Kombat or Guitar Hero, which is apparently where all fights are settled these days. But don't worry, they didn't have cell phones back then, so your humiliating defeat at the hands of a kid half your age and weight wouldn't get uploaded to youtube.

So, yeah, doesn't it bother the Eisenberg/Ceras that younger, smaller kids with a lot less muscle mass and access to alcohol can beat the crap out of them, all just because not everyone is a wussy hipster with weak wrists from too much gaming who masks his fear of pretty girls via esoteric pop culture quips? 

In the real fighting world of blood, sweat, time, and endless punches to the gut and face, the 70's kids above would maybe get bloodied up if they were fighting older bigger kids (as happens to Carl the lead in OVER THE EDGE) but the next day, the guy they had the fight with would probably show them some respect, for taking their lumps like a man. Of course nowadays courage is not easily tested outside of the digital arena, or the military, or kick boxing class, as in NEVER BACK DOWN (see my Bright Lights Blog entry, "Why We Still Fight," here). 

Naturally, my anger over this issue stems from unresolved feelings of teenage cowardice on my own part--all those tender moves I was afraid to bust because my heart leapt into my throat and I thought I'd pass out as she leaned in to be kissed (or did she?)--or backed down from bullies' provocations only to kick myself for not standing up to them later--I was as terrified as Michael Cera, but one thing's for sure, if the girl did actually bust a move herself, or gave me any sort of clear sign, I didn't leave her hanging with a lot of lame excuses. And if I got in a fight, I didn't run, I just went for 'the sweet spots' like a dirty fighter, like the son in HISTORY OF VIOLENCE.

So Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, isn't it time you stopped being girly men, and learned to bow down to the muscle! Bow down to the manly muscle men of the 1980s, who happen this very week to be exhumed en masse in a final box office blow-out of becrunched limbs and rapid fire Contra-killing fury, here to beat your puny girl arms to shaky pulps ("You crushed my guitar hero finger!") in this weekend's no prisoners war for total box office victory, THE EXPENDABLES!

(Yeah, I know.. they don't have a chance. 
Damn you Scott Pilgrim! Damn yoooou!)

See also: Fight Club: Maturity, Initiation, and the Fantasy of Self-Annhiliation

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Orphans of Jessieland

I like a movie that makes no bones about it's philosophical geekiness, even if that means we must endure the anal-retentive Michael Cera-clone, Jesse Eisenbeg as he nervously runs around rattling off do's and dont's in the post-apocalyptic American survival, noting: "You have to enjoy the little things," as if even we didn't know that from ED WOOD's rose-sniffing scene, and explaining why his Han Solo older brother asskicker guardian (Woody Harrelson) is hell-bent on finding twinkies in the post-apocalyptic Zombieland. They kind of represent to Woody what "home" is, i.e. civilization before the collapse, before America became Zombieland (that would have to be around 1982 or so), but of course this film could be aimed at folks younger than me, and if it steers them towards a better appreciation for the little things, and helps them gain deconstructive analytical skillz, then I guess I shouldn't curmudge. At least Jesse's voiceover spares us dot connecting as far as consumerism, slack-jawed troglydyciousness as seen in reality shows like the Kardashians, and computer game addiction. Or maybe, just maybe, no one remembers that those things are bad, and that they make Europe worry about our mental health.

For after all, the apocalypse has been floating over our heads since the days of Jesus "C" - a kind of mass suicidal ideation The apocalypse film appeals in general to the malcontents of all classes and creeds, cuz it makes us feel less caged to know there might come a time when our credit card debts are erased and we're free to loot and pillage and fight for survival like our DNA has programmed us to. In the meantime we sit around and do the best we can. We plot, and wait, and game.

Even back in the vulnerable pre-cellular/internet 1980s, we fantasized about the impending apocalypse. Back then however, zombies were confined to a few sequels and spinoffs from the Romero original.  For the real apocalypse fantasy we worried more about bikers, mutants and dwindling oil reserves, ala THE ROAD WARRIOR (aka MAD MAX 2, 1982). And we didn't much have to deal with babes like Kristen Stewart or Taliban Shire or whatever name is, in our Zombielands. If the girls showed up at all they were usually robots (CHERRY 2000, Pris in BLADERUNNER) or scouts for their underground breeding programs (A BOY AND HIS DOG). Alas, we find that in the zombieland of tomorrow, the feminists have stolen all our shit with the finesse of mutant biker older sisters.

