All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS (2010)

From a very pedestrian viewpoint, The Runaways were a scruffy chick rock L.A. version of that original pre-fab/anti-fab combo, the Sex Pistols, aimed at a fucked-up demographic by nutcase impresario, Kim Fowley. But then there's the 'enlightened' viewpoint which was like whoa, these chicks rawk! Kind of confused about whether its a tired meditation on dues, fame and girly girls, ala LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS, or drugs and excess, like ROCK STAR, the RUNAWAYS has a little of both: lots of dues-paying, the girls deflecting tossed beer cans and dried excrement with their guitar necks, dealing with small hotel rooms, blossoming lesbianism, and Cherie Curie's terrible music taste. Little things add up to an uneasy feeling, like CROSSROADS welded on THE DOORS and clanging the loosey-goosey 70s 'kids are all wrong' bell of OVER THE EDGE (1979), still the greatest kids amok film after all these years!

Too bad about Dakota, though... tick tock. RUNAWAYS misses some grittier possible marks in order to coddle blonde "Cherry Bomb" lead singer Curie's bratty myopia, a bad decision considering Fanning's halfhearted performance. Or is it just that Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett rocks harder and mopes so much mopier than Fanning that the movie grows lopsided? See that picture above, of the real Cherie? She may be acting as coy as Carmen Sternwood but those eyes are feral and dangerous, like a wild tigress we have known, like Carmen Sternwood in fact. Now look at poor Dakota below, blank as the freshly fallen snow. Carmen wouldn't even waste a bullet on her.

I say this as someone who loves Dakota, but she's not even the rather alarmingly focused creature belting out an a capella "Hound Dog" in the 2007 movie of that name (my review here). There are 16 year-olds out there who are going on 23 and there are 20 year-olds out there going on 11. Dakota was an 11 year-old going on 30 but now 12 seems to have caught up with her, while the real Cherie was clearly still 'advancing' to an alarming degree. Maybe the studio hoped Fanning would mature during the filming, for certain she's due to pop into womanhood any day... if she lets it happen. There are ways that girls can prevent it, and I shudder to think that Dakota's following in so many young girls' DSM IV-certified child actor anorexic stunted growth footsteps. In THE RUNAWAYS she's still just a deer in the headlights, not yet a she-wolf eating said deer, as nature intended. Fanning lets Kristen Stewart do all the eating while she sits in the corner, sucks her thumb, and acts coy. Is she even having fun? Does she still like to pull the wings off flies? Are you getting all these super-droll BIG SLEEP references?

Despite the Dakota handicap, THE RUNAWAYS has things going for it, like an awesome soundtrack dialed cleverly to the left of cliche'd expectation: The film opens with Cherie Curie's first menstrual period, reddening in a gas station bathroom to the tune of Nick Gilder's "Roxy Roller" (though you'd think the obvious Nick Gilder choice would be "Hot Child in the City," and since they didn't use it, right there that's an extra point for not being blatantly obvious). Meanwhile Joan Jett's jamming to Suzy Quatro's "All my life I wanted to be somebody now here I am! I'm the wild one," and huffing glue with her less-than-Cherie-level-hot girlfriend. Cherie meanwhile is cutting her own bangs and punking out her lingerie before hitting the high school talent show in a glam rock Bowie lip sync, getting cheered on by the sisters and booed by the fellas.  But hey, all she's doing is lip syncing and posing, Joan at least learns guitar, though her first teacher is a clumpety old man who wants to teach her "On Top of Old Smokey." This is later followed by a walk through the empty parking lot as "This is a Man's World" nods sympathetically from the soundtrack, and not the James Brown version, but MC5! Again, cliche' sidestepped, by a sole-scrape.

But even though Cherie lights a cigarette at the wrong end and dances around dressed as Stevie Nicks we're still never quite sure what drugs she's doing or what kind of rock star she really wants to be. Joan gets to fill her squirt gun with vodka and urinate on the douche bag headliner's guitars --she really is the wild one, and you hope some of that wild stuff might rub off on Fanning's Curie and for awhile it does. When their plane's about to land in Japan, the pair quickly wolf down their coke and pills in the airplane bathroom to avoid trouble with customs and suddenly the film speeds up for the butterfly stomach sweaty-palmed high of being cranked up onstage, twirling under the hot lights, merging like a playback pitchshift melt with the slow-downs of their first kisses in the dark of post-show euphoria, drenched in crimson light and scored to a slowed, druggy  "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that makes you ache in rock and roll remembrance of the first trip on acid or the first trip on ecstasy, the first kiss backstage; first time on stage on acid, making out with a cigarette; the blazing red lights in your face as you sing turning into flames forming a holy funnel around the microphone and your mouth becomes the size of a black hole in outer space, spewing flaming lyrics into the clenched alien insect fangs of the microphone, and outwards in waves of pink that wash over the melting-faced fans. It's a first kiss that starts as a gentle shotgun from a joint and slowly tentatively becomes a supernova of blinding white light. From their first gig to Cherie passing out in Japan, the film is alive with pleasure.

