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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Best Erich Kuersten Film Writing of 2010

Whether in Bright Lights Film Journal or this very blog, Erich Kuersten's been busy trying to fracture reality through bizarro psychoanalysidelic film analysis. This year he found himself hung up on the ambiguous sexual crosscurrents of feminine desire (in #6 of the Acidemic Film Journal proper) was cited as one of the best film criticism sites by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, and had his mind blown by seeing ENTER THE VOID and BLACK SWAN in a single 24 hour time period, all while sick, and strung out on Robitussin DM!

1. Sex is a Hen Decapitated: BLUEBEARD and Eroticism of Catherine Breillat

Do we not, in associating white for virginity and purity, forget that red means the alchemical opening up of that purity into the raw violence of procreation? So what does that third color of the French flag--blue--represent? Naturally, the cooling rescue of death--or rather as symbolized in the 'bloody chamber' where all the previous brides are stored, a suspended animation -- a sleeping beauty status wherein the enslaving agonies of childbirth and old age are forever kept at bay. In short, the blue represents frozen death and timeless decadence, pleasure and a disruption of the natural enslavement process of patriarchy. Bluebeard postpones sexual relations--and life itself-- in order to keep romance forever young... (more)

2. Misogynist! Genius! (Dario Argento)

No great art actually solves problems or answers question, but instead brings confirmation to doubt, a sense the answer to that question you were obsessed with as a child is still relevant and waiting for you to pick up its breadcrumb trail. To firmly believe in two simultaneously contradictory opinions is to free to be in on the joke of your own enslavement, which is all true freedom is... (more)

 

3. Great Acid Movies: THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

A good myth functions as a natural psychedelic, but OZ also functions, like 2001, as a metaphor for acid itself, and remains a common way to describe the effects to people who've never tried it (...) No matter how many times we've seen (the film), even knowing it's coming after dozens of viewings since childhood, that transition from black and white Kansas to technicolor OZ is a bit of a shock. And the shock just intensifies with the arrival of 'The Lollipop Guild'...  The great Terence McKenna wrote of 'machine elves' as common mushroom hallucinations, positing that fairies, aliens, mythic creatures, all might be tied up into particular, small, elvin beings that exist in alternate dimensions but are nonetheless real... (more).

4. Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, S/M, and the Daemonic in TWILIGHT

... I say this not to belittle Edward or lay down some pseudo-psychological trip. I think this pre-sexual object of desire is very important and incredibly erotic. It's the whole virginity/purity thing that fascinates me about this series and its popularity. The idea of chastity being hot is not just some Mormon conspiracy — it dates back to the age of King Arthur and courtly love. It's not just a mask for fear of sharing bodily fluids; it's a spiritual act, a renouncement... (more)

5. Lindsay Lohan will Have her Revenge on Seattle

I've downward spiraled many times and I can tell you this: she'll either die or she won't, but unless you're a traffic cop and she's swerving down the road; or you're a relative planning an intervention with her crazy family; or a producer who's already paid her an advance on an upcoming role, it's really none of your frickin' business if she wants to drink herself into an early grave, sneak off to Cannes and promote a film barely in the preliminary stages of casting instead of going to out-patient; orblow holes in her car with a shotgun, or set herself on fire like Richard Pryor... (more)

6. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call Summer's Isle

Isn't it sad to realize the patriarchy has to repress and belittle the feminine, for the very simple reason that otherwise women will realize it's much better to kill men off once they've served their reproductive purpose, or send them off to work in the fields as castrated slave labor than to have to launder their clothes and do their dishes until death? Hasn't anyone seen CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)? What's the matter with you people? You think this is a joke? A child is missing! Her name is Rowan! (more)

7. Thanks / for the Lucky Strikes (Bob Hope)

Their push-pull dynamic is only heightened by the words and melody, making this one of my all-time favorite musical moments. Particularly I love the sudden breaks from singing to speaking: "That's life I guess (sung) / I love... / (spoken) your dress," he sings, the 'love' causing her to look up expectantly. Then he says 'your dress' and she looks down at it, her tears temporarily subsided. "Do you?" (more)

8. BIGGER THAN LIFE: Nicholas Ray in the Heart of the Gray Flannel Darkness

However, the tricky part of a Jekyll/Hyde role like Ed Avery is in first winning audience sympathy as a good, "normal" kind of guy. Remember when Stephen King got all mad at Kubrick for putting Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in The Shining? Dude!...

