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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real life drone pilots at their gaming consoles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Acidemic Best Films of the 1980s

Ugh, February, the month of hassles and cold and weariness. Slogging towards March like a slouchy Bethlehem that evaporates on clammy handed contact. Another March 2nd means another year older for your humble narrator, another step closer to the grave. I've been looking for a way out, and I found one --the past.

In fact, goin' back thirty very odd years ago, to the 80s! NatGeo is showing their entire 80s series today - Sat. March 1st -- right now they're saluting Reagan. And now skate parks...

To me, it begins and ends with the VCR.

I had to assemble this list to combat the best of the 80s lists on the web that all either include nostalgia-invoking propaganda like Ferris Bueller (which I loathe on principle) and Raiders of the Lost Ark or acts of admittedly brilliant pop like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment.  Don't think I don't love some of them too, in my fashion and can quote them endlessly (because of the VCR), namely, Tootsie and Raiders: Was ist los? Warum schläfst du!? Nobody cared... nobody showed. Blow it up! Blow it back to God! That is one nutty hospital. Too bad you don't speak Hovito, you might have warned them! I could have done without the dancing. Truth is... truth is you were okay company. Why don't you tell me...eh... where the ark is, right now? Michael, I begged you to get some therapy. The charmer's name was Gaffe... I'd seen him around. Wait, that's Blade Runner's now excised voice over, and thank god - how we hated it. Much like most of that decade, at least until 1987 when we discovered we didn't have to live in it at all. We could hide in the 60s.

10. PASSION (1982)Directed by Jean Luc Godard

We invariably come to any film with pre-set responses to cinematic iconography. Godard assumes this and intentionally screws with our narrative-based expectations. We're made aware of how dogmatically we're conditioned by a lifetime of filmgoing and story hearing. When a film adheres too closely to predetermined narrative formulations, we have cliche; when a film deliberately screws with them we have Godard: a medieval knight on a horse is seen trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden while racing a horse around a circular spinning scenery wheel --thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: will we see this chick being carried off? Will we see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense, used to a thousand permutations of the same violation. Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera; the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman; he rides after her; she climbs up into the lighting rigging to escape; the knight dismounts and goes to have a smoke... (more)

9. AKIRA (1988)

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

The quintessential cyber punk anime, Akira occurs in a riot-scarred "Neo-Tokyo" on the verge of some massive unnamed catastrophe and peppered with amok biker gangs, conspiratorial cops, cute anarchists, flying vehicles, telekenetic mutants, and teddy bear hallucinations, all so gorgeously illustrated that time melts and even the tear gas flows gorgeous enough to leave your already-dropped jaw so low it distends off your skull and HDMI-ready flesh tendrils reach out, connecting your tongue directly to the screen.

The plot may hinge in the end on one of those typical Asian male friendships between misfits, one of whom goes crazy, but there's a cataclysmic beer-after-liquor-never-sicker sort of apocalypse as government-sponsored Methuselah syndrome psionics try to reign in the crazy friend who's become godlike and fallen in love with smashing half the city. When things get quiet enough you can hear Walt Disney's frozen head explode.

