1994: The year Fiorentino and Tarantino saved us from Vampire Morality

Now more than ever we're remembering the pre-CGI sci fi horror boom of the 1980s as a golden age, thanks in a large part to the Scream Factory series of DVDs coming out, elevating to high art in their loving detail everything from old slasher films to oddball Dolph Lundgren Terminator riffs like Dark Angel (see my praise piece on BLAD: "Rated R for Retro"). The market was so big that in 1987 two semi-big budget films came out about vampire teens, with almost the same story:  Near Dark and The Lost Boys. Both involve a vain teenage hunk--in a single parent family with a younger sibling-- ready for his first big mistake, falling for a hot young vampire who lures him into her weird pack. The pack in each film includes a small child vampire and a wild man shadow figure to the lead. And each lead wastes his gifts in lots of moral hand-wringing about drawing one's first drop of innocent blood. Ugh, there's the rub.

I refused to see either films in the theater at the time, because I hated seeing the 'brat pack' spill over into my favorite genres --me being around their same age. And seeing them now they're fun and brooding in their measure, but man, I've had it up to here with these brooding hunks who dig the percs of being vampires and don't mind drinking blood if a hot vamp girl feeds it to them from her own wrist after she does the dirty work, but won't go around killing humans for food, because that would be 'wrong.' Oh Prunella! Oh Heaven forfend! Son, that's called being a mooch, a lazy good-for-nothing boytoy - a K-Fed.

The Cool Kids (Top 2: Near Dark)

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The buzzkills

Yeah man, Jason Patric in Lost Boys, Adrian Pasdar in Near Dark: two doe-eyed hunks used to getting everything they want through manipulating hot babes, relying on their motorbike or horse to wow the girls into submission, clinging to their vamp girl like she's their new mommy (one of perhaps a long string of blank doormats expected to worship their lame peccadilloes), they suck, in short.

Both films assume we know and respect the hierarchy of attractiveness in boys but young male viewers who aren't doe-eyed hunks aren't about to identify with these clowns and we're the ones who watch these kind of movies, the ones who would kill some humans and drink their blood, and worry about our immortal souls at the proper time (after it was too late to do anything about it). That would be a good angle: the awkward shy kid uses his vamp gifts to bite everyone whoever wronged him and gets so high off the hottie vamp's attention and the sense of belonging to the cool kids for the first time in his 'life' that he doesn't eve have a second thought until it's far too late. Instead, in these two films, the doe-eyes just squirm and try to dodge their bloodletting responsibilities like Donnie Brascoe with a gun to a squealer's head, waiting for a deux ex machina to rescue them. We end up loathing these self-righteous mooches with a passion that lasts far longer than our ugly duckling phase, it lingers on the edge of our beautiful manipulative older male swan phase and re-surges in the old reprobate phase, when we begin to beam nondescriptly at their moody foibles as we would our own grandchildren's.

Jason Patric in Lost Boys is exhibit A: When he sees Star (Jami Gertz) in a big beachside crowd gathered around an open air stage (with a great burly rock sax guy), he starts following her around as if he's already pissed at her for walking away instead of falling onto her knees before his physical beauty, which he considers a sacred church and therefore no laughing or running around should be allowed in his presence. This overconfidence gets a comeuppance when he's goaded into a dangerous beach race to one of the cooler vamp cavern hideouts and manipulated into drinking vampire blood.  These scenes are the best in the film, and director Schumacher ably captures the adrenalized swirl of energy around hooking up with a group of wild new friends, the need to belong weighed against the warning signs going off deep in your sacral chakra.

Star, it turns out, has chosen to initiate a new member to the clan, with Kiefer's approval - but dumbshit Patric can't figure out what's happening... chalking it up to some ecstasy or something in the blood wine he was given. Next day he's a pale, shaky mess who can barely keep his feet on the ground. Some of us back in the 90s had to fill our high heels with sand just to stop from floating away after nights of drinking weird potions in the basement with the boys, trippin out on Miles Davis' Live Evil and driving home at dawn on the back of undulating black asphalt serpents with yellow dash line dorsal ridges. We didn't blink! Patric's a pussy.

Almost the exact same plot serves Near Dark but instead of Schumacher's ingenuity with packed beach boardwalk scenes, thousands of coordinated extras, colorful taxidermy gardens, pumping anthem rock, and ingenious literalizing of common phrases of parents at the dinner table (if your new friends jumped off a bridge, would you?), there's Kathryn Bigelow's moody Badlands-esque emptiness: vast fields like a lover's skin, the few straight roads like arteries begging to be punctured with gas stations, phone booths, and silos; one of the more realistic looking biker bars caked with dust and the muted loneliness of the aging regulars, all the fight leeched out of them slowly, drip by drip from the numbness of time's passionless faucet and the emptiness of the landscape which the pack visits and rains terror on, almost like an angel of deliverance from this glum nothingness.