In the 1980s--thanks to Pat Benatar--we knew love was a battlefield, but then came the 90s and it takes an army to raise a village and perhaps the second decade of the 21st century will be about how the army is overseas and the village has failed to raise itself, leaving boys with no way to turn 2 men other than leaving for the Middle East, or doing drugs and drinking... blood. And the beautiful Kristen Stewarts of the world will wither and die... or worse, go out with Jessie Eisenberg before he's passed his initiation tests, before he's actually stood the test of manhood, either by getting drunk and sleeping around and then hating himself, or tripping on acid and getting in a fight or riding the mechanical bull, or in the words of Craig Finn from The Hold Steady, "waking up in someone else's van with a backstage pass in your back pocket."

I guess I'm squeamish since I was just as insecure as Eisenberg until around 1985 when I started drinking. To use the iconography of ZOMBIELAND, I went from a Jessie to a Woody in one swift funnel. Thing with Eisenberg is -- the two movies I've seen him in are both a) one world titles ending in "land" b) about amusement parks - the first is the semi-fun comedy ADVENTURELAND, wherein he slavers after the delectable pout of (below) Kristen Stewart (I hope you can feel that every time I write that name there is about a 2 minute pause while I swoon to the floor like a 16-year old promise ring-wearing Goth).

If this was a WW2 metaphor Eisenberg (and me prior to discovering alcohol) would be tightass Montgomery and Woody Harrelson would be a mighty Patton. Picture if you will, a small boy. He is Russian, and acting as a scout behind German lines for the Soviet Army. This kid is so tough and adorable, he'll break your heart and inspire you to risk death in the name of victory, all in one Hawks-like swoop. The film, she is called IVAN'S CHILDHOOD (1962). If this kid can be that cool, surely our Ceras and our Jesses can get themselves some nice Mickey Rourke-style bruises and at least give heroin a try?! The Cera-Eisenberg principle instead operates on the kind of squeamish comic embarrassment Ricky Gervais smuggled over from the BBC. And of course, Judd Apatow, and the "growing up" element has more to do with letting a hot girl kiss you without running away, or going to bed with her without stuttering some excuse why "it wouldn't be right" before realizing that "hey, it's the little things that matter." Or as Bushwick Bill once said "Size ain't shit!"

I've got nothing against wimps and computer nerds,  now that I can stare like Clint and  have a deep voice... so I get mad when nerds betray their struggling nerd audience with a bad role model like Eisenberg, for whom everything is done the hard way, when meanwhile Xanax and booze are free for the taking at deserted pharmacies and supermarkets across the nation.

I'm sorry, ZOMBIELAND, you're okay. A good enough zom-com is good enough for me. If it was easy to make a good-enough zom-com, there would be lots more good ones, so take a bow. Let us fill up virtual racks at the rental store with these unfettered amalgams! And the best part is, one of us invented the whole unified zombie mythos, i.e. a 20th century indie film maverick (as opposed to a Victorian playwright), George Romero - yet no one has to pay him a ha'penny of royalties. I mean, I wish they did, so he could be rich and afford to make his own zombie films... better. I mean I couldn't even get more than 20 minutes into DIARY OF THE DEAD. Jesus Christ, it's worse than Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS!


What's generally missing in all these Romero homage/spin/rip-offs is Romero's original deeply embedded critique of consumerism. There's a scene for example in the original, long-ass DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979) where the heroine is getting herself all dolled up in the mirror, with beautiful gold lighting done in a commercial manner, and with the gun seamlessly integrated into her ensemble. ZOMBIELAND by contrast would have Eisenberg's narration go "It was like we were living in a critique of consumerism." and show a Phillip Seymour Hoffman cameo as a zombie Marxist liberal arts professor.

Z is for Zombie, that's good enough for me, and if the movie is really more of an amusement park ride than an actual horror film, and even if Bill Murray has to show up doing a frickin' Be Kind Rewind -remix of the library scene from GHOSTBUSTERS with his home's invaders, who'm I gonna call? So just remember that Zombieland is about appreciating the little things, and family, and fire arms, and all the stuff we take for granted that's going to go down in flames in a few short years. Hallelujah oh Dark Lord whom I choose to call Kristen!

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