8. MOONSTRUCK (1987)

Directed by Norman Jewison

Does a mainstream film like this really belong on a disreputable site like mine, you ask? How dare you. What would you put instead, Tootsie? I thought about it, but seeing it on TCM a few weeks ago showed me it hasn't aged well. We've grown hipper about patriarchal subtext, thanks in large part to Molly Haskell. Dustin Hoffman's whole schtick, that he's a better mother than Meryl Streep in Kramer Vs. Kramer and that that he knows more about feminism than all women in Tootsie; and also that awful Stephen Bishop song ("It Might Be You") by itself is enough to keep it off this list. But Moonstruck looks to the great Italian operas for its soundtrack, and it's the best Cher role ever; her chemistry with Nicolas Cage sizzles. He was a relative unknown at the time but brings such mushmouth ferocity to lines like "Gimme da knife so I can cut my froat!" and "I'm going to take you to da bed" that we all would have fallen off a cliff for him if he asked. Between this and Raising Arizona (also 1987) and The Vampire's Kiss (1988), Cage's effect on us was akin to what Brando in Streetcar must have been 30 years before, same mix of madness, heat, wit, beauty, and ferocity all unleashed at the right time to electrify an entire generation. Interestingly enough, all three are dark comedies, though Jewison's is dark literally, a beautiful palette of black clothes and nights, which makes overflowing with color and character balanced without need for animosity, climaxing in a family breakfast where all grievances are aired, love declared, and Olympia Dukakis steals the film with little more than exasperated but resigned sighs. Forget Scorsese, it was this film that made me proud to be dating back-to-back Italian-American chicks at the time. If you have to hate a sweet optimistic comedy from the 80s, hate Tootsie! Telling me it must be you / telling me it must be you / all of my life / RIFFS! / YEAH, RIGHT!

7. MATADOR (1986)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

His fifth film, Matador marks the turning point of Spain's beloved Pedro Almodóvar from post-Franco celebratory punk shock cinema anarchist to something infinitely darker, yet more tender and compassionate as well. After a disturbing credit sequence involving masturbation to a slasher film highlight reel, we find gored ex-toreador Diego (Nacho Martinez) lecturing a class on the proper way to kill a bull in the ring intercut with a strange woman (Assumpta Serna) killing her lover in just such a way. A disturbing juxtaposition of imagery to be sure, but then as it plays out Almodóvar adds a small minor key piano motif and it becomes an almost Sleepless in Seattle-level melancholy reverie. These two sick fucks need each other in ways that make the suicide pact of Romeo and Juliet seem a second tier booty call. Hitchcock / Wellesian / Bunuelian homage, death drive-to-the-floor Freudian psycho-savvy, color-coded symbolism, a theater playing King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, a solar eclipse, and oblique fashion show commentary on Spain's post-Franco identify crisis all pave the way forward to a romantic lover's climax so free of the usual last-second morality and phony sentiment it restores your faith in cinema. Dub it downer if you want but then you'd best run back under the censor's skirts for protection, puta madre, because cinema's true heart is darkness, not sentimentality. With: a jovenes Antonio Banderas as Diego's repressed, psychic, vertigo-stricken protege; Eva Cobo as the model girlfriend who dresses like a red cape men follow to the sword; Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura, Veronica Forque, Chuz Lampreave; and the astonishing Bibi Andersen as a Titania-esque flower girl. Almodóvar himself cameos as a fashion designer. They're all great but the film belongs to Martinez's cobra-hooded toreador and Serna's luxuriantly bloodthirsty femme fatale (Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct is but an ice tray-cracking naif by contrast). Most American fans of Almodóvar came around with the 1988 hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (or Todos Sobre Mi Madre in 2000) but rich, hilarious and subversively life-affirming as those films are, I'll take Matador, to the bloody grave.

 6. EXCALIBUR (1981)

Directed by John Boorman

Time has been kind to this deeply Jungian retelling of the Arthur legend. It takes a few dozen viewings to really understand what's going on, especially if you see it on a pan and scan. Thanks to the beautiful blu-ray I have finally figured out most of it, but even if incomprehensible there's the beauty and the Wagner and the natural magic, and inklings of how desire and jealousy can wreck the noblest intentions, and the stirring manly grace that only loyalty to a worthy king can provide. See it again and bask in its Jungian archetypal richnesss. Director John Boorman stocks the film with an array of dreamy class-A Brit thespians players (incl. Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Nicol Williamson, Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Nigel Terry) all drinking the same Wolfram von Eisenbach-laced Kool-Aid through glistening lenses that make the armor gleam like mirrors. See it again and become a fan of "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Wagner's Ring cycle, which I love so much because of this movie it made it onto the climax of my own Arthurian retelling, Queen of Disks (2005).