Near Dark wins the contest just because it at least thinks to critique its doe eyed hunk's willingness to literally leech off his girlfriend rather than nut up and get his own. One could conceivably view it as a metaphor for the hypocrisy of today's consumerist carnivores who get super indignant when confronted with evidence of their butcher's slaughterhouse crimes, wherein they'll eat all the meat you can serve, provided as they don't have to look into its eyes. Serve the calf's brains jellied inside the cow skull, you're a serial killer; serve the usual rump steak and you're simply a nice host. Serve honey roasted grasshoppers, you're a freak. Fried shrimp? A true surfside chef! Shrimp are just insects of the sea, dude. And killing humans is no different than choosing your own lobster once you're not a human anymore. If we all had to do a few days work in the slaughterhouse, co-op style, how much you want to bet this country would be easily 70% vegetarian? No wait, I don't gamble. It might send the wrong idea to children!

I feel guilty every time I leave my cat in the morning, or when I go to the zoo. I never got comfortable even fishing. Even throwing them back I wince at the pain from imagining a hook in my cheek. Rules of the Game (1939) is very brave in that - what other comedy shows dozens of bunnies and birds being shot, for real, and the hunters barely noticing, so wrapped up in their petty romantic intrigues? And though the characters don't flinch, Renoir does. But he doesn't blame them -- they are after all the very rich, the predator species of all cultures. It's what they do. That's real morality and if it leaves a strange taste in the mouth, savor it, that's the bitter tang of real art!

I tried being vegan during my big spiritual awakening of last fall (see 'Scrooge Satori Apocalypse', The Holy Madman for proof!) but simply got too dizzy in the end to keep it up. My body delighted in shedding all the crap from my system, but then ran out of stuff to shed, and began feeding on itself. My body was like fuck you I'm a meat eater, give me meat or after the little bit of fat we've stored is gone I'll start in on the muscle, bro, I just don't give a fuck. So I obeyed it, the way a vegan game warden obeys its aristocratic ruler. I learned one simply can't be holy these days without one's own private cook. And whatever happened to the apocalypse of 12/21/12? Aside from the trans-galaxial enlightenment I and dozens of others received either from galactic alignment or placebo effects, nothing happened. Not even ice cream... 'cuz it's dairy.

Going back to meat took its toll though, and now I'm blind in one eye again, so I don't have to think about the pain and bottom line-minded torture my dinner went through to reach me. Maybe the whole point of ignorance is bliss, there's a reason that Italian guy eats a steak in The Matrix and not a celery stalk.

Tony Scot's parallel lines 

Too bad filmmakers, even talented ones with some moral fibre (mmm mmm) like Neil Jordan, Bigelow, and Tony Scott, balk at the chance for true vampiric ambiguity: The Hunger, Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys, the list of movies where a lucky stiff is vamped only to get all moral about killing is endless. It makes me wonder... is there any vampire movie where the newborn actually does kill a human or two without moping about it for the rest of the story? (see my post on Vampire Morality Blues). Damn I need a drink. Oh wait. I can't anymore. I'm like one of these vegan vamps, but for booze.

But then... a miracle happened. The year was 1994, a boozy flood came and washed the lack of sin off the screen. All that bad faith ended with a triple threat of charismatic young leads who got away with cold stone murders: Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, and The Last Seduction. 

Looking at them now, they're still cool -- but what was so energizing about them has been forgotten by the skin deep imitations - and what was that? That the lead characters all got away with murder. They killed the innocent and robbed and arranged murders and in the end got away scot-free. And we rooted for them every step of the way.

There are no words to describe our exhilaration after having to suffer through so much leftist moral hand-wringing over onscreen killing. Superheros crashing Humvees through shopping malls like maniacs, probably wiping out dozens with collateral damage, but then braking to not hit the main villain; whole crates of ammo being fired by The A-Team without one guy being even wounded; Cameron having to show that the hundreds of cops Arnold shot in T2 are only clipped in the leg (Fatalities = 0, it says on his monitor), it all got to be a serious problem.  But then came True Romance (1993), and the crazy couple got away with the loot, for once, and the girl didn't browbeat the man for killing her pimp! Hallelujah.

Naturally there has been some kickback. A couple of dumbass kids out in the boonies went on a killing spree after being inspired by Mickey and Mallory Knox, but their parents' lawsuit against Oliver Stone was unsuccessful!

Sadly, as they have always done, the Hollywood imitators of the Tarantino mythos got the surface right but missed the point. The skinny black ties and pop culture references didn't make the QT films great, it was the flatline savvy about death, about understanding that cinematic death doesn't equate to real life death, but that in realizing this the onscreen deaths actually become more real, more vivid; the more they are recognized as cinematic expressionism rather than glum social sermonizing, the more true they are. Audiences can be trusted to not all go home and kill Rodney Dangerfield. As Godard once said, it's not blood, it's red. When we want insincere Hollywood hedonists to lecture us about the sanctity of life and death we'll ask them. Go ahead and bite a neck or shoot a man, Billy! You've got nothing to lose but your fear of flying. Can't you ever let go of the handrails.. even in a dream?

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Language! Drinks! Cake! Oppression!