Fanning's good in these moments of stoned triumph and good much later as a zonked junky in the grocery store, using her cart for support as she glides through the aisles. Trying to buy two large onions and a liter of vodka from a skeptical cashier who looks distrustfully down at her blank eyes, bruised arms and shitty ID. We like that she steals her dying aunt's medication, and that she plays mind games with her copycat sister, but it's one thing to be believably fucked-up, another to turn that fucked-uppedness into rock and roll gold. Brando was a believable working class slob in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, for example, but that's not why the role made him an icon. He brought ferocious animal grace. Fanning needs that.  She's still eerily mature like she was in I AM SAM, but now she's clinging to a blank DARIA-style po-faced apathy, trying to stare down adulthood in the mirror, and who can blame her, considering the horrors she's seen herself go through on film? Speed, anorexia and self-loathing keeps a girl 'forever young' until one day she just turns to dust or goes to rehab, or is saved by rock and roll. Yeah baby, rock and roll. But Dakota, if rock is to save your life you have to at least give a shit about it. You have to thank it, bathe in it, love it unconditionally. Otherwise you're just a poseur looking for a validation hand-out.

In the end, Kristen Stewart pulls off being a rock and roll survivor just like the real Joan Jett, and Keith Richards, because she taps into that feeling of how passion and genuine interest in something other than yourself can save your life, even if it makes you a little grubby in the process. Fanning / Curie never finds that, never deigns to look outside the mirror for her raison d'etre.  But in Joan, Kristen, and Keith's cases, it's a love of one's craft. No doubt rock and roll is what keeps death at a respectful bay for Keith and his guitar, and by the end, once Joan's suffered and lost her mind and got it back through writing "I Love Rock and Roll," she has earned the right to be a rock goddess the way she hadn't while in the Runaways. She suffers and survives through rock in a way Dakota's Cherie never accepts, admits, or apparently wants.

It's the Keith Richard life preserver, keeping you above the sharks that saves one even as the other metaphysically drowns. It's like selling your soul to the devil. You may smell bad and look hungover as hell, but the devil always keeps your love lamp lit because you've found something to hold onto, something with six strings that can't just leave you or turn against you, a creative outlet you can practice and play on forever and never stop improving until in this one thing you are good enough to hang your head high. Art is like a crack in a prison wall and you know that the more you scrape at that hole, the wider your glimpse of daylight 'til one day you can just escape. Escape isn't even important as long as you are comforted by the OCD notion you never have to stop scraping, so the scraping becomes the love --that's the Robert Johnson crossroad devil's bargain. Joan and Kristen signed the Satanic contract but Cherie and Dakota just fold it up, asking the devil if they can hold onto it and "think about it"...  until indecision becomes their whole persona, and that's death if you're in a rock band. You may as well bring your mother along, like Cameron Crowe does in ALMOST FAMOUS.

As a child actress coming into fruition, Dakota's heading into some treacherous waters... she needs a Keith Richards life preserver. She seems to have forgotten she used to have acting. She's a lost little girl and making personal lostness part of the role isn't the same as playing a lost little girl in such a way as to make us swoon from the cinematic complexity of your acted lostness, to bemoan our own lostness reflected but in a cathartic not depressing manner. It's not just Cherie throwing a tantrum of indecision, it's Dakota throwing a tantrum by draining Cherie's tantrum of cinematic resonance. It's kind of like when your trying to do improv with someone who wont obey the first rule of improv (always say yes) and so every attempt to start a scene is shot down by them without even thinking. Another example is Don Rickles whose act is insulting people in the audience. No one minds getting insulted because the love in his heart is palpable, that's the trick of Curie's rock moxy and Dakota's problem. She's the Rickles where the same insults fall flat and bruise feelings, escalating the urge to quietly leave the club.  She's become like another child star whose precocious genius has seemed to fade, Christina Ricci (as Nathan R. writes about on Film Experience). If moviedom was their parents, Christina and Dakota would be going through a phase, a kind of passive aggressive tantrum, like Richard Burton in EXORCIST 2 (below). Sometimes too, as with Burton, if you have a rep of being a great actor, directors are skittish about telling you how bad your sucking. And you go on auto-pilot, not realizing future generations will be cringing over your hammy bad vibe hangover of a performance for aeons to come.

Since we never see the Curie spark in Fanning we never really see what it was she lost, or if she even lost it. We can only discern that that some people were born to rock, and others to fold napkins at a gift shop and occasionally dress like Stevie Nicks. I'm not knocking napkin folding or Stevie Nicks. Most of us--myself included--leave the rock world for folding napkins sooner or later. Maybe napkins are all we can handle once the devil collects his first chunk of his due.