5. L'AMOR BRAQUE (1985)

Directed by Andrzej Zulawski

L'amour braque is a 1985 gloss punk-style French action movie of sorts, falling between Subway (1985) and La Femme Nikita (1990 (with which it shares the amazing Tcheky Karyo) while helping itself to Dostoevsky, Chekhov, cocaine snorted off the legs of whores, Brecht-fast emotional eleven scale butoh Panic Theater frothing at the mouth, and smashing of stuff, all in all a high-octane end game for the entirety of the European nouvelle vague, with actors raving and cavorting, trashing the sets and badmouthing the bourgeoisie while rolling around in the street, twitching herky jerky. Typically 80s synth stabs invoke Hong Kong and Mondo Vision's subtitles keep up brilliantly with Zulawski's poetic post-structural dialogue. For relatively un-intoxicated bros expecting Luc Besson-ish linearity, finding the end frenzy of Antichrist stretched to feature length. Action fans who wondered -- as I did -- if Karyo was just a dud actor after his stone-faced blank of a performance in Nikita will cry for joy as the man tears it up like a dozen Oscar Jaffes on a cocaine and whiskey bender one minute and care about his suffering, on the next. 

The story finds easygoing Czech refugee Leon (Francis Huster) spontaneously adopted by an insane bank robber (presumably) Mickey (Karyo) and his gang of gibbering, joking, Shakespeare-quoting Arab terrorists. The beautiful Sophie Marceau is their mutual obsession, yet another Lynch pin in Zulawski's string of love triangles. She's rich, damaged, nymphomaniacally insane, and proceeds to destroy half of France while pursuing her ancient vengeance against a ritzy conglomerate. Meanwhile Leon's hot cousin Aglae (Christiane Jean) competes for his attention while performing in a version of Chekhov's "The Seagull". (more)

4. BLUE VELVET (1986)
Directed by David Lynch

I'll confess it took me a long way to come around to this movie. I found it disturbing and without a cathartic resolution. After a few decades of film theory and great books by Todd McGowan and Zizek that helped me unravel my private relationship to its Freudian subconscious Oedipal separation trauma, the purple and blue velvet apartment where Kyle McLachlan spies through the closet blinds isn't mere anger/anxiety over a woman being hurt, but a primal scene as understood through the mind of a child who mistrusts the animal grunts of sex and seethes with resentment over the dad's power to occupy mom's breathing rate on a whim.

Highlights include of course the beautiful Dean Stockwell lip syncing Roy Orbison while Kyle behaves like a frightened kid hanging out with his drug dealer to score coke in order to impress some girl. The initiation these terrifying people provide him is invaluable, and eventually he becomes a mature man through their abuse. Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart). But Blue Velvet is Lynch's first great 'cracking it wide open,' his Picasso's "Demoiselles d'avignon" his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment.

3. THE LITTLE MERMAID (1989)
Directed by Ron Clements

If The Shining set the uncertain scary tone at the start of the 80s, then The Little Mermaid signaled the glorious start of the ending. Tapping deeply into the Jungian dream core of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, it reinvigorated Disney and sent them scrambling back to animation full time. Voiceover work is uniformly strong (the congested kid bad-acting the voice of Flounder being the only exception) espcially the glorious Ursula the Sea Witch, luxuriantly voiced by Pat Caroll like a zaftig, tentacled hybrid of Elaine Stritch, Margo Channing and Ethel Mermen. And what's most impressive, Ariel (Jodi Benson) breathes and her eyes dilate when she's turned on. Not to mention the prince is named Erich, all of which make Little Mermaid the best example of resonant Jungian archetypal myth since The Wizard of Oz. It's universal, yet we all feel it belongs only to us, that it's about us, and that's what myth should be.