Watching Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS for the sixth time recently all I could do was absorb the language barriers; all those dinner parties I sat through in Buenos Aires while intellectual friends of my ex-wife talked in rapid fire Argentinian Spanish suddenly came into clarity. Quentin's whole film is about being at one of those dinner parties. Is he dating an Argentinian? Or wait, no, Che! Che es claro! C'est un chick francais.

Either way, when one is in a situation like that, one can't really do anything except smile politely, look at the speaker like you understand a word they say, and muse along BABEL-ish lines. After all, small children and animals feel bored and left out by adult conversation all the time... if you multiply that factor by Nazis in France speaking German, now you can start to get super mad. When Americans go to Paris on vacation and expect the waiter to know English, that's bad, but at least he doesn't have to know it. The tourists can't have him shot; they should take his rudeness as a sign of solidarity --he's free to be rude.

It might help to understand the feeling of being at the mercy of someone with whom you are having a 'civil' interaction if you've been either a drug dealer during the Reagan administration, though now just going through airport security should be enough for you to savor some of that long-term slow burn paranoia when one bunch of people has absolute power over another,  and each side pretends--one for their own vanity, the other for basic survival--that everything is copacetic. These moments are when Tarantino shines. In his world, every meal, every round of drinks, is pregnant with these sublimated maskings. One side pretends to not be a cat about to pounce, the other side pretends to not be a mouse about to bolt for the exit. Anything can go wrong and over drinks, deserts, and changing table guests, waiting for a check, the suspense can become almost unbearable.

The Cinematic Mountain of Leni Riefenstahl

These scenes work so effectively on the nerves because they tap into a deep, unresolved response of infantile rage at the bullying ignorance of adults. We all remember being a child and having no say in our life's direction. Parents decide when our bedtime is and what TV shows we can watch and if we can have ice cream. They can spank, whip, imprison, strip-search etc. rummage through out drawers looking for drugs they heard about on Fox, and we can't do a thing about it. All we can do is count the hours and months and years until we're out of there.

But that's the thing, most of us don't have to submit to this once we are 21 and/or out of our parent's house. But the poor devils in Tarantino's last two films each have to contend with whole dinner times going past, or lengthy conversations, with people trying to be their parents, with laws that remove rights already instated and strip classes and races of social equity. A parallel might be trying to get through a whole dinner with strict parents as a ten year-old trying to hide the fact that you're stoned and drunk out of your gourd, and by dessert you think you've got them won over so your mask starts to slip a little, and you keep hitting the wine even though your mom glowers at the water level. And your friend who stayed for dinner is like dude, ixnay on the ineway tilunway erway outway the oordway

This is how the Jewish heroine of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS has to live most of her life, such as tense moments like the luncheon (above), where she's unceremoniously dragged. She's expected to be charming as people talk in rapid German (which she does not speak, as we learn indirectly in the beginning) about her theater, never even asking if she wants to host their big film night, all but forcing the "honor" on her, with blithe unconcern about her personal desires. They must certainly know it's hardly an 'honor' for the oppressed French to host any Nazi event, but to mangle a line from THE MALTESE FALCON, "for her sake I let her pretend." Or another line, from a 1931 favorite of mine,
"it's only old Svengali, talking to himself again."

That's Tarantino's genius, level one -- the power of lengthy dinner conversations to with utmost fluidity chronicle not just the dynamics of power and deception, but of the way lengths of time work to change those dynamics, wearing down some positions and strengthening others, and the power of the words we absorb in their seemingly casual use when they later come into play, into action.

Even as early as PULP FICTION, QT buries valuable intel in the rambling opener with Jules telling Vincent about Tony Rocky Horror, a big Samoan guy getting thrown out of a window for giving Marcellus Wallace's wife a foot massage. This bit of knowledge adds great depth to our apprehension at the very thought of Vincent--who weighs far less than the average Samoan drug dealer--going on a date with the very same Mrs. Wallace, and when she almost ODs on his watch, well, now we're really scared for him in ways we would never be without the saga of Tony Rocky Horror.

 We would need also to have absorbed the dialogue back at Eric Stoltz's dealer pad about 'the Madman' and 'Panda' to appreciate the strength of said smack... in other words a whole day and night of seemingly random pop culture referenced-infused dialogue is needed, every last word, to finally snap shut an elaborate trap that is never clearly spoken or delineated. And then that apprehension over Wallace's capability for wrath continues when we learn Bruce Willis needs to go back for his watch; and we needed the full flashback of Christopher Walken's monologue about the history of the  watch to make us invested in Willis' need to go back and get it, even when the full brunt of Wallace's wrath is going to be waiting.