Only a few go the distance like Joan and Keith, for whom no drug will ever supplant their rooted allegiance to rock, which is why they're free to do as much of them as they want. The rest of us may have rocked and had a good time, but love of rock never really supplanted our love of drugs or our longing for a sense of rooted creature comfort. We'd rather stay home and listen to music and get high than go out on the road and deal with afternoon sound checks in barrooms still reeking of smoke, booze, sweat and vomit from the night before. We'd rather not have to worry about staying more or less sober until after the first set. And we hope Dakota doesn't turn out like us, but on the other hand, you can't hang in the doorway forever. As for the real Cherie Curie, she finally found her own Keith Richards life preserver...with chainsaw sculpture! Big sister, burn on! 

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LL/LL: Through the Peeping Glass

Mining a bit of the sleazy tabloid feel of STAR 80 and WONDERLAND with the lost Lenore/Laura Palmer surrealism of FIRE WALK WITH ME, the images from the "last of Lindsay" photo shoot (see below video) for the in-development INFERNO are disturbing in their implications of an as-yet innocent Linda Lovelace being roped into a hotel g-bang by her rough trade husband, Chuck Traynor. When you consider that poor Lindsay was on her way to jail when this photo shoot occurred, prior to any actual filming of the story, and that scraps of the sexually turgid script are apparently all over the internet, I get uneasy, doomed, wretched feeling we're all going to hell, just from a video about a photo shoot! In its own way, this little video teaser is already a perfect slice of Hollywood at its most self-reflexively turned-on and remorseful about it at the same time.

Considering he's done only one other film, 2008's YOUR NAME HERE, its perhaps unintentionally revealing that the first thing on the poster you read is "Mathew Wilder's Inferno," as if implying he's the impresario-exploiter of the piece, the Chuck Traynor to Lindsay's Linda. And what does that entail? Maybe he's just distinguishing the film from Dario Argento's INFERNO; I hear the script's good, but does that earn Wilder his headliner marquee status?

The big star of the video of course is Lindsay; her expressions in the photos betray a staggering talent and a wounded soul: regret, excitement, ambivalence, and even disinterest in her own welfare. Anyone who's ever been in love with beautiful, young, tragically self-destructive woman will inevitably have that familiar feeling of their heart dropping to the floor and breaking into a million shards. It's almost enough to make you go and sin no more.

Life imitates and heals art as, right in the middle of a photo shoot re-creating this ground zero of lost innocence, two smart, talented ladies sit and talk, capable lionesses in a den of wannabe poachers and hyenas, the sidelines a blur of slavering and snapping paparazzi. Supplying the light to the shadow, the always amazing Kim Morgan does the interviewing as Lindsay--her voice raspy and thoughtful-- explains how she reads the character of porn star Linda Lovelace. On her own blog, Sunset Gun, Morgan notes of the experience:

Thoughtful, funny and good, Lohan depicted her shoot, which were essentially, stills from the movie (written and to be directed by Matthew Wilder), with impressive, shifting emotions, gritty strength and intense poignancy. As photographer Tyler Shields snapped the dramatic pictures, based on an especially sad moment in  Lovelace's life, it was fascinating to watch her go in and out of character.

When it was all done, Lindsay sat on the bed with me while I asked questions (and here, simply listened, like a therapist), and she talked quite easily about the sadomasochist relationship of Lovelace and Chuck Traynor, at one point saying the script reminded her of her parents. Yes. She has been through some things. (Read full piece here)

Like myself, Kim Morgan is a staunch defender of Lohan's right to be wild, pointing out that the same bad behavior in men (like Colin Farrell, for example) only gets a winky smirk from the press, while a girl like Lindsay is crucified and condemned as if by a nation of tut-tutting moral committee matrons:

I don't care what so-and-so movie writer from whatever newspaper or Web site feels about Lindsay's partying or sexy lifestyle (there's a strong strain of misogyny in this kind of critique), the real question is, can she act? If critics assessed Jack Nicholson for his off-screen behavior, he might not have the Oscars he so richly deserves. (KM)

That's a good point, and the answer is yes, she can act up a storm. The misogyny thing is tragically true. In her own way Lindsay is the Richard Burton of her hour, but girls aren't allowed to be bedrunken titans, only coy and pretty and if they want Oscars they have to wear false teeth and shoot skeevy Florida johns; they have to bow and suffer before the pervy desires of evil men rather than looming tall and true and as fucked up as they wanna be. All phoenixes must first be ashes and these days they use special phoenix-retardant urns to keep the vengeance from spuming forth.