But the thing is, though Jack Nicholson made for a creepy dad, he was the creepy dad that we all know: the kind who laugh at their own jokes, presuming no one else will get his brilliant wit. He's smarmy, but a sexy, earthy, real smarmy that comes from having lived a full and addled life, i.e., a mix of love and hatred for his rich plethora of vices. He lets it all hang out with a sense of a college-educated snob who surrounds himself with unintelligent people and takes jobs lower than his abilities just so he knows he'll always be the smartest guy in the room. By contrast, James Mason comes off more like the child of a very harsh British prep school, all the mischief long since beaten out of him, employing a dry Ronald Colman-ishness as a carpet to cover the wormy floorboards of his megalomania...(more)

9. South Park Terrorism and the Nicole Kidman Experience

...she slithers between the moral poles of silent film virgins like Lillian Gish and unapologetic, homicidal sirens like Fu Manchu's daughter, Fah Lo Suee. For a prime example, please see BIRTH and play close attention to the sex scene early on, and the long take of her face at the concert...(more)

10. Enhancement of Anguish: Godard's VIVRE SA VIE on Blu-Ray

Coutard's camera leers over Karina's shoulder, sympathizing with her sadness even as it causes it, never sure what's an act and what isn't Is she just drawing us in to ask if she can borrow 2,000 francs? In a meta way, it's even true that her character's dreams of being a film star are realized, right there in the act of being in the movie you are now witnessing, and yet even that is not enough. Godard is forcing us to realize how we destroy the characters we love by looking at them. Our eye is the real monster here. But whereas the similarly distant Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion reacts to the encroachment of our gaze with delusional homicidal madness, Karina's prostitute just watches, almost bemused, as her freedom and life are crushed up in the jaws of the other's tepid desire...(more)

11. I got a Home in that 'Raq

Bigelow's unflinching feminine eye shows how much damage the male psyche--man's need to prove himself against real physical danger--has suffered over the years trying to be "nice" in the long twisted, never-ending, ever-more draconian and litigious wake of early 80s PC thuggery and "bare life" fearmongering. No pain, no gain, but while women are born into a cycle of menstruation and the agony of birth,  what do men get to do as far as "taking the pain?" No wonder we men have grown so squeamish, like women we should be forced to take a punch in the stomach at the end of every lunar cycle... (more)

12. Great Films of the 80s: CONAN THE BARBARIAN

Valeria's fierce devotion and her beautiful monologue about passing other people in couples in tents in the night breaks our hearts and when Conan leaves her to pursue his quest for vengeance, we understand her sorrow and still understand his quest, because in this case Valeria's reasons not to ride against Doom aren't based on fear of death, but fear of losing this love so soon. Laugh all you want, but this was our Romeo and Juliet, our Titanic! Our Twilight...(more)

 

13. All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS

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, and the slow-downs of first kisses in the dark of post-show euphoria. The big seduction lesbian moment between Joan and Cherie is scored to a slowed, drug-drenched "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that makes you ache in rock and roll remembrance of the first trip on acid, the first trip on ecstasy, while on stage, the blazing red lights in your face as you sing and the flames form 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 flaming energy that washes over the melting-faced fans...(more)

14. From Russia with Hell

The amazing performance by Olga Mironova as a Madonna/whore split personality is alone enough to catapult COME AND SEE into the pantheon of all-time greats. And there's nary a drop of easy sentimentality or preaching, just a savvy truly artistic appreciation for how war turns existence into a literal living nightmare, with all splits between awake and dreaming, interior and exterior, home and abroad, life and death, good and evil, mended into one twirling mad carnival of chaos, starvation and violence... enough to make Von Trier's ANTICHRIST look like a summer picnic..(more)

15. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! (Gold Diggers of 1933)