QT never feels the need to underline his overlapping brilliance, which is why his films reward close study - they are created for the DVD generation and so I don't feel ashamed that it wasn't until this fifth viewing of BASTERDS that I realized Soshana can't understand what Goebbels and friends are laughing about at the lunch since she doesn't speak German. Her blank cutesy expression as the men talk around her can throw you off if you're just following their subtitles instead of listening to them in the polite way we listen to a table of people talking very fast in another language who are presumably thinking we understand what they are saying. In America we have such a deep embarrassment about our knowing only 'American' that we automatically assume every European speaks all European languages. And in BASTERDS we would certainly think Shoshana knows English if not for her failure to bolt while hiding under the dairy farmer's floorboards in the opening scene. But that whole scene seems so apart from the later ones that it takes awhile to connect them - it's as if QT wants us to keep watching and digging, so buries new chunks of realization deep in the fabric of his rapid-fire dialogue.

So in that first lengthy dinner scene -- the Paris bistro with Goebbels -- we get a sense of constant on-edgeness that must accompany life under occupation. A good analogy in the US would be if the NSA extended their authority to include random house searches of all its citizens and if NSA agents wanted to invite themselves over for dinner, search our bedrooms, and sleep with our daughters, and if we ever complain wind up at GTMO with a plastic green bag over our heads. The price of freedom from this is eternal vigilance, yadda yadda ---BUT even if we didn't grow up under German occupation or deep south segregation, even if we're lucky enough that we're more or less protected from such invasions (presuming we're not Native Americans, of course), most of us remember the hopeless rage we felt towards our parents as children who never got to do anything ever and it's not fair and Waah Waah I hate you I hate you and the plotting to one day destroy them. Quentin goes back deep to that universal childhood rage as well. He understands that it's the job of great exploitation cinema to act as a catharsis to these deep-seated unresolved rages, on the personal, psychic, historical, social, and viral level.

And that's why every demeaning expletive and subjugation and atrocity is necessary in Tarantino's last two films--INGLOURIOUS and DJANGO UNCHAINED. Because no amount of vengeance, of cathartic destruction can be truly cathartic without it; if it sickens you beyond measure than the film is only doing it's job and this bloody catharsis is for you. This is the kind of trauma we should be getting from our movies, not the casual torture of films like HOSTEL and WOLF CREEK. Serial killers and psychopaths are frightening but they're isolated individuals or groups whose actions are against the law. In Nazi Germany and the Antebellum South, casual torture, subjugation and atrocity are law; extreme racist barbarism is the societal norm. The idea of what's 'right' as far as bloody vengeance is muddied by our inability to see the forest for the trees as far as the social order we're living in, and that's the Quentin difference.

The second example of time elapsing is the sheer length of the basement drinking game scene in BASTERDS; audiences generally complain that it's too long and claustrophobic which is the point. Perhaps in some ways the film never quite recovers from its show-stopper aspect. But here's the thing -- it shows the gradual erosion of nerves over a lengthy session of drinking and chit-chat, the length between thinking you're getting away with your ruse and feeling like you finally have, your enemy is about to leave or give you what you want, only to have a last minute prolonged moment of suspense as suddenly everything reverses and you're caught but by then that's it - you don't give a shit about getting away with it anymore or even getting out of there alive. You've been stifled so long under the garb of your false identity and the other's ranting egotism that your rage overrides your sense of self-preservation and BAM! Say good-bye to your nuts.

DJANGO and INGLORIOUS each have one of these scenes, and these two films are separated by these scenes from the rest of QT's oeuvre. While gangsters, thugs and assassins from his earlier films are outlaws in a world in moral twilight, the pre-Civil War South and Nazi-occupied France are worlds beyond moral twilight because the morality of the prevailing social structure is evil and violent. Slavery and subjugation is moral according to the Confederate South, and Hitler's Germany. They use modern democratic social structures  to obscure the evil, but in these two films undisguised evil gloats from its established position of power via even the smallest of presumably friendly gestures. In a sense the Nazi's openness with their evil is almost more noble than the red state congressman who preaches family values and wants to ban gay marriage and sodomy, but then goes and picks up a male hustler at a bus stop; who wants to ban free speech but would never ban the right of rednecks to fly confederate flags outside their courthouses (imagine if the Germans wanted to keep Nazi flags in their court rooms, why is it any different?)

In being open with their oppression, the Nazis also set themselves up as an easy target, of course, and in doing so they--as with the slave owners in DJANGO--remind us that the power of cathartic violence lurks under the surface of any violently imposed social order. As the recent psychopathic gun violence in our country indicates, our citizens are hopping mad but aren't sure who is oppressing them, so they don't know who to shoot at. So thank your oppressors for letting you see their face up close, should they ever do that, because when you kill them finally in a moment of explosive release it will be so worth the wait.

ONE LAST THING -

Drugs are also Tarantino's sinthom magnifique - most tellingly in a seemingly plot-advancing scene in a vet's office after the basement shooting. It begins with a morphine needle to the thigh of Brigit Von Hammersmock. The Basterds have commandeered the office of a veterinarian, and are in his operating room - while he stands by in a robe. A bullet has shattered some bone in her leg. Aldo Raine presses on the wound in a bit of torture to force the truth out of her, angry at losing three men in what he perceives as a possible ambush. He relents when starting to believe her but his manner never changes -- as the morphine hits her system though Brigit slowly morphs from defeated to intrigued to almost excited, especially once the idea of pumping her full of more morphine is discussed. It's a subliminal melange of addictive trigger motions I haven't seen so subtly played since that of Juliane Moore hearing about all the delicious drops she can pilfer from her dying husband's scrips in MAGNOLIA. In fact there might be so much crazy subtle acting going on in these moments that these things I see might not even be in the actors or director's minds at all, not even unconsciously, that it might be just my own addictive, paranoid personality...BUT... that Tarantino can start me thinking like that, in these great self-deconstructing paranoid loops speaks to his startling genius.