Thus INFERNO could be Lindsay's THE WRESTLER, or it could be her I KNOW WHO KILLED ME PART TWO, and maybe a lot of that will depend on sexist preemptive judgment and maybe not. Either way, Lindsay's due some respect from the sneering hordes, whatever the role. And who will play Lindsay playing Linda and re-enact this photo shoot in 40 years? Will the self-reflexive merry-go-round of glamorously tawdry recreations of scuzzy moments in adult film history ever come to its crashing halt or will it just get more dizzying? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

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I know why the entombed mummy sings...

In the late 50's-early 70's there was a deluge of marvelously British horror films from Hammer Studios, you probably already know that. But did you know that while they sucked on UHF TV with their washed out prints and bad editing and pan and scanning, they look damned great on DVD? And did you know also that being British and smart as paint the filmmakers often enriched these pics with colonial and class issue subtext, including a sub-subtext linking buxom beauty co-stars with pre-Christian paganism? Jolly brave and true of this upstart little studio, and damned British. When I read the words Pinewood Studios in end credits now I get all tingly... be it early James Bond, The Avengers, or lovely Hammer.

Many of the Hammer films have aged well; maybe it's that the DVD spit and polish really brings out the deep reds, maybe it's the pre-Christian roots and rigid class system creating far more sparks than would similar situations in the States; Britain's longer history of international third world exploiting and economic inequality makes their horror films--which after all deal with the 'return of the repressed'--- so much more "rich" than ours of the same period. For weird old America we have Edgar Allen Poe ("the divine Edgar") and maybe Ambrose Bierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and then we run into a wall. But England has a whole Victorian era to plunder; the monsters generally come from the wealthy class, and the peasant girls are the first to get it, the nobility last to be suspected and by far the most decadent. Hammer horrors invariably include a cozy tavern scene full of comic relief hypocrite doctors and priests, agitated innkeepers who won't let their daughters divulge information ("Hush up, girl!"), witnesses who no one believes because they're tipplers, and a cowardly populace who bar their door at night.

But the one I want to single out as exemplary in its completely Britishness and gutsy approach to monsterness is Hammer's THE MUMMY (1959), expanded from the 1932 original to include the Victorian equivalent of a Middle Eastern terrorist, an Egyptian Egyptologist (the nerve!) named Mehemet Bay (George Pastell) who dares suggest that ancient burial relics should stay where they are, undisturbed, or the very least stay in Egypt and not become mere curiosities for the swaths of unwashed gawkers at the British Museum. How dare this fez-wearing heathen even suggest such a thing?! But the even-keeled screenplay lets this Mehemet Bay off with plenty of sympathy; he even prays to Karnak, the god of said mummy, to release said mummy's spirit at the end of his vengeance spree. And his house is pretty nice-looking. I'd rather live there than in Cushing's wearily formal mansion. The two actors play well of each other, and their climactic battle of wits--- with Cushing blithely baiting the Egyptian into a confession by dismissing Karnak as a second-rate deity-- is truly a unique sociologically ambiguous moment in horror.

Of course it's not perfect, unless you believe Brits have way too much faith in guns over supernatural juggernauts. Every night he gets a visit from a seven foot-tall mummy who smashes doors apart and barges through rooms like a freight train, and--even after two shots from his revolver did nothing the night before-- Cushing's sure his shotgun will do the trick. What saved him the night before was the late inning presence of his worried wife, as usual the spittin' image of the mummy's dead love. And of course, Cushing insists on sending her away during the mummy attacks, so she'll be "safe." Ah so brave! So blind. So British.

Feminist-wise the film fares little better: the beautiful, cat-eyed Yvonne Furneaux (Carole's sister in REPULSION,  Marcello's clingy girlfriend in LA DOLCE VITA) is the 'living image' of the dead high priestess, the point where if Cushing had a brain he'd just ask his wife to tell the mummy to go back and kill Mehemet. Instead, even after she saves her fey and disinterested husband's life once already, Cushing sends her upstairs, "like a good little girl." Even more brainlessly, at the climax, he has her wait out in the bushes with the inspector so "she'll be safe." And of course, the cops stationed outside fall like dominoes and she's spirited off, as we all know she must. Then again, we don't watch these films to see how to smartly deal with the undead, we watch them to see heavy-breathing beauties walk down dark corridors in their foxy Victorian era negligees, and then get carried into bogs by lovesick corpses.