From: Film Experience 1/28/2010

Blondell goes from trying to stand up for her beaten-down beau against an unfeeling cop to addressing the audience, and the world, directly, her hands outstretched in a massive, Broadway belt of a plea. Watching Obama last night I was reminded not of Jimmy Stewart's hoarse fillibuster in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, but Blondell, opening her human heart a mile wide to engulf the nation in a surge of compassion as the music marches inexorably onwards. (more)


RUNNER UPS:
Some of these are heavy, some too light, some too just right, some caught me flak from angry feminists:
1. Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (#67 - Bright Lights Film Journal)
2. X is for Xanax (Acidemic 11/18/10)
3. Katherine Hegl: Infantilization's Poster Girl (Bright Lights After Dark 10/5/10)
4. Book Review: Hammer's Lethal Ladies & Femme Fatale (#67 Bright Lights Film Journal)
5. The Drowned Phoenician Sailor and his Mermaid Muse: HE RAN ALL THE WAY (Acidemic  11/24/10)
6. Let the Right One KILL BABY KILL (Acidemic 10/5/10)
7. Remote in Reach: THE WALL (Acidemic 7/27/10)

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American Grievers, Part Two: THE FOUNTAIN

"Death is the road to awe."

Was it an accident I watched THE FOUNTAIN (2006) the very next night after INCEPTION (see Grievers part one here)? There are no accidents in cinema when its imagery is way more high-def than your foggy day-to-day 'reality.' There's a handful of differences twixt the two: DiCaprio's brooding dreamweaver in INCEPTION becomes FOUNTAIN's Hugh Jackman, but they're really the same -- one bends time through dream-invasion, the other through past-life recollection.

THE FOUNTAIN's American Griever, Jackman, claims to love his wife but he dismisses her attempts to show him the wonders of the stars as mere imbecilic prattle. 

As a concerned neurochemist trying to cure his terminal wife (Rachel Weisz) via ancient tree of life scrapings, Jackman's many lives-one master hero is even more dour and dull than Leo. Poor Rachel just wants to find peace and die but  Hugh us too busy being ridden with angst and posturing grief to give a shit what she wants. We flash forward and back through time (via her calligraphy hand-written journal) like we're skimming a glossy-paged graphic novel: a shadowed inquisitor is self-flagellating and plotting against a golden-hued queen and her champion (Jackman again), a seething conquistador who sets off to South America in search of the same mystic tree.

All well and good but what makes FOUNTAIN such a classic American Griever saga is Jackman's blindness to Weisz herself. He loves only the thought her dying, like hurry up and die so I can drink to escape the pain and you can haunt my fringes, like all of Leo's dead wives. Weisz has seen the light but Jackman buries himself in sunless jungles so he can create an eternal light. All this when the deathlessness of light already is eternal! Right? You can float like a Buddha all you want, Hugh. It's as phony as a tree dolla bill. The parts in the beginning where he seems to die and be reborn into another aspect of self are very cool, but turn out to be kind of misrepresentin'. When and if he dies, he demands the whole earth shake and dissolve in admiration. He may meditate and look as self-righteously enlightened as Richard Gere, but the ego is a cunning focus-puller.

Personally, if I ever lost a parent as a child, or vice versa, my attitude might be more conventionally 'oh death, I'm mad at you! Instead I  have a great grandmother who lived to 107, and her daughter, my granny, alive and bored at 95 and put on suicide watch at her home if she even jokes about going out in a bang not a whimper. So I'm a represent, for her sake, that under-represented, pro-death voice: If your eyes are truly open, and life appears as it really is, infinite, then you know death is just the brief dream-filled sleep to life's 3-D space-time waking --living in the moment is impossible without feeling this to be true, of facing and making peace with your own mortality--and so when you hear this 'life is still life even if that life is less than lovely' jazz, you understand why our medical system is so fucked up. We'd outlaw death if we could, jamming a crowbar into the wheel and wondering where that grinding sound is coming from, and why the lines at Epcot are so long, and why so many people are being born with such cheap knock-off souls.