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"I'm not afraid to die..." Tony Scott and Dangerous Women

The news of Tony Scott's unfortunate death, which floored all fans of ballsy film, came this Monday afternoon when I was already moping to my saddest Spotfiy mix at work, mulling over the last full season of our old Mayan calendar existence... to this I easily added morning for the first fallen soldier in the first day of fall, Awash with all the sad chicks in my headphones, I knew I needed to revisit DOMINO (2003) when I got home. It may seem an odd choice from his impressive repertoire, but I think it's his most personal film, almost a righting of the wrongs of one of his first films, THE HUNGER, from 20 years prior (1).

Scott's films tended to be both overrated and underrated in equal measure, at the same time. Like his older brother Ridley, he's a master of light and sound who'll go the extra distance for just the right shot, and that's not always a good thing.  Often self-hamstrung by second-guessing and over-editing, each has a style that indicates roots of insecurity and the sinking feeling they get lost in possibilities and completely lose sight of what their original vision was in the first place. That said, Tony's films deliver consistently and he leaves behind a legacy of beautiful and true moments in film even if the films around them didn't completely hang together. He was a courtier of reckless abandon in life and in cinema, like John Huston, Sam Peckinpah, Abel Ferrara, and almost no one else. It's rarefied company, and he deserves his place among them.

Perhaps he's right now up in the crazy clouds, carousing with the real-life Domino Harvey, who died at 35 of a possible drug overdose (ruled as heart attack) the year their film was released. Maybe she's waiting at the bottom of the ocean (in my conception of the afterlife, the bottom of the ocean and the highest clouds are on the same level), with a devil's bounty hunter badge for him. If you ever see him in the DVD extras to his films he always seems like he's got one eye on the exit or the horizon, half-fully engaged (if it's possible, and with him I think it was), half recoiling from the acres of hangers-on and crew and cast all wanting something from him all the time, always talking about, and filming films about, ducking off into the sunrise with nothing but a gun, a suitcase of money, and a Hawksian woman. If you have the gun and the Hawksian girl, why do you even need to make a movie? Because he still can't get away from himself, except by working.

It's important the girl is the right girl and is not afraid to wear lots of black eyeliner or kill a man execution-style. They mustn't preach anti-gun violence / non-smoking / condom-conscious moral reform code or credo as so many A-list stars do in their smoke-free films. Scott never bowed to the PC reformers: in his films everyone smoked, because he liked to film the way sunlight through half-open blinds and cigarette smoke intermingle, and he knew the profound bond created by sharing cigarettes, and that they're cool regardless of killing people, and if you thought it was wrong to smoke indoors on a film set, for the health of the crew and the easily influenced kids watching at home, then go fuck yourself. Art with Scott bowed not to PC thuggery. Words can't express how rare or wondrous that attitude is in a land where everyone talks about being bad and subversive while having fainting spells and calling their lawyers if the road takes them even remotely close something like a genuine edge.

A small insufficient tribute, here are three of Scott's dangerous women, in reverse chronological order:

Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey - DOMINO (2003)
You can badmouth Tony Scott but if you do, and someone bashes a high contrast emerald beer bottle over your head, DOMINO is the proof you had it coming and that a lot of punchy fashion models might be healthier mentally if able to work bounty hunter jobs instead of just drug habits. Knightley is in good company with Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez as bounty hunters scrounging around L.A. All three have no problem being balls-to-the-wall badass and Tony Scott takes every opportunity to bash and savage the whinin' boys of the Hollywood industry when these bounty hunters get their option picked up. Knightley is so good that when she says "I'm not afraid to die," you believe her. It's not just idle MTV boasting.

Even if you've seen it and it just gave you a headache, watch it again, and then again, and you'll still be soaking up the details. Maybe Domino doesn't actually kill anyone (that I recall) but she does break an actor's nose just 'cuz he's a douche and deserves it and maybe the big mob stand-off climax seems like cliched overkill and much too similar to Scott's earlier TRUE ROMANCE but you can bet he tried the script and plot a dozen different ways before realizing this was the best and most cinematic way to go, and was full well aware of its derivative Hong Kong-ishness and it being ultimately unlike the real Domino, but as she says in the film, if she told us the full truth it would have to be sanitized so she wouldn't go to jail or have mobsters on her ass, and Scott knew it would be better to just lie bigger than truth smaller.

And anyway, they do way too much mescaline very convincingly. That forgives a lot, in the Acidemic lawbook.