And man, what a girl. Slim old Peter Cushing looks like he'd be crushed in the sack with her, frankly - she's like twice his weight in this film, and he seems to be implying his characters' secretly queer by the way in which he coldly dismisses her affection; he'd much rather wrestle with a manly mummy! Oh those lads of British theater! Christopher Lee is great as the bandaged (and in flashback unbandaged) high priest, getting to use only his expressive eyes and lumbering gait; you can feel all the horror and anger of being entombed alive for centuries in his sad, lovelorn expression. Hey, if I had been buried all those centuries, I'd try to carry Yvonne Furneaux off to my swampy lair too. If I was unable to speak my love (since the cats back in my home epoch cut out my tongue) or write her sonnets (since my heiroglyphic-writing hand was paralyzed) I'd have to demonstrate it in other ways, like obeying her commands with a shambling wordless courtesy.

I love Cushing! I love this mummy more than all the Universal sequels to the Karl Freund original combined. Which says exactly nothing. Is there anyone in monster fandom who loves the mummy over other monsters? Who is like a 'mummy' fan? To me, the mummy is right at the level of the Wolfman, who leaves me kind of nonplussed, though WEREWOLF OF LONDON has great atmosphere. I love DRACULA (1931) the most, and the Hammer vampire films--with a few tedious exceptions--are my favorites. Still, Hammer's MUMMY is a mummy to be reckoned with, a juggernaut that wastes little time in moving from the door to your throat. Even the lengthy flashback to Egypt is creepy, with long ceremonies of death, death and more death, the strange props that make it associatively linked with Kenneth Anger's unforgettable LUCIFER RISING (1972).

And lastly, one can't ignore the vein of rich critique to be found in exploring the fey way Brits claim Egyptology as their own little playground in these films, seeing Egyptians themselves as having little to no right to their own artifacts, and also even after it's clear Karnak is a badass god who can help mummies live through untold centuries, he's still considered a pagan superstition compared to the god of these fey British scientists, and Mehemet Bey's way cooler and sexier than Cushing in the film. (coming off the best, actually is the American accented Eddie Byrne as the inspector). When the white patriarchal reps see this giant mummy resist bullets and crush larynxes with ease, they still refuse to believe in him, even when he walks off with their girl! I root for the mummy every time! Go mummy! This time you shall be free, shall be free. Even if freedom means a mucky swamp grave, there to float and dream until Jimmy Sangster writes you into life once more. Kharis, you magnificent bastard, I read your scroll!

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I like big bugs and I cannot lie

Even children can get a handle on divining subtext and collective symbolic anxieties through the television, especially when it shows 1950's giant bug movies. I love them giant bugs... TARANTULA is tops, THEM the coliseum and even BEGINNING OF THE END the start of a full on pawty. Of course not all the big monsters of Atomic Age America are bugs, i.e. BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS or IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA but since an old girlfriend once termed them derisively "those giant bug movies," i.e. "ugh, you're not going to stay up all night drinking whiskey and watching those giant bug movies again, are you?" I think of them that way, oh so fondly.

One of my earlier memories: I'm three, in a Philadelphia hospital for a minor operation, scared out of my wits by the cold clinical strangeness of it all and my parents abandoning me there for the night; the television in my hospital room plays EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1959) and the older kid, a teenager I think, in the other bed insisting on changing it because I'm too young. Too young? I would have killed him if I could. The dickhead didn't understand, I was scared of the hospital and of him and of everything else and the only source of comfort, of relief from the anxiety, lay in the image of a giant black tarantula creeping around a 1950s suburban neighborhood, in glorious black and white. Nowadays I can conjecture that my feeling of powerlessness as a three-year old lost in the hostile uncaring world of rectal thermometer-wielding nurses was allayed by seeing those humble creatures that man in his snobby superiority squashed grown now large enough to tromp on him in just as callous a manner. If I was the size of the AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) I could find that evil rectal nurse and break her in twain and ditto that kid who turned the channel from EARTH VS. THE SPIDER. and I can't remember if I got him to turn it back or not, but I remember my outrage and horror that he would dare to change it. If I knew where that kid was today, I'd swear upon him an oath vile enough to raise the hairs on the necks of men.

Later memory: living in mid-town Manhattan over a Pita Grill in the mid 90s; my only cure for the drunken blues was a Leadbelly CD and a six-hour SLP video tape I'd made a decade earlier of TARANTULA followed THE DEADLY MANTIS followed by IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA followed THE GIANT CLAW. My roommate had his models and his coke and soon his cool million dollars in the dot.com bubble, I had my whiskey (and his when mine ran out), a 25K a year / four day a week art gallery job, three tapes of Simpsons episodes, and the giant bug tape. The warmth of the whiskey making the repetitive black and white sense of authority united against a purely abstract foe as comforting as TRIUMPH OF THE WILL probably is to Rico's Roughnecks.

I love these bugs now for their abstract destructive force. Bugs are innocent; you can't hate them even as they smash the building down upon you. They don't have the brains to be evil. At the same time you don't need to have sympathy for them. There is no saboteur working for the giant bug. And as a twentysomething struggling to stand out in New York, I longed for the kind of playing field evener a giant bug attack could provide. All you had to do to be a hero and shag a buxom 50s research assistant was be cool under pressure, which all good drunks are. Watching with my hand over one eye to not see double, I would cheer every attack, on either side, over and over, warm and amniotic and safe.