2. THE SHINING (1980)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

This is really a 70s movie, or rather the last movie of the 70s, virtually creating the 80s to come in its molten intellectual crucible. It even has a whole documentary to itself discussing the film's myriad meanings (Room 237: See: Ripped Danny's Dopey Decal, baby), and I've got my own each new viewing uncovering new layers of meaning and madness. The film is open to almost anything because the space of the hotel is so vast the Torrance family each falls into a separate madness. With no direct link to the social order present to keep them anchored--whether to each other, the social order or linear time/space--they dissolve into the archetypal time warp created by their own unconscious minds who are, for our purposes, indistinguishable from the ghosts and dark energy of the hotel. They are like an iPod that must erase its current contents to connect with a new hard drive (the family name isn't 'torrents' for nothing!) Danny is erased from his body altogether, to be replaced by his talking finger, Tony. Jack goes off the deep end; in his writerly determination to not be 'a dull boy' he's compelled to literally sever his family ties so he can escape into the past; Shelly's inability to get a 'normal' response from either of the Torrance males drives her into hysterics. There's no new hard drive waiting to fill her memory, the social connection won't erase. With each new viewing she's less annoying and more genuinely heroic. (See: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror).

1. COME AND SEE (1985)

1985 - Dir. Elem Klimov

A stunning movie that changed me absolutely, left me literally trembling in awe, and yet I never want to see it again. It's just too beautiful and disturbing, taking the Munch-ish scream of Kubrick's Shining, flooring it to the ceiling and exploding through the wall of what is possible in depicting brutality and beauty at once, telling through a child soldier's eyes of Bellarus's suffering at the hands of the Nazis until it becomes a bizarre transhumanist poetry, staggering in the way it encompasses the best of Tarkovsky, Kubrick and even David Lynch and just keeps expanding from there, widening from the unfathomable horror of war wider even than insanity's parameters.

As a side note, one thing that's kind of deeply reassuring about WWII is the way the Nazis bound us to the Russians in a forced realization of our relative humanity. Politics, sides, none of it mattered compared to the horror of the camps, the sheer monstrous scale of it. There was no way not to shudder if you were human, and that bound us non-Nazis together. In Come and See we are as viewers united in a similar way, watching the sparkle in this kid's eyes gradually replaced by a twisted leer of a horrified face, something the boy and girl stars (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova) were supposedly hypnotized to be able to provide, something beyond human, a face unseen before or since in any cinema.

2. CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Directed by John Milius

Fuck it, I'm putting this in. We now know that 1982 was the single greatest year for sci fi and fantasy, giving us Blade Runner, The Thing, Road Warrior, Cat People, to name just a few. But of them all, for me, Conan has best survived the winds of change and become a classic as enduring as that ancient king's sword. The dead set opposite of many of the artier films in this list, it uses all the narrative tricks modernism eschews but brings such a heady focus, such an enraptured attention to even the smallest details, that repeat viewings just continue to reveal facets--especially in beautiful widescreen anamorphic and with some cut scenes restored. And best of all, surprisingly enough, is the love story between Valeria and Conan, one so touching it's been making fanboys of a certain age weep for the last 30 years. (more)

  3. REPO MAN (1984)

Directed by Alex Cox

Long before there was straight-edge, goth, emo, and granola, we just had the one thing - punk, and the film that defined us was Repo Man. Alien conspiracies, oblique metatextual greek chorus TV commentary, Emilio Estevez in the role for which we still love him (fuck Breakfast Club, man), consumer parody ('generic'), Harry Dean Stanton in the role for which he is now and forever considered cool by those who know, and the Circle Jerks gamely going lounge. Along with Rude Boy, Gimme Shelter, and a Lou Reed Live video I had, this was part of a daily after-school TV party ritual for myself and my suburban punk brethren. We'd all imitate Dick Rude's whiny timbre, "let's just go do the job" when going off to score booze, and "I blame society" when we failed. The Criterion blu-ray finally reveals what we never saw on our ratty pan and scan taped-off-cable version, that director Alex Cox has a modernist knack for capturing not just the sunny desolation of L.A.'s seediest outer fringes, but its natural magic. I still write within its kinetic but forlorn rhythms. And it made me a lifetime fan of the great Fox Harris ("I had a lobotomy, man!") - It's worth having Forbidden World (1982) on blu-ray just because he's in it and it's almost a prequel.