I know it's a touchy issue and I don't mean to sound all-knowing or callous, but in not even daring to touch on it, we're killing quality at the expense of quantity. I've known people who've pissed away their life savings keeping a vegetable relative hooked to a machine. And I've waited in lines. At Epcot. And I've seen the limitless expanses of trash dumps, and mass production, and stockyards, and phone books... and suburban sprawl. Know who benefits from our fearful overpopulation? The soul-eaters, the reptillian overlords, and CEOs of giant conglomerates.

What makes THE FOUNTAIN all the more troubling is actually its most interesting aspects: the way death is viewed as a form of public transportation; if you surrender to death in the right spirit you never really die. So in a way this tree of life is a sister to the mind altering South American plant concoctions like ayahuasca. But these elements aren't explored so much as passed like ship-shaped phantoms in the on the way to another tearful tantrum. I stood up a few times and yelled at the screen: "Hugh. we may already be immortal, soul-wise, so why cling to one body forever rather than find out?" It may well be that radiation treatments may prolong your life if your body has cancer, but at the cost of warping the electromagnetic weave of your immortal soul, which is an electromagnetic field that can become permanently damaged by radiation, hence William S. Burroughs' description of the atomic bomb as a soul killer:

Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.

Imagine if in doing chemo we are prolonging our current life at the expense of mutating our immortal soul, like the Bridey Murphy medieval witch in Roger Corman's THE UNDEAD? Now that is an awesome movie.

My point with 'American Grievers' is not to be controversial for attention but to illuminate a gap between romantic male characters in today's cinema and those of old Hollywood, when men relating to their female partners in a direct and tender manner while remaining tough (not falling into rom-com territory) was not a forgotten art. Think of the rapport between William Powell and Myrna Loy in THE THIN MAN or William Powell and Kay Francis in ONE WAY PASSAGE and JEWEL ROBBERY. Think of Bogie and Bacall; Newman and Woodward; Taylor and Burton; Gable and Lombard; Gable and Scarlett --all instances of actors able to be both masculine and tender, deep and badass but also sexually healthy compared to the anguished loners of post-'82 American dramatic cinema, who were never supposed to become role models. Aside from Russell Crowe--an Australian--who can still do this?

I must be preaching to the choir in the case of Aronofsky. in his last two films, THE BLACK SWAN and THE WRESTLER, death is practically advocated as the one truly badass artistic climax of performance. I would hope we're meant to side with Rachel Weisz's right to die vs. Jackman's tiresome "you're not gonna die!" tirades. This keen and subtle critique of America's blase' closed-mindedness towards any talk of death with dignity or eternal life as a reason to let go of a dying body is a subtextual touchstone for Aronofsky's last two films. The characters Jackman resembles in THE WRESTLER and BLACK SWAN are SWAN's Barbara Hershey as a micro-managing stage mom WRESTLER's Marisa Tomei as a single stripper mom wary of ex-client Mickey's headlock.  The trouble is, Jackman's the main character in THE FOUNTAIN. He's supposed to be the good guy.Would you want to see THE BLACK SWAN if Hershey's character was the lead, and Portman just an ungrateful daughter?

In the end Jackman may or may not get wise to the joys of nonexistence, but either way his life as a lotus-posin' baldhead taking care of an outer space yum yum tree doesn't seem real, doesn't seem "earned" based on his record of glum tantrums. Meditation is where one goes to find the truth of what lies beyond our current mortality, what survives when the rest is burned away, what is eternal and true vs. what is ephemeral. What makes Aronofsky's later films much better is the introduction of art to that equation, to mean art = a very cool death, regardless of your clocked meditation tree-time. As a doctor, Jackman's whole Hippocratic Oath thing stops him from being true to Mickey and Natalie's ideal of deathless fierceness --but truly good doctors know when to stop torturing the patient with painful, temporary stave-off measures and endless spinal taps and start encouraging them to enjoy their last remaining moments. Don't they?