Plus, Knightley's white satin beauty and adamantium razor cheekbone toughness is backed up by a strange and effective roster of side players: Christopher Walken, Delroy Lindo, Mo'Nique, Tom Waits, Mena Suvari, Macy Gray, Jacqueline Bissett, Dabney Coleman and Lucy Liu. Even against all these hard hitters, Kierra kills it.

Patricia Arquette as Alabama - TRUE ROMANCE (1993)
It's both hard and too easy to dig up misogynistic subtext in Tony Scott's films, but he loves showing super strong women who love their man and aren't disgusted if he still reads comic books, stays indoors watching kung fu on a sunny day, and kills people.

An example would be the way Alabama finds Christian Slater's murder of her pimp incredibly romantic... when we in the audience and Slater, like any PC-era antihero, are expecting a long moral harangue about the wrongness of violence, like Liz Hurley might lecture Austin Powers on safe sex, or John Connor his Terminator about "you can't just go around killing people." And we love the way Alabama faces off against hulking mob goon (the future Tony Soprano) in a fearless deadpan. Letting her bag of womanly tricks and feints run empty with a chuckle; mixing coy laughter and sudden, brutal, outside-the-box retaliations; it's a triumphant bit of acting and a ballsy move on the part of the director to film it so artfully and savagely.

I personally like TRUE a lot better than QT's directorial debut, RESERVOIR DOGS, which gets better as it goes along but has a painfully overwrought beginning (after the awesome diner scene) with much too much of Tim Roth yelling in pain like a little punter and fake blood and monotonous grey concrete decor. Alabama is ten times tougher than the whole damn lot of those dudes, save, naturally Lawrence Tierney; you can imagine her getting gut shot and just laughing about it while never trying to deny her mortal terror. That sort of chutzpah we really don't see again until Daniel Craig finds a way to laugh uproariously through his ball torture in CASINO ROYALE. Scott saw that women had to be tougher and stronger than men every day, and loved them for it, as we love them always now through his eyes.

NOTES:
1. The Hunger- a postscript, 8-13 - this was just on TCM - it's pretty upsetting because parts are amazing, especially everything with David Bowie, who modulates his rapid aging so superbly you forget what age he even is. Deneuve is also superb but Scott's vision really fails him, not least because the next lover Deneuve chooses is Susan Sarandon, a bad choice as she is in full moral piety mode, sabotaging the whole damn thing because she objects to killing people three times a week for the next 300 years, and as if the whole 'bad faith' angle wasn't bad enough (it's sunk better films than this: Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys) Scott cranks up the jump cuts back and forth across time and space so now you can't even kill a person without intercutting ceiling fans, Bauhaus videos, and a crazy baboon. Good lord Tony, why make a lesbian vampire film just suck the fun out? 

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Villain of the Year

For this year's Oscars, the only nomination I really care about after all the smoke settles is Christophe Waltz as Waffen SS Colonel Hans Landa of Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009). Is that my fault or Hollywood's? Am I out on a limb in saying that the only interesting characters coming out of Hollywood these days are villains? Even while smiling politely, Hans Landa exudes a kind of menace that makes his every microgesture burn its way into our cortex, the way, say a frightened 1st grader might focus trapped laser beam attention on every nose hair of his irate elementary school principal.

When it comes to Nazis, Hollywood's never before really found a groove, muddled by whether to have them speak German with subtitles or speak English; and if English how much of a German accent? As for characters, we either get slimy sadists or military career officers who use discipline and regalia to distract themsleves from the realization that they're a) the bad guys and b) losing. Now I'm sure both kinds of Nazis existed aplenty, but Quentin Tarantino reminds us in BASTERDS that there were lots of shades and colors within the black, men of culture and distingue, for whom vices like pride, lack of empathy and bullying arrogance were encouraged by the times to the point of snow-blindness. As Patton knew, sanity can be a hindrance when it comes to war, just like compassion can doom a gangster (ala Tony Montana in the 1979 SCARFACE) and by having a Nazi be the most charming male character in the film, Tarantino muddies and exasperates our genre expectations concerning war films until we finally settle into a state of fearlessly sado-masochistic amorality as if by default. Landa is all the more charismatic and reprehensible for the way he's able to stay recognizably human--polite, full of jokes and pithy insights--while pursuing a ruthless, horrific genocidal agenda.

I confess I've been watching a lot of the History Channel lately, and its endless WW2 documentaries. It's fascinating to consider how there were once villains of such a globally spectacular level of evil that nearly all the world--rich, poor, commie and conspicuous consumer-- were united in righteous anger against them. Even as late as 1939, America was determined to stay neutral regarding Europe's latest fracas. We were still recovering form the modernist hangover of World War One. We were totally uninterested in anything outside our own borders. When we finally shook over our leviathan-like slumber and stirred into action, it was not unlike your Incredible Hulk: at first he is just the sleepy pacifist Bruce Banner and then-- yo, you done got him all mad, and green and with the smashing and the nuking and the roaring. When the smoke clears, of course, no one went back to being pacifist neutral and we were left with a mountainous petro-nuclear hulk trying to pretend he was just an ordinary meddling observer from the UN.