 4. PLATOON (1986)

Directed by Oliver Stone

It's impossible to describe the effect this had on America and me at the time but I'll try: I was a sophomore in college in 1986, in upstate NY, where psychedelic molds and tie-dyes grow wild and free and my hippie-ish posse and I were all in the class America in the 60s (which PS- I failed). We had to see it while it was still in the theater, as homework. We called for a cab, piled in, smoked a joint with the driver at his request -- and the mushrooms we'd taken an hour earlier were kicking in by the time we sat down in the dark - our heightened sense giving the amazing jungle foley work an extra 3-D surround boost: every humming bug and footstep dripping with possible ambush menace; humanity's potential for raw violent evil about to be unleashed palpable in the jungle shimmer. We howled with relief when Sheen finally finds some a tent where everyone's smoking weed. Later, my buddy Jason had to leave for awhile when Bunny says those immortal words, "Sarge, did you see the way his head busted open like that?" But I was enthralled, the psilocybin in my brain giving me rare access to the feeling of "hell yeah kill 'em all!" like I was channeling the madness of Mai Lai, the mushrooms short-circuiting my pre-set empathic response, making everything I saw seem brand new and sans social sermon. The soul fear terror of the jungle was so palpable to me that the soldiers' level of sociopathic anger and violence seemed the only way any kind of courage might manifest. If you ever took 'too much' of anything maybe you know the feeling: without a warrior howl, a game face, courage screwed sticky side-down, you'd wind up strapped down to a gurney, or freaking out your parents.

and his hair was perfect.

Seeing it later, on VHS, over and over, zonked out on whiskey and 3' graphix, was never quite the same as that magical afternoon in 1986, but I still have sympathy for the hardened Tom Berenger character and think Dafoe's hippy sarge is way too naive. Some elements are downright racist, (the Asian characters are all extra-alien and inscrutable, though that works for creating paranoia there's no excuse for making the black soldiers mostly cowardly and the first to fall asleep on guard duty) and Sheen's tacky voiceover ("They're the best I've ever seen, grandma") is almost as bad as the one, now excised, from Blade Runner.

But I'd heard of vet's cathartic reaction to the film, and I actually saw a sobbing vet-age man in the audience on the way out of the theater that afternoon, and even in the low house lights I could see he'd been crying, a cathartic wave of inky aura was fizzling around him like a fading wall of gnats, replaced by a pink light. He'd clearly been keeping a dark secret venom up in his nervous system for the last 15 years, and it was now broken open, leaking all over the floor. I must have been staring as he looked up, but the shrooms saved it from being awkward. I gave him a small salute he nodded, and I walked out on rubber legs. I'd know that feeling too, in about 10 years, being able to admit I had a drinking problem, and feeling the black iceberg within my soul melt and drain all over the floor. With Platoon, the horrible secrets of a nation seemed at last exposed to light as if some glorious combination award ceremony and drug intervention. This wasn't some dumb Russian roulette gambit, or Hearts of Darkness, or a hippie Jon Voight. this was what it was like being in, as they say, the shit. The kind of low-to-the-ground pulp story only a writer-director who was there at the time could tell. The last time we were graced with such a survivor's eye view was the 50s, with Sam Fuller's Fixed Bayonets and Steel Helmet. --each of which made a comparable, if less publicized, mark on a generation of vets struggling to unpack their collective traumas. But those boys had been heroes; before Platoon, these guys had been outcasts. Now, at last, we could begin to welcome them home.