That said, the visuals of THE FOUTNATIN are quite impressive, but again you can have acres of trippy hallucination and it's no more than eye candy for something that never seems to really happen, i.e. the transcendence of the duality of life and death into one eternal deathless state. In the words, psychedelic. If you're going to be that deep, it's cool to not show self-righteous American grievers getting rewarded by the cosmic good fairy as if spiritual points are given just for self-importance. There's more to Zen than baldness and Jason Patric-style sanctimony! Look at Jack and Rose on THE TITANIC! They loved a lifetime worth in a few hours, but ole Hugh doesn't care about a few hours, and that's the very definition of un-Zen. Imagine for example, Leo spending his last moments with Rose just lecturing her about how stupid it was she jumped out of the lifeboat to be with him... that's THE FOUNTAIN.

Fortunately, Aronofsky learned the lesson from its failure at the box office and with critics.  THE WRESTLER and THE BLACK SWAN would keep the best elements of THE FOUNTAIN--the even-keeled examination of mortality-- and sideline the blind clingers. Aronofsky learned in THE FOUNTAIN that the best way to make a point about art and the death drive is by portraying artists in physically masochistic fields like wrestling or ballet. Without some true artistic pain, these greenscreened actors are as lost in the winds as Jar Jar off his meds.

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American Grievers, Part One: INCEPTION (2010)

Was INCEPTION--released this week on Netflix--the trippiest film of 2010? Outside of THE BLACK SWAN, TOY STORY 3 and ENTER THE VOID, perhaps. Is it great? Perhaps not. The high-def uber artsy set and lighting make it impossible to hallucinate into; the hallucinating is done for you, by professionals. Jungian resonance glimmers, swirls, and fades away before it can cohere into myth, a sad failure to launch -  the question is, who chickened out at the last minute when it came to laying bare their sad soul?

We know the answer. These same elements occur in SHUTTER ISLAND so it's Leo. It's like he can't see his own elephant in the room, and he's the big star so the movie wears a blindfold while lecturing about the importance of sight. What is it about being a tight-lipped professional man with dark family secrets and a dead wife taunting from beyond that so appeals to Leo that he has to play it over and over? A fine actor and true humanitarian, DiCaprio is certainly is a success on many levels, so why is he so obsessed with this narrow-minded 15-year old's idea of masculinity?  Can it be mere dream coincidence that all these ghost wives and beautiful little ghost children and houses by the shore with swing sets are so very dead or far away? He's sorry, Rose, but he has a job to do. That job is looking tortured and behaving with little in the way of self-aware humor as he laments he can't be home with you, Rose. Don't you get it? DON'T YOU GET IT??? (emotion)

Still, if nothing else INCEPTION should illuminate--and make a great double bill with-- Nicholas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW, which always confused me before, but which now I understand and want to see again. Like INCEPTION, Roeg's film deals with a shifting reality (the ancient and ever-crumbling Venice) and involves parental grief and guilt, out-of-sequence narrative, a city sunk knee-deep in water, and little children whose faces you never see as they're always turning corners. Man, it's a trip, if you know what I mean.

I mean I wasn't high but I could feel the tang of salvia divinorum, the 'ride the snake' dragon teeth face melt with fried time-space onions and trans-dimensional sweetness of select INCEPTION images and scenes: Leo and Juno staring at each other as slow mo Zabriskie Pointed Parisian cafes explode around them; Ken Watanabe as ancient as Bowman at the end of 2001, his liverspots aglow in perfect unison with the lanterns on the wall behind him like an Alex Gray painting.

But the similarities in Chinese puzzle box construction between INCEPTION and SHUTTER ISLAND are too great to ignore (substitute planes for boats and it's more or less the same movie). In both, Leo is a dour, myopic brooder haunted by images of his dead wife and kids. In both films we must ask, WICKER MANnishly, is Leo actually investigating a crime or is he trapped in an Escher-like maze of the mind? Is he just paranoid or is everyone really out to get him? Or the classic latency test: is he convinced the whole world is a show put on just for him, and nothing exists outside his own realm of experience? Is he anima-dominated due to emotional dysfunction as a result of a show business childhood? Can it be that for him love is contingent upon uncrossable absence? No dad is more needy and pain-stricken about not being with his kids than a dad who can NOT get back to them. If the kids are actually there, then why bother even lowering the newspaper to behold their latest construction paper art projects? That's how that objet petit a keeps you crippled, as the Anima-Kali-Cotillard projection beats you senseless for not taking her out more often. Yeah, and you know what's the sickest part? You love it, because you're a holy inquisitor. You long to have her back so you can ignore her once again!