And so, the Nazis, the ultimate villain for all times, and so gleefully proud of being the bad guys they even dress in black and wear skulls on their caps. The concentration camps they left behind for the allies to find and weep over are still unrivaled in the pantheon of man's barbaric inhumanity to man, a permanent rip in the fabric of our basic human decency that, in a way, manages to continue to work as a warning that please, whatever we may repeat of history, let us not repeat this. With the film footage of the holocaust, racism's gruesome endgame is forever on display for all to see. Sometimes the only way to deal with such horror is through repetition-compulsion, watching Nazi documentaries over and over again (thus the History Channel's maligned nickname, 'The Hitler Channel') like scratching a scar that can never properly heal.

No matter how many times you watch that footage, it still haunts and disturbs, for if even one of us is capable of such madness, are not we all? To submerge oneself in WW2 history is to climb a roller coaster that takes you straight to the hellish bottom of the Universal Self. After a few hours down there, all other roller coasters seem like an afternoon at Kids R. Us.

Thus Landa becomes the ultimate in hipster evil -- smart enough to know what he's doing is wrong, and yet hip enough to go with the flow, to adopt a sportsman's disinterest in issues of life or death, or even national loyalty, to turn evil into an art form beyond mere petty bullying and sadism. Landa's character operates from a feeling of superiority harnessed to a bemused noblesse oblige, but there's a master hunter's disinterest in any actual outcome. The game, the puzzle, is the thing. He languidly talks a farmer into giving up the Jews he's sheltering, yet lets one of them escape, like a fisherman throwing back the "too small" fish to catch another day.

We can become so fascinated by the gaping black hole of evil that Nazis blasted into our collective humanity, that we can surely become them if we're not careful --but just as surely we can be re-affirmed in our collective goodness. The genius of the Landa character is how he manages to register on both counts, drawing us into evil and repelling us at the same time. We identify with him as we identify with RICHARD III in Shakespeare or Prince Prospero in Poe's MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. -- a man too smart for his time, who's grown used to being the most cultured and canny guy in the room, to the point that he positions himself outside convention, and so treats all of life as a daydream meant for his own wayward indulgences. By the end of the film, Landa's presence onscreen has become so intimate that we feel completely trapped by him, like a slow, relentless, cheerful "just doing my job" IRS auditor or homicide detective setting up camp in our living room, who talks slower and slower as our heart quickens to panic levels, and no end in sight, or a lover who seems to suck the air out of our lungs even as we're drawn into their charismatic orbit.

It is especially through drawing attention to language--always a key element in Tarantino--that this sense of intimacy manifests itself. Landa speaks French, German, English and Italian during BASTERDS, and each with great relish and a sense of poetic appreciation, his tongue rolling through the French vowels like a hot bath, stopping on a dime to switch over from one tongue to the other, taking advantage of other people's lack of understanding to tease and prolong their (and our) suspense. Education and fearless confidence make us admire him even as we despise and--most importantly--fear him. The result is a muddled locus of identification that we're not used to outside of gangster pictures, wherein underdog class conflict and anti-authoritarianism give the bad guy at least a few admirable traits. The only aspect of the Nazis that is not reprehensible by contrast is their unabashed relish in that reprehensibility.

In Tarantino's war we're encouraged to identify with Landa but also with his prey: the weary farmer who just can't sustain his stoic front over a prolonged glass of milk; the German actress/spy who leaves behind a telltale shoe; Shoshana, his escaped Jew now disguised as a theater owner in Paris. By first fearing, then identifying with (due to his charm) and then fearing him again as our identification moves to these other figures, we dredge up the kind of Stockholm Syndrome repulsion-attraction that can put is in the thrall of the worst of monsters if they're charismatic enough (i.e. the irresistible MILF hotness that is Sarah Palin, lower right, man I love her deep reds and blacks).

The fact that every non-Nazi who saw them, no matter what their rank or nation, were so unabashedly horrified by the concentration camps is, in the end, testament to a common humanity that transcends iron curtains, class and color divides.  No amount of crying and moaning softly into one's pillow--even today, over half a century later--can lessen the horror of the Final Solution. It is this horror and endless grief, however, that brings us all together. What else can one do? If you're not traumatized, on a personal level, by the Nazi genocide, just watch the Hitler Channel for a few days and let it all sink in. Then revisit INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and appreciate just what a daring high wire act Waltz and Tarantino really pull off, getting you to laugh wryly even as the horrors of the war are branded on your soul, creating a character so insinuating and inescapable it feels like he's somehow followed us home from the theater and making us, for what it's worth, proud and happy to be a human being capable of a deep empathic response of sorrow, pity and deep, deep horror.

PS. After that, if you're still not devastated, see COME AND SEE (1985)

P.P.S. When researching last week's Leo di Caprio entry, I learned he was originally considered for BASTERDS as Hans Landa. Can you imagine? I'm curious to know if he backed out (my guess he was too worried about his good guy reputation and ever-more-limited glumby range.) Anyway, I sure am glad Waltz got the part, and I sure hope he wins der Oskar!