5.  RAGING BULL (1980)
Directed by Martin Scorsese

I remember hearing a WBNC talk radio review of this film (I would have been 13) on my dad's clock radio one morning while he was in the shower and I was trying to think of a good illness to feign so I could stay home from school. The way the announcer went on I thought this landmark movie was going to crack open the world. I felt like wow, this movie sounds soooo adult and dangerous. It's sad that you don't hear that kind of literally unrestrained enthusiasm anymore, as if critics no longer trust their own instincts, or is it the pictures that got small? Maybe Raging Bull was the last time they really knew a masterpiece had landed brand new in front of their eyes. Yeah, maybe.

Flash forward a decade, Seattle, 1990: my girlfriend coming home from a traumatic day of work with a bad headache; me loafing in front of our tiny TV, drunk; LaMotta in a Florida jail pounding the wall shoitng "Dummy! DUMMY!" over and over while I drank; her raincoat angrily dropping onto the floor; I was hoping La Motta would stop beating the wall soon, as I could see what the misery of that scene was doing to her. But he kept pounding and screaming, and our apartment was too small to escape it. On and on the pounding went, breaking our relationship apart. I was to drunk to defend Scorsese's choice, or to find the remote and press stop, or remember how long that scene dragged on from past (also drunk) viewings.

We broke up. I drove to Syracuse in time for the block parties. When I came back to get my shit she was already dating a jackass hippie whose claim to fame was that he curated an open mic at the O.K. Hotel. He whinnied like a horse when he laughed and danced arms akimbo when he walked. But he was so terrified of me he ran literally the other way when he saw me comin' - I'm not gonna hurt ya! I shouted. Come 'eah!

Sure, despite it breaking up my relationship, Bull is a towering masterpiece but it's not fun, or perfect. And after the string of Leo-starring bros-behaving-badly films Marty's given us this past fifteen or so years, Scorsese's inability to depict a strong female character (even Alice should have just whacked Harvey Keitel over the head with a frying pan instead of running away) and his over-reliance on manly violence rather than exploring his castration anxiety head on and cutting through, if you'll forgive the expression, the bullshit, shows a willingness to use flashy editing and resonant masculine humor to avoid using the mirror for anything except lines, coke or poetry - makes no difference; they're the same, ain't they? Come 'eah!

The result is that now Jake LaMotta seems an odd choice for such artful storytelling. He's a thug, a bruiser, and might be suffering from paranoid derangement brought on by consistent head trauma. One last thing I remember from that relationship: trying to sleep at her place while I was in the midst of a terrible fever (Syracuse = always sick). She was in the other room, painting (VPA). I got up and in my delerium accused her of having a lover in the closet - then after I looked, I knew he was under the bed, I looked there too, nothing, but then I knew he was back in the closet. I kept looking in the closet over and over. I knew he was there even if he wasn't. Even while she was all alone in the other room I could hear her conspiring whispers and a man's voice, even though it was just a Billie Holiday album. I heard males whispering about me, laughing quietly with her about how easily they could snow me.  So when I see LaMotta all supernaturally jealous I wonder if head trauma would be the same thing as my fever.

That's no excuse though, and either way, the film is certainly rich enough with the language and pulsing rhythmic emotion of Little Italy it doesn't need great psychological insight, and yet... there's Cathy Moriarty laying out by a sparking community pool, being lured over to the wire fence by LaMotta (and in some senses the most courageous thing he does in the film) and in her breathy agreement, as much worldly romantic poetry as in any other movie on this list, .

Aside from Valeria's of course. DUMMY! 

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The First Lebowski: CUTTER'S WAY (1981)

Every once in awhile a man has to pause. Every once in awhile a man has peer into the decades behind him, take a cursory flip through Leonard Maltin and wonder... is John Heard really a good actor? I mean, is he awesome? Or is he too much too late?

The question is answered the same time as you ask: do all 1970s movies involve grizzled vet loners going after corrupt power father figures like they're lone wolves growling valiantly but for naught against the machine?