When a move's made about the mind, any evidence of  unresolved inner conflicts in the filmmakers will be made apparent via simple deconstruction, so be careful! We can discern from the text that Leo DiCaprio has never been married or had children. He dates models. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it shows-- at least on the surface-- a level of laddish insecurity: his women must be certified gorgeous so everyone knows he's a man. Playing a humorless widower allows him to be--in theory--a deeply romantic and caring soul, yet he doesn't have to unfold even a gram of tenderness... doesn't have to risk ridicule, doesn't have to get all sensitive up close and caring, as said kids and wife are not alive. He can just curl his lip and mope and we all have to accept it: grief trumps all. When the wife does show up, she's just a phantom, so he can yell at her without upsetting the feminists. He can, instead of dealing with his issues, brood.

Opium is the heroin of the masses

In Jungian terms, the dead wives here assume the role of Leo's anima--or the projected feminine ego of his unconscious. The anima takes many forms: she can come to you as a hot babe, or as a castrating vagina dentata Katharine Hepburn in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. When she's just a dead wife fantasia, it's kind of a 16-year old virgin's comic book fantasy of a real conscious-unconscious relationship, or am I just thinking of my own pre-adult fantasias wherein, for example, I pined and longed for Jean Grey to rise again as Phoenix in X-Men? There's no benefit to falling in love with a living comic book character! Where's the pine?

Pining is, above all, a performance... a slow... motion... tantrum... and it can be sweet, but on the basic level, it's absurd, juvenile, something Bella might write in her TWILIGHT diary and, years later, with nostalgic relish, read aloud to her sorority friends for cheap drunk laughs. Should art cater to juvenile minds or should it not also educate, enlighten, and transcend? When you blow the doors of your mind wide open, make sure the floors inside are clean, even if your movie is about dirty floors. Company is coming, and the company is a future self with a clean house that you made possible, defeating your ego at its own game.

But that's never the issue. The wifely anima projection in the unconscious of Leo's character/s is defined by her need for him, her wanting to be with him all the time, and of having no life of her own beyond her stifling adoration of her tortured husband. No true anima is that weak, or that crazy. They do their own thing. Half the time you can't even get them on the phone. The fantasy in these films is that Leo's anima is so needy and doting that she never just sinks into the dark and does something on her own. Just as Bella's animus Edward hovers over her like a clingy stalker, so too hover Leo's dead wives.

Perhaps it would be good if Leo owned up to his romantic streak: he might see that all the stale action sequences and need to embody Scorsese tough guys like Howard Hughes--and soon, Dean help us, Frank Sinatra-- is just a fear of looking wimpy to his laddish entourage. Word on the high-def rain-soaked GGI streets is that he's also going to be playing a serial killer in a period film about some old World's Fair! If he doesn't make the character a tortured brooder haunted by his dead wife or lost children, I'll eat my hat! Maybe he'll enrich this killer with twisted joyfulness, ala your Hannibals, Freddies, Nicholsons, and Karloffs... instead of his usual dour tortured cowboy--ala your Jason Patrics and David Boreanzs. I doubt it, but I don't brood about it. My own psyche is, after all, deeply invested in Leo as he reminds me a lot of my younger brother, Fred - the blonde hair, the baby face, the big bulky frame. God knows I've tried to reach him (Fred, I mean), but he just does his own thing - fixing motorcycles and listening to Metallica out in Phoenix, AZ, with his concealed weapons permit. It's an older brother thing. We have to live with our own frustrating inability to mold our younger siblings. We're America, beating up the world so it won't get hurt.