But they're now each in a DVD set and seen all clear and restored, and I'm sober, and so the films are missing the fuzzy static they needed to seem 'alive.' They're still soothing, but not fuzzy warm soothing. You can see clearly now the sad ghost town emptiness of the sets, the smears of make-up on once-manly men of action and science, the gaffer glove left unnoticed in the corner of the frame.

So why go back? The drinking amniotic sac days are gone. Why stick with the 50s' atomic age anxiety? Having learned in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) that for God there is no zero, no high or low - the life of a dung beetle equal in scope and importance to the life of an emperor, I know that my giant bug hospital moment will come again. And for me at least it's essential to have a fantasy escape wherein a common enemy unites all peoples, especially one that has no vocal chords with which to defend himself in the courts of our nation. Without such an enemy, Uncle Same must dress up its own foot as a sneaky terrorist and blow of its own toe like that old campfire tale. More than just a symbolic manifestation of atomic and sexual anxiety, the giant bug is a good, wide target. Would you like to know more? 

There is one film that I like even more now that I can see it in a theatrical aspect ratio: THE GIANT CLAW (1957). Jeff Morrow--with his hair of slick oily blackness-- is my new cranky idol. And that amazing bird / on a wire is no longer laughable, but truly psychedelic, wondrous and eternal.

Not to make this all about me, but I look at that face below, and I see a little bit of myself, and maybe, of us all, even that rectal thermometer-in-the-middle-of-the-night-trauma-inducing nurse. As the atomic bomb's loving father, Robert Oppenheimer once said, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." He was quoting the Baghavad Gita, but I swear he was looking right into the New Year.

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Great Acid Shorts: BLACK AND TAN FANTASY (1929)

You can draw a thin but prominent line after a certain moment in jazz history, and BLACK AND TAN FANTASY could be the pen, when jazz split into sanitized radio 'sweet' music ala Benny Goodman or "the old Maestro" on one hand, and Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives on the other. But in between raged Duke Ellington, using the big band format to craft elaborate, beautiful, wistful, dark, surreal and elegant yet raw and bluesy compositions that sound fresh and new to this day. Perhaps the only jazz artist to really follow in his wake is Charles Mingus, who turned the big band style on its ear, like a broken octopus ride at Coney Island.


Duke's first film appearance, a short from 1929 called "Black and Tan Fantasy" reflects this mix of surrealism, elegance and social commentary. Shooting by in 20 minutes or so, it begins as a piano rehearsal, segues into dance numbers and a star female dancer already exhausted, killing herself, red-shoe style in a drugged-out shimmy, finally dying in a shadowy backstage dressing room as her last request, that they play her "that Black and Tan," becomes a bedside serenade, kind of like the dwarfs singing to comatose Snow White in the Disney cartoon which was still some years off.

Alas, the above clip is only the music segments edited together, so you miss the drama of Duke, his dancer Fredi Washington (below) and his trumpeter (Arthur Whetsol!) bribing the collection agency piano movers with a quart of bootleg gin. And you miss the backstage drama of the doctor warning Fredi not to dance because of a heart condition, and her psychedelic collapse, but the more complete version can be found in the highly recommended Kino compilation at left.

Along with Satchmo, Duke is the perfect guy to wind down with after a long crazy night of psychedelic colors and angry inner demons devouring the soul. But while Armstrong focused on the cheery and fun, Duke never shied from plunging down into the abyss with you, and you're glad for the company, because when it comes to locating the redeeming angel of mercy at the core of the dark and lonesome blues, Duke was like a magic bloodhound.

The film also offers a rare and precious glimpse of the kind of stuff white patrons would see at the Cotton Club where the Duke often held court, and lithe black Venus-style flappers gyrated in a manner that might be too shocking even for pre-code Hollywood. But Harlem was Harlem, and in this marvelous little 20 minute film, you see just why it mattered, and still should.

Standing at the dawn of the sound age with few surviving peers, BLACK AND TAN FANTASY still crackles with weird, lysergic power. That muted trumpet in the beginning can light up your spine like a Kundalini serpent if you're chemically open to it, so open up! As they used to say at parties when the guy arrived with the suitcase full of bootleg booze for sale, "that man is here!"

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Revenge of the Lohan

Hearing poor LL's Rehab of Doom options being bounced around by all the bitches in the country ("We just want to be sure it's going to be very, very strict and tough with her," yes yes, and will there be much "ahem" spanking?), it's clear they've made LL the Joan of Arc of our day, the Frances Farmer, the scapegoat absentee parent proxy lamb to the mediated slaughter.