As Robert Evans would say, you bet all 1970's movies involved grizzled loners growling for naught against the machine. And they all must have a big crowd scene parade, or a wedding, or a political rally, or some place where they can see some figure in a white dress representing old world innocence now reduced to a symbolic lamb sacrifice against the coming storm of dread and draconian soul-eating.

Perhaps a bit shaggy, CUTTER'S WAY can't make up its mind about itself: is it called CUTTER'S WAY or CUTTER AND BONE? Is it a Elmore Leonard-ish beach bum crime drama, a Vietnam vet character study; a buddy-buddy California corruption tale or an elegy to the American dream in a small California town where everybody knows your name and you can drink right out in the open and not be arrested? ("Hey man! I have a beverage here!") Is it CHINATOWN meets MIDNIGHT COWBOY? BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA meets NIGHT MOVES? SHAMPOO divided by THE DEER HUNTER? It's got a little of a lot and sure it's brilliant but by 1981 these tropes read like quirk by the numbers. Why shoehorn the whole evil murder plot in there at all? And Heard overplays so much, and acts so drunk, that a murder case seems way too much for him to handle, or care about. He should be using some of that voracious animal intellect to not piss his pants, like the rest of us!

Those pants really tied the room together.

In short, this movie could have been a prequel to THE BIG LIE-BOWSKI, wherein the very same Jeff Bridges deals with a similarly massive conspiracy by the much saner approach of going bowling, and this time his Vietnam vet wreck of a buddy isn't a little scrawny fucker with only one leg and an eye patch but John Fucking Goodman! Goodman would have shaken the shit up in CUTTER'S WAY, but Heard can't do much more than ride a horse through a window. As Sam Eliot once said: "Take her easy, dude... and I know you will, too."

CUTTER took it too easy, way too easy, never get out of the boa. It started as a project back in 1971 and if it had been released in 1972 instead of 1981 it would probably have been a hit and a modern classic like your DEER HUNTER and your CHINATOWN, but studio regime changes as well as trend shifts delayed its completion and release, and by 1981 people had grown a little weary of the traumatized vet loner solving a rich man's crime thing. I remember reading some good reviews in the local newspaper when CUTTER finally did come out, but I knew even then, at 14, that the 1970s were over. We'd all had a good laugh at the HEAVEN'S GATE debacle, and grown tired of the undignified posturing--chronicled in PEOPLE magazine--between the stars of DEER HUNTER and COMING HOME over the 1978 Oscars, and Jane Fonda bashing the former over its 'demonic' portrayal of the Viet Cong. One more film about a Vietnam vet disillusioned and seeking to overturn the turtle of American politics wasn't going to make us leave our sofa. We craved fantasy, escape, ET!! And lo, ET he was on his way, to trade us our innocence for some magic candy--like a safety class stranger--just one year after this last gasp of 1970s corruption-venting.

And for some of us, John Heard was just too... Kevin Bacon-ish? No denying he's ferocious here and gives it 111%, but seeing the film now, long past any due date, I honestly don't know how I feel about him, or the film. All the ingredients are there and maybe that's the problem. It's like the film was given an unlimited shopping spree at the seventies' paranoia cliche' store and just had to clean the place out.

But hey, it's worth seeing some time when you're high on 1970s 'Nam-gate cinema, and what a double bill it would make with LEBOWSKI! May I recommend an angle on which to view them, for political meta-purposes? Just have Bridges = Blue States / right brain (blue for Bridges, peace, man!) and the vets (Goodman and Heard) = Red states / left brain (guns break class barriers!) The corrupt power elite figure equals the 'real' corporate shadow puppet (Halliburton, Enron) figures that capitalize on the dissonance between the colors/hemispheres to steal everyone's IRA and soul. Keep this in mind and let the bowling balls and cocktails fall where they may.

The fine and trenchant blog OUT 1 reviews CUTTER here, and draws a similar Lebowski conclusion while dealing more with the plot and production of the film itself. It makes a fine double bill with this post! Tell them the Dude sentchye.

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The Bleating of the Wallies

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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