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Holiday Viewing Diary 12/21-12/30

At the Kuersten Xmas is a time for marathon TV watching and (for some) drinking. The commentary from the couch flows fast and free, and eloquence gets waxed like a candle burning at both ends. In my brother's Arizona house there's a big screen but it's not plasma and it's not anamorphic, so you have zooming and stretching instead of correct aspect ratios. My dad and bro both get wicked pissed if I change the size of the screen; neither cares if everyone looks wide like a house or thin like a bee or has their heads cut off, so it can get exasperating. Still, that's family, right? Imagine if you will the family dynamic, slightly shuffled of LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (same amount of siblings), so that the older brother is the gloomy poet and the father isn't cheap, and the mom's a Christian Scientist and not a junky, then come with me now as we blaze through a rundown of what was watched in between football games:

 12/22

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1967)

This got a lot of fun poked at it by my now drunk family, and my dad's along enough in years that Raquel Welch's stunning fur bikini draws no moans; I was the only one salivating over her and the Harryhausen dynamation dinosaurs, and the Martine Beswick catfights. I reminded my dad that this was a favorite back in the 1970s when he and I would watch Saturday afternoon horror films on UHF local TV and try to make each other laugh with our dry, witty quips, and that my childhood was thus well planned to suit this blog, but to everyone but me the dinosaurs here were like plastic toys, and Welch only a babe, not the true goddess she is/was.

BAD SANTA (2003)

Terry Zwigoff was no fool making a film like this, as Christmas movies have a long shelf life if they have some kind of a hook, such as badness. Films like A CHRISTMAS STORY and SCROOGED play almost nonstop alongside IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and so forth this season, so here it was again, my brother's attempt at an Xmas tradition. This film tries a bit too hard to be bad (see my coverage of OBSERVE AND REPORT below for a truly 'bad' film) as far as acting goes, it's impeccable. Lauren Graham is a hearthrob for the working man and Thornton a loveable, genuine roustabout.

12/23

Ho bloody ho. Where's my blasted beard?

DEAD RINGERS (1989)

Because nothing says Xmas at the Kuersten house like a pair of junky brothers futzing over wombs in Canada. Image quality was bad, but the acting was solid, you had to continually remind yourself Jeremy Irons was playing both roles because the editing was so seamless you'd forget otherwise. Still, the icy clinical aspects kind of throw off the dynamic, which happens at times with Cronenberg. But am I complaining? Uh uh. More than anything, this film made me want to go deeper into the world of pharmaceutical enlightenment, even if the whole gynecological instruments for mutant women thing seemed tacked on, like Cronenberg thought he had to weirden it up for the fans, to make sure it got included in the lucrative midnight movie horror section instead of dreary old drama. 

 

THE WICKER MAN (1977)

Aside from my mom we're all pretty much heathens at the Kuersten house, so we cheered and danced and lit the fire when it became clear to the first timers what was happening to poor old Richard Attenborough. Edward Woodward. Too bad the IFC formatting was off and the print lousy and the reception foggy and the nude witches stretched to obesity. Still, the message was clear enough and holiday revelry ensued amongst we Kuerstens as the flames soared higher amongst the pigs and chicken.

 12/24

SCROOGED (1988)

David Johansen rocks as the ghost of Xmas past, but damn that loooong ending of Bill Murray lecturing the TV audience on holiday cheer carries less and less emotional catharsis as the years go by. Now he just looks like a self-centered prick who thinks the whole world should stop and celebrate the fact that his head's finally out of his ass. Dude, they all knew how to celebrate, it's you who were the problem. Go lecture to the mirror! This need to convert the already converted is what starts holy wars and makes people call you an ass behind your back. You can respect a prick, he gets the job done, but an ass is just that and no amount of cheer can change it. You don't know how much smarter and more holy your audience is than yourself, give them the benefit of the doubt. Then again, it was the 1980s. 

12/25

JUDGMENT AT NUREMBURG (1961)

Hadn't really seen this all the way through before. Got the DVD for my dad as he kept ranting about it and how much he wanted to show it to us. Then he kept ranting about how great each performance was all through the movie. I agreed with him about Monty Clift's jaw-dropping performance as a sterilized laborer -- his sheer intensity made my eyes well up with admiration, but I felt like spray painting "Why so Serious?" on Spencer Tracy's guest room wall. And my dad's comparison of the film to Picasso's "Guernica" was repeated in great Wellesian tones three nights in a row, with the same cues of admiring laughter, until I told him he'd said the same thing earlier, and he got sulky. But I still love him!