Dudes, she's just a hot fucked-up chick in L.A., capital of hot fucked up chicks! Why can't they just let her make her movies and party, as god intended!? By the time that rehab lets her go, she'll not only be burnt at the shock treatment stake, she'll have discovered Jesus and gained 20 pounds and they'll lead her to the set in chains like Grace towards the end of DOGVILLE. Is that you want, America? Then America, it is YOU are who not a true Christian!

Kim Morgan has written a beautiful piece on LL's ancestor in LA glamor-system face spitting and well-deserved court contempt, Frances Farmer, "Come Back as Fire and Burn all the Liars."

Speaking of Nirvana, I wrote a defense of Lindsay back in May called "Lindsay Lohan will Have her Revenge on Seattle."

Kurt, wherever you are I'm sure we don't have to tell you. Ain't a damned thing changed. You stay up there and we'll let you know when the flames start falling from the wings of the FF/LL phoenix! We wouldn't want to see Seattle burn to the ground with anyone else's ghost at our side.

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From Russia with Adamantium Cheekbones: SALT (2010)

I totally dig the idea of Soviet "sleeper" agents, second only to covert Satanic networks in their possible omnipresence. Think about it: any (or all) of your friends could be a Russian spy and neither of you even know it. You might be one and not even know it! One day you just go to get your shoe fixed and an old Russian shoe repair guy looks in your eyes, startled: "You want sole replaced? Five Dollars." You suddenly blank out and find yourself saying, "The hole is too big for that" He nods, reaches under the counter, and gives you a gun, which you accept without a word. Or wait, was it just a receipt for your deposit?

I'm a real-life sleeper agent, but for booze. The old Russian shoe repair guy would be any bartender in any bar; all I have to do is drink what everyone else is drinking and my trigger is pressed. If you ever 'activate' me, i.e. somehow get me to drink even one drink, I will turn into Laurence Harvey seeing the queen of hearts on the table in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962). I'd become a black-out sleeper drinker of such catastrophic power that my bank account would be sucked down in a week and I'd vanish, leaving only a trail of empty bottles and ATM receipts. My intended target, programmed into my brain from birth? Myself. There isn't a target in the world so ironically deserving.

Making the audience connect to such insanity is the goal of the existentialist spy film, like THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD or THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, wherein working for any one side turns out to be a bad idea; all values are turned upside down and intimacy -- even with family members -- is always up for questioning. The good guy, your boss, is using you as a chess piece to get your own KGB moms killed by her own people.  The only way out is with humor, and that's why the best moments of SALT aren't so much the BOURNE or OCEAN'S twists as much as Evelyn's use of a taser to spur on the near-dead driver of a police vehicle while she's handcuffed in the seat behind him, or the no-nonsense way she goes about fulfilling tasks in the most direct, outside the box manner.

This Evelyn Salt falls into a long line of super spies that are fun to watch as they're usually a few steps ahead of the audience, which means we can relax and not worry about their safety: the J's Bourne and Bond are key examples, but based on the frequent use of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS framing (i.e. a close-up of a face, eyes staring right into the camera in the middle of the screen with dead space on either side of the frame) I'd say we're also supposed to think of Evelyn as 'Hannah Belle Lecter.' Is old Lecter just the true antecedent of these indestructible genius types? Not just, Clarice, what did they do to you in that Korean prison camp? Leon, What's the first thing that comes in to your mind when you think about... your mother?

It's now common pop mythos that the "super prowess" of these sleeper agents stems from their being trained from birth at a remote and clandestine spy school, usually in Russia, where it's cold and harsh and there is no mercy or child protective services, only vodka. Through this relentless training they master endurance, marksmanship, martial arts; they are fed cutting edge body-healing-enhancement drugs and so were their parents so they were already born gifted superhumans. This is all so it's more believable that girls with thin limbs can kick the shit out of bulked-up army men, SWAT guys, and street brawlers.

The idea that you can craft super soldiers if you get them early enough is something that's long been a staple of Hong Kong cinema, with many of its action stars coming out of the draconian Peking Opera School: the whole 'brutal training by a stern father figure' thing often happens around the opening credits -- ala NAKED WEAPON or AZUMI or THE PRINCESS BLADE -- or comes in flashbacks, ala ELEKTRA (below), and ALIAS, and KILL BILL.

It's implied rather sweetly, that women are man's natural superior, needing to absorb only our Wu Tang sacred men's club scriptures (ala Jade Fox in CROUCHING TIGER) in order to beat us at even the most violent of our manly figthin' games. In a way it's a kind of guilty payback to the woman at the center of this sort of film, who is in a man movie, a pawn avatar juggled between the fanboy writers and fanboy viewers. Men love to see themselves kicked around by hot bitches and I shudder with 1980s liberal arts major-Peking Opera-imbued shame to admit I'm no different. One look at that picture below and I feel like I've already been kicked in the gut. That jawline with those bangs, that straight long hair, those lips, good lord.