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Acid's Greatest Hits #8: NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)

Oliver Stone is that rare anomaly of craftsmanship-overkill directors who try to achieve the psychedelic effect via glossy bombast--ala Ken Russell or Terry Gilliam--in that he succeeds in spite of himself, sometimes. A lot of it has to do with his choice of material: murderers, politicians, political murderers, combat troops, football sharks, Wall Street sharks. Even more of it has to do with his ability to take a clear-eyed look at the threat of immanent death or financial destruction. He gives them both the thousand-yard stare of a true Vietnam vet. And most of it has to do with his willingness to spin the moral compass. In the end of the Oliver Stone trans-global thesis, desperate times justify insanely over-the-top measures in order to crack reality's brittle shell wide open. Charlie Sheen may rat out his dark father Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) in WALL STREET, but we don't particularly love him for it. We'd certainly would rather watch Gecko ranting to his monitors than Martin Sheen playing blue-collar saint. Tom Berenger's cobra-like killer in PLATOON turns out to be a better soldier than Willem Dafoe's sweetie pie sergeant because he sinks to match the madness of his time, as does James Woods in SALVADOR. But in NATURAL BORN KILLERS there isn't a Dafoe or Woods or Sheen left, and that's part of the film's charm, and undoing. In re-creating the wild highways of America as a shattered glass simulacrum, void of 'good guys', Stone encourages our emotional divestment to the point of disinterest. The nominal heroes--Tom Sizemore as a star detective and Tommy Lee Jones as a warden--are just as savage as Micky and Mallory and with good reason. What makes them "bad" in this sense is that they have less charisma; they're too sweaty and full of craven sneers. Plus they're not in love, so they're how you say nowhere.

Stalin his orgasm... for her pleasure

It's the charisma that counts, and Juliette Lewis, Woody Harrelson and Rodney Dangerfield each lend enough to save the mess from toppling into "who cares?" country. Trent Reznor's ingenious score, a mash-up of everything from Patti Smith's "Rock and Roll Nig**r" to Jane's Addiction helps keep the ball rolling. As Micky and Mallory, everyone's favorite serial killer couple, Harrelson and Lewis buck all odds to emerge as horrifyingly sympathetic, even when killing innocent people. We never even realize how much we care until they are separated after their arrest. No matter how many times you see it, no matter how bludgeoned you are by the cartoon violence that's come before, their jail break-out reunion never fails to provide a tearful catharsis and a sense of romantic triumph.



Where Oliver Stone also rises above Gilliam and Russell is there is no doubt this man has walked the walk, psychedelically speaking. He's quite open about it in interviews, and the thumbprint of the trickster is heavy on his brow... which is a very paradoxical weight for the trickster thumbprint. While yes, the overall Stone bombast can wear thin if you're in a peaceful mood, it's great when you're wasted, and even better when you're really wasted, as in on the third night of a bender, or waking up out of a black-out and discovering it on the hotel HBO along with a still half-full bottle of vodka on the bureau. The scene where Micky and Mallory take mushrooms in the desert is so vivid you can feel it in your pineal gland. They wind up, as desert voyagers will, in the strange tepee of an ancient Native American, who reads "Too Much TV" on their shirts and realizes almost instantly he's already as good as dead. The presence of many rattlesnakes on the ground is another indication of the psychedelic effect, the feeling that dangerous critters are all around, and that being bitten by a venomous snake has, in some sense, already happened to you before you are even bit... if you even are. In the realms of the psychedelic spore, all shadows take on serpentine dimensions, the world breathes before you. Seeing our sociopathic lovers stagger through an all-night drug mart is to remember perhaps doing the same thing yourself once, racing down twisting over-lit store aisles at 4:20 in the morning, your brain exploding with overpowering images of blood and carnage and thoughts you took too much of whatever you took--hopefully not datrura root--and are going to die, trying to find the gallon-size bottle of Nyquil to knock you unconscious before you start screaming and laughing at the same time and then can't stop, and then someone calls the cops who call your parents. Bummer!



There are lots of moments of great revenge along the way, from the beating up of Rodney Dangerfield through to the scene illustrated below. The idea here is that all of society has committed a heinous crime against our violent young lovers, either through inbred sexist piggery or accompanying tolerance of same. Stone's a deconstructing over-thinker like the Scotts Ridley and Tony, the Terry Gilliam, etc., but at least where they refuse to leave the safety of a corny core narrative, Stone plunges into the abyss of Godardian self-reflexive post-modernism --everything from French New Wave to McDonald's, even the sailor who does the soft shoe. Even if stretches bore you or seem trite it's never long before there's another memorable set piece or off-the-cuff cuff-offing. Just don't, if you end up going on a killing spree after watching it a hundred times, let your parents sue Oliver Stone, or me. If you play it backwards you'll get the real Satanic message of the film: All is Love... All is love. Kill your ego first, and the asses will follow, one by one, like ducks in a shooting gallery.

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