REVENGE OF THE SITH (2005)

Speaking of why so serious, it was great to tune into on SpikeTV late Xmas night and find this, in HD and filling up Fred's screen like a shiny computer game. I find Hayden Christensen surprisingly inoffensive as far as pretty boys go--maybe it's his deep voice--and Natalie was a delight. Still, every scene was so full of fanboy detail it was first exhilarating, then exhausting, then annoying, then deadening. This film is clearly meant to be seen over and over again by the hardcore fans. Like the other two in the second trilogy, I got really into it for about 20 minutes, then lost interest, my eyeballs saturated, my dad gone to bed. It definitely helped coming into it halfway through, as I tried to watch it once before long ago and didn't get too far, turned off as I was by the queen bitch crankiness of Ewan's Obi Wan.

12/26:

 TRUE GRIT (2010)

As a kind of apology to Fred for the joyous dysfunction of our family holiday, I kept repeating that line from the commercials for this film--played ad nauseum one very channel we watched--where Jeff Bridges looks down at the dying hombre and says, "I can't do nothin' for ya, son." The movie was good, too. The language was flowery and really well-gummed by ole Jeff (see more about the film in my top ten of 2010 list)

FARGO (1996)

The impact of TRUE GRIT inspired us to dig out more Coens. This was a big hit all around the Kuersten tree, with minimal commentary. We all agreed that Peter Stormare was our favorite --the Nordic ice truck killer most like our family. Now though I still have the voice ringing in my head of the dopey husband of the Sheriff McDormand saying: "I love you Margie" in that zombie infant voice...

12/27:

VALHALLA RISING (2010)

The second film I saw in two days about a child following a one-eyed warrior into the unknown wilderness. While Fred's buddy came over to watch football, I sulked in my room and watched this on Netflix streaming for the second time to see if I could add it to my top ten list. I always try and keep my top ten manly and subversive and VALHALLA more than exceeded my expectations... great post-rock score! No women! Jim Jarmusch meets CONAN! 

BIG LIEBOWSKI (1998)

I tried to explain to my dad how this was a 'modernist' meditation on THE BIG SLEEP times Nordic mythology, and he sneered, but then suggested I would have a lot to write about with all the weirdness in the film for my blog. I told him there was no fun to be had writing about Coen Brothers films since they come to you already deconstructed, and he actually understood that, and I saw my star rise a slot on the slick icy ladder of his esteem. Still, I wrote about one Coen Brothers film, for Bright Lights, here.

 

12/28

OBSERVE AND REPORT (2009)

Of course that wasn't the end. I wound up stuck at Fred's for two more nights due to the east coast blizzard. What we watched aside from this film, I haven't a clue, but I knew Fred would love it as, like Ronnie, my bro is armed and dangerous and has a lot of love to give. Fred, you're the best. Here's a sample of some writing I did on this fine film from last year, comparing it to the aforementioned Thornton film:

OBSERVE AND REPORT is the film that Terry Zwigoff is too inherently decent to make; the highlighted tantrums of his BAD SANTA--a similarly mall-bound film--errs on the side of decency and thus undoes any attempt at genuine subversion. It's one thing to threaten children and then "come around," it's another to bash them into pulp with their own skateboards and then go even deeper into darkness from there. In BAD SANTA, we watch a man behave badly, but OBSERVE AND REPORT itself behaves badly. (A Travis for Our Times, April 13, 2009)

Then, on the plane home, I saw GET SMART with Ann Hathaway looking awfully hot. She's clearly meant to wear buckets of black eyeliner! The film was much better than it had any right to be, though maybe it was because I flew first class for the first time (the only ticket I could find after my initial flight was canceled). Worth a look if you have to entertain a diversified age group with no tolerance for subtitles, though the film prefers complicated and goofy stunts over everything else and Hathaway is stuck with maybe two sentences of dialogue in the whole film. Still, that eyeliner....

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