And then to add to the 'believability' of a girl asskicker it helps to bring in the Russians, or some 'Other' from far away.  In America we get an overall impression or Russia that's icy and bitter on all levels, unlimited vodka being the only sorth or warmsh. It stands that no one is afraid of death there because A) life sucks without American commodities and B) death's not scary when you're loaded on vodka.

Americans have only the sketchy concept of 'freedom' as an asset in lieu of all that fuzzy drunken tough guy stuff. And we all have been bred from birth to know that Russian women are so tall, red-headed and ice cold ruthless they'll suck a schmuck they meet on the internet clean down to his penny stock portfolio and kick him to the curb before he can even finish typing "I'm wiring you $1800 for a plane ticket, my love!"

The vodka aspect of Russian superiority is not to be overlooked in the crafting of superb fighters, either: as the DRUNKEN MASTER (left) could teach you. To be drunk is not just to have courage, to be drunk is to be loose of limb, flexible, relaxed even in the middle of life or death stand-offs, able to survive falls from fifth story windows twice.  If you have the genes, alcohol even makes you more coordinated. I know. I have the genes. I am the sleeper agent from the Kung Fu school of Drunken Monkey Claw.

The advantage with being one of these super drunks is you can fall from the off-ramp onto a speeding truck below and not even be aware you've fallen. You might not even spill your drink. Poor Angelina is not so lucky, I mean she drinks only one or two shots of vodka so she can 'ahem' with the bottle. And yet, after numerous hits to the face, the only thing at all puffy is those bee-stung lips; her cheeks don't have a single moment of puffiness. Adamantine, like Wolverine's, perhaps but worryingly fragile-looking nonetheless.

We're used to it by now, but still, in a weird masochistic voyeur way we "feel" the pain of body blows much more keenly and sharply when they fall upon an older woman and Angelina has lost her baby fat almost everywhere but those lips. Banged around from her moving truck leap-frogging or ledge diving, we realize she's not Gia anymore; we suffer for her from the bumpy safety of her simulacrated womb. We're her alcohol; we absorb the pain and punishment like an audience of opiate tea bags. And with Jolie the pain stings extra because she has become thinner in bone and meat since tearing through those Laura Croft movies. I kept worrying she wasn't getting enough calcium. Her hips could cut glass. We're not looking at a buff young killer, no Russian gymnast with the Bond larynx-crushing thighs. @e're looking at a woman facing the onset of osteoporosis.  

With males action figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger it's different: buoyed by his puffy gym muscles, he hath bore no children from his womb; he hath bones made hard from large amounts of amino acid and milkshakes as a German youth, and estrogen en absentia. Plus he's a bad enough actor (in a good way) that the more he strains to look hurt the less we believe him, thus cutting the masochistic chord and filling us with good cheer. Jolie makes her pain tangible if fleeting, eyes dilating with tears, and occasionally ennui. I still have sympathy splints from watching her run in those high leather shoes.

SALT's biggest drawback isn't it's lack of originality--that it seems like it was made after screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (the poet who brought us ULTRAVIOLET) watched ALIAS and fell in love with the way Jennifer Garner changes wigs dozens of times an episode, then forgot all the other things that makes that show good (for the first three seasons). For one thing, this is one film foolish enough to think we still care about averting yet another nuclear meltdown. By now there have been so many near-misses in action films that we just want to see one bomb go off, just to see what would happen. The first half of SALT has some ambiguity that holds the attention--is she good or bad?--but in the end we just don't care which side Salt's really on as the nuclear threat plot is trotted forth, and is so dusty at this point even the president seems like he's forgotten where ye auld Def Con Red button is. Nuclear war now has an almost nostalgic twinkle about it: we never did get to have that mushroom cloud senior prom moment back in the existential days of the Cold War. All those decades of tense nuclear posturing were just a tease. Now we just have very old bombs lying all over the place -- vintage nukes. Isn't it kind of a waste? Kind of un-American when you think about it? Let's press that button, Mr. President, for old time's sake, for the Gipper and for that most American of reasons, why we come to films like SALT in the first place, escape from boredom.

Thusly, with a romantic impetus as hackneyed as one of Leo's recent slew of dead wives, and no clear cut person to root for, you can only wince.. and wince again as Jolie falls two stories to land on her hip bones on a hard metallic surface, or grabs onto sharp metal elevator shaft corners by her delicate fingernails, then gets up and runs off, unscathed, onwards--ever onwards--her wig not even crooked, just pleasantly grayed with the dust of an exploded mid-town landmark. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's L'Oreal.

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